Ballmer says PCs here to stay

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer argues that "software plus services" idea takes advantage of local processing on PCs, reports CNET News.

Ballmer says that lines between on-premise software and Internet-delivered services are blurring, an industry shift the company is embracing. He said many Web sites can be described as "click to run," where a service is delivered via a Web site but runs on a PC.

"I do think that we`re in a transition where software goes from something that`s in its pre-Internet day to something we call Live (Microsoft`s hosted services), where you have click-to-run capability on a Web site... But software will still execute on a PC," Ballmer said.

Microsoft has issued a record-breaking number of security updates, fixing at least 26 separate security holes in its Windows operating system and other products, reports the Washington Post.

The patches include 16 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Office components.

Among the problems addressed in the ten patch bundles released as part of its monthly patch cycle are four flaws in Office, as well as four security holes each in different versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint (one of the Word flaws is only present in the version made for Apple Macintosh systems).

Microsoft also patched a flaw in Windows Explorer that criminals have been exploiting to compromise Windows computers over the past few weeks.

Isilon, having updated its OneFS distributed file system, says that the system can now manage one Petabyte of capacity, where the previous version topped out at 250TB, reports The Register.

OneFS is part of Isilon`s IQ software suite for clustered storage. The new version, OneFS 4.5, allows up to 1PB of data to be managed as a single volume and a single file system.

The aim, according to Isilon, is to let enterprises bring their huge data archives online, making them as accessible as any other critical business information.

Google is set to launch a new product called Google Docs, which will merge Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a collaboration and document management solution, according to sources quoted by Eweek.

The new offering will be available at docs.google.com, although that address produces a 404 error right now.

According to sources, Google Docs isn`t so much a new online software application as it is a combination of the two existing products. However, Google Docs focuses on collaboration among multiple users.