Digital Trends
Microsoft is inching closer to the release of its next version of its mainstream desktop operating system, Windows 7, beginning limited distribution of its first Release Candidate (RC) of Windows 7 to Technet and MSDN subscribers. But while Microsoft’s paid-up inner circle gets first crack at the release, the general public won’t be left in the dark for long: last week, Microsoft announced that the general public will be able to download and test Windows 7 RC1 beginning May 5.
Microsoft has said that it will be making Release Candidate 1 of its Windows 7 OS available to Microsoft Developer Network and TechNet members on April 30, with mass availability coming on May 5.
Unless any surprising bugs are discovered, this will be the final code cut before the product becomes commercially available, although Microsoft has yet to give any definite date for a final release. However, the suspicion is that it will become available on new PCs and in stores as early as back-to-school shopping time.
There have been changes to the OS since its beta release, notably in Touch and Media Player.
Those who had planned to get their virtual families under way with The Sims 3 at the end of February will have to wait a little longer. On Wednesday, Electronic Arts announced that the release date for the hotly anticipated title has been bounced back three months to June 2.
EA didn’t offer much of an explanation for the delay in its official press release, choosing instead to dismiss it in a cloud of PR flare. “The June launch combined with the break-through game the team is building gives us the perfect runway to create awareness for The Sims 3," said Russell Arons, Vice President of Marketing for EA. “The Sims 3 will be the original IP summer blockbuster of 2009 as we build off the success of the best-selling PC franchise of all time to create awareness with both loyal Sims fans and new players.”
If you’ve been holding your breath for the release Internet Explorer 8, stop right now. Microsoft has announced that it won’t be out this year after all. The company has opted for another round of testing – known as a “release candidate” version – early in 2009.
In a blog posting, general manager Dean Hachamovitch wrote:
"Our next public release of IE (typically called a ‘release candidate’) indicates the end of the beta period. We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done."
There’s no final release date set yet, but Microsoft has made the Beta 2 of its new IE8 browser available for download by consumers – folling up on the promise by Bill Gates that it would be available before the end of August.
With a smart address bar that uses previously typed URLs to predict a requested address, better tabbed browsing and the previously-disclosed In Private privacy feature, IE8 offers a lot of improvement over its predecessor, and will be more standards compliant.
James Pratt, a senior product manager in the IE development team, told Computerworld:
Firefox 3.0 is barely, and very successfully, out of the blocks when Mozilla has announced it will release of beta of the new Firefox 3.1, ZDNet reports. It’s set August 19 as the release date, although the organization has added that the date is flexible.
So what will 3.1 contain? According to a posted wiki, there will be browser support for HTML 5, meaning Firefox will be able to work with audio and video html tags, as well as support for the Ogg Vorbis audio codec and the Ogg Theora video codec.
Developer Chris Double wrote in his blog:
With a final, full release still expected in the middle of this month, Mozilla has release the new beta of its Firefox 3 browser.
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s VP of engineering, wrote in a blog posting:
"The second Firefox 3 release candidate is now available for download. It includes new features, as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed."
There have been some changes from RC1, especially in memory, where memory cycles are now broken, to be collected by an automated collector, and a new memory allocator lowers fragmentation, among other things.
Mozilla took a giant step towards the full release of the new version of its open-source browser on Friday. The release of Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 means that everything is now ready for some public testing and, all being well, a full release of the new browser next month.
Firefox is claiming a total of over 14,000 improvements in the new browser, although very few of them will be obvious. The biggest one will be speed. According to Information Week, Mozilla says Firefox 3 is more than nine times faster than IE7 and almost 3 times as fast as Firefox 2 on JavaScript performance. It will also be much less of a memory hog, supposedly using 4.7 times less memory than IE7.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed rumors of an impending Vista SP1 release on Monday by announcing that it had officially released to manufacturing, meaning physical copies of the update are being burned to discs and shipped to computer manufacturers. Ballmer broke the news at a “Microsoft Strategic Update” for investors on Monday morning.
While the release to manufacturing stage is already in progress, actual availability of the software for most users still sits over a month away. On the official Windows Vista blog, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows product management, Mike Nash, announced that SP1 would go live to customers through Microsoft’s download center in mid-March. In a separate announcement, the company noted that Microsoft Volume Licensing customers would be able to purchase the updated version of Windows Vista on March 1.
Radiohead may have shaken up traditional channels for music distribution with the Web-only release of In Rainbows this fall, but after months of name-your-own-price downloads, the album is finally hitting plastic. The physical version of the album will go on sale Jan. 1, with a list price of $13.88, according to Amazon.com.
To coincide with the launch, the band will stream “some songs and other bits” from Radiohead.tv on New Year’s Eve (UK time). Lead singer Thom Yorke called it “a wee celebration of the release of the physical manifestation of In Rainbows” on the band’s Web site.
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