Microsoft to Release Windows 7 Release Mid '09, Reveals Vista Improvement Program

Windows 7 is set to drop mid-year 2009, says Microsoft

At Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), an important yearly event for the tech giant, new hardware details on the upcoming Windows 7 weren't the only revelation that Microsoft had in store.  Perhaps the most significant development of the conference came as a minor clarification -- Microsoft set a solid timeframe for when it plans to release Windows 7, barring unforeseen problems.

Originally, speculation was that Microsoft might field a Windows Vista successor in 2011 or 2012 as there was over 5 years between the release of Windows XP and Windows Vista.  However, with less than glowing reception of Vista, largely due to poor hardware partner support and a large footprint, Microsoft stepped up its efforts to launch its new Windows OS, which would set right the places where Vista went wrong.

Early this year, 2010 was what some Microsoft executives were saying to expect for a release date.  However, as the year progressed, Microsoft's top executives became increasingly optimistic that the OS could be delivered in late 2009.  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first floated the possibility of a 2009 release earlier this year.

Microsoft director Doug Howe showed slides in a WinHEC presentation that all but confirmed a 2009 release -- and even earlier than expected.  His slides stated that Microsoft will be releasing Windows 7 mid-year, in time to be included on the machines to be sold during the holiday buying season.  Mr. Howe stated, "Definitely the holiday focus is going to be on 7."
Also revealed by Mr. Howe were more details on Microsoft's secretive Velocity program aimed at improving Windows Vista PC quality.  The program, according to Microsoft, will run through next spring, conveniently terminating at about the time that Windows 7 will be preparing to ship.

The new program was initially only open to select computer manufacturers, but will now be opened to select software and hardware partners as well.  The basic premise is that the partners will have to engineer their products to work optimally with Vista and will have to undergo rigorous certification testing.  Partners will benefit from the good publicity, and Mr. Howe revealed in a slide that Microsoft might do some advertising for their products first-hand.

No list of the criteria was given, but one of the criteria, confirmed by Mr. Howe, was the ability to boot Windows Vista and have it ready to run within 50 seconds.  Many of the Velocity-certified machines boot significantly faster than this, according to Mr. Howe, but Microsoft wanted to set a widely obtainable goal.

After the debacle of Microsoft's "Vista Capable" program, which saw the company's stickers placed on underpowered bargain machines clearly not Vista ready, Velocity is both an effort on Microsoft's part to show that it's turned over a new leave and an effort to overall improve Vista machine quality.  The program launched in July 2007.

The program targeted the sluggish system performance that was plaguing many Windows Vista machines.  Originally intended as a three month program, it was extended far past the planned termination, due to Microsoft realizing there was still much work to be done.  In particular the program aims to speed up the time it takes for Vista computers to start up, shut down, sleep, and wake up.  Other goals include that all the hardware and software is completely compatible with Vista, as compatibility is a perennial trouble-spot or Vista.

Microsoft's labs in Redmond, Wash. are in charge of the Velocity testing.

Overall, Windows observers should be able to appreciate that Microsoft sincerely seems to be trying to improve the OS.  However, what it can't improve like memory and processing footprint, should be remedied with the release of Windows 7, which has now been all but confirmed for mid next year.   

One last interesting note -- Microsoft previously stated that it would release Vista's Service Pack 2 before Windows 7 -- so that means that if it sticks with this plan, Vista SP2 is likely coming in Spring of 2009.  Stay tuned for more details on that one.

DailyTech - Microsoft to Release Windows 7 Release Mid '09, Reveals Vista Improvement Program

Atari Officially Picks Up Ghostbusters

Confirming earlier comments by actor Dan Aykroyd, Atari today announced it will be publishing Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

"Ghostbusters: The Video Game is a fantastic addition to Atari's global line-up in 2009," said Phil Harrison, President of Atari parent Infogrames Entertainment. "The title has built considerable anticipation and excitement among game fans for its high quality action and all-out mayhem. There's no more thrilling Ghostbusting experience to be had, short of building your own proton pack."

 

Ghostbusters was originally a Vivendi Games-published title, but that company dropped the game following the Activision merger. Earlier, Atari signed The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, also originally on Vivendi's schedule.

In development at Terminal Reality (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) and Red Fly (Wii, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS) and featuring the likeness and voices of the original movie actors, Ghostbusters will be released some time in 2009.

Atari Officially Picks Up Ghostbusters - Shacknews

Rocks That Capture CO2

Often it turns out that nature is way ahead of us. Scientists at Columbia University discovered that a type of rock found in Oman, New Guinea, California and other places is able to capture vast quantities of CO2.

Peridotite rocks produce calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate (both solids) when they come in contact with CO2. Researchers discovered that these rocks in the Omani desert naturally absorb 10,000 to 100,000 tons of CO2 a year.

While taking rocks to the CO2 would be expensive, CO2 could be brought to these rocks. Scientists believe that they could bore into the ground and inject water containing CO2. The CO2 would immediately produce calcium and magnesium carbonate and be permanently stored in the rock.

Successful tests have already been completed and the scientists want to try it on a larger scale. This type of CO2 capture seems more feasible and safer than many other options and it harnesses an already-occurring, natural process.

Rocks That Capture CO2 | EcoGeek - Clean Technology

Obama Pushes Ambitious Tech Agenda; Tops on List: Privacy, Fast Net

Obama is recruiting a transition team of former tech executives will help to push his vision of low-cost, fast, private internet

President-elect Barack Obama has an ambitious and comprehensive national agenda that seeks to put into effect many initiatives and changes.  To assist him in implementing this vision, he is recruiting top leaders to his transition team, which will prepare his plans and flesh out his plans, and ready them for proposal to the new House and Senate.

Top on Obama's agenda are many technology-related efforts.  President-elect Obama is no stranger to technology and has said that he wants more expansive protection of users rights to online privacy, a stance which surely runs counter to the RIAA, MPAA, and other groups' aggressive litigation efforts.  Also on the list are plans to free up unused government spectrum for public use.  Obama during his presidential campaign referred several times to the White Space, a section of the spectrum which Google and Microsoft have been lobbying for the government to free up.

Finally, Obama wants to fight bandwidth caps and mandate faster internet from internet service providers.  He is concerned of what he sees as a trend among companies like AT&T and Time Warner to give the customer less for more.

Among those whom Obama has recruited for his team are Google.org's Sonal Shah and Julius Genchowski, a former IAC executive.  Both individuals bring with them diverse and varied backgrounds to the table.

Sonal Shah is a part of Google's global development team.  She also served as a Vice President at Goldman, Sachs and Co. in the environmental protection department.  She is the founder of Indicorps, a U.S.-based non-profit organization offering one-year fellowships for Americans of Indian origin to work on specific development projects in India.  She's an expert on a diverse range of tech topics and an expert in global trade and the internet.

She also has government experience, serving in the Department of Treasury in a variety of roles, working in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Julius Genachowski, an executive with Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, likewise has government experience.  He worked with the Federal Communications Commission as chief counsel to former Democratic Chairman Reed Hundt.  He has been advising Obama on tech issues as is chairing the President-elect's Tech & Innovation Plan.

The pair first met in Harvard Law School, and he has helped sway Obama into making tech a focus of the campaign.  Mr. Genachowski is pushing for laws that would ban ISPs from slowing, blocking, or placing other controls on internet content over their networks, a plan tentatively approved by President-elect Obama.  The proposal has drawn harsh criticism from ISPs who argue that place limits on what their customers receive is critical to their business.

Rick Whitt, Google's Washington telecom and media counsel, says Mr. Genachowski is the perfect advocate with the technical know-how and desire to represent the average American, and the perfect leader for Obama's team.  Mr Whitt states, "Julius is a true believer in the power of technology to change lives and I think that bodes well for the Obama administration that someone like him is part of the transition team."

Both advisers eschew the traditional lobbyist background that many of the advisers from the past several administrations had hailed from.  Supporters say that this is a sign that Obama-administration really is about change, including in the tech industry.  With his party in firm control of the new House and Senate, barring a conservative filibuster, it looks like he may be able to pass through some impressive legislation which will protect citizens' rights on the internet.

DailyTech - Obama Pushes Ambitious Tech Agenda; Tops on List: Privacy, Fast Net

WPA is going the way of WEP, cracked in 15 minutes flat

According to PC World the days of securing your WIFI network using Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) may be over, as researcher Erik Tews will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption in around 15 minutes at a the Tokyo PacSec Conference in two weeks time.

WPA was designed to overcome the insecurities in hacked Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) which can be hacked in a few minutes using a modern laptop.

Erik Tews will be demonstrating how he cracked the WPA encryption to read the data being sent from a router to a laptop.
To read the data being sent Tews found a way to crack the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key without resorting to using a dictionary attack which, security experts have agreed that the protocol might be vulnerable too.

Although this is a big step Tews was still unable to crack the keys used to encrypt the data being sent back to the router from the laptop.

If the demonstration lives up to its headline then the days of WPA look to be numbered. This would come as a big blow to both consumers and corporations alike.

WPA is the most common standard of encryption in uses but, there is also a newer more secure standard WPA2, (which uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and is unaffected), although support is still patchy. Consumer may find they are forced to still rely on the now unsecure WPA encryption to connect their devices to the network.

For Business this is even bigger headache. The TJ Maxx chain had hundreds of millions of customer details stolen due in part to the fact that they were still using the cracked WEP standard. It’s easy to see a situation where hackers may try to do the same using WPA forcing corporate users to VPN or WPA2 dumping devices that can’t support these protocols.

WPA is going the way of WEP, cracked in 15 minutes flat

Plan to Send Hot Air Balloon to Saturn's Moon Titan

A hot air balloon drifts gently in the breeze, gliding over mountain ranges and vast lakes.  Thick clouds extend over the entire horizon, threatening rain.  The meager light that filters through illuminates one side of the balloon, making it look like a giant question mark in the sky.

This is a vision that floats in the minds of scientists who study Titan, Saturn's largest moon.  The Cassini spacecraft currently traveling around the Saturn system has provided us with our

best glimpse yet of Titan, but there is still much to be explored. 

Athena Coustenis, an astrophysicist and planetologist with the Paris Observatory, is helping draft a plan to send a hot air balloon to Titan, as well as an orbiting spacecraft and a surface probe.  Called TSSM – the Titan and Saturn System Mission – this three-tiered approach to exploration could shed more light on the still-mysterious moon.

Seeing Through the Fog

"Titan is the best place to go with a balloon because of the atmosphere," says Coustenis.  Although the atmosphere of Titan is filled with a smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze, it is primarily composed of nitrogen – just like Earth's.  In fact, Astrobiologists think Titan's atmosphere may be quite similar to how the Earth's was billions of years ago, before life on our planet generated oxygen. 

The moon's resemblance to Earth was eerily brought to mind when the Huygens probe descended to the surface of Titan in 2005.  The photos showed a mountain with river channels carving their way down to a lake shoreline; a geography reminiscent of Earth today, except that on Titan the mountains are made of ice, and the rivers are liquid methane. 

The Huygens probe eventually landed in a sandy river bed dotted with pebbles.  This soft terrain would prove hazardous for a wheeled rover – the Mars Rover Opportunity got stuck for weeks in a sand dune and was nearly stranded forever.  "The ground on Titan may be gooey, and you don't want to get stuck somewhere," says Coustenis.

She says that to move around, the TSSM probe could be outfitted with a helicopter rotor that would allow it to fly from place to place.  The probe design also may include floaters that would prevent it from sinking if it landed on one of Titan's hydrocarbon lakes. 

The probe also would have a scoop to help it analyze the surface soil or liquid.  The models for Titan suggest the surface would be primarily made of hydrocarbon particles that rained out of the thick atmosphere, but Coustenis says they are still unsure of exactly what the chemistry of Titan's surface is like.

"Huygens was designed as a descent module, and there were no instruments designed to do surface science after landing," says Coustenis.  "If you ask me what the dunes are made of, I don't know.  The only way to find out what the surface is made of is to go touch it, sample it, and have a laboratory there that will analyze all the samples." 

Huygens unexpectedly did gain some data of the surface upon landing.  The probe heated the cold surface and caused some of it to evaporate, and an instrument designed to read the chemistry of the atmosphere caught a whiff of methane gas.  But Coustenis says that instrument only could detect a very limited spectrum, and so scientists still have more questions than answers about Titan's surface chemistry.

Exploring an Alien Landscape

Our knowledge of Titan's geography has improved thanks to Huygens and Cassini.  Long before the probe landed, scientists thought Titan was completely covered by a hydrocarbon ocean.  This ocean was thought to be the source of methane in Titan's atmosphere.  The Huygens probe proved the theory of a global ocean was incorrect, and from what the Cassini spacecraft has seen so far, the lakes of liquid hydrocarbon on Titan are mostly confined to the moon's north polar region.  Still, it's hard to speak of Titan's geography with much certainty.  While Cassini's radar has allowed it to peer through Titan's thick atmospheric haze, in the end Cassini won't be able to map even half of the moon's surface. The third part of TSSM – an orbiting spacecraft – will give scientists a more complete view of the enigmatic moon.

"We need a Titan-dedicated orbiter because after four years of Cassini, we still haven't mapped more than 25 percent of Titan's surface," says Coustenis. "When you see the diversity the moon has, you realize it needs full-coverage mapping.  And we can have a polar orbiter, whereas Cassini only passes by Titan on the ecliptic."

The orbiter also could be used to study Enceledus, a tiny moon that previously had not garnered much attention.  Cassini discovered that Enceladus has geysers of liquid water at its south pole, and this spray generates one of the rings around Saturn.  Scientists are puzzled how this icy snowball could generate enough heat to keep water liquid.  Because liquid water is believed to be a prerequisite for life, some scientists now think Enceladus could be a potential location for alien organisms in our solar system.

Some may think the TSSM is too risky a mission, since hot air balloons and probes that float on liquid have never before been sent to alien worlds.  But Coustenis says our exploration efforts beyond Earth always need to be on the cutting edge. 

"Why would we want to have a new mission unless we were going to do something original with it?" she asks.  "(This mission) is challenging, but it's do-able.  Even if it is a crazy idea, we shouldn't keep sending the same kinds of missions out there."

NASA and ESA are working in cooperation to develop an outer planets mission, and they are expected to choose between TSSM and a mission to Jupiter and its moon Europa in early 2009.  Whichever mission they choose, the projected launch date is around 2020, with an arrival around 2030.

SPACE.com -- Plan to Send Hot Air Balloon to Saturn's Moon Titan

Windows 7 Shows Off Simplified Hardware Interface, Improved SSD Support

The latest developments from Windows 7 focus on hardware

With the bits of Windows 7's pre-beta and milestone releases taking the torrent community by storm, there's more excitement than ever surrounding the highlights of the UI and top level features of Microsoft's upcoming OS, demonstrated and released at its Professional Developers Conference.  Many are pleased to see Windows 7 to be running leaner than Windows Vista, despite featuring rich graphics.

An important focus at Microsoft for Windows 7 has been hardware, though, not software.  Hardware was a virtual nightmare for both Microsoft and Vista users, when poor developer support led to incompatibility with many devices at launch.  Vowing not to repeat this problem, Microsoft is rethinking how it approaches hardware with its new OS.

At its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, it released more official pre-beta copies of Windows 7 to hardware developers.  And it gave the same features overview, this time with a hardware twist.

Leading the way is Device Stage, a new invention from Microsoft.  This intuitive idea is something you might expect from OS X, but it’s a sign of the newfound creativity brewing at Microsoft.  The new center allows the user to select from any device attached to the system.  Microsoft is providing an interface that allows the user to access any capabilities of the device and to go online to fetch manuals and documentation on the device.  Microsoft is being stricter with hardware partners, demanding they provide quality interfaces and information.

An example of how this feature would work is if you plugged in your cell phone -- say a Blackberry Pearl. Clicking on the device in question, Device Stage has a section for manuals, a file browser where you can manage content or look through the files.  Any interface functionality, which the hardware provides will be accessible in Device Stage.

Julie Larson-Green, vice president of program management for the Windows Experience describes, "I can set up my sync capabilities [on my Motorola phone].  I can manage the media on my device. I can browse files. I can go and find that documentation because I probably threw out the manual when I got the box, so I can go online and get that. And anything that the device does can be exposed through the Device Stage."

Also improved is Microsoft's code to exploit SSD drives.  SSDs will be faster than before.  They will also provide much faster wake up and hibernation.  According to initial reports, the difference between a Windows 7 PC equipped with a SSD and a Windows Vista PC is visibly dramatic when it comes to wake-up and sleep times.

Microsoft says it is planning "Windows enhancements that take advantage of the latest updates to standardized command sets, such as ATA."  SSD makers are enthused about Microsoft's support as they feel it may give the turbulent industry the boost it needs.

While much of the Windows 7 hardware interface upgrades will require some work from developers, Microsoft is also mollifying them, by explaining that they will have less work to do adapting to the underlying interface than with Vista, as Windows 7 shares much with Vista on a base hardware level.

Microsoft is expected to elaborate more on new hardware features in coming weeks.

DailyTech - Windows 7 Shows Off Simplified Hardware Interface, Improved SSD Support