MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes

prawnonthebarbie writes:

"Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."
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The Top 21 Tech Screwups of 2006

From exploding laptops to corporate spying to Rocketboom's bust, a review of the year's gaffes and blunders.

It was a year where the world's biggest software company had to admit its flagship operating system was going to be delayed--yet again. And the number one PC manufacturer was caught spying on reporters and board members.

In 2006, turning on your laptop was an adventure in flammability. Of course, lots of government and corporate officials didn't have to worry about their notebook bursting into flames--they'd already lost theirs--along with the personal records of millions of Americans.

Surfing the Net you stood a good chance of being hoaxed by an actress pretending to be a lonely teenager or a blogger in the employ of the planet's largest retailer. If you subscribed to AOL, your searches might have been shared with the rest of the Web. And if you did anything stupid, somebody with a video camera and a YouTube account was probably there to broadcast it to the world.

Here, then, on the following pages we humbly offer our nominations for the biggest tech mistakes of the year. (And if you notice any errors in this article, please--keep them to yourself.)

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Updates for Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey 'critical'

"Highly critical" security updates have been released to patch flaws in the popular Firefox web browser and related programs that could allow an attacker to hijack computers running the software.

The Danish security firm Secunia updated its security advisory on Thursday for software distributed by the Mozilla Foundation, citing alerts issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) and Mozilla. "Highly critical" is the second-most severe alert rating on Secunia's five-point scale.

"Mozilla products contain a memory corruption vulnerability related to SVG processing," reads the U.S. CERT note issued on Wednesday, referring to the way in which the software handles imagery known as Scalable Vector Graphics.

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Turn Off Unnecessary Windows XP Services

Turning off unnecessary services in Windows XP can greatly reduce your exploit risk, while improving system performance. It's a good time to inject that often there are all sorts of "download optimizers" and other cute programs that vendors like to push on users. The first rule is "If you don't know you need it, you probably don't."

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) — Germany's Siemens AG has set a new speed record for electrical processing of data through a fiber-optic cable, it said on Wednesday, opening the possibility of cheaper Internet and data networks.

Siemens said in a statement it had processed data using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second—roughly two full DVDs per second—and sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100 mile-long (161-kilometre) U.S. network, the first time outside of a laboratory.

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Creative ships stylish wireless earphones

Already bought the one you love an iPod, Zune, Zen or somesuch? Want to know what to get 'em next? Ask Creative, and it'll suggest a pair of its new Bluetooth 'phones, among the least bulky wireless cans we've seen.

The SE2300 set comprises the usual transmitter dongle, which plugs into any player's 3.5mm earphone socket, digitises the audio stream and beams it to the 'phones. These are a pair of clip-on speakers connected by a cable - so they're not entirely wire-free, unlike older 'phones with a headband.

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Fender bender crooks swipe $190K in chips

Crooks in California stole $190,000 in chips after staging what investigators reckon was a planned car collision.

A silver Mazda car containing around 100,000 microchips was rear-ended by a white van in Santa Clara on Tuesday. But when the victim left his car to inspect the damage and exchange insurance details, one of the occupants of the van slipped into the Mazda (license plate 4NKV115) and drove it away. The van driver then drove off, leaving the victim stunned.

"We suspect, based on the fact that the cargo was so valuable, that these guys had been planning this and maybe had staked out the chip warehouse and waited for somebody to come by with a huge delivery," Santa Clara police Detective David Tanquary told the San Francisco Chronicle. "[The collision] was just a distraction technique to get him out of his vehicle."

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Vista Could Sap Notebook PC Battery Life

Notebook PC users who upgrade to Microsoft's Windows Vista may have to disable some of the new operating system's flashy graphics features to avoid seeing a decrease in battery life compared to when running Windows XP.

The drop will come from the extra power needed to run the high-end processors, graphics cards, and memory capacity required to support Vista. Microsoft has designed the new OS to deliver novel visual effects such as the translucent "Aero" windows on the desktop interface and to offer improved performance as a digital media hub. The business version of the OS was released last month, with the consumer version due out next month.

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Intel to Launch Core 2 Quad Chip in January

Intel plans to launch the third model of its four-core processor in January, continuing its efforts to stay ahead of Advanced Micro Devices on the next-generation processor family.

Intel will launch the Core 2 Quad chip for high-end desktop PCs during the CES trade show in Las Vegas the week of Jan. 8, industry sources said. The new chip follows Intel's launch in November of its quad-core Xeon 5300 for servers and Core 2 Extreme QX6700 for gamers.

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