Group Policy Settings Reference for Windows Server "8" Beta and Windows "8" Consumer Preview: This spreadsheet lists the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the Administrative template files (admx/adml) delivered with Windows Server® "8" Beta.

Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.<p>

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment.

The team, led by Jeremy Elson in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research Redmond, set the new sort benchmark by using a radically different approach to sorting called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS). The team’s system sorted almost three times the amount of data (1,401 gigabytes vs. 500 gigabytes) with about one-sixth the hardware resources (1,033 disks across 250 machines vs. 5,624 disks across 1,406 machines) used by the previous record holder, a team from Yahoo! that set the mark in 2009.

Microsoft quietly revealed this week that it will kill off the Aero glass interface in Windows 8 and replace it with a flat, Metro-like Explorer that’s more in line with the company’s current design mantra. But this change isn’t just about obfuscation. It’s about the Windows team abandoning the very market that drove Windows’s success for over 25 years in order to chase a coming and potentially illusory market for tablet devices.

You can call Steve Ballmer many things, but you cannot call him the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/05/12/oops-5-ceos-that-should-have-already-been-fired-cisco-ge-walmart-sears-microsoft/3/">"the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today"</a> as Forbes's Adam Hartung did in a recent article. It's easy to see Microsoft as a bumbling fool of the tech world, but when you look closely at its business, the company's core competencies, and Ballmer's decisions, a coherent picture begins to form. It's a picture of a company being run from a very rational and respectable set of philosophies.

In 2010, Microsoft researchers published <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-experiments-with-homeos-and-home-app-store-ideas/7352" >a white paper about their work on a HomeOS and a HomeStore</a> -- early concepts around a Microsoft Research-developed home-automation system. Those concepts have morphed into prototypes since then, based on a white paper,<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/157701/homeos.pdf" > "An Operating System for the Home,"</a> published this month on the Microsoft Research site.</p><p> The HomeOS is a "PC-like abstraction" for in-home devices, like lights, TVs, surveillance cameras, gaming consoles, routers, printers, PCs, mobile phones and more. These devices appear to the HomeOS user as peripherals connected to a single PC. </p><p>The white paper never explicitly says that HomeOS is derived from or based on Windows. (There are other operating system research projects and incubations at Microsoft, including <a href="http://www.ma-config.com/tld/SDN8%20Target%20Application%20Environment.pdf" >Singularity</a> and Midori, neither of which is Windows-based, so it's not a given that HomeOS is Windows-derived.) But it was built using C# and the .Net Framework 4.0, the new white paper on the technology explained.

Dr Hopkirk is a respected advocate for <a title="Dr Andy Hopkirk on LinkedIn" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/andyhopkirk">“openness and interoperability of systems, of people, processes and information technologies”</a>. He has in the past, for example, been an invited observer at events such as <a title="Open Forum Europe" href="http://www.openforumeurope.org/">Open Forum Europe</a>.</p>
<p>However, at the time he was engaged to facilitate the Open Standards roundtable, while we were aware that he represented the <a title="National Computing Centre" href="http://www.ncc.co.uk/">National Computing Centre</a> on the <a title="Microsoft Interoperability Executive Customer Council" href="http://www.microsoft.com/interop/featured/IECCouncil.aspx">Microsoft Interoperability Executive Customer Council</a> (along with 40 other CIOs/CTOs across the public and private sector who participate in a voluntary capacity) he did not declare the fact that he was advising Microsoft directly on the Open Standards consultation.</p>
<p>When this came to our attention we asked Dr Hopkirk for an explanation and he has told us that he has “not been paid to specifically write their response to the Open Standards consultation but he is engaged to help them tease out the issues”.

Given our recent announcements, we wanted to reiterate how developers can integrate SkyDrive into their apps and devices, showcase a few of our favorite integrations and let people know about a few developer events we are sponsoring in Amsterdam, NYC and Las Vegas.

Everyone got all excited that the Windows division actually managed to grow last quarter. Because the broader PC market has been stagnant and Windows 8 is in testing mode, expectations were extremely low. 4% growth was considered a big win.</p><p>

But Microsoft as a whole saw 6% growth year-to-year when it came to revenue. It wasn’t Windows driving it, it was the Business Division (9% growth) and the Servers & Tools Division (14% growth). Again, the enterprise side of things.</p><p>

The Business Division is now by far the largest Microsoft division in terms of revenue. Meanwhile, Servers & Tools almost surpassed the Windows Division this past quarter. The last time that happened was the tail end of the Vista nightmare. It’s going to happen again. Microsoft’s two biggest businesses will be their enterprise businesses.

A judge at the US International Trade Commission has just ruled that Microsoft's Xbox 360 infringes five of Motorola's patents. The ruling isn't unexpected, since many of the patent cover H.264 video encoding, which is a standard — the ITC wasn't persuaded by Microsoft's argument that Motorola will "kill video on the web" by failing its obligation to license the patents under fair and reasonable terms.

I recently participated in an interview with the Portuguese website Zwame, where I made some comments on the future of Windows Phone that created confusion. Rumors are swirling, so I feel the need to clarify my statements.</p><p>

The point I was attempting to make was simply that existing Windows Phone applications will run on the next version of Windows Phone. This is the same guidance that Microsoft shared late last year.</p><p>

I mistakenly confused app compatibility with phone updateability, which caused the rumors we saw yesterday.  I did not intend to give the impression I was offering new guidance on any products under development or their upgradeability.

We’ve heard it before, heck, we’ve said it before. Yahoo has been weighed down for years by way too much product. Thompson’s light-bulb moment came after discussions about what it would take to change Yahoo: “Yahoo has been doing too much for too long … We need to be clearer going forward about what we won’t do.” How is he going to fix this? Fifty properties that “don’t contribute meaningfully” are being shut down. I’ve been told most of them are outside the U.S. but Yahoo won’t confirm that or provide details. Hard to imagine that 50 will be enough but Carol Bartz did give him a head start.</p><p>

Instead Yahoo will focus on the properties that contribute the most engagement and revenue — news, finance, sports, entertainment and mail. R&D and resources will go to owned-and-operated sites, halting third-party efforts.

A cover story in Men’s Journal, called “<a href="http://www.mensjournal.com/nathan-myhrvold">How a Geek Grills a Burger</a>,” casts the former Microsoft chief technology officer as a “mad scientist” living out a “nerd fantasy.”</p><p>
He has a bestselling six-volume cookbook, he studied astrophysics with Stephen Hawking, and his giant Tyrannasaurus rex skeleton has turned his waterfront home into a tourist attraction.</p><p>
And yes, by the way, he tried to convince Microsoft to make the iPhone, basically, more than two decades ago.

Greg Fell, CIO for global manufacturer Terex, is so keen to adopt Windows 8 for tablets that he has arranged with Microsoft to test a Windows 8 tablet in May. Fell, who supports 200 iPads among his 23,000 Terex workers, said he was interested in the interoperability Microsoft is promising between desktops, tablets and phones with Windows 8.</p><p>

Fell has another motive for scrutinizing Windows 8. He wants another viable platform to support. “We don’t want Apple to be the only vendor in the enterprise,” Fell said. “If BlackBerry is not going to be the strong No. 1 or No. 2, somebody else has to be, and if that’s Microsoft, that’s good for us and competition.”

Here's what Netscape <a href=http://news.cnet.com/Netscape-patents-crypto-protocol/2100-1001_3-203307.html>said</a> in 1997, when it received the SSL patent:</p>

<p>"Netscape Communications (NSCP) quietly received a patent last month for one of the most popular types of encryption on the Internet, but the company says it will continue to give it away for free.</p>

<p>"The encryption in question is the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, or SSL. Both Navigator and Internet Explorer browsers use it to secure Web-based information, including credit card numbers, stock information, and private documents. Netscape applied for the patent back in 1995. The US Patent and Trademark Office granted the patent last month.</p>

<p>Even though SSL is heavily used in servers, browsers, and other networked products, Netscape said it has no plans to start charging developers for the source code or to impose other conditions.</p>

<p>"We don't want to discourage developers from using our platform," said spokesman Christopher Hoover. "An SSL license would be a real hurdle. It's not an income source that's necessary to exploit."

A Nomura analyst commented, “Meeting Tami Reller, the head of marketing and CFO of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft. Microsoft will not be adding back the Start Button. They will add a tutorial to show keyboard/mouse users the new commands that they need to orient themselves with in the new OS. We have not seen the controversy on the touch (Metro) side, and this is where all the industry growth will come. Our next look at the product will be the Release Candidate (RC), which we have expected by June, followed by the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) in late July or August, and finally the release to General Availability (GA) in September or October.”

How and where the company will make large-scale cuts in staff, which I have previously reported were coming and will perhaps be numbering in the thousands; which businesses to sell off and which to keep, including its ad tech unit; the correct structure for the reconfigured entity; and who will be left to run it all when it is all settled.

Also up for debate is the best course of a two-pronged effort — being led primarily by CFO Tim Morse and members of his corporate strategy team — to renegotiate its search and advertising partnership deal with Microsoft, while also engaging in active discussions with Google about it taking over Yahoo’s search business.

Which brings us to the other aspect of Microsoft's renaissance: good timing. The once-hipper than Microsoft foes, Google and Apple haven't looked so good these days. Google, the once beloved search company, has users uneasy with its <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/even-googlers-are-losing-faith-google/50247/">Google+ integration</a>, privacy issues and anti-trust concerns. Even Googlers <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/yahooization-google/48338/">aren't too sure</a> of Google's mission, these days. Apple still produces insane-popular gadgets, but no longer wows reviewers like it once did. The new iPad is still the best tablet out there, but it&#39;s not a must-have. Plus, it too has gotten itself into its own <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/02/theres-easy-fix-apples-latest-iphone-privacy-problem/48732/">privacy messes</a>. It also had the misfortune of acting as the face of the last few months of <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/topics/foxconn/">Foxconn scandal</a>. Though the Foxconn protesters that threatened mass suicide back in January made Microsoft's XBox, thanks to Mike Daisey and Apple's financial successes, Apple not Microsoft absorbed most of the bad PR.

Over the last few months, Microsoft has turned its video-game console into your TV’s best friend. Late last year, the company revamped the Xbox’s interface, adding a wonderful voice-search feature through the Kinect motion-gaming add-on. Microsoft also added dozens of entertainment services to its Xbox Live online plan, including Netflix, Hulu, ESPN, and on-demand video from cable and satellite services around the world. This week, the company is <a href="http://majornelson.com/2012/03/27/comcast-xfinity-tv-hbo-go-mlb-tv-now-available-on-xbox-live/">adding access</a> to Comcast’s Xfinity on-demand service, as well as apps for HBO and MLB.TV.

Shut down, restart, and log-off used to be simple actions from the Start menu in Microsoft Windows, but in Windows 8, the <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsoft-keep-the-start-menu-in-windows-8-please-185785">Start menu sleeps with the fishes</a>, and turning off your PC from the legacy desktop involves several less-than-intuitive steps. Imagine my surprise then when I discovered, hidden in a dark corner of the company website, a couple of Microsoft-approved apps that do everything you might want.

Microsoft will release the next version of its Xbox console in 2013 at the earliest, as the company squeezes at least one more year of sales out of its current model, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

The company may show the successor to its Xbox 360 in June 2013 at the E3 conference and put it on sale that same year, said the people, who declined to be named because the plans are confidential. David Dennis, a company spokesman, said earlier today that Microsoft won’t discuss new Xbox hardware at this year’s E3, quelling speculation that the device would be unveiled at the 2012 show.

It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my time there I became fairly passionate about the company. I keynoted four Google Developer Day events, two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific contributor to the Google testing blog. Recruiters often asked me to help sell high priority candidates on the company. No one had to ask me twice to promote Google and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so. In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

If Apple is made in Steve Jobs’ Image, then Steve Ballmer is made in Microsoft’s image. The large, blustering, bumbling exterior belies a very smart, capable core that is struggling to weather two storms: (1) the shift in power from from client to cloud and (2) the return to dominance of a vertical industry structure in the fastest growth area of computing: mobile.

Steve Ballmer can’t take many lessons from the way Steve Jobs weathered the horizontal storm. Microsoft’s remarkable profitability means that it will not hit bottom for a long, long time. It can’t easily do the iMac trick and retreat into a niche, because horizontal platforms need market share and scale in order to succeed. And it can’t do the iPod trick of finding a nascent category to dominate, because horizontal platforms don’t do well in the early stages of a market when consumers need clarity and simplicity more than anything else about the value proposition.

A common thread we’ve seen in the feedback so far about Windows 8, on this blog or elsewhere, positive or negative, is that people using Windows 8 for the first time might need a little help getting their bearings.

We know right now, there’s no denying that we’re in a great transition. People argue about, are we in a post-PC world. Why are we arguing? Of course we’re in a post-PC world, but that doesn’t mean the PC dies. That just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to these other things. But it’s still general computation.

In other scenarios there are also other post-worlds. For example, in productivity, the PC era was defined by documents. Documents are the core of how we have thought about productivity. But if you count the words that everyone here types on a computer, increasingly in Facebook, in Twitter, in this blogging package and tis and that, by addressable market of words types, the classic document, is decreasing as a part of that, and what productivity is the meta level around documents, as much as the documents. So we’re actually into a post-doc world, as much as we’re heading into a post-PC world.

Now we know why Microsoft officials refused to discuss whether <a href="http://desktop.onlive.com/">OnLive — the company offering iPad and Android tablet users a hosted Windows desktop app</a> — was in violation of Microsoft licensing terms.

It seems Microsoft believes they are.

One of the biggest changes in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is the Removal of Start Orb along with the Good o’l Start Menu with it,a move which was said to be necessary to emphasize on the Metro UI and the new Start Screen Page with Tiles making it more touch friendly.

But with many likings for the new Metro UI also come many dislikes as well.So for those who don’t like to use the Metro UI and those who want to bring back the Start Button along with the Start Menu,ViStart is the way to go.It was initially designed for bring the Windows Vista’s Start Menu to Windows XP,but it also works for the Windows 8 versions as well,thanks to the recent updates to the software.

Is there any way to completely disable Metro, and bring back the Windows 7 start-menu? (or, even better, the XP start menu!) Either a setting or a hack or whatever... Anything..
I can understand why the interface needs to be updated/reworked for touchscreen devices but for a normal desktop computer some of these changes seem... how do I say this without getting banned from the forums... "somewhat annoying"..

Metro is a user interface designed for smartphones, which I have praised generously, and which looks good and works well on small devices. It may yet mature into something equally attractive and useful on iPad-like tablets. But welded onto a non-touch laptop or desktop PC, it represents a huge negative for the majority of Windows users.

The latest seminar was a textbook example of how not to lobby. ICOMP invited Christopher Graham, Britain’s information commissioner, and Georgina Nelson, a lawyer with Which?, a consumer-rights group, to give the event a veneer of respectability. But the aim of the evening seemed to be to give Pamela Jones Harbour, a former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, a platform from which to attack Google.

Oh, look! Worldwide, 8% of all desktop/portable computer users are still running the hated, reviled Windows Vista. That’s more than all users of OS X and Linux combined.

And, of course, if you add up the number of Windows XP users (dominated by enterprises) and Windows 7 (mostly consumers and small businesses), the percentage is more than 10 times the total of all OS X and Linux users combined.

That’s from a worldwide base of nearly 1.5 billion traditional computers—PCs and Macs.

Pretty good for an irrelevant company.

Motorola should honor its promises, and make its standard essential patents available on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. Microsoft is certainly prepared to pay a fair and reasonable price for use of others’ intellectual property. Within just the past few years, Microsoft has entered into more than a thousand patent licenses. We know how it’s done.

Unfortunately, Motorola has refused to make its patents available at anything remotely close to a reasonable price. For a $1,000 laptop, Motorola is demanding that Microsoft pay a royalty of $22.50 for its 50 patents on the video standard, called H.264. As it turns out, there are at least 2,300 other patents needed to implement this standard. They are available from a group of 29 companies that came together to offer their H.264 patents to the industry on FRAND terms. Microsoft’s patent royalty to this group on that $1,000 laptop?

Two cents.

Less than a week after <a href=http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/apple-brought-formal-eu-antitrust.html>Apple's EU antitrust complaint against Motorola Mobility</a> became publicly known, <a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2012/02/22/google-please-don-t-kill-video-on-the-web.aspx">Microsoft has also filed formal competition charges against MMI with the European Commission</a>.</p><p>With two industry leaders complaining about MMI's alleged abuse of FRAND-pledged, standard-essential patents, the prospects of formal investigations have certainly increased. Under its best practice guidelines, the European Commission will presumably make a determination on the launch of full-blown investigations within a few months. European regulators are <a href=http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/eu-launches-full-blown-investigation-of.html>already investigating Samsung's related conduct</a>, which is largely consistent with what MMI is doing in Europe.

the speed with which Android handsets can be developed seems to be a key value of that operating system and one for which Microsoft does not have a good answer.  Nokia is now one year into its commitment to the Microsoft platform and it has a very limited portfolio to show for it (and limited sales as well.) As a result, Nokia’s Symbian business evaporated very rapidly. More rapidly than the company anticipated.

The dilemma for other vendors may well be how long will it take for them to develop a replacement for their Android portfolio in Windows Phone.

The opportunity cost of this switch is subtle and insidious but may be the root of why we don’t see a stampede toward Microsoft. Conversely, Android's contract-free, implement-at-will availability may be its greatest selling point.

First make sure that you have a back up of your Windows 8 Registry file so that it will be useful in case you face some problems.

Don't blame it on Microsoft: The lion's share of vulnerabilities last year were in third-party applications, with 78 percent of all bugs, versus 10 percent in Microsoft software products, according to a new report published today.
Secunia's annual report for 2011 found that the number of endpoint flaws jumped past 800 bugs, more than half of which were considered very critical.

Sinofsky also said that the Windows-on-ARM machines will come with several Office apps — Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that have been tuned to run in a very battery-efficient manner. But Sinofsky said that, although those applications will run in the traditional Windows desktop, they will be the only programs allowed to do so, other than components of Windows itself.

“There are no other compiled dekstop apps that are available,” Sinofsky told AllThingsD. All of the other apps for Windows on ARM will be the new-style “Metro” apps.

Windows 8 for Intel and AMD chips, by contrast, will be able to run all of the kinds of programs that have traditionally run on Windows, inside a Windows 7-like desktop environment.

"Kinect hacks have been used for many a grand feat, from a tool that helps the blind navigate more easily to hands-free questing in World of Warcraft and virtual cat brushing.

The Mirracle system projects a CT image onto the user's reflection to give the illusion of seeing inside one's own body.

So why not integrate the powers of Microsoft Kinect with a mirror to teach such subjects as basic anatomy?

The capital of Wisconsin is buying 600 iPads this spring and plans to buy another 800 this fall, all paid for using funds from the state's settlement with Microsoft related to consumer lawsuits claiming the company overcharged customers for its software.

Does Microsoft have something against the city of Las Vegas? Late last year, Microsoft announced that 2012 would be its last year keynoting the Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place in Sin City every January.

Now, it's also pulling the plug on MIX, an annual conference for developers that Microsoft has held in Vegas for the last six years. The change probably has nothing to do with the location, and more to do with Microsoft's shifting priorities.

MIX was originally focused on Microsoft's Web technologies, particularly Silverlight and Internet Explorer.

"Microsoft Corp. and LG Electronics have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for LG’s tablets, mobile phones and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome OS Platform. The contents of the agreement have not been disclosed."

"I’ll say it: I’m bullish on Microsoft in 2012. This could be the year that it shakes its malaise and takes its place alongside Apple, Google, and Amazon as a dominant innovator of the mobile age."