Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs, one effect of which will be to limit the hardware capabilities of this type of device, IDG News Service has learned.

Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs, one effect of which will be to limit the hardware capabilities of this type of device, IDG News Service has learned.

A few days ago we wrote about Microsoft’s defense of RAND (and a bit of its latest slime against Groklaw). Do not be mistaken or deliberately misled to the point of believing that this RAND gotcha only applies to OOXML. It also applies to Mono and — by association — to Moonlight, which Microsoft hopes to infect the World Wide Web with.

"We occasionally discuss Microsoft’s very clear plan to ’steal’ free software projects from GNU/Linux and bring them over to Windows. The OSI ‘invasion’ was merely a first step. At the moment, Microsoft is trying to grab Apache..."

Is Microsoft’s Windows “Genuine Advantage” program installed on your computer? Did you want it? Did Microsoft ask you before they installed it on your computer? If you feel that what Microsoft’s did with its Genuine Advantage program was wrong – there is something you can do about it.

Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs beyond the current deadline of June 30, 2008, to accommodate a new class of ultra-low-cost PCs (ULCPCs) that are just beginning to pepper the market.

As the release of low-cost laptops based on Intel's upcoming Atom processor draws near, Microsoft is getting boxed into a corner. The software company plans to stop selling most Windows XP licenses after June 30, yet most of these low-cost laptops won't be powerful enough to run Vista when they arrive later this year.

A few days ago, I saw the leaked screenshots from Windows 7. Microsoft Paint and Wordpad now “feature” the ribbon bar, just as Office ‘07 does. It finally occurred to me: Microsoft isn’t stupid. It’s not like they didn’t recognize that the switch to the ribbon in Office ‘07 (with no alternative interface) would drive users to OpenOffice.

The last time we wrote about Microsoft’s ‘dumping crusade’ against GNU/Linux was just under a fortnight ago. This collective item included a new incident and references to our previous writeups about Microsoft’s DreamSpark [1, 2] — essentially another attempt to further close the World Wide Web, making it more Microsoft Windows-dependent.