Microsoft Fixes 23 Security Vulnerabilities with 12 Patches
by Alex Woodie

It's a full moon, another month has passed, and Microsoft has issued its regularly scheduled round-up of patches to fix security vulnerabilities in its products. August's Patch Tuesday yielded a bumper crop, including 12 patches--nine of them critical--fixing 23 separate vulnerabilities, including a serious remote code execution issue with Windows Server service that is currently being exploited. Other fixes target problems that run the gamut of Microsoft products, including Office, Internet Explorer, the TCP/IP stack, and the Windows kernel itself. READ MORE >

Windows Server 2003 SP2 Will Be 'Limited Scope'
by Alex Woodie

Microsoft will deliver a second service pack for Windows Server 2003 before the end of the year, but it won't be anything like last year's SP1, the company said last week. Microsoft said the compatibility issues of Windows Server 2003 SP1 were a necessary byproduct of the security improvements that operating system brought. With those changes out of the way, SP2, now in the first round of beta testing, should be less disruptive while introducing a "few limited-scope features." READ MORE >

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Goes GA
by Alex Woodie

Microsoft last week announced the general availability of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the version of Windows aimed at the high performance computing (HPC) segment of the market. Along with the GA announcement, the software maker shared the stories of several early Compute Cluster Server 2003 users, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Computational Biology Service Unit at Cornell University. READ MORE >

The X Factor: Is Memory-Based Software Pricing the Answer?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A year and a half ago, the IT industry was just beginning to come to the realization that the advent of multiple cores on processor chips was going to wreak havoc on software pricing. Since that time, vendors have been wrestling with how to price software on products where more and more processing elements, virtual threads, and even whole virtualized machines are zooming around dynamically inside of a single physical machine. But the answer might have been there all along: The 1s and 0s of main memory.READ MORE >