Software

The broad availability of the Windows Vista client OS has been pushed back to next year, Microsoft Corp. Co-President of the Platform and Services Division Jim Allchin announced Tuesday. Microsoft, however, plans to release Vista to business partners through its volume licensing program in November 2006, he said in a conference call.

Novell Inc. kicked off its BrainShare 2006 event in Salt Lake City on Monday with several announcements around the company

Developers at the Mozilla Foundation are readying the first alpha version of the Firefox 2 open-source browser, and could release it as early as Tuesday. The release includes a new "Places" feature intended to make it easier to find and return to recently visited Web pages.

Multimedia developer Jered Cuenco calls it the "gray box application" phenomenon: when a developer, befuddled by a graphic designer's computer-drawn mockups and unclear instructions, comes back with a prototype full of generic gray buttons, plain white backgrounds, oversize headlines in blinking Times New Roman text and other such crimes against user interfaces.That's the problem that Microsoft Corp., with its upcoming suite of Expression design software, hopes to solve.

Late last month, Microsoft was in the news for being the target of another formal complaint to the European Union for alleged anti-competitive practices. This time the complainants are focusing on the ubiquitous MS Office suite and asking

Scaling Ethernet to new heights

Just last year, Toronto

Security companies have reported what may be the first virus to target InfoPath, Microsoft Corp.'s product for sharing information in forms using the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format.