The Technophilez

Microsoft has fixed a technical glitch that locked out thousands of users around the world from their Windows Live accounts, Hotmail e-mail, and other Microsoft online services, the company said.
"An issue began that has caused some consumers worldwide to experience difficulty logging in to their Windows Live ID accounts. This issue has since been resolved and normal operations have been restored to all customers," said Samantha McManus, Windows Live product manager, in an e-mail late Tuesday to InformationWeek.com sister site ChannelWeb.

Microsoft didn't disclose the nature of the bug, but reports indicate that in addition to Hotmail and Windows Live, it affected numerous Web services -- including Xbox Live online gaming and Microsoft's Windows Messenger instant messaging platform -- that rely on users' Windows Live IDs for logins.

The problem appeared to be global. Affected users posted messages on various Internet forums from countries ranging from Finland to Japan and Honduras in Central America.

"Our customers have come to expect a high level of service reliability in their experience with Windows Live, and Microsoft worked aggressively to resolve this unique problem as quickly as possible," said McManus.

The glitch also brought down a number of third-party services. Bell Canada's Sympatico e-mail service, which is hosted on Microsoft's MSN network, was knocked out for several hours, a spokesman told the Canadian Press wire service.

Hotmail was created in 1996 by a pair of programmers who sold the service to Microsoft a year later. The service was rebranded from MSN Hotmail to Windows Live Hotmail last year as Microsoft looked to unify its online services under a single brand.

Microsoft claims to have about 280 million Hotmail users.

Intel Corp. unveiled its latest gaming and high-end computing platform, which includes two quad-core processors and graphic cards.

The new platform, which had been code-named Skulltrail, not only holds a total of eight processors; it also gives users a choice of two multicard graphics solutions -- one from ATI and one from nVidia Corp.

"This shows Intel taking the lead in developing and bringing to market cutting-edge PC designs," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. "Before, they tended to aim more for the middle-ground mass market and, in doing so, left the high-performance side of the market to others. Now, with this new combination, they've elbowed aside everyone else to take the lead in the PC performance race."

Olds noted that while the new platform will be largely welcomed by gamers, along with 3-D animators and high-definition video editors, it also will have its place in corporate IT. "Right now, it's mainly for gamers, but there certainly are some enterprise workloads that will benefit," he added.

Intel was to officially unveil its Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform today at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The platform is the latest product to run Intel's 45-nanometer Penryn microprocessors, which hit the market last November.

The new platform's motherboard, Desktop Board D5400XS, is being paired with two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors.

"For the team creating world-class games here, time is one of our most valuable assets," said Robert A. Duffy, programming director at game maker Id Software, in a statement. "Having eight powerful Intel cores in a single machine helps our team create and test our latest titles at record speed. We have seen one of our most time-consuming asset-generation processes cut from over four hours to under 20 minutes by utilizing all eight cores and threading the generation code."

An interesting part of today's announcement is the fact that Intel is supporting graphics technology from ATI, which is owned by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Olds called this a smart move for Intel.

"It's a move toward gaining market share and also a hedge," said Olds. "If Intel doesn't support ATI graphics, then they automatically cede that market to AMD.  Right now, nVidia owns the high ground in graphics, but that isn't a guarantee that they will forever. If ATI leapfrogs nVidia, Intel will be well positioned by supporting cards from both vendors."

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is giving away, free of charge, development software that would normally cost about $3,300, the company announced Tuesday. The effort, called DreamSpark, is aimed at giving jump starts to current high school and college students for their IT careers.
"We want to do everything we can to equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software to improve lives, solve problems, and catalyze economic growth," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said in a statement.

It's not all altruistic, of course. Microsoft hopes that by giving students software for free, the students will be more likely to purchase the paid versions later.

DreamSpark includes Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Expression Studio, XNA Game Studio 2.0 with a free yearlong subscription to the XNA Creators Club, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition. When Windows Server 2008 is released to MSDN, it will be available to students as well.

In the beginning, DreamSpark will provide college students in 10 countries access to all this software, and Microsoft hopes to expand the program worldwide and to high school students by the end of 2008. Students will log into a site on Microsoft's Channel 8 student-oriented Web site to get access.

The software will be available under an educational license, meaning that it isn't licensed to use for business. However, it won't stop working when students leave their institutions, and Joe Wilson, Microsoft's senior director of academic initiatives for developer and platform evangelism, said in an interview he hopes students will use the software as a way to get their business careers started.

"If we have a thousand more ISVs or new startups, I think that's a great outcome for this program," Wilson said. "Students are on the honor system. Overall, students are going to go do what the best thing for them is at that point; we don't sit around worrying about that."

It could be challenging for Microsoft to verify identities, but the company has a verification system in place to make sure students are students and not professional developers. It uses public and private sources of information to verify identities, including a database run by academic software company JourneyEd in the United States and other educational information networks in China and Europe.

That's not to say nonstudents won't fall through the cracks. "There's no magic button to instantly verify students," says Wilson.

Microsoft's effort follows that of Adobe, which began giving away a free version of its Flex Builder development software to students in November.

Several companies lost access to their own files when Amazon.com Inc.'s pay-as-you-go data storage system went down Friday morning.

Amazon said computers that power its Simple Storage Service were unreachable at one of three data centers for about two hours. By 7 a.m. Pacific Time, most users' problems were resolved.

The two-year-old storage service is one of several "cloud computing" offerings from Amazon.

Web startups and others pay to store and crunch data on Amazon's servers rather than running their own. By the end of 2007, about 330,000 people had registered to use the services.

Simple Storage Service customers flocked to Amazon's support discussion board Friday to report problems, seek updates and vent frustrations.

"S3 service has stopped working about 2 hours ago. This is really a severe blow to confidence in trusting AWS services," wrote one, under the name Andrea Barbieri.

Several startups that use Amazon Web Services, including digital photo sharing site SmugMug Inc. and Web e-mail provider Mailtrust, said Friday they were not affected.

Asheville, N.C.-based DigitalChalk Inc., which delivers multimedia training over the Web, said some of its content was inaccessible as a result of the outage.

"While we are very concerned about the potential impact this had on DigitalChalk.com, we were glad to see that the recovery was fairly rapid and we had no loss of data or files," Tony McCune, DigitalChalk's vice president of sales and marketing, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

"Our biggest concern going forward will be how well Amazon communicates with their customers about the incident," he said, echoing the online comments of several people affected by the outage.

In an e-mail, Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener wrote, "Any amount of downtime is unacceptable and we won't be satisfied until it's perfect."

The Red Planet was too salty to sustain life for much of its history, according to the latest evidence gathered by one of the US rovers on Mars' surface.

High concentration of minerals in water on early Mars would have made it inhospitable to even the toughest microbes, a leading Nasa expert says.

Clues preserved in rocks that were once awash with water suggest the environment was both acidic and briny.

The observations were made by the US space agency's Opportunity rover.

It has spent months examining rocks on an ancient Martian plain.

'Ghost of a chance'

Dr Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team, and a biologist at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, said the finding "tightens the noose on the possibility of life".

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, he said conditions on Mars in the past four billion years would have been very challenging for life.

The quest for life on Mars will go on with the next generation rover
"It was really salty - in fact, it was salty enough that only a handful of known terrestrial organisms would have a ghost of a chance of surviving there when conditions were at their best," he explained.

The US Mars rovers - Opportunity and its twin, Spirit - have now spent more than 1,400 days on the Martian surface.

As their work comes to an end, Nasa has its hopes set on the Phoenix lander, which is due to reach Mars on 25 May.

The Phoenix mission will land near the planet's north pole, and aim to dig under the frozen surface in search of signs of microbial life, past or present.

The next-generation rover, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), is set to leave Earth in 2009, and land in 2010.

Twice as long and three times as heavy as Spirit and Opportunity, it will collect Martian soil and rock samples, and analyse them for organic compounds.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc has decided to exclusively sell high-definition DVDs in the Blu-Ray format, dealing what could be a crippling blow to the rival HD DVD technology backed by Toshiba Corp

The move by the world's largest retailer, announced on Friday, caps a disappointing week for HD DVD supporters, who also saw consumer electronics chain Best Buy Co Inc. and online video rental company Netflix Inc. defect to the Blu-ray camp.

In a statement on its Web site, Wal-Mart said that over the next few months it will phase out sales of HD DVD systems and discs. By June, it will sell only products in the Blu-ray format which was developed by Sony Corp.

"We've listened to our customers, who are showing a clear preference toward Blu-ray products and movies with their purchases," said Gary Severson, a Wal-Mart senior vice president.

The move affects 4,000 Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in the United States, as well as related online sites. The stores will continue to sell traditional DVD players and movies.

The so-called format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray has been a thorn in the side of retailers, which have had to commit shelf space to devices from both camps even as they field complaints from frustrated and confused customers.

Next-generation DVDs and players, boasting better picture quality and more capacity, were expected to help revive the $24 billion global home DVD market. But Hollywood studios had initially split their alliances between the two camps, meaning only certain films would play on a consumer's DVD machine.

The mission to build a common login for all sites across the Internet has taken one giant step forward. Five, actually.

The OpenID Foundation announced today that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign would become its first corporate board members.

"This really puts, very strongly and clearly, an important first piece of the puzzle in place," said Bill Washburn, executive director of the OpenID Foundation.

Washburn told InternetNews.com that Web entrepreneurs and site operators have increasingly acknowledged the need for a trusted universal identifier that site visitors can use to access all their favorite Internet destinations.

Though a number of initiatives have emerged to provide common logins, most notably Microsoft's Passport, "none has taken hold," Washburn said.

Possibly until now. Today's announcement could provide OpenID with the momentum it needs to win support from other companies that have so far stayed on the sidelines, supporters say.

OpenID began as a grassroots movement in 2005. While it can now boast the support of more than 10,000 Web sites, phishing and other security concerns have hindered adoption.

Doubters have also been skeptical that enough sites would ever accept it to fulfill OpenID's promise of becoming a universal identifier.

Last June, OpenID's early community members formed the foundation to give the effort legal and organizational support. Several large companies also began making more serious overtures to the movement, including some that today joined its board.

Of the companies now joining the board, Yahoo has perhaps been the most vocal proponent of OpenID. Last month, the portal giant announced its full support of OpenID 2.0, making it the largest issuer of OpenID logins.

Security concerns have prevented Yahoo from becoming a relying party, however, meaning that the portal giant does not accept OpenID logins issued by other sites.

The involvement of IBM, and especially VeriSign, should address the security concerns of the OpenID movement, Washburn said.

VeriSign also has a long partnership with OpenID, said Nico Popp, the company's vice president of innovation. Popp told InternetNews.com that in the future, a top priority will be to ensure that the standards and protocol of OpenID remain open.

"We will definitely be very active supporting the mission of the foundation," he said. "The core mission is to protect the intellectual property," he added, citing the success of open security protocols SSL and DNS.

Combining the brain trusts behind VeriSign Identity Provider and IBM's Tivoli identity management software should go a long way to secure OpenID while ensuring that the protocols remain open, supporters said.

IBM makes for a natural partner for OpenID, because of its historic embrace of open protocols in enterprise, said Tony Nadalin, an IBM distinguished engineer and the chief security architect of Tivoli.

Nadalin said IBM had been working actively to promote a common identifier among enterprise applications, and saw in OpenID the opportunity to expand into the public Web.

"Our goal is to better enable the Web technology along with the enterprise technology as far as identity management is concerned," Nadalin told InternetNews.com.

As far as Microsoft and Google go, OpenID might actually give them something to agree on. Microsoft has expressed support for OpenID for a year, and Google has already deployed the standard on its Blogger property, both issuing OpenID logins and accepting those from other sites.

That Google has taken the first tentative step to becoming a relying party is significant for Washburn, and he hopes that more Google-owned sites will begin accepting externally issued OpenID logins -- and encouraging its proliferation.

"The expectation is that it will become pervasive," he said.

Washburn said that although the foundation will continue recruiting companies of all sizes to support the OpenID standard, it is not likely to add any more board members. The foundation is also clear that board members serve in an advisory capacity, but do not make decisions about how the OpenID standard and the community around it develop.

He also said he hopes a few specific online communities will enter the OpenID fold.

"I personally would love to see Craigslist getting serious about identity," he said, adding quickly that he is a big fan of the site. "Ninety-nine percent of the people are honest," he said, but clearing out those who aren't with identity authentication could improve the community.

He would also welcome the major social networks to follow Plaxo's lead in joining up with OpenID. However, he noted that those companies are still young, and it often takes time for sites to warm up to ideas like OpenID.

"We would just jump at the chance for them to become part of this," Washburn said. "It would clearly be something that the young users on the Net would be able to run with."

Sony Ericsson unveiled a range of new phones, including its first phone using Microsoft's software.

The handset maker, a joint-venture between Sony and Ericsson  of Sweden, launched 7 new phones, including the Xperia phone brand targeting the business market with the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating platform. The Xperia X1 phone, with a 3-inch touchscreen and stylus, is the first phone the company has launched using Microsoft's software, joining rivals Samsung Electronics Co. (005930.SE) and Motorola Inc. (MOT), which already use the technology.

It also launched the G900 touchscreen phone, with a 5-megapixel camera and WiFi Internet connectivity. The phone also has a 2.4-inch touchscreen, drawing parallels with the iPhone.

"It's very important for us as a growing business to extend the Sony Ericsson brand to new users," said Steve Walker, head of portfolio planning at Sony Ericsson. "These new phones are helping us achieve this."

Lifting the curtain on the Mobile World Congress telephone trade show in Barcelona, Sony Ericsson also launched the G700 model 2.4-inch touchscreen phone and the W980 clamshell-model, with 8-gigabytes of internal memory to store up to 8,000 songs.

Two new Cybershot camera phones were also launched: the C902 12-millimeter thin camera phone with a 5-megapixel camera that can store 700 photos; and the C702 Cybershot splash- and dust-proof phone, with a 3.2-megapixel camera, built- in global positioning system and Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Google Maps.

The Z770 high-speed Internet clamshell phone will also go on sale by this summer, the company said.

Apple Inc on Tuesday introduced models of its popular iPod touch handheld computer and iPhone with double the memory available in previous versions.

Apple, which said in January it had sold more than 4 million iPhones since sales began last June, says the iPhone will now also sell with 16 gigabytes of memory.

The iPod touch, a wireless touch-screen device that plays music and videos, adds a 32 gigabyte model. Both devices will sell for $499, Apple said.

Apple will continue to sell its iPhone with 8 gigabytes of memory for $399, and two lower-capacity versions of the iPod touch, 16 gigabytes and 8 gigabytes, for $399 and $299, respectively.

The updated models come amid a slump in Apple's stock, due to fears that a U.S. recession could make consumers less likely to buy iPods or iPhones. The stock, which closed on Tuesday at $131.65 on Nasdaq, is down more than 33 percent so far this year.

San Francisco - A Tuesday deadline has been set in which several leading open-source PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) projects plan to stop supporting older versions of PHP in upcoming releases.

The Go PHP 5 campaign, sponsored by several PHP proponents, is intended to move the PHP developer community fully onto the PHP version 5 platform. Among the projects backing the effort are Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine. These vendors are committing to use PHP 5.2 in releases developed after Tuesday.

Campaign advocates also have issued an invitation to other PHP projects to participate, and so far, about 150 software projects and about 200 Web hosters have committed.

Most PHP Web applications run in PHP 4 and 5. PHP 4 was released in 2000, while PHP 5 became available in 2004.

"We think PHP is absolutely the platform going forward," said Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer at PHP tools vendor Zend Technologies, which is supporting the Go PHP5 effort.

PHP 5 features object orientation, for enterprise application development, and Web services capabilities, de Visser said. But adoption has been slow because of issues like Web hosts that offer PHP 4 by default, Go PHP 5 said.

"No one's moving to PHP 5 because no one wants to be first," said Larry Garfield, a co-founder of the Go PHP 5 project.

Hosts will not upgrade until projects do, but projects will not upgrade until hosts do, thus presenting a chicken-and-egg situation, according to Go PHP 5's July 2007 statement. Go PHP 5 hopes to give Web hosts incentive to upgrade servers to newer versions of PHP.

Additionally, extensions to the PHP 4 platform are ceasing, according to Garfield. There will only be major security issues considered between now and August, and after that, PHP development stops, he said.

PHP 6, meanwhile, is not due for more than a year, de Visser said. It will focus on internationalization, he said.

Almost five years in the making, Microsoft Corp.'s newest server operating system has hit its next milestone: Development is complete, and it's been released to manufacturing.

One key feature of the server operating system is Server Core, a stripped-down, lightweight installation option that contains only a subset of executable files and can perform a limited number of functions. Not only can Server Core work on older hardware when the full-boat operating system will not, but running Windows Server 2008 in this way means fewer security vulnerabilities, Computerworld's reviewer says.

Other new functions include expanded support for Internet Information Server, where administrators can control exactly which pieces of IIS are installed and running at any given time, and more options for running and controlling applications remotely.

The path to Windows Server 2008 has not always been a straight line, however. The operating system has been delayed at least once, and Microsoft has changed course about which virtualization features to include natively in the operating system.

Microsoft will show Windows Server 2008 to IT pros, and any other interested parties, during a nationwide series of launch events starting later this month. The first is scheduled for Feb. 27 in Los Angeles.

Also on display at those events will be Visual Studio 2008, which recently was made available to volume customers, and SQL Server 2008, which Microsoft said has been delayed until the third quarter.