SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates is working on another book, once again about how technology is changing the way we live.
“This is going to be a book about where Bill thinks technology is headed, and how these innovations are going to have an impact on business, on the way we work, on entertainment, the way we communicate and on big institutions,” said Microsoft spokesman John Pinette.
There’s no word on the book’s title or a release date. The company is finalizing who the book’s co-author will be and has not met with any publishers yet, Pinette said.
“We’re just at the very beginning,” he said.
New hand-held gets hard drive: PalmOne Inc.’s new hand-held with a built-in hard drive makes it possible to jam more rich content than ever into your pocket.
The Milpitas, Calif.-based company, a pioneer of electronic organizers, hailed the LifeDrive as a new breed of personal digital assistant, the first to feature a hard drive.
The device, which will retail for $499, has 4 gigabytes of storage, a large color screen (320-pixel-by-480-pixel) and is about the same width and length as most PDAs.
By offering to manage a person’s entire MP3 music collection, as well as movies, games, photos and large quantities of documents, the LifeDrive is the latest challenger to iPod digital music player from Apple Computer Inc.
Windows for older PCs: Microsoft Corp. is working on a new Windows-based operating system designed to help companies make older machines run better.
The software, code-named Eiger, will look and feel like much like Windows XP and will be equipped with Service Pack 2, a major security upgrade released last summer, said Barry Goffe, a group product manager for Microsoft’s Windows client unit.
The idea behind Eiger came from businesses and school systems that said they couldn’t afford to replace an old fleet of computers but wanted machines running Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows NT to be more secure and easier to manage.
Software piracy continues unabated: The rate of global computer software piracy was virtually unchanged last year, with illegal copies continuing to be most prevalent in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the U.S. Business Software Alliance.
The alliance said that the rate of piracy averaged 35 percent around the world in 2004, compared with 36 percent in 2003. However, the value of illegal software rose to $32.7 billion, from $28.8 billion, it said.
“For every $2 of software that was purchased legitimately, there was $1 worth of software that was obtained illegally,” said Robert Holleyman, the alliance’s chief executive. “That is a huge shortfall and it has big consequences.”
Netscape 8.0 released: The newest Netscape browser combines the best features from Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox but no longer tries to commandeer all search traffic to its own engine.
America Online Inc.’s Netscape 8.0 now uses Google as the default search engine. A test version of the free browser had used the Netscape engine.
Out Thursday, Netscape 8.0 also lets users choose AskJeeves, and AOL says it is in talks with Yahoo as well.
Netscape also switches the placement of the boxes into which users type in search terms and Web addresses. Recognizing the growing use of search for navigation, the search box now has the more prominent spot on the left.
IE remains the dominant browser, but many users complain of its numerous security vulnerabilities and lack of modern features such as tabbed browsing, which lets you visit multiple Web sites without opening multiple browser windows.
Firefox addresses those issues, but some sites won’t work because they’re tailored for IE. The new Netscape, which is only available for Windows PCs, addresses that quandary.
From Herald news services
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