Some of the top technology companies, including Intel, Microsoft, Dell, and Advanced Micro Devices joined forces Tuesday to form the PC Gaming Alliance, which will try to promote the PC as a gaming platform.

The alliance will bring hardware makers, software companies, and game publishers under one roof to "accelerate innovation, improve the gaming experience for consumers and serve as a collective source of market information and expertise on PC gaming," the alliance said in a statement.

The companies will work together on challenges facing the PC gaming industry, including piracy and the establishment of hardware requirements for PC games, the alliance said. PCGA also hopes to accelerate growth of the PC gaming industry and standardize the development of gaming PCs and software by developing and promoting guidelines.

The alliance comes at a time when PC video game sales are falling. PC games sales in the United States were $910.7 million in 2007, down from $970 million in 2006, according to research from NPD Techworld. PC game sales in 2007 dwarfed in comparison to the sale of software for video game consoles like Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Wii, which were $6.6 billion.

Unit shipments of PC game software totaled 36.4 million in 2007, compared to video game software unit shipments of 153.9 million, according to NPD.

The U.S. gaming industry already has the Entertainment Software Association, which represents vendors that publish games for both computers and consoles. About 90 percent of the $7.4 billion revenue of PC and console gaming software in 2006 belonged to ESA members, giving the association a dominant presence.

Other PCGA members include Acer, Epic, Nvidia, and Razer USA.

The announcement comes during the Game Developers Conference, which is being held in San Francisco. During the show PCGA member Intel launched a new gaming platform formerly code-named "Skulltrail." The Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform includes two quad-core microprocessors, totaling eight processing engines, and supports graphics cards from ATI or Nvidia.

Hewlett-Packard reported solid financial results for its fiscal first quarter, driven by growth in PCs and enterprise hardware. The results prompted HP to raise its forecast for the year ahead.

Revenue for the quarter, which ended Jan. 31, was $28.5 billion, up 13 percent from a year earlier, HP announced Tuesday. Pro forma net income was $2.3 billion, or $0.86 per share, up from $1.8 billion, or $0.65 per share, a year earlier.

The figures beat the expectations of financial analysts, who had forecast revenue of $27.6 billion and pro forma earnings per share of $0.81, according to Thomson First Call. The pro forma figure excludes one-time items that slightly inflated the results. Using generally accepted accounting principles, HP's profit was $2.1 billion, or $0.80 per share.

HP's Personal Systems Group, which produces its laptop and desktop PCs, grew its revenue 24 percent from the same period a year earlier, to $10.8 billion, with unit shipments up 27 percent. Notebook sales climbed fastest, up 37 percent, while desktop sales climbed 15 percent.

The division had already been doing well. HP extended its lead over Dell in PC sales last year, according to figures from Gartner. HP ended the year with 18.2 percent of the market, compared with 14.3 percent for Dell. The PC market overall grew 13.4 percent.

HP may find it hard to sustain that growth rate, in part because it has to make comparisons with increasingly successful quarters in the year before, CEO Mark Hurd said on a conference call. Still, Hurd said, "when you look at 24 percent growth, I think that's pretty darned strong."

HP's imaging and printing group performed slightly less well, with revenue climbing 4 percent to $7.3 billion. Printer unit sales declined by 1 percent from a year earlier, thanks to weakness in the consumer market. Revenue from supplies, which includes HP's profitable ink business, climbed 6 percent, however.

Revenue from the servers and storage group climbed 9 percent to $4.8 billion. Sales of blades and industry-standard servers were strong, while HP's PA-RISC and Alpha chip businesses continued to shrink. Services revenue climbed 11 percent year-over-year to $4.4 billion, while software sales climbed 11 percent to $666 million, HP said.

Hurd said he was pleased with the results overall. He attributed them to successful cost-cutting efforts, the addition of 2,000 new HP sales staff in the past year, and a diverse product portfolio.

HP generates an increasing amount of its business overseas, he said. Its biggest market continued to be Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where revenue grew 15 percent to $12.3 billion. Asia-Pacific revenue climbed 22 percent to $4.9 billion. Growth in the Americas was a sluggish 8 percent, generating $11.2 billion.

"We generated 69 percent of our revenue outside the U.S., with emerging markets driving significant growth," Hurd said.

The company now expects second-quarter revenue of $27.7 billion to $27.9 billion, and pro forma earnings per share of $0.83 or $0.84. That's above what analysts polled by Thomson had been estimating: pro forma profit of $0.82 and revenue of $27.4 billion.

Determined to utilize mobile applications to improve operational efficiency, food chain Au Bon Pain is taking the outsourcing route to save time and money in getting wireless tools into its employees' hands.

Faced with the prospect of managing the enterprise mobility equation on its own, from device acquisition to applications development, the company of more than 200 bakery and sandwich shops decided to hire an outsourcing specialist to handle almost every aspect of its strategy.

In a move that some market watchers contend will represent an increasingly popular model for launching and maintaining wireless business tools, executives with the company said that it made more sense to offload as much of the process as possible onto its partner, startup Enterprise Mobile, than it would have made to drive its mobile plans internally.

At the core of the company's strategy is the development and distribution of a proprietary business management application delivered over Microsoft's Windows Mobile architecture.

"There's only so much we can do with almost unlimited demand on IT resources. Some projects you simply have to outsource," said Ed Mockler, senior vice president of IT at Au Bon Pain. "This is very nascent technology; we believe it will be very powerful for us in the long run, but we don't have the same level of access to carriers or Microsoft that a dedicated outsourcing partner could offer."

Enterprise Mobile is handling everything from device selection and service contract negotiation to working with the eateries' internal development teams to port its business application, dubbed the Daily P&L, from the PC to the handheld environment.

In addition to its ability to oversee nearly every aspect of its project, Mockler said that Enterprise Mobile's specialization around the Windows Mobile platform was a crucial factor influencing its commitment to outsourcing.

While Research In Motion's Blackberry products remain the de facto leader in the enterprise mobility space, Mockler said that embracing Windows Mobile made the most sense for Au Bon Pain for a variety of different reasons.

Because Au Bon Pain already works with a number of Microsoft technologies, in particular its .NET applications development environment, the executive said it made far more sense to build around the software giant's wireless products.

"Everyone makes a judgment call regarding technologies that will last and prove cost-effective. We thought that.NET would be that platform and felt that it was a prudent decision to continue in that direction with our mobile plans," Mockler said. "We felt that there would be cohesion on all the platforms down the road and wanted to avoid challenges that could be created by a lot of handoffs between different technologies."

By pushing the Daily P&L application from the laptop to the handheld, the executive said that Au Bon Pain's field managers can respond to business challenges more quickly and shift their travels among the chain's locations on the fly to address any emerging problems.

When the application was tied to the PC, managers typically planned their routes ahead of time based on where they expected to be needed. Now the workers can garner detailed operational information in real time and move to cut off any business issues as they emerge, he said.

Moving forward, Au Bon Pain is hoping to port other internal applications, including staffing management and forecasting tools onto handheld devices. Mockler said that the decision to adopt a mobile outsourcing strategy has already allowed the company to accelerate its planning for those future projects.

Mort Rosenthal, chief executive of Enterprise Mobile, said that most businesses are only now getting to the stage in their wireless initiatives where the prospect of using outsourced services makes sense.

IT departments and line-of-business teams have handled the process of selecting devices and negotiating calling plans up until now, but as customers grow into more mature, applications-driven aspects of their planning, acquiring the services of a dedicated mobility partner is becoming a more appealing alternative to keeping operations in-house, he said.

"There are so many moving pieces that as companies attempt to take more of their business applications to the handheld platform, they're realizing that the whole process can become very time-consuming and expensive," Rosenthal said. "As with any outsourcing decision, when companies reach the point where mobility is becoming too much of a burden on IT departments, more customers will decide to head in this direction."

As for Windows Mobile, Rosenthal said that the Microsoft platform is also benefiting from growing maturity among companies regarding the types of applications they hope to push to the handheld. Prior to launching Enterprise Mobile in late 2007, Rosenthal founded Corporate Software, considered one of the earliest and most successful resellers of Microsoft's Windows and Office technologies.

"Blackberry carved out a great market based primarily on mobile e-mail, but as companies move to push more complex applications into the wireless domain, in particular those already built and running on Microsoft technologies, there will be growing adoption of Windows Mobile," Rosenthal said. "Companies want to take advantage of their existing investments in other Microsoft products."

The WordPress.com blog-hosting service suffered a DoS (denial-of-service) attack that began Saturday and was still preventing users from logging in or posting to their blogs on Tuesday.

Matt Mullenweg, spokesman for Automattic, confirmed that the service experienced a DoS attack with spikes of up to 6 gigabits of incoming traffic, which was making some blogs inaccessible for about five to 15 minutes on Tuesday. Though service had mostly been restored, Automattic, which maintains WordPress.com, was still working on returning service to normal levels on Tuesday afternoon, he said.

"Obviously that [is not good] and is pretty unusual for our service," he said. "All our people who can are working on the issue."

However, an employee at a New York-based company that has blogs hosted by WordPress.com suggested that some users were experiencing outages for longer than 15 minutes. The source, who asked not to be identified, said on Tuesday afternoon that users there were unable to log in to their blogs and post comments for "most of the day." However, the blogs were still able to be viewed publicly.

"It's starting to come back to life now, slowly," said the source on Tuesday afternoon.

WordPress.com users were notified via e-mail about the DoS attack. In the e-mail, the service provider said that the attack was affecting user log-in and causing some forums to be offline.

Mullenweg said that the main Wordpress.com page was down longer than some blogs because "we sacrificed it in order to keep blogs and our users up." However, the site's home page and Web site were up and running on Tuesday.

He also provided a link to a graph that shows the traffic spikes to WordPress.com on the graph, where the service's traffic is displayed in a brown line.

A DoS attack is an attempt to make a Web site or service unavailable to intended users by flooding the service or site with incoming data requests, such as e-mails. Motives for DoS attacks vary, but perpetrators mostly target companies with high-profile, highly trafficked Web sites.

Joris Evers, a spokesman for security research and software company McAfee, said DoS attacks are still fairly common, although they have tapered off in recent years because technology has been developed that can head off such attacks before they affect service.

Though he had not heard specifically of the WordPress attack, Evers said that it's possible the attack was mounted by someone "who was upset about something that was written on a WordPress blog, and they decided to take action against that."

The world's top PC vendor, Hewlett-Packard, beat competitors Dell, Lenovo, and Apple to provide the best online customer support, according to a survey released on Tuesday by The Customer Respect Group.

HP was also rated as providing the best online customer service among a sample of 18 technology companies surveyed, ahead of Intuit, Xerox, Microsoft, and Lexmark, according to the survey, which rated online support for the first quarter of 2008.

Using metrics, including Web site usability, content accessibility, and responsiveness to queries, the survey independently measured a customer's interaction with a technology company via the Internet, the company said.

Dell lagged in 12th place behind hardware vendors HP, Lenovo, Apple, and Gateway, according to the survey. Dell has a good community site linked from the home page, but the support pages are difficult to locate, said Terry Golesworthy, president of The Customer Respect Group.

"I think the story with Dell is that they have excellent materials and content, but it is not always as usable by the more naive users," Golesworthy said. Dell needs to mature support to cater to new users without neglecting the self-service experts, Golesworthy said.

Apple's product offerings are fairly simple compared to Dell's, and so is its online support, Golesworthy said. Apple provides no chat or e-mail support options and encourages users to contact Apple through stores and by telephone to resolve issues.

Apple's message may be about being simple, but a major glitch could become a big problem as self-help provided by Apple is minimal, Golesworthy said. Apple has plenty of technical articles on its Web site, which could be hard to locate at critical times.

While some issues linger, vendors are finding better use of technologies such as RSS, online chat, e-mail, forums, and self-support Web content to support novice and expert PC users, the survey said.

Technical customers are generally well serviced on location, so companies are looking to provide more basic information to support novice PC users, Golesworthy said. The documentation on some Web sites is being aligned for novice users to first identify a problem, then download the relevant drivers and programs to solve problems.

Companies are also adopting more interactive and real-time techniques to provide customer support, the survey said. Online chat is challenging e-mail as a support option, with more than 50 percent of companies surveyed including online chat, an improvement from 30 percent six months ago.

Online chat provides quicker response, cuts down on customer support costs, and eliminates user concerns about speaking to support agents with foreign accents, Golesworthy said.

Some Web sites had data-intensive home pages that took time to load, but it could become commonplace as companies try to provide better and more interactive support to users, the survey said.

Two upcoming technologies -- remote support and intelligent monitoring -- could help improve customer support provided by vendors, Golesworthy said. With remote access, technicians will assume control of a machine from a remote location to fix a problem. Instead of wading through pages of content to diagnose an issue, intelligent monitoring will provide a clearer choice for users to diagnose and resolve issues.

Sun was rated as having the simplest Web site, followed by Xerox, Microsoft, and Apple. Intuit was rated as being most responsive to customers' problems, followed by Microsoft, Symantec, and HP.

Microsoft appears to be looking for new ways to tie Windows Mobile phones and Zune media players together, although a Zune phone remains unlikely.

Over the weekend, Microsoft developer "Mel" asked an open question on the Windows Mobile blog: "What are some ways the Zune player and a Windows Mobile device can work better together?"

Since then, more than 50 commenters have suggested ways that Microsoft might converge the two devices. The most common idea is to essentially replace the Windows Media Player on Windows Mobile devices with Zune software.

"I proposed that WMP should be fazed out in favor of a combined WMP/Zune player which will synch with both Windows Media AND Zune, instead of having to have two separate apps with two different libraries for each device," wrote one commenter using the name Colin Walker.

Peter Henning, another commenter, also suggested making just one media player that works on both devices. "Currently you are just making our lives much more difficult with this parallel development and incompatibilities," he wrote.

A single media player would solve some of the problems that other users complained about in syncing music between a Windows Mobile phone and a Zune. Another commenter going by the name Charlie Quidnunc noted that he has to create new playlists once he transfers music from Zune to his phone because Windows Media Player can't read Zune playlists.

Another complained that he can't transfer music that he downloaded under his Zune subscription plan to his Windows Mobile device because of DRM restrictions.

Offering Zune software on Windows Mobile phones could be one simple way for Microsoft to converge the two, said Michael Gartenberg, a research director with Jupiter Research. "There are any number of ways that Microsoft could go about Zune integration. We might see a Zune application for Windows Mobile devices."

But what we most likely won't see is a Zune phone, despite many Zune phone rumors. "On one hand, the Zune is a closed proprietary system not built around a partner ecosystem," Gartenberg noted. "On the other hand, the phone business is built on a partner ecosystem." Microsoft develops the Windows Mobile software, but hardware makers build the phones. By contrast, Microsoft develops the hardware and software for the Zune.

If Microsoft started making a Zune phone, it would compete with its phone hardware partners. "It's the same reason we don't see a Microsoft-branded PC," he said.

On the Windows Mobile blog, "Mel" emphasized that wasn't looking for more suggestions of a Zune phone. "I'm not referring to an imaginary 'Zune phone,' and I'm certainly not hinting or speculating about a converged device," he wrote.

Building a better music playing experience into Windows Mobile will be important for Microsoft, which is increasingly trying to make Windows Mobile phones appeal to consumers and not just business users. "For the most part, Windows Mobile has ignored consumers," Gartenberg said.

Microsoft recently announced plans to buy Danger, the developer of mobile phone software that runs the youth-oriented Sidekick device from T-Mobile. Microsoft has also made some executive changes in the Windows Mobile group designed to better focus on consumers.

U.S. government employees have a telecommuting gap -- nearly all of them could work from home at least part time, but only about 20 percent do, according to a survey released Tuesday.

More than four in 10 survey respondents were unaware if they were eligible to telecommute, according to the survey released by Telework Exchange. But 96 percent of the U.S. government employees who filled out an online quiz from the group could telework at least part time, and 79 percent could telework full time, the survey said.

A three-day-a-week government telecommuter could save an average of $5,878 a year in commuting costs and avoid putting 9,060 pounds of pollutants into the environment, according to Telework Exchange.

If the 79 percent of U.S. government employees eligible to telework full time actually did, they would save $13.9 billion in commuting costs and spare the environment 21.5 billion pounds of pollutants, the study said.

"The point here is that telework saves money, it saves the environment," said Joel Brunson, president of Tandberg Federal, a video conferencing software and services vendor that helped fund the survey. "Telework is the panacea for a lot of the ills out there."

The U.S. Congress passed a law in 2000 requiring federal agencies to offer telecommuting as an option to many employees, but it's been slow to catch on in practice. Advocates of telework say it can provide government agencies several benefits, including a way to remotely continue operations during a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Telecommuting can also ease the enormous traffic problems in the Washington, D.C., area, advocates say.

Government employees need access to a good broadband connection and support such as a help desk in order to telecommute successfully, Brunson said. But it's easier than ever to telework, with broadband, mobile e-mail, easy-to-use video conferencing and other services readily available, he added.

"Telework has grown leaps and bounds from five years ago," he said. "With the prevalence of broadband service out there, there are a lot of tools we have that we didn't have five years ago. With today's technology, [video conferencing] is pretty rock solid and almost utility-like."

Employees have some responsibility to show they can telework, he added. They must prove they can work without on-site supervision and still meet deadlines, Brunson said.

This is the third government-focused telework survey done by Telework Exchange and Tandberg Federal since early 2007. The most recent survey had 664 responses, 70 percent from civilian government agencies, and 30 percent from Department of Defense employees.

Microsoft is moving to counter some scathing comments regarding a security paper authored by researchers at its Cambridge, England, facility.

The paper, "Sampling Strategies for Epidemic-Style Information Dissemination," looks at how worms sometimes inefficiently spread their code.

The research explores how a more efficient method could, for example, be used for distributing patches or other software. The advantage would be that patches could be distributed from PC to PC, rather than from a central server.

That method would reduce the load on a server, and patches would be distributed faster. But the patches would have the same qualities as a computer worm, a generally malicious file.

Since a story about the paper appeared on Thursday in the New Scientist magazine, the paper has been roundly assailed.

"This is a stupid idea," wrote Bruce Schneier, a security expert, author and CTO of Mountain View, Calif.-based enterprise security vendor BT Counterpane, on Tuesday, before quoting a passage from the New Scientist story on his blog.

Schneier wrote that the idea of so-called "benevolent worms" comes up every few years.

However, a worm is designed to run without the consent of a user, which doesn't make it a good method of software distribution, Schneier wrote. The worm patching technique could also make the patches hard to uninstall or interrupt during installation, he wrote.

Worms designed to distribute software patches could also be hacked to distribute malicious software, wrote Randy Abrams, director of education for security vendor Eset, in his regular e-mail commentary.

Forced patching is also troublesome since some patches may not be compatible with critical software, Abrams wrote.

"Breaking into computers is a bad idea," Abrams said.

A Microsoft spokesman said on Monday that the New Scientist story is not inaccurate. However, the writer of the story "sexed" up the research paper a bit, particularly with the headline that used the phrase "friendly worms," the spokesman said.

In response to the criticism, Microsoft said it doesn't intend to develop patch worms.

"This was not the primary scenario targeted for this research," according to a statement.

The company also said it will continue to let customers decide how and when they apply security updates.

One of the paper's authors, Milan Vojnovic, said in a statement that there were no plans to incorporate the ideas into Microsoft's products. Efforts to reach Vojnovic for comment were unsuccessful.

Microsoft plans to intensify its pursuit of Yahoo this week when it authorizes a proxy fight to oust Yahoo's board, meaning the 19-day old acquisition attempt will soon turn a darker shade of ugly, according to The New York Times.

The proxy fight will cost Microsoft between $20 million and $30 million, much less than having to significantly up its offer for Yahoo, The Times reported Tuesday morning, quoting anonymous sources.

The aggressive move would be consistent with Microsoft's statements hinting that it's willing to acquire Yahoo via hostile means if necessary. Yahoo's board rejected unanimously Microsoft's offer, calling it too low.

Yahoo declined to comment about The Times' article. Microsoft didn't immediately reply to requests for comment.

Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment on The Times' article.

If Microsoft plans to wage a proxy fight, that would reveal that the company is getting impatient with Yahoo's resistance, said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.

"Microsoft feels that it made a fair and very generous offer, and that Yahoo doesn't have a lot of options," Sterling said.

Entering into a proxy battle has its downsides, he said. It will delay the acquisition process and, by making the process nastier, could prompt valuable employees to flee, Sterling said. "To what extent does this aggressiveness poison the well? I don't know," he said.

But clearly, Microsoft is ready to shift into an alternative plan if it's convinced that the best-case scenario of wrapping up the acquisition promptly won't happen with Yahoo's current board, he said. "Microsoft had probably factored this step into its strategy. I'm sure it's a calculated decision," Sterling said.

On Feb. 1, Microsoft offered to pay $31 per share for half of Yahoo's outstanding shares in cash -- about $22.3 billion -- and 0.9509 of a Microsoft share for the other half. Microsoft's half-cash/half-stock offer to Yahoo was valued at about $44.6 billion at the time it was made; Yahoo's share price was $19.18 at the time.

However, the bid's value has dropped to about $41 billion as the price of Microsoft's stock has fallen from $32.60 at the time the offer was made. It was trading at $28.77 on Tuesday morning. At the same time, Yahoo's stock has surged, erasing the bid's original premium. It was trading at $29.32 on Tuesday morning.

In the proxy fight, Microsoft would hire a proxy solicitor to urge Yahoo investors to kick out board directors, The Times reported, adding that all Yahoo directors are up for nomination this year.

After investing heavily in recent years in its Internet business and failing to achieve its desired goals, Microsoft is now convinced that it must acquire Yahoo in order to compete against common rival Google, especially in search advertising, the largest online advertising market pie, and one that Google dominates.

As of the end of 2007's third quarter, Google had almost 25 percent of the U.S. Internet advertising market, up from almost 21 percent in 2006's third quarter, according to IDC. Meanwhile, Yahoo's share during this period dropped to 11.3 percent from 12.3 percent, while Microsoft's declined to 5.2 percent from 5.8 percent, according to IDC.

In search usage, Google held a commanding 62.4 percent of queries worldwide, followed by Yahoo in a very distant second place with 12.8 percent, according to comScore. Microsoft ranked fourth with 2.9 percent, after Baidu (5.2 percent).

Unquestionably, Yahoo would be a major win for Microsoft in the display ad market. In November, Yahoo ranked first in the U.S. in display ad impressions with a 19 percent share, while Microsoft came in third with 6.7 percent, after News Corp.'s Fox Interactive (16.3 percent), according to comScore. Google took seventh place with 1 percent.

However, skeptics question whether acquiring Yahoo will yield the expected benefits, considering the complexity of integrating the two businesses, cultures and technology platforms and the fact that Yahoo has had severe internal problems that have stumped its most seasoned executives. In addition, some aren't sure that a unified Microsoft/Yahoo will have a better chance to compete against Google.

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang, who is also on the board of directors, has been urgently looking for and considering alternatives to a Microsoft acquisition soon after Ballmer and company made their bid.

Reports -- all attributed to anonymous sources in various media outlets -- have emerged in the past two weeks that Yang has held conversations with Google, AOL and News Corp., exploring various deals that would allow him to reject Microsoft's offer.

The key is that the shareholder value created by a competing deal would have to at least match the value of Microsoft's deal. Otherwise, Yahoo would make itself liable to shareholder lawsuits that alleged the board had failed to perform its fiduciary duty.

So far, as experts have analyzed the potential value to Yahoo of outsourcing its search advertising to Google, merging with AOL or selling a 20 percent stake to News Corp. in exchange for MySpace, the consensus has been that none of those scenarios comes close to matching Microsoft's offer.

This story was updated on February 19, 2008

Sybase Tuesday launched its strike in the cluster-database market, releasing Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition to compete with the likes of Oracle's Real Application Clusters.

Sybase's offering is aimed at IT shops that require high availability from their datacenters. It uses shared-disk clustering, where a number of ASE server instances is grouped into a cluster seen as a single system managing the same set of data. This allows application workloads to be balanced among the instances. The software automatically migrates connections if a node fails, according to the company.

Noel Yuhanna, a Forrester Research analyst covering database technologies, said Sybase has made a wise move.

"They've realized they need to innovate to stay competitive and they're doing that," he said. "I think it's a good move and makes them comparable in certain situations with Oracle RAC."

While most companies employ some type of failover technology in their data centers, it may take effect in minutes, not seconds, Yuhanna said. "Companies who want it to happen really fast, that's when shared-disk clustering can really help," he said.

"It's only about five to 10 percent of the applications in an organization that would really need that up-to-the second [performance]," Yuhanna added.

Sybase hasn't necessarily surpassed Oracle's capabilities, according to Yuhanna. Its new product might be more suitable for "smaller environments, or those that are only focused around Linux and Solaris," he said, adding that word hasn't yet circled back from customers regarding the product's performance.

David Jonker, senior product marketing manager in the ASE group at Sybase, said the company worked with 12 large companies on a technology preview version of the software. He declined to name them, and said none had agreed to speak to the media.

ASE Cluster Edition is compatible with systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 (x86_64); Solaris 9 and 10 on Sparc (64-bit); and SUSE Linux 9 and 10 (x86_64). Sybase did not release pricing information.

Boasting of a one-of-a-kind solution for the application development lifecycle, Bungee Labs is launching the public beta Tuesday of Bungee Connect, an on-demand platform for Web application development and deployment.

Featured is a full gamut of tools and services to build and host applications. "Bungee Connect is a single platform for the development, testing, deployment, and hosting of rich Web applications," said Lyle Ball, Bungee Labs' vice president of marketing.

With the platform, developers can collaborate to build Web applications leveraging multiple Web services and databases. Applications are deployed on Bungee Labs' multi-tenant grid infrastructure and can be SaaS-based or offered as stand-alone Web destinations. They are accessed via popular browsers.

Rather than developers having to assemble disparate pieces such as IDE, an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) toolkit, and testing and collaboration tools, Bungee provides all these capabilities.

"Developers log onto Bungee Connect. It's in the cloud and it's a hosted environment," Ball said.

Bungee describes its product as a platform-as-a-service system, in which the entire software development lifecycle can be supported on the same computing environment to reduce costs, risks, and time to market.?

Because Bungee Connect is entirely based on-demand, users can build and deploy applications without installing or configuring servers and can connect to multiple Web services from within a single environment, said Brad Hintze, Bungee director of product marketing.

"I think it's got some very interesting benefits because it's managing to integrate development and deployment but in a service environment, so it allows for a developer to [have] access to tools," said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "It also at the same time gives them a place to deploy their applications without having to worry," about run-time choices and operational issues," he said.

Bungee also provides a way to mash up with other Web services, Gardner said. Bungee is "on to something" that is a harbinger of things to come in creating a seamless relationship between development and deployment, he said.

As part of its launch, Bungee is offering reference applications, including a calendar application, WideLens, which integrates Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce.com, Google Calendar, and other sources. These applications serve as examples of integration offered on Bungee Connect; source code for the applications can be imported into any Bungee Connect account, modified, and used in commercial endeavors.

AJAX-enabled applications can be built and embedded within other Web applications, in SaaS solutions, or offered as a stand-alone Web destination.

Interactivity is delivered via AJAX but developers themselves do not write any AJAX. They use the Bungee Logic programming language for building application logic while the UI is built using a drag-and-drop metaphor. Bungee Logic features a C-style syntax and acts like Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform, Hintze said.

"We automate AJAX interactivity," while developers focus on creating applications and value, Ball said.

Development, collaboration and test deployment are free of charge on Bungee Connect; developers only pay when applications are used. Through a utility-based pricing model, businesses can expect to pay between $2 to $5 per user per month for a heavily used business productivity application or fractions of a cent per e-commerce transaction.

Bungee's grid infrastructure provides data on application usage patterns. Applications are hosted free during the Bungee Connect Public Beta program. The public beta program is expected to continue until the end of 2008, whereupon Bungee would launch the general release of its service.

"And [then] the world is a different place," Ball said. Some 40 developers worked to deliver Bungee Connect, according to Bungee Labs.

After cracking the encryption system that protected DVDs in order to play the discs he had bought on a PC running Linux, Jon Lech Johansen has his sights set on liberating other audiovisual content from the format in which it is sold.

DoubleTwist, a company he co-founded in March 2007 with Monique Farantzos, on Tuesday released beta versions of a Facebook application and a PC desktop application for unlocking and managing music and video files.

Johansen achieved notoriety as 'DVD Jon' when he ended up in court for co-writing the DeCSS software that cracked the encryption on DVDs and allowed them to play on PCs running open-source media player software on Linux. Until then, they could only be watched using authorized hardware or proprietary software because their content was encrypted using the Content Scrambling System (CSS).

He followed that up by breaking a series of other DRM (digital rights management) encryption systems including FairPlay, Apple's proprietary DRM wrapper around the open AAC format music files it sells via its iTunes Store.

While Apple's iPod is not the only portable device that can play AAC files -- many Nokia phones do too -- it is the only one that can play the encrypted AAC files Apple sells. There are ways to work around Apple's DRM, including burning the files to a CD and then ripping them back into the computer in another format, but they are time-consuming.

DoubleTwist's tools, Twist me and doubleTwist desktop, are intended to make it easier to move music and video files, including those locked by Apple's DRM, from one device to another, or to share them with family and friends, the company said.

Twist me, the Facebook application, lets users of the social network site put music and video on their profile pages to share with friends.

DoubleTwist desktop runs on Windows PCs alongside Apple's iTunes, and can take legally purchased iTunes files in the DRM-protected AAC format and, on the machine authorized to play them, turn them into MP3 files that will then play almost anywhere, the company said.

The desktop software also includes tools for sharing audio and video playlists and photo albums, and synchronizing them with Nokia's NSeries, Sony Ericsson's Walkman and Cybershot phones, the Sony PSP game console and the Amazon Kindle e-reader, among other devices. In addition to AAC and MP3, it handles WMA (Windows Media Audio) and WAV audio formats, and video in MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV (Windows Media Video), AVI and the 3GP format used by mobile phones.

DoubleTwist's software may soon be obsolete, though. Digital music retailers are beginning to realize that DRM just irritates customers, and Apple now offers almost half the encrypted music in its iTunes Store in higher-quality versions without DRM, at the same price. Amazon.com, meanwhile, sells all its digital music in MP3 format without DRM, as do independent online music stores such as EMusic.

The high-definition movie disc battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can be traced all the way back to 2000, when companies began experimenting with using new blue lasers in optical disc systems.

Because the wavelength of blue light is shorter than that of the red lasers used in DVD, less physical space is needed to record each bit of data and so more information can be crammed onto a DVD-sized disc. This extra space was needed to store the new high-definition video and TV services that were starting to be commercialized around that time.

But what started in 2000 as technical research became a battle between the world's largest electronics companies and movie studios, with the consumer caught in the middle.

Here's a look at the major milestones from the first research:

2000

Oct. 5 -- Sony and Pioneer unveil DVR Blue at Japan's Ceatec show. The format would go on to form the basis for first-generation Blu-ray Disc BD-RE.

Nov. 1 -- Sony announces the development of Ultra Density Optical (UDO), a blue-laser optical disc format proposed to replace magneto-optical discs.

2002

Feb. 19 -- Led by Sony, nine of the world's largest electronics companies unveil plans for Blu-ray Disc.

Aug. 29 -- Toshiba and NEC propose to the DVD Forum the next-generation optical disc format that will become HD DVD.

Oct. 1 -- Prototypes of both formats are unveiled at Japan's Ceatec exhibition. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Pioneer and JVC showed prototype Blu-ray Disc recorders while Toshiba showed a prototype under the name Advanced Optical Disc (AOD).

2003

Feb. 13 -- Licensing of Blu-ray Disc begins . Player makers pay US$20,000 to license Blu-ray while the content-protection system license carries a $120,000 annual fee and additional charge of $0.10 per player. Media makers pay $8,000 annually and $0.02 per disc for the copy protection system.

April 7 -- Sony announces its Blu-ray Disc-based Professional Disc format for data archiving applications.

April 10 -- Sony puts on sale in Japan the world's first Blu-ray Disc recorder, the BDZ-S77. It's based on a 23G-byte cartridge version of the BD-RE disc and costs ¥450,000 (US$3,815 at the time). The machine and a later model from Panasonic lack support for prerecorded movies that will launch later and prove an expensive early step into next-generation video.

May 28 -- Mitsubishi Electric joins the Blu-ray Disc group .

2004

Jan. 7 -- Toshiba unveils its first prototype HD DVD player at CES. The player includes backwards compatibility with DVD.

Jan. 12 - Hewlett-Packard and Dell put their support behind Blu-ray Disc.

June 10 -- The first commercial version of HD DVD-ROM is approved by the DVD Forum.

Sept. 21 -- Sony announces the PlayStation 3 will use Blu-ray Disc.

Nov. 29 -- Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO and New Line Cinema announce support for HD DVD .

Dec. 9 -- Disney announces support for Blu-ray Disc.

2005

Jan. 7 -- Backers of both formats promise players and movies in North America by the end of the year -- something that never materialized.

March 24 -- Talk and hope of a common format as Ryoji Chubachi, then Sony's president-elect, says: "Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing and we haven't totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise."

April 21 -- Sony and Toshiba begin discussions on the possibility of a single format. The talks ultimately go nowhere.

Aug. 18 -- Lions Gate Home Entertainment and Universal Music Group decide to back Blu-ray Disc.

Sept. 27 -- Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. put their weight behind HD DVD .

Oct. 3 -- Paramount Home Entertainment says it will offer movies on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

Dec. 16 -- Hewlett-Packard decides to drop exclusive support for Blu-ray Disc and back both formats .

2006

Jan. 4 -- Bill Gates announces at CES that Microsoft will offer an add-on HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 console.

March 10 -- Blu-ray Disc-supporter LG Electronics surprises the industry with news that it's developing an HD DVD drive.

March 31 -- Toshiba launches the world's first HD DVD player , the HD-XA1. It cost ¥110,000 (US$936 at the time) in Japan.

Nov. 11 -- Sony's PlayStation 3, which packs a Blu-ray Disc drive, goes on sale in Japan.

Dec. 29 -- Hackers report success in breaking through part of the AACS copy protection that's on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

2007

Jan. 7 -- Seeking to end the battle, LG Electronics unveils a dual-format player, while Warner Bros. shows a prototype disc that holds both an HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc layer so is compatible with players for both formats.

April 17 -- Sales of HD DVD players in North America hit 100,000 since launch.

Aug. 1 -- Microsoft cuts the price of its HD DVD player for the Xbox 360 from US$199 to US$179 and starts offering five free movies.

Aug. 20 -- Paramount and Dreamworks Animation both drop Blu-ray Disc in favor of HD DVD.

Sept. 13 -- Sony says it will use Blu-ray Disc in all high-def video recorders in Japan.

Nov. -- The price of Toshiba HD DVD players drops to US$100 with rebates as the holiday shopping season begins.

Nov. 11 -- Sony begins selling a lower cost version of the PlayStation 3.

2008

Jan. 4 -- Warner Bros. drops its bombshell: it will stop issuing HD DVD movies in the coming months and rely exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. In response the HD DVD Promotion Group cancels its CES news conference.

Jan. 6 -- Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, says at CES : "We remain firm in the belief that HD DVD is the format best suited to the wants and needs of consumers." In response Sony CEO Howard Stringer, with a grin on his face, says "All of us at Sony are feeling blue today."

Jan. 14 -- Toshiba cuts the price of HD DVD players with the HD-A3 seeing a retail price of US$150.

Feb. 11 -- NetFlix and BestBuy say they will phase out HD DVD.

Feb. 15 -- Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, says it will phase out HD DVD by June.

Feb. 16 -- Japanese public broadcaster NHK reports Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players. Several additional local media reports confirm and The Nikkei business daily says Toshiba has decided to stop developing the format any further.

Feb. 19 -- Toshiba formally announces it will phase out the production of HD DVD players and recorders by the end of March. The format war is over.

(Dan Nystedt in Taipei contributed to this report.)

Microsoft shrugged off HD DVD's demise on Tuesday, declining to say if or when it would support Blu-ray Disc for the Xbox.

Microsoft steadfastly backed HD DVD, selling an external drive for the Xbox for $129.99. That offer was still on the U.S. Xbox Web site as of Tuesday, despite the news that Toshiba will scuttle the format. Toshiba had been the lead electronics manufacturer in a coalition of companies pushing that format but content producers have thrown their support to Blu-ray.

Microsoft's decision to make the HD DVD drive external rather than within the console "was quite a strategic move on their part," said Paul O'Donovan, principal analyst with Gartner.

However, it's inevitable that future Xbox versions, as well as other gaming systems aimed at tighter integration with entertainment systems, will incorporate Blu-ray Disc drives, said O'Donovan. The Xbox currently has a standard DVD drive.

Sony gained momentum for its Blu-ray player by putting it in its PlayStation 3 console, according to research company IDC.

The PS3's "dual roles as a gaming console and a next-generation DVD player have made it an important part of the format war," according to the report.

Prior to Toshiba's announcement, Microsoft downplayed the rumors of HD DVD's death, contending buyers are more interested in gaming functions.

"We do not believe the recent reports about HD DVD will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace," the company said in a statement. "It is premature to speculate but we do know from market data that HD movie playback is not a primary purchase driver for consumers buying video game consoles."

Microsoft, which started selling the external drive for $199 in late 2006, has dropped the price twice, to $179 last August finally to its current price, which varies by region.

O'Donovan agreed the company likely won't face declining sales of its Xbox gaming console. But Microsoft's greater problem may be getting rid of the external HD DVD drives in its inventory.

HD DVD is "dead and gone" now, O'Donovan said.

Sony is beating its own target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and will begin promoting a sustainable lifestyle to consumers through its products, its chief executive said Friday.

"Sony alone has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 9 percent to date, exceeding our original target of a 7 percent reduction by 2010," said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, at the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) Climate Savers conference in Tokyo. The conference was held at Sony's new headquarters in Tokyo, which itself has helped the company to achieve its goal. Greenhouse gas emissions from the building are 40 percent lower than at equivalent conventional buildings.

Sony is one of 12 companies that has joined the WWF's Climate Savers initiative, under which they pledge to an aggressive cut in greenhouse gas emissions. Tech companies Hewlett-Packard and Nokia are also members as are Allianz, Catalyst, Collins Companies, Nike, Novo Nordisk, Sagawa Express, Spitsbergen Travel, Tetra Pak, and Xanterra Parks and Resorts.

At the conference the companies signed a declaration that recommitted themselves to action and expanded their work to include partnering with business partners to further cut emissions, the promotion of a low-carbon lifestyle to their customers and greater transparency of their carbon footprint and environmental activities.

"For Sony this means we will proactively look to expand our emissions reductions beyond our sites to include logistics and other parts of our business," said Stringer. "We must also continue to improve the energy efficiency of our products, particularly televisions which consume the most energy of all our home electronics products. Yet while the trend is towards larger screens and more sophisticated functions that inevitably consume more power Sony's televisions are already among the industry leaders in terms of energy efficiency."

Stringer said Sony expects the operating power of electronics products to be reduced to half their existing levels in a few years.

"I am confident that our engineers can meet these expectations," he said.

And just as the company has created products like the Walkman Stringer said Sony will now look to promote and help people adopt sustainable lifestyles through its products.

For companies like Sony one of the greatest inefficiencies in their products comes from the standby power that is consumed continuously when the device is not in use. It's not a great deal of power per product but the number of such devices has multiplied in recent years so the total amount of energy used in this way is now becoming quite large.

"Standby power is a huge and growing share of electricity use because those things are plugged in 24/7 but nobody when they buy a computer buys it based on its efficiency in using standby power," said James Leape , director general of WWF International, at a Tokyo news conference. "You're thinking about a hundred other things when you buy your computer and so the market doesn't work. And so standards are crucial and the industry can lead on that by defining norms but its a place where government action can be quite important."

Many of the largest PC makers have joined together under the banner of the Climate Savers computing initiative and have pledged to reduce power consumption of computers by 50 percent by 2010. The companies plan to highlight some of their advances and technologies at the Cebit exhibition that will take place in Germany in March.

Energy use by IT equipment is growing fast. The recently published report, " An Inefficient Truth ," found about 10 percent of energy consumption in the U.K. is by IT equipment -- equivalent to the output of four nuclear power stations.

One of Harvard University's Web sites appeared on Monday to have been hacked, with its contents appearing on the BitTorrent file-sharing network.

A compressed 125MB file claiming to be the database for the Web site of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is available via the BitTorrent peer to peer network. The file is listed on The Pirate Bay, a Web site that indexes torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content from other users on BitTorrent.

The Web site for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was offline on Monday.

A note attached to the torrent claimed the file contained a backup of the site -- including some contacts files and other files associated with Joomla, an open-source content management system -- along with other various bits. It appears to be legitimate.

The note's writer claims the stunt is intended to demonstrate the insecurity of Harvard's server. The writer also exposed what purport to be usernames and passwords belonging to two of the site's system administrators.

"Stupid people, you don't use a secure password," read a note preceding the sensitive information.

As of Monday afternoon, the compromised file was being distributed by 11 users -- known in file-sharing terminology as "seeders" -- and was being downloaded by nine "leechers," or those downloading the files.

Harvard's media office was closed on Monday due to a national U.S. holiday.

It doesn't take a genius to catch on to the fact that in IT, innovation is a mandate. Push the envelope of what's possible, or find yourself relegated to wayside. But, to borrow a favored David St. Hubbins Spinal Tap aphorism, there's a fine line between clever and crackpot when it comes to making good on technological breakthroughs in the enterprise. It is in that spirit that we revisit last year's level-headed look at crackpot technologies that could transform the enterprise, putting the screws to a new rack of could-be enterprise contenders. But before you write off nanotech or direct brain interfaces as the next big enterprise thing, consider this: [ For an in-depth look at last year's crackpot tech assessments, see: 12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise ] Of the dozen technologies we examined last year, several made significant enterprise-minded strides since we first assessed their IT prospects. Desktop Web apps, for one, lent credence to the conjecture that fat productivity suites might just have a shorter future than previously thought; solid-state drives popped up everywhere, from ultramobile laptops to the datacenter; and Sun's datacenter-in-a-box proved compelling enough for Google to move first to patent it. Even quantum cryptography received a vote of confidence, with Switzerland tapping the technology to protect parliamentary election transmissions. Sure, some of this year's out-there technologies may prove fruit for future high-profile tech flops lists, but without forward-thinking, there would be no worthwhile enterprise advancement. So raise your eyebrows or your suspicions as you deem fit, and join us in assessing the potential each of the following technologies has to earn IT's respect or derision. ? Nanotechnology ? Optical computing ? Pervasive computing ? Wireless power ? The $100 laptop ? Direct brain interfaces ? Enterprise supercomputing ? Virtual worlds

InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP available indefinitely, not end most sales on June 30 as currently planned, has prompted many readers to suggest that maybe the best answer for those who don't like Vista is to switch to another operating system completely.

"Don't be afraid. Just switch to Linux and become a member of a really free society," wrote Carlos Raul Gutierrez.

[ Find out the deployment secrets of early Vista adopters ]

"Windows Vista was the reason I bought a Mac mini. I didn't want my only choices to be an operating system that would soon be obsolete (XP) or one that was buggy and would break much existing hardware (Vista), and I'm not enough of a geek to use Linux (do things from the command line? Puhleeze...)," wrote "Jack."

How realistic is a switch to Linux or Apple's Mac OS X? For some users -- often technically savvy people such as engineers, consultants, designers and CTOs -- it is clearly an option that already works quite well. In the past year, running Mac OS X or Linux as your default OS has been made easier by the capability to run Windows in a virtual machine, giving you access to both Windows-only applications and Web sites that rely on Microsoft's Internet Explorer-only ActiveX technology. But in a business environment, switching to a Mac or Linux PC may not be quite as easy.

The Mac OS X option Of the plausible alternatives to Windows, Apple's Mac OS X has the largest market share and history. InfoWorld chief technologist Tom Yager has written that the latest version of the Mac OS, Leopard (10.5), is simply the best operating system available. And Macs are indeed popping up more frequently even within IT circles -- I've seen more MacBook Pros in the hands of CTOs and IT execs at conferences in the past year more than I've seen Mac notebooks in such venues ever. Although there are no real numbers on just the business adoption of Macs, it's clear that Apple is in growth mode, gaining an increasing proportion of all new computer sales for more than a year now.

InfoWorld's Yager has chronicled the adventures of one PC user who switched to the Mac OS, showing that for an individual, the conversion was ultimately a rewarding one. The TechWeb site has also provided a good guide on how to make the switch to Mac OS X.

A key tool for any Mac OS X switcher is a virtual machine to run Windows for those apps and Web sites that require it. Both Parallels Desktop 3.0 and EMC VMware's Fusion software will do the trick, as InfoWorld's comparative review has shown.

Although Macs are compatible with most typical hardware, such as monitors and drives, fitting a Mac into an enterprise's management systems and ERP applications can be a different story. Yager's Mac Enterprise blog and the Mac Enterprise user group both provide advice on managing Macs in a traditional IT environment.

The Linux option The more technically inclined may be attracted to Linux, the most popular form of desktop Unix. Linux desktops typically are challenged by limited hardware compatibility (due to lack of drivers), limited application options, and user interfaces that require active participation to get work done, which tends to keep Linux away from the general user population. But those who work with a Linux server all day may find that using it on the desktop as well actually makes their lives easier.

Just as Mac users need occasional access to Windows, so do Linux users. Because Linux distributions run on Windows-compatible hardware, it's straightforward to use desktop virtualization software, such as Parallels Workstation, Sun's (formerly Innotek's) VirtualBox, and EMC VMware's Workstation software, to provide access to both environments.

Although some enterprises have committed to wide Linux deployment -- such as automaker Peugeot Citro?n's plans to install 20,000 Novell Suse Linux desktops -- most have left Linux to the engineering and development staff.

InfoWorld Enterprise Desktop blogger Randall Kennedy argues that desktop Linux is doomed to remain a tiny niche OS, given the Linux community's lack of interest in providing a UI that regular people could use. Kennedy tried to spend a week working on nothing but the Ubuntu distribution of Linux but gave up on the fifth day.

But Kennedy's take isn't the last word on desktop Linux. Frequent InfoWorld contributor Neil McAllister put together a special report on how to move from Windows to Linux, concluding that the effort was not as hard as you might think.

Who's right? As with any platform choice, they both may be. A one-size-fits-all approach may be unrealistic. And that likely explains why many businesses will have a mix, dominated by Windows XP today (and perhaps Vista in a few years) but not exclusively tied to Microsoft's OS.

After a slight delay, Everex has started shipping its Cloudbook ultraportable PC and will follow up with future models that support touch-screen applications, the company announced Friday.

Priced at $399, the Cloudbook is designed to compete with inexpensive ultraportable computers like Asustek's Eee PC. The Cloudbook runs a version of the Linux OS, includes a 7-inch screen and weighs 0.22 kilograms (0.49 pounds).

The company has already shipped 20,000 of the notebooks to retailers including Wal-Mart, Newegg, and TigerDirect, said Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex. Wal-Mart will start selling the product on its Web site on Thursday, he said.

ZaReason, which distributes Everex products, said on its Web site Friday that the Cloudbook had sold out. Everex had shipped a few hundred Cloudbooks to ZaReason, Kim said. As of Friday, the PC was not yet available on TigerDirect or Newegg.

The Cloudbook was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show last month in Las Vegas. It was originally due to ship in January, but last-minute tweaks to the GNOME interface software caused the delay, Kim said.

The computer is powered by a 1.2GHz Via Technologies C7-M processor and runs on the gOS, a flavor of Linux based on Ubuntu. It includes a 30GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM, wired and wireless networking, a DVI (Digital Video Interface) port, a 4-in-1 media card reader, and a lithium-ion battery.

The company is also developing a Cloudbook with a touch-screen interface that it plans to make available worldwide by the end of the year, priced at $499, Kim said. It hopes to enlist the open-source community to help it create touch-screen applications for that product. It said it plans to put about 2,000 of the touch-screen Cloudscapes on sale to developers at the end of March for this purpose.

Everex may also incorporate solid-state drives in future Cloudbooks as the price of flash storage drops, he said.

The Cloudbook will compete with Asustek's low-cost Eee PC, which has sold around 350,000 units to date since its launch late last year. Acer and MSI are expected to launch low-cost PCs later this year.

Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. retailer, on Friday said it would phase out the sales of HD DVD offerings and exclusively offer high-definition Blu-ray hardware and DVDs by the middle of this year.

The decision was based on U.S. customers' preference for Blu-ray movies and hardware in purchases, Wal-Mart said in a statement.

The retailer will phase out HD DVD offerings in Wal-Mart and Sam's Clubs retail stores, as well as online offerings, by June, the company said.

Wal-Mart's rejection of HD DVD is a sign that Blu-ray is catching on with retailers. Best Buy earlier this week said it would recommend users to buy Blu-ray products, though it would continue offering HD DVD products. Movie rental chains Netflix and Blockbuster recently abandoned HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray DVD offerings.

Six of eight major movie studios publish Blu-ray DVDs, including Walt Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Sony, and Warner Bros. Only two major movie studios, Paramount Home Entertainment and Universal Studios Home Entertainment, publish in the HD DVD format.

The Blu-ray format has also seen a spate of victories in the gaming and consumer electronics industries with companies like Philips adopting the format over HD DVD.

Blu-ray supporters include Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung, while Toshiba, Microsoft, and Intel are among the companies supporting HD DVD.

The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.

The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.

These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.

In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.

Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim's browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim's PC. "The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks," said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.

In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.

Some of the data surprised Provos.

"When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger," he said.

It turns out the Web's nice neighborhoods aren't necessarily safer than its red-light districts.

"We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher," he said. But "there really wasn't a huge difference."

"Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't good enough," he noted.

Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google's research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).

It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. "They're the Kleenex Web sites," he said. Criminals "know they're going to be shut down, and they don't care."

Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.

So how to stop this growing pestilence?

Google's Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. "You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology," he said.

But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. "I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts," for the problem to go away, he said.

Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a $75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.

Jepsen's departure as CTO prompted critics to accuse her of taking advantage of OLPC's nonprofit inventions for personal gain, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a listing ship. OLPC has been afflicted by production delays and rising costs over years, with the laptop's estimated price rising from $100 to $188. It is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors like Intel that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.

Jepsen denied the allegations, saying her departure was put in place early last year and that she continues to work with OLPC on developing technologies for future XO laptops while selling it for a profit to commercial organizations.

Technologies she invented at OLPC include the display system optimized for low-power operation, which has been implemented in the XO laptop.

Retaining the OLPC spirit, Jepsen said Pixel Qi is developing inexpensive products like a power-efficient display that can be used in developing countries. She chatted with the IDG News Service about the new company, the $75 laptop, and her days at OLPC.

IDGNS: How is Pixel Qi progressing?

Jepsen: Things are going great. Pixel Qi is now a month old. I've done a lot of startups before, but [Pixel Qi] is a very unusual startup. It's got products to ship already, so that's unusual. It's getting a lot of attention, which surprises me, but it is good that people are interested.

IDGNS: Are you working on the $75 laptop right now?

Jepsen: The $75 laptop -- maybe people are interested in it because it's a catch phrase -- but mostly it's about designing things for the billions of people who are joining the information age right now. That's what Pixel Qi strongly believes in.

Right now I'm starting this company ... to get a lot of the technologies in [OLPC's XO] laptop into other laptops and cell phones as a first priority. Then working with OLPC to focus on driving that next-generation laptop. But we just started shipping this generation [of XO laptops], we owe it to ourselves to see how the children use them ... and before we start in earnest the design and development cycle to have the feedback from children in different countries.

I'm focused on getting the screens and power management into other people's small laptops and cell phones right now. I think the [$75 laptop] will happen pretty soon, but again, I'm not really focused on the $75 laptop right now, while the innovations that I'm working on can go into that.

That mimics what we did at OLPC. We thought a lot about [designing the XO laptop] before executing on it. It's a lot easier to redesign on paper. [We are] taking this time and really talking to a lot of who's who in technology about what [the $75 laptop] should be. But it's certainly possible to go lower price -- if you look, there are $10 CPUs around.

IDGNS: There is a perception that you left OLPC to privatize the technology and make money out of it.

Jepsen: I arranged it with Nicholas [Negroponte]. My departure has been well planned and organized with OLPC. It was in place since spring of 2007, and I was committed to delivering the XO into high-volume mass production. But as somebody who ... invents, develops, and gets hardware into mass production, there wasn't much more for me to do at OLPC after ... that.

On some level, I was responsible for making a laptop ... and, I realized ... I should keep doing this. So I got access to the ... intellectual property and patents. Not because I was the inventor, and not even because the inventor has the really good chance of improving the price and performance of her invention, but because OLPC is the beneficiary as the licensee.

I'm still in spirit with OLPC, but now I'm with Pixel Qi, and I am not working on just children, but adults and trying to get the cost down. That doesn't mean just Dell on a diet if you will, but [a laptop] that people are proud to own and proud to use at low cost and designed for different environments. The mass market -- there's literally billions of people who want to join this information age, and they need products too. They need interesting products, not stripped-down stuff. The XO is probably the first in that line.

IDGNS: A $75 computer seems optimistic considering OLPC's inability to produce a $100 laptop. Can you walk us through the changes needed in component prices and system design to reach that target?

Jepsen: I don't think it's that hard, frankly. If you look at the cost of flash and DRAM, they go down 50 percent year over year. You look at screens, they go down 30 percent every year. If you look at the cost of CPUs -- well, some of them stay expensive -- there are several companies working on the $10 CPU right now.

There are pretty low-cost [parts], but using low power, guess what ... you don't use the same amount of ... processing power. Your battery is really inexpensive if you don't use a lot of power because it won't need as many cells, for example. I think it's very straightforward.

There's ways to hit ...[the $75] envelope if you look at the mechanicals and the keyboards and everything else you need on the motherboard. I think we know how to ... integrate the components and work with manufacturers and producers to get there very quickly to lowering the price and increasing the performance. But then again, you have to redefine performance for a cow herder and pick your country.

IDGNS: All of that still calls for performance. Is there going to be some kind of trade-off in capabilities relative to a mainstream notebook?

Jepsen: There's two ways to be fast, one is the standard, more blah way, where you just heap on the megahertz and megahertz and then heap on the code. Vista's footprint is 12GB as opposed to our OS at OLPC, it's 0.1GB, it's 120 times smaller. You could do big code and big iron or skinny down the code and make do with a 500 megahertz processor ... that was a state-of-the-art laptop in 2000. All of the software has gotten bloated, and do you really need a little paper clip guy or doggy telling you what to do?

The XO is ... an outdoor usable laptop. You can drop it, you can spill on it and the batteries last a long time. And it's green. Those are performance metrics that really matter. Making your batteries last a week is also a performance criteria. Intel has said for a number of years that it's not about one more megahertz anymore, it's about lowering the power consumption.

IDGNS: Are inexpensive laptops a new category? IDC says notebook computers like Eee PC -- they don't take those laptops when they measure market share or measure unit shipments. They're calling the category "notebook gadgets." How do you feel about that?

Jepsen: It's funny. I don't feel much about the word. I just talked at a gadget conference, "Greener Gadgets," but ... [Intel's] Craig Barrett, when he was trying to be derogatory toward the laptop project, called it a gadget. I think that we think of gadgets as things that don't really work for long, have a short life, and are transient, not real machines. The XO lasts two-and-a-half times longer than a standard laptop. That's not a gadget-like property of it. What is a gadget? Is it a learning machine or is your laptop a gadget or cell phone a gadget?

IDGNS: Did Intel undermine the OLPC project with their Classmate PC?

Jepsen: It's such a long story with them, especially for me because I used to work [at Intel]. It's hard for me to summarize. Certainly, there are so many individuals at that company on the technical side when we finally got working together, it was great. We were really pursuing an -- I think it's been announced -- Intel chip in the XO, that was something we were working well together on with their technical team. I think the difficulty was from the sales and marketing side as I understand it, and I really wasn't involved in that in OLPC. I would only hear from the ministers in the countries I would visit and from Nicholas and so forth. I wasn't that involved in it towards the end.

IDGNS: Is there a release date for the $75 laptop?

Jepsen: It's not that hard. It will take about two years. Realistically, it does need that time because what you have to do first is make the components and then you put them together. At OLPC, it took three years because we had to start with the disbelief, but now people believe. Now cut that down to about two years, it's about reasonable. It's 2010 we're looking at.

Amazon's data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.

As of around 9 a.m. on the West Coast of the U.S., the issue had been resolved, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's issue has been resolved, and the system is continuing to recover," wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee, on the forum.

She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but that the priority is to make sure the system is stable.

Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.

A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours, but that it was operating at 99 percent of normal performance before 7 a.m. on the West Coast. "We've been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a statement.

Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their end.

Others wrote about the problems that the outage was causing their businesses. "It's becoming very embarrassing for us here," one wrote. "We desperately need an update ... it's a huge hit on our reputation."

Many of the users said that the service was down for around three hours.

Gustavo, a user in Brazil, said that his company hosts more than 30,000 images from a large television station in Brazil. "Now we are having several problems because of this S3 issue," he wrote. "My company chose to work with Amazon because of its reliability."

Late last year, Amazon introduced a new service level agreement for S3 that guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime each month. If the service slips below that level, the company promised to provide service credits to certain users.

Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.

The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft's format and the possible standard.

Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.

Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company's Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to "promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers."

The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.

According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft's Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.

Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.

To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.

Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML's rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.

Yahoo's Chairman Roy Bostock is leading a group of the company's board members in favor of accepting Microsoft's unsolicited $44.6 billion takeover bid, according to a new report.

The informal group headed by Bostock also includes other board members and billionaire investor Ron Burkle, according to the report in the New York Post, which quoted unnamed sources close to the situation. Board members Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at Softbank Capital, and Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Publishing, are standing behind Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who does not want to accept Microsoft's offer.

On Monday, Yahoo's board rejected Microsoft's offer, saying it undervalued the company.

According to the Post, the discord revolves around Yang and his followers who are so opposed to selling the company to Microsoft that Bostock and his group fear they will act out of emotions rather than their fiduciary duty to Yahoo shareholders. Such an action could expose the board to lawsuits by shareholders.

Yang sent a letter to shareholders Wednesday night, saying that Microsoft's bid substantially undervalues the company and that Yahoo is positioned to take advantage of growth in the online advertising market.

Yahoo