2006-June-1

Microsoft launches its Windows Live OneCare for home, offering protection against phising, spywares and viruses on 3 computers for USD49.90 a year with a free 90-day trial. It comes with an improved firewall, hard drive defragmentation application, and a data backup application.

Windows Live OneCare for business, currently known as Windows Client Protection, and is due to ship later this year.

2006-April-26

Microsoft expands its anti-piracy efforts by unveiling "Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications" tool that displays a message when users of counterfeit Windows log on. The tool has been used by Microsoft in a pilot program involving seven other countries since November 2005, but extended to the U.S., U.K., Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand, effective immediately.

If you see a dialog box containing the following message, your copy of Windows may be pirated: "It appears that you could be a victim of software piracy. The copy of Windows installed on this computer is not considered to be genuine by Microsoft. The notification will continue to display until your computer is running genuine Microsoft Windows."

2006-April-24

As part of its plan to phase out the Pentium brand, Intel annouced vPro, targeting businesses and IT customers.

At the heart of the first Intel vPro-based PCs will be an Intel® Core™ 64-bit microarchitecture dual-core processor. Intel vPro technology also includes the second-generation of Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) and Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT).

Intel Core is a 64-bit microarchitecture offering performance gains and reduced power-consumption.

Intel AMT is designed to help manage, inventory, diagnose, and repair PCs even when systems are turned off or have crashed operating systems or hard drives.

Intel VT allows for separate, independent hardware-based environments inside a single PC such that particular tasks or activities can run independently, invisible to and isolated from the active PC users.

2006-April-23

Microsoft has released a test version of its upcoming Internet Explorer 7.

Features that would immediately benefit Infoarch applications include: (1) printing of reports such as extended account aging so the content doesn't get cut off on the right side, (2) content magnification so fonts are larger and easier to read.

Although we do not offer official support for IE7 at this point, users who need to print large format reports are encouraged to download and install it.

A final version of the browser is expected to be released later this year.

2006-March-17

Jaring had once again restricted access to their name servers. Jaring's domain remained visible, its email and web services are operational. We expect the same cycle of Jaring's email problem to repeat again in another six months time.

See or 2006-Jan-13 Alert for the background story regarding Jaring's name server usage policy.

2006-March-10

Microsoft officially launched its Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC). Weighting slightly more than 1 kg, these are full-fledged computers that run Microsoft Windows XP. The devices is the size of a paperback book, runs on Intel's Mobile Celeron processor, and features 7-inch touch screen.

2006-February-24

Google is testing Google Page Creator, a tool that lets people easily create Web pages and maintain them at googlepages.com, matching a service already offered by Yahoo! Inc.

The service provides a simple template with heading, subhead and body. There are currently 41 different background styles to choose from, user can easily include links and images.

2006-February-16

Oracle annouced the purchase of Sleepycat, maker of an open source database engine. This move is significant because MySQL database, the popular open source and free database software, was rumoured to migrate to use Sleepycat's engine instead of InnoDB's engine.

InnoDB was bought by Oracle in November, 2005.

2006-February-3

The Internet is bahaving erratically. All Malaysian Internet users will face intermittent connection problem. We are not sure if it is related to the Karma Sutra virus, as the performance degradation was gradual and started from more than two weeks ago.

2006-January-23

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released the result of a survey on computer security.

84% of those surveyed had outbreaks of computer viruses, 80% were affected by spyware, 33% had incidents of port scans.

Unauthorized access and theft of laptop PCs are costly to rectify, but fixing the problems caused by worms, viruses and Trojan horses is the most expensive, costing an average of USD24,000 to 64% of the affected companies.

The attack came from 36 countries, top of them are the US (26%) and China (24%), but in our opinion this is meaningless, as it only highlights the number of zombie PCs, not the master controller which initiated the attacks.

2006-January-19

While not entirely news, we have been puzzled by the implementation strategy of Jaring's high-speed wireless network ever since it was first announced: Instead of providing coverage to areas that has no land-line Streamyx service, Jaring's top priority was to provide coverage to areas where Streamyx service was recently introduced, second priority was to cover areas where Streamyx had been firmly entrenced.

We have found out why, and this is news to us. Jaring's strategy was not to ATTACK Streamyx, it was to DEFEND itself from loosing its dial-up customers to Streamyx.

Jaring's rationale is this: its market share in dial-up subscribers is larger than TM Net. When these customers switch to broadband, Jaring would loose these customers. So to prevent it, Jaring had to provide broadband service as well. The irony is, Jaring's wireless broadband still costs more than Streamyx.

2006-January-18

Researchers discovered that people could rate the visual appeal of web sites after seeing them for just one-twentieth of a second - less than half the time it takes to blink. These judgments were not random, the researchers found - sites that were flashed up twice were given similar ratings both times.

Gitte Lindgaard, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, published the findings in the latest issue of the Behaviour and Information Technology journal

Lindgaard said the findings had powerful implications for the field of website design. "It really is just a physiological response, So web designers have to make sure they're not offending users visually."

"If the first impression is negative, you'll probably drive people off."