Neowin.net

Microsoft said Friday that it would allow some of its business customers to download its new Office desktop application bundle about two weeks sooner than originally planned.

The software giant said Office 2003 and Microsoft OneNote applications would be released Monday, to those signed up for its Enterprise Agreement and Software Assurance licensing plans. The company will also allow subscribers to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) to download the software. Office 2003 and OneNote are parts of the company's Office System family of software, an umbrella marketing name for its business productivity software, which includes Office 2003, Visio, InfoPath, SharePoint Portal Server, Live Communications Server and other products.

As previously reported, Microsoft will sell the standard edition of Office 2003 for $399, the professional version for $499, and the student/teacher version for $149. The Office 2003 bundle includes the 2003 versions of Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath, Access, Publisher and Outlook applications. Microsoft is hailing its revamped Office suite as a major transition. Most notably, Office will support XML (Extensible Markup Language), which lets applications communicate with back-end business systems and Web services. Microsoft hopes XML support will convince businesses to upgrade to Office 2003.

News source: C|Net News.com

Pending detailed information from Valve, we are only aware one bug with Rel. 50 and the version of Half Life 2 that we currently have - this is the fog issue that Gabe referred to in his presentation. It is not a cheat or an over optimization. Our current drop of Half Life 2 is more than 2 weeks old. NVIDIA's Rel. 50 driver will be public before the game is available. Since we know that obtaining the best pixel shader performance from the GeForce FX GPUs currently requires some specialized work, our developer technology team works very closely with game developers. Part of this is understanding that in many cases promoting PS 1.4 (DirectX 8) to PS 2.0 (DirectX 9) provides no image quality benefit. Sometimes this involves converting 32-bit floating point precision shader operations into 16-bit floating point precision shaders in order to obtain the performance benefit of this mode with no image quality degradation. Our goal is to provide our consumers the best experience possible, and that means games must both look and run great.

The optimal code path for ATI and NVIDIA GPUs is different - so trying to test them with the same code path will always disadvantage one or the other. The default settings for each game have been chosen by both the developers and NVIDIA in order to produce the best results for our consumers.

In addition to the developer efforts, our driver team has developed a next-generation automatic shader optimizer that vastly improves GeForce FX pixel shader performance across the board. The fruits of these efforts will be seen in our Rel.50 driver release. Many other improvements have also been included in Rel.50, and these were all created either in response to, or in anticipation of the first wave of shipping DirectX 9 titles, such as Half Life 2.

We are committed to working with Gabe to fully understand his concerns and with Valve to ensure that 100+ million NVIDIA consumers get the best possible experience with Half Life 2 on NVIDIA hardware.