David Weiss shares an excellent virtual tour of Microsoft’s Mac Lab and tell’s what it’s like to work in the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft.. That’s freakin’ impressive!
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XP and Vista to get new media player
Microsoft plans to jazz up its music player in Windows Vista, the company’s next operating system. But at least some of the new features will debut much sooner. The software, which will be built into Vista, is designed to offer better synching with portable devices, make it easier to scroll through long libraries of music, and be tightly integrated with Urge, a new subscription and download music service co-developed by Microsoft and MTV Networks. Microsoft is on track to release a Windows XP version of Windows Media Player 11 before the end of June, the company confirmed last week. Microsoft has said the XP version won’t have all the features of its Vista sibling, but the company won’t say which features will be excluded. The company also has yet to offer a public test version of the software. Check more details.
No EFI support for Vista
Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.
Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco, Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz, also revealed that there will never be any support for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors.
That’s terrible news for Intel Mac users who have been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors not 64-bit (and thus will never be supported by Windows EFI booting) but Windows Vista won’t boot on EFI anyway. #.
Microsoft unfolds “Origami”, reveals on-the-go PC
Microsoft Corp. on Thursday unveiled its ‘Origami’ project, a paperback-book sized portable computer, which is a hybrid between a laptop PC and a host of mobile devices that the world’s biggest software maker hopes will create an entirely new market.
The Ultra-Mobile PC is a new kind of computer. It combines the power of Windows XP with mobile-ready technologies that make it easy to access and use your software on the go. With small, lightweight, carry-everywhere hardware designs, you can connect and communicate, accomplish any task anywhere and at any time, and be entertained and informed wherever life takes you.
Lighter than two pounds (0.972 kilograms) with a seven-inch (17.78-centimetre) touch-screen, the new “ultra-mobile” PCs (UMPCs) use microprocessors from Intel Corp. and run a modified version of Microsoft’s Windows XP Tablet PC edition.
