Microsoft Archive

Microsoft has released an initial release of version 2.0 of the Singularity operating system (research development kit, as it likes to call it). Singularity is a microkernel research operating system, where the kernel, drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Singularity is released under a shared source academic license, and you can do whatever you want with it, except making money (simply put).

Among all the Windows 7 announcements, one of the more surprising ones was about things the new OS would not include – specifically, applications for e-mail, photos, and video editing. Instead, Microsoft decided that these programs would be updated and downloadable as part of the Windows Live Essentials. Not only did Microsoft announce Wave 3 of the Live applications on Thursday, but the company completely redesigned its online services, too.

Microsoft offered a software development kit for Surface, the company's tabletop computer, to about 1,000 people at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. The article features a some details on apps already available for Surface. (For example, designers at Vectorform have built an application that lets people can "carve" a jack-o'-lantern on the Surface by using their fingers to trace a design in an image of a pumpkin.)

"If you disassemble a single binary, you can never tell why something was done in a certain way. If you have eight different versions, you can tell a lot. This episode of Computer Archeology is about reverse engineering eight different versions of Microsoft BASIC 6502 (Commodore, AppleSoft etc.), reconstructing the family tree, and understanding when bugs were fixed and when new bugs, features and easter eggs were introduced. This article also presents a set of assembly source files that can be made to compile into a byte exact copy of seven different versions of Microsoft BASIC, and lets you even create your own version."

Pagetable.com has an interesting article on a Microsoft easter egg. "If you type 'WAIT6502,1' into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string 'MICROSOFT!' at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg 'after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel', 'just in case Commodore ever tried to claim that the code wasn't from Microsoft'. In this episode of Computer Archeology, we will not only examine this story, but also track down the history of Microsoft BASIC on various computers, and see see how Microsoft added a second easter egg to the TSR-80 Color Computer - because they had forgotten about the first one."

The New York Times and The Guardian both published interesting editorials about Microsoft's latest press blitz in Europe, and its promotion of Windows 7, "Windows Cloud," and its positioning against Google.

One of the common complaints regarding Microsoft is that the company has problems eating its own dog food. Even though it promoted Windows Presentation Foundation as the programming framework for building Windows and web applications, it so far failed to produce any significant WPF applications itself. None of Microsoft's major applications use WPF (Expression Design and Blend aren't major), which does not help in promoting it as the Next Big Thing. This may all change in the near future, as a small but extremely popular Microsoft application is about to make the switch to Windows Presentation Foundation: MSN Windows Live Messenger.

Microsoft . . . complained in its annual report that it was facing increasing pressure from open source companies. It claims they are stealing its ideas and benefiting from its intellectual property. "A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products." Also see analysis at Microsoft Watch.

At the OSCON open source software convention, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) got an unexpected new sponsor: Microsoft. The Redmond software giant, which will contribute $100,000 annually to the ASF, joins Google and Yahoo as a platinum sponsor of Apache development.

Scott Finley, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has ported the Linux files system Ext2 to Microsoft's new research operating system Singularity. One of the most striking observations was the author's comments on Singularity's robustness. "Perhaps the best testament to Singularity's dependability was the extremely good system stability during the development of ext2... If the ext2 process terminated as the result of a failure, it only resulted in open channels closing. Other processes could (and did) recover gracefully." Finley's report details all his findings quite extensively.

The company plans to charge corporate customers a monthly subscription of $15 per user for a suite of "hosted" software, which includes e-mail, Web meeting, collaboration and messaging applications running on Microsoft's computers.

A Silicon.com article takes a look into the crystal ball, with Bill Gates departing from Microsoft, and posits the following potential changes: 1. A greater acceptance of open source 2. A new approach to Windows releases 3. Secure new revenue by buying big 4. Taking the web seriously through interoperability 5. More Microsoft than Gates .

The web is abuzz with articles related to Bill Gates' retreat from Microsoft, and the BBC, too, partakes in this buzz. The BBC decided to list a few of Bill Gates' and Microsoft's predictions and drastic moves, and came to a list of hits and misses. Five misses, four hits.

The launch of Microsoft's new interoperability principles have been both cautiously welcomed and sceptically scrutinised as the company goes about convincing the IT industry that it is genuine in its pursuit to provide interoperability with rival products, more consumer choice, less vendor lock-in and greater collaboration with the open source community. Here, Microsoft Australia CTO Greg Stones gives some obviously polished PR-approved responses to questions from Computerworld regarding the motivations behind support for ODF and PDF, what the software giant is really gaining by providing support to rival formats, and the ambiguities in its Open Specification Promise. He also gives a painfully polished response to CNN's senior editor's claims that the company is trying to eliminate free software.Typical Microsoft PR response to tough questions, but interesting nonetheless....