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Electronics manufacturers and retail chains are slashing prices of Blu-ray players in a bid to boost adoption of the high-definition movie format, which has yet to catch on with American consumers.

Entry-level Blu-ray players have dropped to below $230 at major retailers including Target Corp.,Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Best Buy Co. Some experts predict that promotional prices may fall below $150 on Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving. Earlier this year, most Blu-ray players retailed for $400 or so.

Sales picked up at Best Buy after prices were cut, said Mike Mohan, Best Buy’s senior vice president of consumer electronics. Still, he said, some consumers may not understand the benefits of the technology, which can offer crisper images than standard DVDs when viewed on high-definition TVs. "We have a job to do in explaining to customers why Blu-ray is important," Mr. Mohan said.

Another impediment to Blu-ray adoption: The price of Blu-ray discs, at about $30, is still often twice that of DVDs.

Industry analysts believe stores may have been overly optimistic in ordering Blu-ray players for the holiday season. That’s another factor behind the price cuts, especially since some older models in retailer inventories can’t connect to the Internet, which is necessary to tap interactive features on some Blu-ray discs.

There is another motive for the markdowns. Manufacturers and retailers want to speed the mass adoption of Blu-ray before digital-movie downloads and video on demand overtake movie disc sales and rentals — a looming development that already may be damping sales.

Read more @ WSJ

Microsoft announced this morning at its PDC conference that the next release of Microsoft Office will include browser-based versions of some of its main office software products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These will be "lightweight versions", but Microsoft told us yesterday that they’ll still have rich functionality and will be comparable to Google’s suite of online office applications.

The apps will enable users to create, edit and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents through the browser. The apps will work in IE, Firefox and Safari browsers (no word on whether Google Chrome will be supported). Update: Microsoft clarified in an email that these apps will use HTML and AJAX, but also Silverlight components.

The online versions will share the same names as their desktop counterparts (Word, Excel, etc), although unfortunately they don’t fully escape the awkward and confusing branding that Microsoft gives to most of its Internet apps. The collective name for these apps is "Office Web Applications". To remind you, there is also an Office Online (a separate Microsoft site where users can download templates) and an Office Live Workspace (for sharing office files between desktop and Web - our coverage).

The "Office Web applications" will be available to consumers through Office Live, a service which has both ad-funded and subscription options. Business users will be offered Office Web applications as a hosted subscription service and through existing "volume licensing agreements". There will be a private technology preview of the Office Web applications later this year.

Read more @ ReadWriteWeb

At PDC today, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until now, the company has been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers are finally off, the scale of the new OS becomes clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago.

First, however, it’s important to note what Windows 7 isn’t. Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven’t updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

While windows 7 doesn’t undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn’t made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won’t show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

Read more @ arstechnica and gizmodo

CRN are reporting that less than one week after launch security experts at Baltimore, Maryland-based Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) have warned of a serious flaw that leaves it open for hackers to launch drive-by attacks.
Google’s Android OS has been designed especially for mobile use and is compatible with all of its most popular web-apps including Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar and Google Talk. The device also comes with 3MP camera.
According to the report the flaw originates from a buffer overflow vulnerability in some of the older open source packages used of which there are 80 in total.
When a user accesses an infected webpage attackers could gain access to all personal information in the phone’s browser, leaving open the possibilities to steal passwords and, banking login details and other sensitive information.

"If you end up on a bad guys’ site, he can basically take over the phone and run code, and access anything your browser has access to and do anything your browser could do," said Charlie Miller, principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators.

Luckily so far there is no known exploit and the ISE is not releasing any further information and is working with Google to address the issue and releases a patch.
According to Charlie Miller Google were notified of the flaw 2 days prior to launch of the phone.
Google have already started working on a patch:

"We treat all security matters seriously and will carefully work with our partners to investigate and update devices periodically to reduce our users’ exposure," said Google in a statement. "We are working with T-Mobile to include a fix for the browser exploit, which will soon be delivered over the air to all devices, and have addressed this in the Android open source platform. The security and privacy of our users is of primary importance to the Android Open Source Project " we do not believe this matter will negatively impact them."

Intel is claiming that the new Nehalem processor due out in November will be its greenest to date. The company said that the systems it has built into its platforms and the technology used have been revolutionary, so much so that Gordon Moore, co-founder of the company, called its 45 nm transistors the company’s greatest advancement ever.

The high-k metal gate technology in the systems uses the element Hafnium to manage the problems of building transistors on such a small scale. The company says the new design gives major improvements in both energy efficiency and speed. Intel is making “performance and power and now highly connected,” Intel architect Ronak Singhal told vnunet.com.

“I don’t know how many hours we’ve spent arguing about power over features. If a feature added performance but used more power; it’s been a very different mindset for Nehalem.”

Another huge heaving grunt of a move as Microsoft shifts its great fat rear to sit more comfortably on the changing furniture of the computing industry and offer cloud computing services. It could be very bad news indeed for the storage industry.

Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform - ASP as in ‘we’ve been here before, surely’ - lets customers have their data centre applications run in Microsoft data centres. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said he was building an infrastructure for the next fifty years: "We need to lay the groundwork with new types of system and storage applications for a world of parallel computing."

Microsoft joins Amazon and Google in offering cloud computing services and cites IDC, which says cloud computing will grow 16 per cent a year through to 2012. That’s grim.

What’s is Wubi?

Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. No need to burn a CD, just run the installer, enter a password for the new account, and click “Install”. Wubi will download and prepare the required files, and ask you to reboot in order to complete the installation. You keep Windows as it is, Wubi only adds an extra option to boot into Ubuntu.

Wubi does not require you to modify the partitions of your PC, or to use a different bootloader, and does not install special drivers. Wubi keeps most of the files in one folder, and if you do not like it, you can simply uninstall it as any other application. Version 8.04.1 includes unspecified updates.

Download Wubi

User friendly

It’ll download the required files.