Gates outlines Longhorn

With all the talk of delays to the final release dates of Microsoft's next version of Windows - Longhorn - the operating system must have appeared to have taken a giant leap forward to attendees at the PDC conference yesterday, as Bill Gates and co demo many of the new features of the software. Bill Gates opened the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles with the words: 'Welcome to the "Longhorn" PDC'. Longhorn, Microsoft's code-name for its next version of Windows, was very much the headline act for the sold-out show. ...more

Microsoft promises public beta IE 7 early next year

Microsoft has promised a public beta of the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 in the first calendar quarter of next year. On the IE developers' blog, Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer team, said he was constantly being asked for a public beta and promised: 'an updated pre-release build of IE7 for Windows XP publicly - no MSDN membership required - during the first calendar quarter of 2006. 'We want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to try a pre-release version of IE7 and tell us how it works with their websites, their applications, their add-ons, and how they use the web overall,' he wrote. ...more

Microsoft debuts Beta 2 versions of Vista, Office and Server

Microsoft has made available Beta 2 versions of Vista, Office and of Windows Server, code-named Windows Server 'Longhorn', with Office 2007 available as a public download. The announcement was made by Bill Gates at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle. This is the first time that Microsoft has made beta products of its flagship products available simultaneously. ...more

Love Bug author freed

The Philippines Department of Justice has dropped all charges against Onel de Guzman, the man suspected of releasing the Love Bug virus last May. Despite his admission that he may have released the virus accidentally, all charges against him have been dismissed. The virus swept through business computers across the world, replicating itself through email systems and causing damage estimated at around $10 billion. ...more

Budget processor hits 2GHz barrier

The Intel Celeron processor, targeted at budget system, has achieved the milestone of clocking 2GHz. As well as achieving two billion processor cycles per second, the new model features a 400MHz system bus, 478-pin packaging and 128K of L2 cache. It's manufactured on Intel's 0. ...more