2010

The first volume licensing arrangements for Microsoft Office 2010 will be made through company partners on May 1, almost two weeks earlier than expected. This news today from the company’s Office Engineering team, which released the final build of all versions of the company’s principal applications suite today. “Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we’ve had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version — that’s more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads!” reads this afternoon’s post by the Engineering team. “The feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped the set of products we’re excited about, and that I’m sure will delight our customers.” ...

A study of web traffic from enterprises in the first quarter of this year has shown that YouTube videos used 10 percent of bandwidth – more than any other site. Facebook traffic used 4.5 percent, Windows update 3.3, Yahoo!’s image server Yimg 2.7 and Google searches 2.5 percent. The study, by the Hong Kong-based security firm Network Box, analyzed traffic to and from 13 billion URLs. The study also analyzed the number of hits: ...

The CEO of Apple is certainly no stranger to the stage, being known for giving keynotes that typically have the effect of rendering tech geeks into little piles of goo after the announcement of a new product. But now Mr. Jobs — or at least, the story of his career — will be gracing a new stage: an Off Broadway theatre. Playwright Mike Daisey wasn’t scheduled to perform his new monologue about the Apple head honcho until next year, but popular demand from New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre has pushed up the premiere of Notes Toward the Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs to a one-night-only run on April 22. The venue’s artistic director was reportedly so excited about the work that he commissioned a one evening run even though the play is officially a “work in progress and not ready for review.” ...

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin [iTunes link] has his own iPhone app, and it’s packed full of information, news, images and videos related to space exploration. It’s currently the one of the most popular apps in the Apple App Store’s Education category. “Buzz Aldrin Portal to Science and Space Exploration” is divided into five sections: Space Buzz, News, Interactive, Buzz Life, and More. We’ve pictured most of them below. The Space Buzz section serves up a variety of content (mission data, videos, photos, “buzz’s takes” and more) on nine subjects in space exploration, including Deep Space Exploration, Mysteries & Myths, Mars Exploration, Space Tourism & Private Ventures, Hubble & Other Telescopes, Moon Exploration, International Space Station and International Space Race. ...

Taken from Google Official Blog: Last year, in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint (and keep people on their toes), we turned to an unlikely solution for mowing an overgrown field: goats. More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing. ...

Whenever you want to print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have drivers installed for each printer you intend to use. Most of the time, it’s not an issue: at home, you probably have one printer, and all your PCs have the required drivers. Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad. Or a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is why Google is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.” ...

Earlier today, a staging site for the HTC Incredible was found on Verizon’s servers with information about its release date and new name. According to the site — which is now password-protected — the Droid Incredible by HTC will launch on April 29. As we mentioned yesterday, the specs behind HTC’s latest device are pretty drool-worthy: a Snapdragon CPU, an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus and video, a 480×800 OLED screen — it pretty much looks like the next great Android device. ...

The Telegraph, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK, hasn’t had a good time of it lately where their website is concerned. There were vulnerabilities found in relation to the site back in March involving database access, and it seems a hacking group has gone in and defaced two subdomains. These are the two subdomains in question: shortbreaks(dot)telegraph.co.uk wine-and-dine(dot)telegraph.co.uk/site/index.php They appear to have been compromised by “R.N.S. – Romanian National Security”. Here’s a screenshot, both defacements are identical: ...

The fact that Opera Mini was admitted to the App Store was a huge surprise, but judging from the popularity of the app, it was the right move, at least from the users’ point of view. At one point, Opera Mini was the most popular free app in all regional App Stores, as you can see in the screenshot below. Right now, the situation has changed slightly, but Opera Mini is still on top everywhere except in Australia, where it holds the second place. ...

Microsoft’s debut of the KIN yesterday has tech pundits talking about Microsoft’s mobile strategy, about the future of Windows Phone, and about the state of the “dumbphone” in general. It’s a compelling product. And because KIN comes from Sharp and Danger’s parent company Microsoft, the KIN drew a lot of comparisons to the Sidekick straight away. Yesterday, I called KIN the “Sidekick of the 2010s,” Ars Technica called it “Sidekick’s next of KIN,” and Wired said Microsoft wants to “update the Sidekick’s M.O. for a new decade.” ...

Google’s adding an intriguing new feature to its Twitter search options –- the ability to “replay” a moment in time to see what people were tweeting about a given topic at any point between the present and the advent of the microblogging tool. In a blog post, Google explains that this could be used to “explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run?” ...

Avid readers of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Blog (and really, how can you not be?) know that yesterday, April 13th, marked the end of support for Windows Vista RTM, also known as Windows Vista SP0. We’d like to say that we’ll miss Vista RTM. We’d like to say that… but, well… Ctrl+Alt+Del On a related note, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will reach its end of support this summer on July 13th. There are more positive memories of XP SP2, largely because of its emphasis on security. ...

Disney’s ABC television network was the first in the industry to market on the iPad with their impressive app. Downloaders can stream TV episodes free of charge and early data is showing that they’re doing so in droves. According to data shared with the Wall Street Journal, the ABC iPad app has been downloaded 205,000 times and users have already streamed 650,000 television episodes. Those streams have translated into several million ad impressions for the network’s iPad advertisers, including AT&T, Sears and Target. ...

In an excellent blog, the people from Apache did a very good job analyzing and documenting how a security breach happened–going through all the stages of the attack and drawing conclusions. Should you ever become the unfortunate victim of an attack, this blog offers an example of how to document it! I quote:”If you are a user of the Apache-hosted JIRA, Bugzilla, or Confluence, a hashed copy of your password has been compromised.” So if you are a user, please act accordingly after reading this blog 😉 ...

Today the Library of Congress is announcing that it’s doing its part to digitally preserve each and every public tweet since the beginning of time … err Twitter. It fittingly broke the news on Twitter earlier today. As a federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress exists for research purposes, preserving every form of written word imaginable — and now that includes our tweets. The institution deems tweets important and hopes to use the archives “to learn about ourselves and the world around us.” ...