Microsoft said that some people who use its Hotmail and MSN email services are not receiving email sent from Comcast accounts and other Internet service providers. Brooke Richardson, a group product manager with Microsoft’s MSN online division, said the problem appears to be due to an increase in email volume, which is attributed in part to the Sober Internet worm. She said the high volumes are causing email to either be delayed or not make it to MSN and Hotmail users at all.

Microsoft is working on a significant new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which is designed to update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine. Microsoft officials have not talked much publicly about this new feature, but Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft’s platform products and services division, recently told eWEEK this is an example of just how important the reboot issue was to the Redmond-based software giant.

NextUp.com, developer of popular Text-to-Speech software TextAloud, announced the release of an improved TextAloud toolbar for Internet Explorer. New features allow watching words highlighted as spoken within Web pages for better comprehension, new options on what is spoken, and ability to enlarge text for easier reading. The toolbar has been a popular feature in TextAloud, letting users enhance their browsing experience through spoken audio. TextAloud also allows for easy conversion of text from Web news and Web based emails to audio files for portable listening on devices such as the iPod.

Korean trade regulators searched the offices of Microsoft’s Korean subsidiary as part of a years-long probe into the company’s business practices. The Korean Fair Trade Commission has been investigating whether Microsoft violated antitrust laws by tying its messaging software into its dominant Windows operating system, according to a source familiar with the inquiry. In 2001, Korean messaging rival Daum Communications sparked the investigation by complaining that Microsoft was using its monopoly position to freeze out competitors.

Under fire for a marketing plan that may have improperly favored Windows Media Player, Microsoft told a federal judge that it’s trying hard to avoid any anti-competitive behavior by employees. At a conference in the same courtroom here last month, the company took heat from U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly amid news that one of its employees had devised a marketing agreement that would have forbidden portable music player makers from bundling anything except Windows Media Player with their devices.

We’re another step of the way along our RSS 2.0 path. Autodiscovery now seems to work. Autodiscovery is an interesting concept. Basically, it’s an HTML link tag that specifies that your page has associated RSS feeds. This is very helpful because, if you’re using an RSS reader or any of the later browsers (like Firefox and Safari), you’ll be able to go to one of the ZATZ magazine Web pages and the reader or the browser will immediately know about associated RSS feeds for those pages.

Right now, it works for instances of the magazines (like DominoPower and OutlookPower, but eventually we should have it working for the other feeds we’re building (for example, we’ll be offering feeds for each of our authors).

As Pakistan and India were still floundering to respond in the early hours after the Kashmir quake, a convoy laden with supplies snaked its way along the debris-cluttered road to one of the worst-hit areas in Pakistan. The mission of mercy began with a simple SMS in Islamabad. The armies and emergency services of India and Pakistan were caught largely off guard by the Oct. 8 earthquake, which killed more than 73,000 and made millions homeless, but new technology is enabling ordinary people to step in and help in a major way.

Microsoft has sent out a new test version of Windows Live Mail, part of the software maker’s push to introduce Web-based counterparts to desktop products. The beta version, sent out to testers this week, goes out under the banner of "Windows Live," launched earlier month. However, it is actually part of a longtime effort to revamp Hotmail, Microsoft’s current free, Web-based email service.

The first phase of the extreme RSSization process for ZATZ content appears to be ready for testing. Although we’ve had RSS 0.91 feeds since 1998, we haven’t updated our code for these feeds since, well, 1998. A lot’s changed.

We are now ready to roll out RSS 2.0 feeds for each of our magazines, at least as betas. These are fully-validated RSS 2.0 feeds, including content. We’re currently feeding news, but we’ll be adding more and more as we continue coding and adding more features.

Right now, you can get the feeds themselves. You won’t find the little orange XML icons anywhere, we don’t ping the RSS hubs, and pages don’t respond to autodiscovery requests. We’ll be adding those later.

In the meantime, please feel free to subscribe to the feeds and send feedback directly to david@ZATZ.com. I’d like bug reports, usage comments, and anything else you feel would be important as we move more heavily into this area. Here are the individual feed URLS…

Computing Unplugged Magazine

http://www.computingunplugged.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

Connected Photographer Magazine

http://www.connectedphotographer.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

DominoPower Magazine

http://www.dominopower.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

OutlookPower Magazine

http://www.outlookpower.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

WebSpherePower Magazine

http://www.webspherepower.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

Again, let us know what you think. This is definitely the time when feedback might well be acted upon. Be nice, though. A lot of time has gone into coding these features and you’ll see the results over the current months. — David

Scientific Component has released GPS ToolKit.NET version 2.0 for Windows 98, ME, 2000 and Windows XP, a native .NET managed component for adding GPS support to any Visual Basic .NET, C#, or C++ project. GPS ToolKit.NET provides .NET software developers with an API that adds full support for reading real-time data from GPS units. It provides access to dozens of data sets, including position, speed, course, satellite, and navigation data, in a number of formats and units. Additionally, GPS ToolKit.NET notifies the application each time a new fix is received, or navigation or satellite data is updated.