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One of Microsoft's strongest supporters took a good, hard look at the soon-to-be released next version of Windows 8, which could arrive in April, and threw his hands up in frustration. The new version is called Windows 8 Update 1, and it includes a number of small changes, mostly minor tweaks. These tweaks try to fix some of the complaints people still had about Windows 8. But blogger Paul Thurrott of the influential Windows blog “Supersite for Windows” says they really just make Windows 8 more difficult to use, especially on a tablet. He took Microsoft to task, writing: Windows...

May 13, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. on Sunday confirmed reports that it reportedly believes open-source software users owe the company royalties on 235 alleged patent violations. In an interview with Fortune magazine, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, and Horacio Gutierrez, the company's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, said open-souce software, including Linux, violates 235 Microsoft patents. And Microsoft wants distributors and users of open-souce software to start paying royalties for these alleged violations. "This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement. ...There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed," Gutierrez said. Microsoft executives in...

Microsoft is seeing little green men. The software giant will be seeing ET-like captains of UFOs until at least mid-July. In what seems to be the almost feverish global hunt for life on other planets, Microsoft is looking for proof positive. It is inviting users of its MSN Web portal to `take a picture’ of a UFO or alien and publish it on their blogs–online scrapbooks–with an explanation how they came across it. (This is London, Evening Standard, June 23, 2005)

July 23 — Microsoft issued another passel of warnings about security holes Wednesday, including a “critical” flaw affecting most Windows PCs. The most serious of the flaws involves DirectX, a library of graphics and multimedia programming instructions used by most PC games, and could allow malicious users to run code of their choice on a vulnerable PC.