Microsoft is no strange to delays, and the fact that Microsoft SQL Server 2008 got delayed shouldn't be a surprise. Now, I only wonder how did this happen? Were they too happy about the last financial report and "forgot" to complete their work? It really doesn't matter, as long as the outcome may hurt some of their clients more than Microsoft. Now, let's see the details of this story available at this time...

Previously, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2008 should become available in the second quarter of the year, but now they got back to that statement, adding a quarter to the initial estimation. Since the original goal was to provide the next SQL Server edition between 24 and 36 months after SQL Server 2005, they may reach this goal even if SQL Server 2008 is released in the third quarter.

According to sources from the Redmond giant, the delay of SQL Server won't get in the way of the Visual Studio and Windows Server releases, scheduled for the 27th of February. "Our goal is to deliver the highest quality product possible and we simply want to use the time to meet the high bar that you, our customers, expect.", declared the company.

Hopefully, Visual Studio and Windows Server will managed to arrive and time and with as less bugs and security flaws as possible. These being said, let's bid Microsoft good luck and two software releases that arrive as scheduled, on the 27th of February, so that their largest business software concurrent release turns into reality!

Advertising is one of my "little hobbies", and I always enjoyed following different campaigns, online or offline. One of the things I hate most when it comes to promoting products or people (in electoral campaigns, for example) is when a product or a candidate uses other's weak points in its campaign, and sometimes it all ends up with a "mud battle". The Internet is one of the places where everyone can throw mud at others, especially by taking advantage of the fact you can easily hide behind a nickname, and use a proxy server to access the Web and hide your real location. Well, Google takes a first step in trying to stop such things to happen, at least by using its services...


If you want to laugh at your friends by paying to publish ads with fake facts about them...that could be probably done, but I don't recommend it. Anyway, Google recently changed its policy on political ads published using the AdSense network. Basically, it all gets down to 5 big facts -

1. Each ad must comply with the usual AdSense editorial guidelines (no copyright violation, no violence, no counterfeit goods, and so on).

2. Google promotes ads for all candidates without any discrimination, as it should be normal, but it's good they wrote this down, so none could come and say "hey, this is not right, I paid more than x and got less exposure".

3. "No attacks on an individual's personal life." There are sooo many possible interpretations for this...

4. If an ad asks for donations, the landing page must clearly state the donations are not tax-deductible(what a pity!).

5. Misleading ads are not allowed, so when you click on John Silver's ad, you shouldn't end up on Little Big's page, obviously...

No matter how good may prove these new rules to be in the end, and how well is going to work the third one in practice, I welcome Google's decision. By taking such small steps, maybe one day, the Web could be a much cleaner place than today...

What? Windows exceeded financial expectations for the last period? Windows Vista sales are going high? I don't want to be rude, but I only have one answer to the above: so what? As always, their marketing department gets all my respect for being able to sell in large quantities a product that's far from being the best on the market, and having an incredibly low customer satisfaction rate! Today, news emerged about another hole in one operating system from Microsoft, and this time we're talking about a product for the Enterprise market!


First of all, I have to say that reports regarding the flaw I am going to tell you about today appeared related to other Microsoft operating systems, including Vista. Anyway, being given the fact that only a few companies switched to Vista and didn't get back to XP, I am not worried about Vista now... The problem today is extremely serious, because the flaw that threatens Windows Small Business Server now was discovered some time ago and already patched on Windows XP and Vista.

While the flaw described by Microsoft here was considered to be "critical" for other Windows systems, on Windows Small Business Server, they only said this problem is "important", and not "critical".

Being given all the above, the interesting part is that either Windows Small Business Server is the most secure Windows system available, and a critical flaw affecting Vista and XP is harder to exploit on this operating system, either Microsoft tries to minimize the unexplained delay in providing the patch by minimizing its importance.

Anyway, no matter what's the truth, I am sure we're going to have an interesting year when it comes to IT security, since operating systems that once had a very small user base (Mac OS X and Linux, of course) are becoming more and more popular, and so become targeted by malware more often than before...