Microsoft reveals next generation technologies

It’s that time of the year again, and the Microsoft Tech.Ed Developers Conference 2006 Europe has hit the beautiful city of Barcelona, capital city of Catalonia in Spain. Hot off the press news for today is the keynote speech by Eric Rudder, senior vice president of technical strategy with Microsoft. In this, Rudder revealed the new technologies for building ‘next generation applications’ to more than 3000 developers attending the conference.

Spam: The Dirty Dozen

The bad news for the US is that it is now responsible for more than a fifth of the world’s spam. That is 21.6 percent if you prefer, although whichever way you say it there is no escaping the nasty smell it leaves behind.

The team of experts at IT security vendors Sophos, scanned all the spam messages that were caught by the company’s extensive global network of spam traps and honeypots, and has now published the results for the third quarter of 2006 in terms of relayed spam levels.

Microsoft caves in to consumer opinion

Oh well, that’s one less thing I can moan about when it comes to Microsoft Vista. The Seattle giant has had a change of heart, it would seem, when it comes to licensing terms for the new Windows Operating System.

Google gets moving

Google has provided WAP access to email for the longest time, an apt description seeing as that’s how long it takes to read your email via a WAP based mobile device. But all that has changed thanks to the availability of a brand new Java based version of Gmail for mobile devices which promises less clicks, less scrolling, less keystrokes and much faster access.

Visual Studio zero-day exploit code in the wild

Microsoft has issued an advisory warning about a Visual Studio 2005 vulnerability in the WMI Object Broker ActiveX control, part of WmiScriptUtils.dll which could allow remote arbitrary code execution.

Is this the world's lightest laptop?

Well, yes, if you believe the Sony hype then the Vaio VGN-G1LAP at just 1.98 pounds is indeed the world’s lightest lappy. The carbon fiber body helps considerably, meaning that despite the low weight you still get the benefit of a 12.1” 1024 x 768 screen rather than the only good for those with good eyesight 10” (or less) usually associated with the super light sub-notebook genre. The Intel ultra-low voltage 1.2GHz Core Solo processor and 1.5Gb RAM is OK, as is the WiFi (covering most 802,11 bases including a, b and g) and the Bluetooth, and even the 80Gb motion-sensor protected hard drive in case you forget you are holding it and drop the thing.