Author: Andy Taylor

MIAMI (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp.(MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) co-founder Bill Gates said on Friday he expected the new version of Windows operating software, code-named Windows 7, to be released “sometime in the next year or so.”

The software giant has been aiming to issue more regular updates of the operating system software that powers the majority of the world’s personal computers. Nevertheless, Gates’ comments suggested that a successor to the Vista program might be released sooner than was generally expected.

Microsoft has said it expected to release a new version of Windows approximately 3 years after the introduction of Vista in January 2007. A company spokeswoman said Gates’ comments are in line with a development cycle that usually releases a test version of the software before its official introduction.

“I’m superenthused about what it will do in lots of ways,” Gates said in a seminar on corporate philanthropy held during an annual meeting in Miami of the Inter-American Development Bank.
“That’ll be sometime in the next year or so that we’ll have a new version,” Gates said in response to a question from the audience.

Gates, who is due to leave his day-to-day functions at Microsoft and dedicate himself to the philanthropic efforts of the Gates Foundation in June, said the company aimed through its $6 billion annual research and development budget to take the products running on its software to “the next level.”

He said new versions of Windows would help revolutionize mobile phones and run the desk of the future, which would have a touch surface display allowing users to call up items using their hands.

I normally don’t copy and paste “press releases” but thought this we an interesting story.

No Starch Press, publisher of geek books, is trying something interesting with file-sharing sites.
Recognizing that the book business is changing and that books end up on file-sharing sites within days of being released in electronic form, they thought they’d take matters into their own hands. The result? No Starch released their own “official pirate version” of two best-selling backlist titles, Leander Kahney’s The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod. News of the release became a viral hit online, and there were over 11,000 downloads of the books in the first week.
“I’ve always felt that these two books should have sold many more copies than they actually have,” said No Starch Press publisher Bill Pollock, “but that they suffered from a lack of visibility. As four-color, coffee-table books, they were never released electronically and never appeared on torrent sites. So these two were good choices for this little experiment.”
Visibility online came swiftly. One of No Starch’s editors had shared 2GB of data from his home PC within hours of the initial upload. By the next day, The Cult of Mac became the #1 book on the infamous torrent site, The Pirate Bay. And a story about the experiment posted to TorrentFreak.com reached the front page of popular social news site Digg.
The truth of the matter is that the battle to stop people from posting copyrighted material to torrent sites is one that can’t be won. Beside the fact that No Starch Press sells PDFs without DRM (digital rights management) protections, anything that can be viewed online can be captured and pirated. Within days of its release, No Starch Press’s best-selling Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition, was scraped from an e-book site and posted to multiple file-sharing networks.
Of course, part of the reason for No Starch releasing these titles on P2P sites is political. As major organizations and ISPs work to shut down file sharing, No Starch aims to remind them that P2P has valid uses as well—even for traditional content providers. “File sharing itself, or P2P, is not a crime,” said Pollock. “It can be a great way for willing artists to share their work. That’s not to say that stealing copyrighted material is not a crime, and our actions are not in any way meant to endorse it.”

“If this experiment works, we’ll try more titles,” Pollock said. “And even if it doesn’t work, we may try more titles, if only to beat pirates at their own game.”