Monster Patch Tuesday Yields 11 Fixes for 17 Flaws
by Alex Woodie

Windows administrators' love lives may have to be put on hold this week as a monstrous Patch Tuesday wave of security fixes threatens to consume their Valentine's Day. Microsoft released 11 patches addressing 17 security vulnerabilities yesterday, including seven critical patches for a range of remote code execution problems. A handful of Office flaws, new problems in IE, and two new denial of service attacks combine to make February's Patch Tuesday the biggest one in a year. READ MORE >

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft's Bid; Google's Ad Revenues Hiccup
by Alex Woodie

Microsoft's quest to buy Yahoo entered a new phase this week when Yahoo's board of directors unanimously rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer as 'substantially undervaluing' the company. Nevertheless, Microsoft says it's determined to push forward to do the deal. Meanwhile, a new report shows Google lost market share in both online advertising and Internet searches late last year, potentially revealing a chink in the armor that Microsoft and Yahoo could exploit. READ MORE >

HP Puts Out a Four-Socket Itanium Blade Server
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Because of its density, integration, simplicity, and heterogeneous nature--not to mention the account control it gives to server makers because of a lack of standards--the blade form factor would seem to be the inevitable shape of all servers in the long run. But that can't happen as long as blade servers are limited in their processing and memory scalability. The excessive heat thrown off by enterprise-grade processors have prevented blade servers from scaling much beyond two sockets, but that is slowly changing. And that makes blade servers appropriate for relatively large workloads. READ MORE >

System Center Service Manager Delayed Two Years by Microsoft
by Alex Woodie

Microsoft's System Center Service Manager has hit a rough patch and will be delayed at least two years, the company confirmed this week. The product, which is aimed at helping IT departments and help desks track problems from the moment they're reported to their resolution, was to have shipped by the end of 2007. But problems with the early beta have pushed the delivery date out at least until 2010. READ MORE >