Looking to save a buck while buying a laptop? If so, Wal-Mart will have you come calling with the $298 Top 7 Reasons for PC Gamers to Get Windows 7

by Marcus Yam

Yes, it will run Crysis.
With Windows 7 now finished, Microsoft's next challenge is to drive adoption. Those with high performance PCs made for gaming will only switch if there is a decent incentive to do so. While the nice Aero effects and new taskbar are reason enough for some of us who spend most of our time working on our PCs, gamers will need a little bit more.
Microsoft's Games for Windows site lists the following seven reasons for a PC gamer to get Windows 7:
1 - Performance

To quote a coworker: 'Across same hardware, Crysis runs awesome on Win7! Even better than XP!'. Code for the OS has been optimized for better all around performance for games. Whatever you're playing now should be a better experience in Windows 7.

2 - Compatibility

The top third-party games, services, and international versions of games have been tested in Windows 7, so you should not worry about Windows 7 breaking your games. Feel free to move to Windows 7 because whatever you're playing now should work fabulously in Windows 7.

3 - Discoverability

You can use Start -> Search to find any game you just downloaded or installed. No need to launch a separate application. Likewise, you won't need to launch a game to get more info about it: The Windows 7 Games Explorer can show you in-game statistics within a preview pane plus delivers up-to-date info about your favorite game publishers and gives you the opportunity to try new games.

4 - Easy updates

The new Games Explorer will notify you whenever updates are available for your games so you don't have to go searching for them yourself or have to launch the game to see if there's an update waiting.

5 - DirectX 11 support

DirectX 11 means better games, pure and simple, with more advanced features for games to use.

6 - Multitouch support

An increasing number of gamers are using multitouch devices. Windows 7 supports multitouch-capable machines, so you can buy the latest and greatest multitouch laptop or desktop confident it's going to work in Windows 7.

7 - Classics

Here's a bonus reason for you: Windows 7 is going to bring back Internet Backgammon, Internet Spades, and Internet Checkers because you can't spend all your time hardcore.

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$298 Laptop at Wal-Mart Starts On Sunday

by Kevin Parrish

Looking to save a buck while buying a laptop? If so, Wal-Mart will have you come calling with the $298 Compaq Presario 15.6-inch notebook (CQ60-419WM) when it goes on sale this Sunday, July 26. The low pricetag appears to be retaliation against Best Buy's laptop challenge that offers a 15-inch Acer laptop for $299 (already sold out).According to this Wal-Mart blog, the laptop features the AMD Sempron SI-42 CPU clocking in at 2.10 GHz, Nvidia's GeForce 8200M GPU, 3 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, a SuperMulti 8X DVD±R/RW with Double Layer support, and built-in 802.11b/g WLAN support. The laptop also comes pre-installed with Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic (32-bit) and a 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security 2009."Quantities are limited and will begin selling at 8:00 AM on Sunday, July 26th," the blog stated. "May want to pass that along because we expect this one will be quite popular."

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Source: Yahoo-Microsoft deal unlikely this week

by Ina Fried

Microsoft and Yahoo may well reach some sort of search partnership, but any deal is unlikely to come this week, a source told CNET News.
The on-again, off-again talks reportedly heated up last week, with Microsoft executives said to have traveled to Yahoo. The All Things Digital Web site reported that things were "down to the short strokes."
Among those said to have made the Silicon Valley trip were three of Microsoft's top online executives: Yusuf Mehdi, Satya Nadella, and Qi Lu.
However, a deal has yet to materialize, and a source said on Thursday that none is likely this week.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Yahoo's board plans to meet on Thursday for an "update" on the talks.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in May that she was open to a search deal if she believed in the partner's technology and they provided "boatloads" of money.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has indicated for more than a year now that he would like to strike some sort of search deal, although he no longer wants to acquire all of Yahoo as his company offered to do in February 2008.

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PayPal tries rewiring e-commerce with new interface

by Josh Lowensohn

PayPal, eBay's well established but aging mechanism for online payments, is trying to rebuild itself for a new generation of online commerce possibilities.
At an event for press and developers on Thursday, PayPal and its partners described several new programming interfaces that are part of the company's upcoming Adaptive Payments Service and showed what developers can do with them.
For example, Microsoft will use the interface to enable payments within its forthcoming Azure cloud-computing service. And LiveOps' on-demand outsourcing service will use it to automatically handle fluctuating payment amounts and changes to who's being paid. Finally, the interface takes PayPal beyond the browser, opening it up for use on mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other increasingly smart devices.
"It's truly disruptive," said PayPal CEO Scott Thompson at the event. "It puts developers in the driver's seat by allowing you to do what you want to do and (choose) how you want to get paid."
The new service will be available to 300 PayPal partners starting Thursday, with a public beta this November--just in time for PayPal X Innovate 2009, its first developer conference.
PayPal is pitching the Adaptive Payments platform to developers as a way to more easily build PayPal-powered payment options into their applications. It's also a more streamlined version of PayPal's existing program for letting businesses manage transactions between several different parties.
The new payments service is a key part in PayPal's plan to double its revenues within the next three years. Back in March, PayPal's president Scott Thompson promised as much, saying that by 2011, the company should be doing somewhere between $100-120 billion in annual payments. PayPal has also had a fire lit underneath it since Amazon rolled out its own online payments service around this time last year. It let users make online purchases using billing information that was stored on Amazon.com
PayPal isn't just central to eBay's future. It will eclipse the company's auction and commerce operations, the company says.
"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said Thursday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference.
PayPal is a force to be reckoned with. On average, more than $2,000 goes through PayPal every second of each day. It has 75 million active accounts, and it's available in 190 markets and 19 different currencies.

Beta testing
Before the announcement, PayPal had been working with a handful of companies to test the new APIs (application programming interfaces). One of those companies is Microsoft, which is tapping PayPal for online payments in the Web applications built for the company's upcoming Azure platform.
At the unveiling, Yousef Khalidi, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, demonstrated an application that integrated PayPal's payment and billing functionality. It took only two days to integrate it into the existing product, Khalidi said.
Khalidi said that Microsoft plans to offer a simple way to build PayPal's mechanism into hosted applications as part of Azure's full release later this year.
Microsoft probably had an easier time choosing PayPal for its payment service than some of the alternatives: Amazon Flexible Payment Services and Google Checkout both come from companies in direct competition with Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing service.
Michael Ivey, CEO and co-founder of TwitPay, also took the stage to show his company's use of the new PayPal API--specifically to let people pay multiple people at once.
"In one transaction, I'm paying four different people," he said. Before the new APIs, the service would require users to make each payment as its own transaction.
Sites already using the new API include: Webassist, GroupCard, Lottay, Rainfall of Envelopes, and MedPayOnline.com
"PayPal will help you get paid for your innovations--your business will become our business," Thompson told the developers. "We view you as our third set of customers."

New features
The new payment service has a handful of new features designed to make it easier for developers to make money with their applications and services.
Thompson said that even if developers were acting as an intermediary between the person sending the money and the recipient, they would now be able to take their cut of that transaction--just as PayPal does.
Part of getting that to happen involves a new API that lets developers create peer-to-peer and business-to-business money-sharing applications. They can now also split up payments into several transactions and let users authorize a payment after the transaction's been made. Those two mechanisms can speed purchasing, regardless of whether the buyer is ready to pay the full amount at the outset.
As part of the new platform, PayPal also is changing the way fees are charged. Application developers can choose to have the sender of the money, not just the recipient, pay the fee.
In addition, the fee rates can be changed based on the type of purchase, which should ease the chore of handling both high-value transactions and micropayments (transactions below $12) within the same application. As it stands today, PayPal currently requires sellers to have two different accounts open, one for bigger payments and another for micropayments--and each has different rates.
People use PayPal today through a Web interface, but a new API will bring PayPal to nontraditional computing platforms including mobile phones, set-top boxes, and gaming consoles. That's important, given that those devices increasingly are networked and have their own ecosystems of applications. And moving to a browser can be disruptive to a user who just wants to make a quick payment.
Using PayPal that way also means that a developer must build the necessary user interface, though. PayPal didn't provide specifics on that element of the new payments system.
Overall, Thompson said the new payment system will help PayPal keep pace with changes in technology and business.
"The pace of innovation is just staggering," he said. "And the next wave of innovation is poised to move that much faster. "

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Microsoft revenue declined 17% and net income declined 29% year over year in the company's fiscal 2009 fourth quarter due to continued weakness in glo

Vendor knew about critical vulnerability in December 2008, never fixed it, slates updates for late next week
By Gregg Keizer

Adobe Systems Inc. late Wednesday admitted its Flash and Reader software have a critical vulnerability and promised it would patch both next week.
One security researcher, however, said Adobe's own bug-tracking database shows that the company has known of the vulnerability for nearly seven months.
In a security advisory posted around 10 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, Adobe acknowledged that earlier reports were on target. "A critical vulnerability exists in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems," the company said.
The "authplay.dll" mentioned in the advisory is the interpreter that handles Flash content embedded within PDF files, and is present on any machine equipped with Reader and Acrobat.
Adobe said it would patch all versions of Flash by July 30, and Reader and Acrobat for Windows and Mac no later than July 31. Until a patch is available, Adobe said users could delete or rename authplay.dll, or disable Flash rendering to stymie attacks within malformed PDF files. Adobe did not offer any similar workaround for Flash and could only recommend that "users should exercise caution in browsing untrusted websites."
The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT), part of the Department of Homeland Security, included instructions on how to delete the Flash interpreter from Windows, Mac and Linux machines in a Wednesday advisory of its own.
Unlike previous PDF-based attacks, disabling the application's use of JavaScript does no good. Firefox users can install the NoScript add-on to block Flash directed at the browser, and Windows Vista users are shielded from silent attacks by the operating system's User Account Control (UAC) prompts.
While Adobe stopped short in its advisory and an accompanying blog post of confirming attacks, more security companies stepped forward Wednesday to report they had spotted not only hacks using rigged PDF documents, but also drive-by attacks launched from compromised Web sites.
Most attacks reported so far have been exploits served by malicious PDF files. "The PDF here is just the vehicle for the attack," explained Marc Rossi, the manager of development at Symantec. In those cases, the exploit relies on the flawed authplay.dll installed with Reader. "But it's not like you need to have both Flash and Reader on your system," added Rossi. "The possibility definitely exists that a malicious Flash stream from a Web site could exploit this."
That's exactly what others are reporting. Mid-day Wednesday, Paul Royal, a principal researcher at Purewire, said in an e-mail that he had found multiple malicious sites serving up Flash-based attacks. Later in the day, SANS' Internet Storm Center (ISC) echoed Royal. "We [have] confirmed that the links have been injected in legitimate web sites to create a drive-by attack, as expected," ISC handler Bojan Zdrnja said in a warning on the center's site.

Exploits remain few in number, but Rossi expected them to ramp up quickly. "We're seeing very limited exploitation so far, which is pretty typical. PDF attacks tend to start out as targeted e-mail attacks, with an [poisoned] attachment, directed at specific people." After the exploit gains access to the PC -- all in-the-wild attacks seen so far target Windows machines -- it "phones home" to a Web site, Rossi said, to download a Trojan onto the compromised system.
Purewire's Royal noticed that the flaw in Flash was first logged into Adobe's bug-tracking database Dec. 31, 20008, but the current exploit code appears to have been crafted much more recently, on July 9. It's possible that attacks have been in circulation since then. "The bug has apparently existed since December 2008," Royal said.
Although Adobe blocked access to the bug's page for several hours Wednesday night, it reopened the page by about 1 a.m. Eastern today. As Royal reported, the "Created" date for the bug was listed as "12/31/08" on the Adobe Flash Player Bug and Issue Management System.
Adobe has been under the security microscope this week. On Monday, Danish bug tracker Secunia noticed that Adobe continues to provide an outdated edition of Reader for download from its Web site, a practice Adobe originally defended as necessary to produce patches quickly. Tuesday, however, Adobe said it was reevaluating Reader's updating process to close the exploit window.

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Microsoft revenue declines 17% in fiscal Q4

Net income hit $3.05B, off 30% from a year ago
By Elizabeth Montalbano

Microsoft revenue declined 17% and net income declined 29% year over year in the company's fiscal 2009 fourth quarter due to continued weakness in global sales of PCs and hardware servers, the company reported Thursday.
Revenue of $13.1 billion and earnings per share (EPS) of 34 cents slightly missed analysts' forecasts for the quarter that ended June 30. Quarterly earnings were affected by a 2-cent reduction due to $276 million in deferred revenue related to Microsoft's Windows 7 Upgrade Option program announced June 25, Microsoft said. Thomson Reuters analysts were expecting revenue of $14.37 billion and earnings per share of 36 cents for the quarter.
Operating income for the quarter was $3.99 billion, a decline of 30% year over year, and net income was $3.05 billion, a decline of 29% year over year.
Analysts were expecting revenue to be deferred to the December quarter, or later, because of the Windows 7 upgrade program, which allows people to purchase PCs now with the right to upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available. Microsoft can't report that Windows 7 revenue until the upgrade occurs, which will be at least after the software's Oct. 22 availability date.
However, analysts still largely expected Microsoft to meet or even slightly beat consensus estimates for the quarter despite the deferred revenue.
They also thought that Gartner's outlook for the PC market, released last week, would reflect positively on Microsoft's fourth-quarter results. Gartner had expected a 10% year-over-year decline in PC unit shipments for the second calendar quarter, but ended up estimating a 5% decline instead. However, Gartner's PC shipment predictions still could bode well for Microsoft when Windows 7 is released in October.
Microsoft's results also were affected by $193 million in legal charges, $108 million of impairments to investments and $40 million of additional severance charges related to a previously announced severance plan, the company said.
Revenue for the full fiscal year that ended June 30 was $58.44 billion, a 3% decline from the prior year. Operating income was $20.36 billion for the year, a decline of 9%, while net income was $14.57 billion, a decline of 18%. Diluted EPS for the year was $1.62, a decline of 13% from the previous year.
On a positive note, Microsoft said it took $750 million out of its operational costs for the quarter as it continued to enact cost-cutting measures to navigate the challenging economic environment. In January, Microsoft announced its first-ever layoffs as part of these measures, and also cut back on traveling expenses and contracts with short-term employees.

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Microsoft admits it can't stop Office file format hacks

Plans to build 'sandbox' around questionable docs in Office 2010 as defense
By Gregg Keizer

Microsoft's plan to "sandbox" Office documents in the next version of its application suite is an admission that the company can't keep hackers from exploiting file format bugs, a security analyst said today.
"What's been happening is that Office has lots of vulnerabilities," said John Pescatore, Gartner's primary security analyst. "For the past 18 months, hackers have been fuzzing Office file formats," he said, referring to the practice of "fuzzing," a tactic that relies on automated tools that drop random data into applications to see if, and where, breakdowns occur.
Fuzzing has been a hacker's best friend: Microsoft has repeatedly had to patch file format vulnerabilities in Office applications, most recently in July when it fixed a flaw in Publisher 2007 and in June, when it patched seven vulnerabilities in Excel and two more in Word.
"What's happening is that the bad guys are using fuzzing tools to find vulnerabilities in Office, and now Microsoft is saying, 'Okay, we can't find, let alone fix, every vulnerability. So here's a way to put a sandbox around the vulnerability."
The sandbox technique Pescatore mentioned is a new addition to Office 2010, the upcoming upgrade to Microsoft's bestselling Windows application suite.
According to Brad Albrecht, a senior security program manager with the Office team, Office 2010 will sport something called "Protected View" that isolates Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in a read-only environment. The sandbox, said Albrecht in a post to a company blog this week, will have "minimal access to the system, and no access to your other files and information. Even if the file is malicious, it can't get out of the sandbox and do harm to your computer or data."
"That's a good thing," Pescatore agreed. "Sandboxing and isolation are always good things in security, if only to limit the damage of a malicious file."
Albrecht also spelled out other security measures that Office 2010 will implement, including a more flexible file blocker and a suite-wide roll-out of "Office File Validation," a practice that was rolled out in Publisher 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2).
The file blocker, introduced in Office 2007 then back-ported to Office 2003 in September 2007 with SP3, automatically bars access to some document types. Albrecht said that Office 2010 will let users fine-tune the feature to better manage which formats Word, Excel and PowerPoint open.
"File blocking was a real broad-brush thing in Office 2007," said Pescatore, "and it would give users obscure error messages." He applauded the move toward flexibility in the file blocker.
Office File Validation, meanwhile, is a system that validates older, pre-XML file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, then blocks those that don't conform to the documented format. Documents that contain malicious code would presumably trigger the block. At that point, Office 2010 will hand off the file to the Protected View sandbox.
"There's still a trade-off," said Pescatore, talking about the improved security Microsoft plans for Office 2010. "The file in the sandbox is read-only, but if I need to open it and add something to it, that's going to annoy users."
Another downside, said Pescatore: Sandboxing, which is essentially lightweight versions of virtual machines, consumes PC resources. "On the other hand, PCs are getting faster, so we have the ability to throw more cycles at [sandboxes]."
Albrecht claimed that the new security features in Office 2010 would have "an indistinguishable performance impact on your [document] load time," but didn't go into detail about system requirements or the impact on the machine's memory and processor resources.
Microsoft declined to make Albrecht available to answer follow-up questions about Office 2010's security plans.
But Pescatore likes what he sees in Microsoft's bird's-eye view. "To build a sandbox, especially around Word docs, that's a very good idea."

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