The April 25 release of a feature-complete Windows Server "Longhorn" beta is a monumental milestone for Microsoft, perhaps more important than the launch of Windows Vista. As the nucleus of Microsoft's enterprise product strategy, Longhorn will likely pull deployments of other products, including Vista. However, uncertainty about the release of the first Vista service pack looms like a dark cloud over future upgrades.

With the release of Beta 3, Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., reaffirmed its Longhorn release-to-manufacturing commitment for the second half of 2007. However, officials refused to reaffirm commitment for the release of Vista Service Pack 1. In November, Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for server and tools, told eWEEK that Windows Server Longhorn and Vista SP1 would ship "simultaneously."

View: Extreme Tech

Computers and music have been linked since the earliest days of the mainframe, when giant machines controlled primitive synthesizers. Recently, however, a significant advancement has taken place in the field of computer music with the development of software that can not only transcribe polyphonic music in real time, but can also play back complex harmonies alongside human performers. For instance, at the annual Music Information Retrieval Exchange (MIREX) competition, Christopher Raphael of Indiana University demonstrated a system that can understand live music well enough to accompany a musician.

Raphael started playing an oboe quartet written by Mozart, and his electronic accompaniment chimed in playing the other three instruments. When Raphael slowed down his performance, the computer "musicians" followed right along with him without missing a beat, even when he added a trill for emphasis.

"Technology is changing our sense of what music can be," Raphael says. "The effect is profound." The new software was not easy to develop, however. Raphael compares it to the slow progress in effective speech recognition. "There's been a veritable army of people who've worked on speech recognition for several decades, and [the problem] still remains open," he says. "Any time you deal with real data, there is a huge amount of variation that you have to understand."

View: ARS Tehnica

Tokyo (Japan) Just a day after announcing bumper profits, Nintendo is promising that it will “do better” to step up production of the Wii and meet the large consumer demand for the console.

The company is aiming to up its forecast of delivering 12 million Wii’s this year to 14 million units according to comments made to GamesIndustry.biz, and Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told reporters that "We must do our best to fix this abnormal lack of stock. We have not been able to properly foresee demand. We will do our best to offer the machine for those who are waiting."

Nintendo has sold 5.84 million Wii’s since launching the console five months ago, versus the 1.84 million Sony has sold and the 10 million Xbox 360’s sold since Microsoft launched its console in late 2005.

Source: TG Daily

A security researcher will show hackers new ways to defeat Vista's BitLocker drive encryption.

Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for picking apart the security mechanisms built into Windows, is to demonstrate new ways for hackers to invade Windows Vista, including rootkit techniques and ways to defeat BitLocker drive encryption.

Rutkowska recently announced she will be running a training session called "Understanding Stealth Malware" during the Black Hat Briefings and Training event in Las Vegas, which runs from 28 July to 2 August.

The training session, which will be co-presented by researcher Alex Tereshkin, promises to demonstrate new rootkits developed for Vista, ways of defeating hardware-based forensics systems and other techniques Microsoft would probably prefer the world didn't know.

View: PC World

Yahoo's ability to compete with Google in coming months will depend largely on its ability to increase the relevancy of its ads. Access to Right Media's inventory of ads and content may prove helpful in that regard.

In a reponse to Google's recently announced plan to acquire Internet advertising company DoubleClick, Yahoo today said it would buy Right Media, which operates an online advertising exchange.

Last October, Yahoo bought 20% of Right Media. It will pay about $680 million in cash and stock for the remainder. The acquisition will extend Yahoo's ability to broker ad deals beyond its own Web properties.

Right Media currently coordinates the trading of more than 4 billion ad impressions daily among 20,000 ad buyers and sellers.

"We hope to revolutionize the way ads are bought and sold on the Internet and, in turn, drive more value for advertisers, publishers, and partners," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said in a blog post.

Source: InformationWeek

Samsung has announced that it is the first company to begin mass production of 16Gb NAND flash memory. The new 51 nanometer (nm) memory is based on a multi-level cell (MLC) structure and is 60 percent more efficient than its 60nm counterpart.

"In rolling out the densest NAND flash in the world, we are throwing open the gates to a much wider playing field for flash-driven consumer electronics," said Jim Elliott, Samsung Semiconductor's director for flash marketing. "To minimize production costs and improve performance, we have applied the finest process technology a ‘half generation’ ahead of the industry, which is introducing 55nm and higher."

The 51nm NAND flash memory chips are also as much as 80 percent faster than current 60nm MLC-based products. The new MLC design offers read speeds of 30MB/sec and write speeds of 8MB/sec as opposed to 17MB/sec and 4.4MB/sec for the previous generation.

Source: DailyTech

UK Home Secretary John Reid want Apple to help fight street crime by developing technologies for this in its iPod music players.

He plans to approach Apple (and Sony) to enlist their help in developing solutions to help end the scourge of iPod muggings, he said, speaking on BBC show, Sunday AM.

It's not an unusual move: mobile phone manufacturers already hold "close working relationships" with the Home Office to combat this, as reported by Reuters.

The UK government is drawing up a shortlist of MP3 player makers who it hopes to convince to take part in an anti-crime summit.

Street robberies climbed 8 per cent during the last 13 weeks of 2006, the report observes.

"New technology, lifestyle changes, new commodities and new gadgets mean that the criminals continually move on," he said, observing that iPods and satellite navigation systems are becoming targets for such crimes.

Source: Macworld

The Soapbox Team is happy to announce that after months of development, we are relaunching the new Soapbox on MSN Video Beta site.
 
Completely reworked from the ground up, the new Soapbox on MSN Video Beta, now offers a clean UI with improved navigation and performance.
 
Some of the Upgraded Features: 
-- Scalable Page. Change the size of your browser and the thumbnails and page will scale dynamically.
-- New Player with integrated Playlists and Progessive Download Indicators.
-- Playlist Functionality. Each time you watch a video it is automatically added to the playlist. The Playlists can also be shared.
-- Improved Fullscreen Experience.
-- Video Gallery Sorts. Sort by Hour, Day etc.
-- Updated Embedded Player with clean design and Playlist features

View: Soapbox and MSN Video Blog
 

As last week's report noted, worldwide PC shipment growth stands at an annual rate of 10.9% by IDC's account, 2.4% higher than the firm expected it to be at the end of last year. That bump is on account of a number of factors, IDC's David Daoud believes, the onset of Windows Vista being among them, but perhaps more prominently, vendors like HP adopting a more direct approach to how to address their customers.

That new approach is giving HP some vital market differentiation against Dell. But Daoud thinks it may only be a short-term solution.

"How are you going to have HP...begin to address the needs of the female buyer, the teenager, the mobile professional, the ones that actually don't need that much computing power, etc., when you have mature, emerging, very much stratified markets going forward?" Daoud asked. "That's a challenge for the industry as a whole, not just Dell."

Source: BetaNews

Apple on Friday acknowledged yet another battery problem in its MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, but this one does not pose a safety hazard. Instead of potentially overheating, Apple says in an advisory its MacBook batteries may be underperforming or not charging correctly.

The company has released a battery firmware update, which it hopes should do the trick, but says customers can also receive a replacement if they continue to see problems. Apple notes the issue could affect any MacBook notebook built since the product line was introduced last year.

Source: BetaNews