Stories about: Killer

Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other RIA (rich Internet application) and AJAX frameworks, Silverlight arrived with a flourish just over one year ago. Silverlight 1.0 manipulated its multimedia-savvy, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was available at that time only as an alpha test.

Apple has done a complete and meaningful redesign of its top-selling commercial notebook, the MacBook Pro, for durability, serviceability, energy efficiency, and eco-consciousness. A one-piece, rigid, machined aluminum frame ("unibody") forms the MacBook Pro's internal structure, a design feature it shares with the new aluminum MacBook and MacBook Air. As with the MacBook Air, the clamshell laptop that upended the thin-and-light PC notebook market, Apple made some marvelously unorthodox design decisions for the MacBook Pro.

New legislation is putting pressure on US colleges and universities to do a better job combating illegal file-sharing -- and it's taking a toll on campus IT departments, according to research published this week.

With its ambitious Oslo software modeling platform, Microsoft seeks a new application development paradigm that raises the level of abstraction. But the effort has brought up questions about whether Oslo crowds the modeling landscape and whether Microsoft can achieve its lofty goals.

As Microsoft releases its Silverlight 2.0 media player tomorrow, it is claiming strong momentum for its free, would-be Adobe Flash-killer.

Internet infrastructure vendors are working on patches for a set of security flaws that could help hackers knock servers offline with very little effort.

With the imminent release of Silverlight 2.0, developers and Web designers, particularly those already working in Microsoft IT environments, will have the first viable alternative technology to Adobe Flash for building rich Internet applications, analysts and developers said.

The dramatic increase in compute power unleashed by multicore processors will enable applications that blend virtual representations of the real world with information that meets users' contextual needs, Microsoft's top researcher said at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thursday.

The waiting game for a mobile Internet explosion continued on Thursday at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco, but there were glimmers of reality, too.

Within two years, I believe mobile social networking will become the most valuable business application since e-mail.

Google's unveiling of a new browser is not really about trying to outmuscle the other top browsers, it's a key weapon in the company's effort to kill Windows, according to industry observers.