Microsoft failed Monday in its bid to overturn a European Commission antitrust ruling against it, when the European Union's second highest court dismissed the company's appeal and ordered it to pay the bulk of the Commission's legal expenses.
The long-awaited decision by the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg supports the Commission, the E.U.'s top antitrust regulator, on the two essential aspects of the case.
According to Microsoft, more than 11.6 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold.
As Sony soaks up the Tokyo Game Show spotlight, Microsoft was quick to boast its gaming accomplishments thus far including the most played games over Xbox Live.
According to Microsoft, more than 11.6 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold (either to retail or to consumers), this despite multiple reports suggesting that Wii has overtaken total Xbox 360 sales with fewer than 11 million units sold.
Regardless, gamers buy more software for the Xbox 360 than for PS3 and Wii combined according to NPD, and Microsoft said Xbox 360 owners buy an average of 6.3 games per console, more than either PS3 or Wii.
Additionally, Microsoft reports 7 million Xbox Live members (including free silver accounts) and expects that number to reach 10 million by the end of June 2008. The average Xbox Live Gold subscriber has 23 contacts in their friends roster, according to the company, and there are more than 250 games available for Xbox 360, 86 of which are Live Arcade titles.
Microsoft also released the following most popular games on Xbox Live.
These are the top 40 and 42-inch LCD and plasma TVs today, but ratings and rankings can change quickly due to pricing and technology changes, so check back frequently for the latest info.
Diagonal (inches): 40 Native Resolution (pixels): 1920-by-1080 CableCard Ready: No HD Formats: 720p, 1080i, 1080p Price When Reviewed: $1600 Check latest prices
Bottom Line: This well-equipped 1080p LCD set looks similar to its plasma sibling, the H-T4264. It has many inputs and is easy to set up. (Last Rated: September 12, 2007) Full Review • Test Report
IBM has reported an increase in malware volume and sophistication as part of its security statistics report for the first half of the year.
So far this year, its X-Force research and development team has identified and analyzed more than 210,000 new malware samples, which is more than the total number of malware samples observed over the entirety of last year.
According to IBM, the "exploits as a service" industry continues to thrive, with the new practice of "exploit leasing" added to the repertoire of criminals. By leasing an exploit, attackers can now test exploitation techniques with a smaller initial investment, making this underground market an even more attractive option for malicious perpetrators.
According to the report, Trojans (seemingly legitimate files that are actually malware) are the most common form of malware this year, accounting for 28 percent of all malware. Last year, by contrast, Downloaders was the most common category -- a low-profile piece of malware that installs itself so that it can later download and install a more sophisticated malware agent.
SUMMARY: View or hide Windows Media Player 11's menu bar to access features or save space for multimedia playback.
What Windows Media Player 11 looks like with the Menu Bar.
Depending on your configuration, Windows Media Player 11 may not display its menu bar, hiding access to many playback and configuration functions. If you're used to applications showing menu bars and often need access to Windows Media Player's advanced features, enabling the menu bar is easy.
1. From Windows Media Player 11 click the ALT key. 2. Select "Show Classic Menus".
Enabling Windows Media Player 11's menu bar
Alternatively, you can just press CONTROL-M.
If you want to disable Windows Media Player 11's menu bar to leave more room for multimedia playback, just repeat the above instructions.
AutoPatcher, a popular alternative to Windows Update, was shut down today in response to a cease-and-desist e-mail from Microsoft.
Microsoft forced a popular alternative to Windows Update off the Internet today, sending the maker of AutoPatcher cease-and-desist e-mail. The free utility has been removed from its download site.
Microsoft did not give a reason for the move, which came more than four years after AutoPatcher debuted.
"Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft, requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history," said Antonis Kaladis, the 20-year-old Greek college student and author of the program. "As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down."
AutoPatcher, which was in version 5.6, let users collect Windows hotfixes and security patches from Microsoft's update services, then package them so they could be applied to multiple machines, or reused multiple times on a single PC. It was especially popular among people who frequently reformatted drives or those who did informal tech support for friends and family, or in a small business.
Each month, the current set of Windows' -- and as of this month, Office's as well -- updates and hotfixes would be added to the packages. The program supported Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Server 2003. This month, Kaladis and his team of volunteers added support for Office XP, 2003 and 2007.
The Microsoft take-down e-mail was posted to the Neowin.net forum that AutoPatcher used for its user support. "Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above [www.autopatcher.com/downloads/], which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft," the e-mail read.
"We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company's network," it continued after listing various versions of Windows and Office. The e-mail was signed by a Peter Anaman, a Microsoft Internet investigator.
Users of AutoPatcher were, not surprisingly, hot. "I cannot believe that Microsoft did this," Andrew Lucas said in a response to Kaladis' posting of the news. "You are providing a service Microsoft refuses to do. It has now been over 3 years since Microsoft released SP2 for XP."
"The end of AutoPatcher is the end of my use of any Windows product, period," swore a user identified only as KMan.
Other users -- lots of others -- literally swore at Microsoft in the comments attached to Kaladis' post, or on the Neowin forum. More than a few however, took a more c'est la guerre approach to AutoPatcher's demise. "I don't get why everyone is so annoyed, I'm shocked auto-patcher was allowed to continue for so long in the first place. Is anyone really surprised by this?" asked a user calling himself kudos in a post to Neowin.
Microsoft has dealt similar cease-and-desist orders to other patch-related Web sites or services in the past. In April, it leaned on Hotfix.net, whose operator Ethan Allen had posted more than 100 hotfixes he expected would be part of Vista SP1. Coincidentally, Vista SP1 was talked up by Microsoft today. Allen also complied by yanking the download.
Big Blue could establish a strong presence in the market for embedded operating systems with Wind River buy
IBM could establish a strong presence in the market for embedded operating systems with the acquisition of financially ailing Wind River Systems, a deal that is reportedly in the works.
After the Silicon Valley Watcher site reported earlier this week that IBM was considering the deal, industry insiders -- including Wind River competitors -- agreed that an acquisition would make sense.
Wind River, a 1,300-person company in Alameda, California, develops operating systems for embedded applications primarily in the aerospace, defense, and automotive industries, using both a version of Linux and its proprietary VxWorks OS.
In February, the company added another product to its stable when it acquired the rights to the real-time OS RT Linux from Finite State Machine Labs (FSMLabs). Wind River also does business with network infrastructure and consumer electronics companies. For example, Palm Inc. announced last week that it would use Wind River's Linux OS in future versions of its Foleo ultramobile PC.
However, the company has struggled to generate profits, posting a loss of $4.6 million for the quarter ending May 31, an even worse result than its loss of $2.1 million for the same period last year. Company executives told investors they expect to lose a similar amount in the second quarter as well, but pointed out they had increased revenue to $78 million for its fiscal first quarter, an increase from its mark of $65 million in the same period last year.
Wind River did not return calls for comment. IBM withheld any comment on the possible deal. "It is IBM's position not to comment on rumors and speculation," said company spokesman Fred McNeese.
IBM has recently acquired several other software companies, including an agreement announced in July to buy the data integration software firm DataMirror for about $162 million, and a deal announced in June to buy Telelogic, a developer of software development tools, for about $745 million.
Now, IBM would be wise to acquire an embedded Linux vendor such as Wind River, because it would allow IBM to expand beyond its core markets, one industry watcher said.
"IBM sells in other markets than just servers," said Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics. "For instance, IBM sells millions of POWER chips to makers of video game consoles. IBM has probably identified several market opportunities for little, intelligent, Linux-based embedded systems."
The move would also complement IBM's own embedded systems group, Clabby said.
Indeed, the two companies have done business together in the past. Wind River is a member of Power.org, IBM's industry forum for promoting the use of its Power processor architecture. Wind River is also an IBM customer, using products like Rational ClearCase as a communications tool for geographically scattered development teams. IBM also certifies that its PowerPC chips will work with Wind River's VxWorks Developer's Toolkit.
Enea, a rival of Wind River, issued a statement on Thursday applauding the potential deal. Acquiring Wind River would allow IBM to expand its share of the embedded software market and find new customers for the consulting services it has traditionally provided only to enterprise customers, Enea CEO Johan Wall said.
San Francisco (InfoWorld) - AMD is announcing plans to extend its CPU instruction set Tuesday to make it easier for software developers to exploit the power of multi-core processors when building applications.
AMD stressed that converting single-threaded software to be multi-threaded is a highly specialized skill and a challenge for developers. The extensions initially focus on performance analysis via the company's new "Light-Weight Profiling" specification accessible on AMD's site. This technology will enable real-time feedback for performance optimization that can be directly used by software, said Earl Stahl, vice president of software engineering at AMD.
"Developers will incorporate [the technology] into the software, and the software can utilize it to at runtime to discover, for example, cache contention with their memory allocator and reallocate that memory," Stahl said.
Over time, other hardware extensions could be added in such areas as software transactional memory, high-performance message-passing, and fast context-switching for lightweight parallelism. AMD plans to offer the full gamut of specifications released under the plan up for public review.
Software that would leverage the extensions could be applications based on platforms like Microsoft's Common Language Runtime or the Java runtime, Stahl said. Access to the extensions by developers could be done either through compilers or via a small API layer.
The extensions, however, will not be in AMD chips for an estimated three to four years. They will not be in the upcoming AMD Barcelona and Bulldozer chips.
Such a long lead time is not uncommon, according to AMD officials. The company detailed its 64-bit CPU extensions in 1999, but they did not appear in processors until 2003. The purpose of Tuesday's release is to get discussion going on software optimization, Lewis said.
Intel, whose chip technologies are leveraged by AMD, theoretically could use the extensions also if it put them in its own chips, Lewis said. Intel could not be reached for a response on Monday.
AMD and Intel have approached the processor parallelism issue differently, said analyst Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight64. Intel has focused on software tools to help with multithreaded development, while AMD is offering support in hardware itself, he said.
"The AMD extensions will make it easier for multiple threads to cooperate on a single task. Intel is doing that through software, and AMD is saying, hey, with a little bit of help from the hardware, they can make it even better,' " Brookwood said.
AMD's plan could result in better-performing applications, he said.
The only issue Brookwood could raise with the extensions is that they could simply take up space on the chip when the choice is made not to use them and that this space might be used more wisely for other tasks. But the extensions will not create chaos or disorder or force any changes in what people are doing, he said.
AMD's extensions are not specific to multi-core chips, which are becoming more of the dominant processor technology. "While not limited to multi-core, [the technology] certainly will find its sweet spot there," Stahl said.
By publishing its specifications, AMD can get parties like or Microsoft to look at them and have open dialog on implementation, according to AMD. The company would submit the specifications to a standards body, but none currently exists in this area, Stahl said.
In terms of computing power, we've come a long way since 1981. Today's average desktop CPU is more than 600 times faster than that of the original IBM PC. Throw in blazing-fast graphics cards, mind-boggling amounts of RAM, multimegabit network connections, and hard drives that spin faster than a Ferrari engine, and you've got a machine that's powerful beyond the imaginings of the original PC pioneers. By " http://www.infoworld.com"
Microsoft Details Vista SP1 Plans, Beta "In a Few Weeks"
Vista's first service pack addresses performance and reliability. Also on tap: A beta of the third and final service pack for Windows XP Read More
Acer head vows to step down if Gateway deal fails
August 29, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- Amid mounting criticism of Acer Inc.'s plans to buy Gateway Inc., the chairman and CEO of Acer has vowed to step down if his company's bid to join with Gateway fails.
"The merger will definitely succeed. If it doesn't ... I will resign," the Chinese-language newspaper Economic Daily News quoted Acer Chairman and CEO J.T. Wang as saying in an interview published today. Acer spokesman Henry Wang confirmed the statement.
