Microsoft

Microsoft suit alleges ex-worker stole trade secrets

Updated 4:55 p.m. PST with Mullor comment. Correction, 5:12 p.m. PST: An earlier version of this story had the incorrect day the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on this suit. It was Thursday.

Microsoft has sued a former employee for allegedly lying when he applied for a job there and stealing trade secrets that were later used in a lawsuit against Microsoft partners.

According to the lawsuit, filed January 22 in King County Superior Court, Miki Mullor stated on his application that he no longer worked at Ancora Technologies because it had gone out of business. However, Sammamish, … Read more

Microhoo: What might have been

A year ago Sunday, on February 1, 2008, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told the world his company wanted to buy Yahoo.

Despite months of discussions, the deal never materialized, distressing many Yahoo shareholders and hastening Yahoo's replacement of CEO Jerry Yang with Carol Bartz. But what if Yang had gotten up on the other side of the bed one day a year ago and led his company to accept the offer?

It's impossible to know what would have happened, of course. But an exercise in speculation can be illuminating, as Philip K. Dick showed with The Man In The High Castle, … Read more

New test version issued for Vista SP2

While the world and its dog awaits Windows 7, Microsoft has another Vista service pack waiting in the wings.

Service Pack 2 is now into its release candidate phase, and Redmond has made an "escrow" version available to certain testers.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley got her hands on the e-mail that accompanied this week's news:

We are excited to announce RC-Escrow build as the next milestone release of Windows Vista SP2 / Windows Server 2008, now available for download. This build is available on Windows Update for download and install, or by a number of other package … Read more

Google fakes out Hotmail for Chrome support

Google has added a patch to its latest beta version and stable version of Chrome to make the browser work better with Microsoft's Hotmail site.

With the patch, Chrome tells Microsoft's site it's actually Apple's Safari browser, sidestepping a compatibility issue that had caused problems using the site.

"While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we're deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com," Chrome Product Manager Mark Larson said in a blog announcement. It also fixes … Read more

Microsoft adds fancy search option for Firefox

If you had any doubts Microsoft didn't appreciate the advantages of Firefox's ability to accommodate add-ons, you can dispel them now. The company just released one that makes Microsoft's search service work better with the open-source Web browser.

"We're happy to report that we've officially integrated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand," said Live Search Program Manager Beatrice Oltean and Senior Product Manager Debapriya Ray in a blog post Thursday.

Like Yahoo's Inquisitor, the Microsoft search add-on connects to Microsoft's search site to suggest completions of searches as people start … Read more

Better JPEG standard due in 2009

JPEG XR, an image format created by Microsoft that promises a number of advantages over JPEG, has cleared a key standardization hurdle.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group, which standardized the original and still ubiquitous JPEG format, sent JPEG XR to the "final phases of standardization" after a vote at a January meeting, the group said Thursday. That means the standard's future is more certain.

"The committee expects the JPEG XR International Standard to be published later this year," the group said.

JPEG XR offers a few advantages over JPEG, according to Microsoft. For one thing, … Read more

Virtual Windows 7 not the same thing

Emboldened by my success in getting Windows 7 to run on a Mac Mini using Boot Camp, I decided to press my luck. So Wednesday night, I took my Windows 7 beta disk home and set out to load it onto a virtual machine on my iMac.

Having used Parallels successfully in the past to run Vista, I decided to give VMware's Fusion a try--my first experience with the product. Getting up and running was relatively straightforward, a process aided by the fact that VMware lets you enter information such as your password and product key at the outset--handling … Read more

Windows 7 on a Mac Mini

Finding myself with some free time on Tuesday, I decided to try and see whether and how Windows 7 would install using Boot Camp on a Mac.

I must say, I get a little sick pleasure turning a Mac into a Windows machine, knowing that it has to make both Microsoft and Apple's skin crawl to see their progeny used in such a way.

Plus, Macs do tend to make for pretty zippy (if pricey) Windows machines.

With that--and an older demo Mac Mini I hadn't been using much--I was off to the races. I got a fair … Read more

Gmail grows up with offline e-mail access

Significantly increasing the utility and competitiveness of its Web-based e-mail service, Google is enabling an experimental ability to read, write, and search Gmail messages even while not connected to the network.

Google believes almost religiously in cloud computing, the idea that computer applications and data live on the Internet rather than on PCs. But there are times when the network is inaccessible, and generally Web-based applications like today's Gmail effectively seize up under those circumstances.

Offline sidesteps that problem, the classic example being a busy executive traveling on a plane. And offline Gmail access begins a new chapter for … Read more