The Great Geek Manual News

A new report is predicting a slow market for enterprise adoption of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 release.

In a recent survey of 1100 IT professionals, 83 per cent of IT departments are not planning on adopting the new Windows operating system in the next year.

The study was carried out by research firm Dimensional Research with the backing of IT management vendor KACE.

According to the researchers, economic hardships and lingering doubts from Windows Vista were the main causes for apprehension.

Overall 83 per cent of those surveyed said that their companies would be skipping Vista altogether and moving from Windows XP straight to Windows 7.

Of the 17 per cent of respondents who did plan on upgrading to Windows 7 in the next twelve year, more than half said that a desire to avoid Vista was the main reason for the move.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: iT News

Ubuntu distributor Canonical has attacked Microsoft’s claims that Windows is now the dominant force on netbooks as “absolute nonsense”.

Microsoft claimed victory in the netbook market earlier this week, reporting that 96% of netbooks sold in the US now come with Windows.

The software giant also claimed return rates of Linux netbooks were four times higher than Windows, citing Canonical itself as a source.

Speaking exclusively to PC Pro this afternoon, Canonical’s head of platform marketing Gerry Carr has rubbished Microsoft’s claims.

“There’s no evidence that we or anyone can point to of higher return rates on Linux versus XP,” he said. “There is some evidence of poorly engineered products where there was little thought given to the operating system put on there… of higher return rates in some circumstances.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: PC Pro

Microsoft’s chest thumping last week over its 96% share of the U.S. netbook market for February doesn’t appear to be just its normal bravado as the company also is charging toward dominance on a global front.

According to statistics from IDC, Microsoft owned 76% of the global netbook market in 2008 and that number will only get bigger in the coming years.

In 2008, Linux came in with a share of 24% and IDC predicts that number will be in the single digits come the end of this year.

Globally, IDC says 10 million netbooks shipped in 2008. That number is expected to double this year and grow by 25% in 2010.

The result would seem to be another market where Microsoft dominates.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Network World

Microsoft might be betting big on Windows 7, the next version of its flagship operating system, but to Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth, the upcoming release is really an opportunity for Linux to shine.

Granted, Linux on the desktop has not made as much of a dent against Windows as it has in the datacenter. But Shuttleworth, who is also CEO of Ubuntu’s commercial backer Canonical, figures the desktop itself and the applications that people are using are changing in ways that make the coming desktop battle different than it has ever been before.

“The principals of diversity in the desktop space are well established,” Shuttleworth told InternetNews.com. “The benefits to consumers and industry of having an alternative are very substantial. Any change in the status quo is an opportunity.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Internet News

In Microsoft’s ongoing effort to alleviate users’ discomfort with Windows Vista’s security nags, the company may be re-introducing a potential powder keg of new problems, as researchers continue to discover.

In his continuing investigation of the UAC bypasses being tested for Windows 7, developer Rafael Rivera points out another potentially serious problem: As developer Leo Davidson noted in a recent blog post, some binaries in Windows 7 are given the ability to present XML-based manifests of themselves that give themselves a privilege called autoelevate.

It does exactly what it sounds like it does. Now, in Vista itself, auto-elevation has also been possible, but on a very broad scale only. For example, it’s technically possible for User Account Control to suppress all prompts to anyone logged in as an administrator; in fact, a freeware tool for just this purpose has been available since 2007. However, in Win7, an XML-based tag enables this privilege to be extended to individual programs.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Beta News

The rollout of a new operating system is a challenging time for a software company. That’s particularly true when the company’s most recent release was something of a commercial dud, and the last well-received version is nearly five years old.

That’s the difficult position that Microsoft Relevant Products/Services finds itself in as it hastens to bring Windows 7 to market and stem further inroads by Apple’s Mac OS X and a menagerie of open-source variants on Linux. In a clear indication of how concerned Microsoft has grown about the failure of Windows Vista, the company said it will progress straight from the current beta release of Windows 7 to a release candidate, which will accelerate the introduction of the new OS by several weeks.

There’s one other sign that Microsoft is deeply worried about the future of its massive OS market share: CEO Steve Ballmer is essentially warning corporations and IT departments that they risk facing mobs of angry employees if they hold onto Windows XP instead of upgrading to Windows 7.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: News Factor

Microsoft’s decision to limit Windows 7 Starter Edition to running only three concurrent applications could force up the price of netbooks in the UK.

The company announced last week that it was launching Windows 7 Starter Edition as a low-cost option designed specifically for netbooks.

However, the company’s decision to impose a three-app limit could force many manufacturers to opt for the more expensive Home Premium.

The three-app rule includes applications running in the background, meaning that a user running Windows Messenger and Skype, for example, could only use one further application on their machine. Antivirus software is excluded from the app count.

Microsoft says the restriction is designed to ensure that users get the best possible performance from limited netbook hardware. However, it admits it will encourage netbook manufacturers to install the unrestricted Home Premium in the UK.

“It’s up to the OEMs to decide on whether or not they actually pick Starter edition or Home Premium,” Windows product manager, Laurence Painell, told PC Pro.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: PC Pro

Microsoft Relevant Products/Services on Tuesday announced plans to offer six versions of its Windows 7 operating system. But in an effort to make selecting the right version simpler, Microsoft recommends two primary editions: Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Home Professional.

The company said those two editions should meet the needs of most users. Microsoft will continue to offer other versions, including Home Basic, Starter, Enterprise and Ultimate.

“We’ve received great feedback from customers and partners through Windows XP and Windows Vista, and have learned a lot about how to communicate what’s available in different editions of the operating system,” said Windows General Manager Mike Ybrarra. “At the same time, we have a customer base of over one billion along with many partners, so it’s important to make sure the right edition of Windows with the right feature set is available for them.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: News Factor

While Microsoft Relevant Products/Services’s Windows 7 has been making tech news, Apple’s Mac OS X has moved up the market-share ladder. Apple’s operating system continued climbing for the third consecutive month, closing in on 10 percent of the operating-system market, according to Net Applications. Apple now claims 9.9 percent of the market.

At the same time, Microsoft’s Windows operating system saw three consecutive months of decline. As of January, Microsoft Windows had 88.3 percent of the market, a .42 percent drop from December and a 2.2 percent decline in the last 90 days.

That’s the largest slump in a three-month period in the four years Net Applications has been gathering operating-system data — and it doubles the previous record, set from December 2006 to February 2007. During that 2006-2007 period, Windows fell 1.1 percent. Windows XP caused most of the loss.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: NewsFactor

One week after Microsoft began offering preview downloads of Windows 7 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, experts are generally optimistic about what they’re seeing. The full release of the new operating system isn’t planned until 2010. But the software giant seems to be hoping that the preview release will allay the concerns of Windows users who were unwilling to switch from Windows XP to its troubled successor, Vista.

Vista, which was released in late 2006, met with some bad reviews and sluggish adoption in the business world. Forrester Research reports that by June 2008, only about 9 percent of its clients had switched to Vista. Microsoft went on selling XP months longer than it had planned. Now, the company is promoting Windows 7 as a response to user feedback.

Windows 7 features a few changes to Microsoft’s familiar user interface. Buttons for open windows no longer appear along the bottom of the screen. In their place are larger icons representing active and frequently used (or user selected) programs. When a user hovers the cursor over the icon for an active program, preview thumbnails of the open windows pop up, and the user selects the one that she wants. Certain cursor movements also trigger common changes to windows. Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it, dragging a window to the side snaps it in place so that it takes up half the screen, and dragging the cursor down to the right-hand corner of the screen makes all the open windows transparent so that the user can see down to the desktop. Microsoft also says that it has made it easier for users to create home networks, and that Windows 7 makes better use of resources than Vista did. The system requirements are similar to those for Vista Home Premium, but early reports say that Windows 7 manages memory better and runs faster.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Technology Review

There are only two days left until the third Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) will be available
(for testing), and… we couldn’t resist the temptation to take the current daily build for a test drive, before our usual screenshot tour, and taste the “sweetness” of that evolutionary EXT4 Linux filesystem. Announced on Christmas Eve, the EXT4 filesystem is now declared stable and it is distributed with version 2.6.28 of the Linux kernel and later. However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning (see the screenshot below for details). The bad news is that EXT4 will not be the default filesystem for the Ubuntu OS until version 9.10, due for release in late October this year.

OK, OK… so how will the end user benefit from this EXT4 filesystem? Well, first of all, the whole system will be much faster and more reliable compared to one with EXT3 (I guess that some of you still remember the Firefox/Ext3 issue), it will boot faster (the current article proves that) and it’s able to handle files with sizes of up to 16 TB (terabytes). But these are just a few of the features brought by the fourth extended filesystem, for more details you can check the Wikipedia entry for EXT4.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: SoftPedia

I’ve been toying with Windows 7 for a few days now. I’m not ready yet to talk about it in detail yet, but I can say that it’s better than Vista SP1. Of course, saying 7 is better than Vista isn’t saying much. However, I recently read a Network World column, which claims that Windows 7 will crush Linux. Yeah, and the Detroit Lions are going to win the Super Bowl this year.

Desktop Linux is moving forward. All the major computer vendors are now selling at least one PC, laptop or netbook with Linux. Many, if not most, PCs and netbooks will have SplashTop Linux soldiered right on their motherboard in 2009. Netbooks, the new hot computer model, often have Linux running on them. And, oh yeah, some company named Google seems to be making some interesting moves with Android Linux on netbooks. Oh, and have I mentioned that Windows’ market share has actually dropped below 90% of the desktop market.

Windows 7 also isn’t going to make friends with today’s XP users. True, lots of people seem to really like Windows 7 at this early stage. I think what we’re really seeing though is just Windows users who are thrilled that 7 hasn’t proved to be a total waste of bytes the way Vista was.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Computer World

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday with an impassioned endorsement of PCs and a sneak peek at the company’s future Windows 7 operating system.

As expected, Ballmer announced that Microsoft is releasing a beta version of Windows 7, which will be available for download beginning Friday. The news suggests the world’s largest software maker may be giving up efforts to rehabilitate its often-maligned Vista operating system, which was released worldwide in January 2007.

“We are on track to deliver the best version of Windows ever,” Ballmer told an audience of several thousand tech professionals and journalists inside a cavernous ballroom at the Venetian hotel. “We’re working hard to get it right and get it ready.”

Without mentioning the security and compatibility issues that have dogged Vista, Ballmer promised that Windows 7 will make PCs faster and easier to use. He didn’t offer a timetable for its official release, although Windows Vista went on sale more than two years after it was issued in beta form.

Early reviews of Windows 7, which was leaked to the Internet in beta form in late December, have been positive. iReport.com: Will you try Windows 7? Are you attending CES?

Read the Entire Story…
Source: CNN.com

Microsoft earned $1.5bn from sales of PCs that were labelled “Vista Capable”, even though they struggled to run premium versions of the operating system, a court has heard.

The software giant is currently being sued in the US by plaintiffs who claim the company “unjustly enriched” itself by using the stickers to sell PCs that weren’t suitable for Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions.

An expert witness in the case claims Microsoft reaped a handsome reward from the sales of such PCs.

“I have… reached the opinion that Microsoft revenue from the Windows XP licensing on Vista Capable but not Vista Premium Ready PCs sold to Plaintiffs was $1.505 billion,” University of Washington economist Keith Leffler told the court, according to Seattle Post Intelligencer.

How much of that $1.5bn Microsoft would have earned without the stickers on the PCs is open to debate, as many customers arguably wouldn’t have cared if the computer could run Vista or not.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: PC Pro