You can find lots of free software made to stop worms, viruses, and other malware. PC World tested several such programs to find the free antivirus you can depend on.
Australian scientists have unveiled new DVD technology that stores data in five dimensions, making it possible to pack more than 2000 movies onto a single disc.
A team of researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, have used nanotechnology to boost the storage potential nearly 10,000-fold compared to standard DVDs, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journalNature.
"We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc," said Min Gu, who led the team.
Discs currently have three spatial dimensions. By using gold nanorods Gu and colleagues were able to add two additional dimensions, one based on the colour spectrum, and the other on polarisation.
Because nanoparticles react to light depending on their shape, it was possible to record information in a range of different colour's wavelengths at the same physical location on the disc.
Current DVDs record in a single colour wavelength using a laser.
The fifth dimension was made possible by polarisation. When light waves were projected onto the disc, the direction of the electric field within the waves aligned with the gold nanorods.
"The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees," explained co-author James Chon.
"We were, for example, able to record at zero degree polarisation. Then on top of that, were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarisation, without them interfering with each other," he said in a statement.
The researchers are still working out the speed at which the discs can be written on, and say that commercial production is at least five years off.
They have signed an agreement with Korea-based Samsung, one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers.
Last month, US technology giant General Electric said its researchers had developed a holographic disc which can store the equivalent of 100 standard DVDs.
We are committed to providing a safe, secure and positive experience for our more than 300 million customers across the globe using Windows Live Messenger every month. To deliver on that commitment, beginning on August 25, we started asking our customers using versions 8.1, 8.5 and 14.0 to upgrade to the newest version of Messenger. The upgrade will provide customers with the latest software updates including code fixes and feature enhancements, as well address vulnerabilities discussed in the Microsoft Security Advisory 973882 that existed in previous versions of Windows Live Messenger.
The upgrade process will take place in a phased approach over the next several weeks:
First Phase, Optional Upgrade: The optional upgrade will happen in two stages: Starting Aug. 25, customers using versions 8.1 or 8.5 were asked to upgrade their client. Starting early Oct., all customers using versions 14.0 (but not the latest release 14.0.8089) will be asked to upgrade their client. The upgrade at this time is optional. Customers who haven’t upgraded during the optional phase will be required to do so during the second phase.
Second Phase, Mandatory Upgrade: The mandatory upgrade will happen in three stages: Starting mid-Sept., all customers using Messenger 8.1 or 8.5 will be required to upgrade their version of Windows Live Messenger. Starting late Oct., all customers using Messenger 14.0 will be required to upgrade their version of Windows Live Messenger. To ensure that we are protecting customers, those who do not administer the upgrade will not be able to sign in to Messenger after this time.
Please Note: It will take several weeks for the upgrade process to be completed, as the upgrade will be rolled out to customers over the course of several weeks.
Below are some examples of the prompts that you will encounter during the upgrade process.
Notification to upgrade.
Want to upgrade now? You don’t have to wait for the notification. In fact, we encourage you to download the updated version of Messenger right now by visiting http://download.live.com .
If you aren’t sure which version you have, you can go to the Help menu and select About Messenger. Help –> About Messenger. If you have a version that is lower than 14.0.8089 you will need to upgrade.
Google Latitude Service Lets You Track Your Friends: How It Works
Do you know where your friends are? If not, Google wants to help you find them. Today, Google introduced Latitude, a new opt-in feature that lets smartphone and laptop users share their location with friends and allows those friends to share their locations in return. Although not pinpoint accurate, Latitude can display your general location based on information from GPS satellites and cell towers. Latitude works on both mobile devices and personal computers.
What Latitude can do
Once you and your friends have opted in to Latitude, you can see your friends' Google icon displayed on Google Maps. Clicking on their icon allows you to call, email or IM them, and you can even use the directions feature on Google Maps to help you get to their location.
Google says Latitude works in 27 countries and with many mobile platforms including iGoogle with your computer. The list of compatible phones are:
*Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
*iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
*most color BlackBerry devices
*most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
*most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones) *many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)
How it works
Let's say Bob wants to share his location with his girlfriend Jane. He invites her to accept his invitation through his mobile device or computer. Then Jane can accept and share her location back; accept but not share her location; or completely reject poor Bob. If Jane has chosen to share her location with Bob, she can decide whether to share her best available location or simply which city she's in. Jane could also hide her location to keep ol' Bob in the dark from time to time, or if Jane breaks up with Bob for her neighbor Richard, then she could just remove Bob from her location list altogether.
In addition to restricting specific people, Latitude will also let you do a blanket location setting for all your contacts. You can choose to let Latitude detect your location automatically, you can also set it manually if you prefer or you can hide your location completely.
Is Google tracking me?
According to company statements, Google only keeps your most recent shared location on its servers at any time. If you've hidden your location, then Google doesn't hold any information on your locale at all.
While this feature sounds like it could be helpful, and sometimes incredibly annoying, I wonder what this does to the notion of privacy. For example, will federal officials or the police ever try to force Google to relay your location information? Where you are can also say a lot about you especially when it comes to your free time.
Google could easily build a demographic chart to show where certain age groups like to congregate in a particular city. I hope this is not the case, but questions about Google's privacy practices have been raised many, many, many, many times before.
If you're opting in to Google Latitude, then check out the video in this post for a brief introduction to Google's Latitude service. Then go to http://google.com/latitude to sign up.
Blu-ray may have a future in the living room, but its prospects in the PC market appear bleak. A new study by market researcher iSuppli shows that only 3.6 percent of PCs this year will ship with Blu-ray high-definition optical drives, a figure that will rise to just 16.3 percent by 2013.
blu-rayWhy the sluggish adoption rate? Michael Yang, an iSuppli senior analyst, says that consumers can’t find a compelling reason to pay extra for a Blu-ray drive, in part because of the anemic selection of Blu-ray movies.
Yang makes some valid points, and I doubt that Blu-ray drives will ever become standard equipment in consumer PCs, even after 2013. Consumer PCs, particularly notebooks and netbooks, simply don’t need Blu-ray. Here’s why:
HD movies are wasted on small laptop screens: Notebooks outsell desktops, and notebooks have relatively small screens. (A 17-inch display qualifies as a big-screen experience on a laptop.) Blu-ray’s HD brilliance is lost on a laptop screen. The format is best suited to a home theater setup with a 50-inch or larger HDTV.
Living room Blu-ray players are cheap: Some Blu-ray fans might argue that consumers could stream Blu-ray movies from their laptops to their big screen TVs. (An HDMI connection would work too.) Yes, they could, but they probably won’t. Most folks would rather spend $200 for a Blu-ray player for the living room.
Blu-ray isn’t a great backup drive: Blu-ray’s storage capacity may be impressive, but who wants to back up a massive hard drive to a stack of discs? It’s easier to buy an external hard drive, which is dirt cheap these days, or to use an online backup service.
Optical drives will soon be extinct: Quick, when’s the last time you used your DVD drive? Mine has sat idle for months. If I need to install software, I download the program. Shrink-wrapped apps are going away. The MacBook Air ditched the optical drive, and nearly all netbooks have too. I’m sure the users of those portables are fine with that. The DVD drive will soon go the way of the floppy. Fast forward to 2013, and most notebooks won’t have an optical drive at all. Improvements in broadband speeds will make movie downloading/streaming commonplace.
Blu-ray won’t vanish entirely, of course. But it’ll be little more than a niche peripheral that appeals to a small segment of the market.
The innovative online user-written encyclopedia Wikipedia is growing up, and with its growth comes a massive change to how it operates. Back in its early days, Wikipedia could be edited by anyone. Then it nixed the concept of anonymous edits and required authentication. Now contributors can write what they want, but if editing certain articles, the changes must be verified by an experienced volunteer before publication.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the parents behind the Wiki Empire, calls the new philosophy "flagged revisions." Changes to certain articles on the site are invisible until approved by an "experienced volunteer," which, according to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, may be "anybody who has been around a very short period of time [on the site] and hasn't been blocked." Once approved, the changes will appear, but it's uncertain exactly how long the process might take -- could be hours, weeks, or months.
At the moment, a few thousand articles on the U.S. site are beholden to the new rule -- such as those about President Obama, Michael Jackson, and Britney Spears -- but Wikipedia wishes to broaden its scope and apply these new rules to every article about a living person. The German language version of Wikipedia already restricts editing on all of its articles, so it's not a long shot that a similar attitude may hit the U.S. site soon. (A programmer pulled back the veil on that anonymous editing a few years ago with a tool that exposed the source of edits, so readers could assess their credibility.)
Vandalism is the reason behind the change. All too often Wikipedia pages are marred by opposing political views, immature writers, and false information. A recent example was the falsely reported death of Senator Edward Kennedy in January; a sad proclamation that is now, unfortunately, all too true.
This may come as a shock, an affront to the democratic philosophy behind Wikipedia. Some bloggers claim this is a "failure," and that the credo of Wikipedia has died hard. But exactly the opposite may be true: I feel as though this is a necessary step in taking a Web site from the playground to the stadium. Wikipedia should now be taken more seriously, rather than taken with a grain of salt.
Opera Software has completed its first release candidate of Opera 10, a browser that the company says has better performance, a Turbo mode for slow Internet connections, support for a variety of Web standards such as Web fonts, and improvements to the Opera Mail feature.
"Now, we are very close to releasing the best browser in Opera's long history," Jan Standal, Opera's vice president of desktop products, said in a statement. "We hope everyone who has helped us test our browser thus far will put the release candidate through its paces."
The new Carakan JavaScript engine, which is used to run Web-based applications such as Google Docs, isn't done yet.
"It won't be ready for (Opera) 10 final, but rest assured that it will be impressive when it comes," spokesman Thomas Ford said. He said Opera won't comment on the timing of the new engine's release until it enters alpha testing.
Firefox, Safari, and Chrome also all are working furiously on better JavaScript performance too, in an effort to make the Web a better foundation for applications.
The new Opera release candidate is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Opera has been available for years as an alternative to the dominant Microsoft Internet Explorer, the second-ranked Firefox, and Apple's Safari. It was pushed into fifth place with the arrival of Google Chrome. The Opera browser often charts new territory, though. For example, its Speed Dial feature, which presents an array of Web site thumbnails when a person opens a new browser tab, was first introduced in 2007. A similar feature can now be found in Chrome and Safari, and Firefox may add something comparable.
Symwave, one of the first companies to design silicon for USB 3.0, is revealing more details about its SOC (system on a chip) using the high-speed standard at the Hot Chips conference on Monday.
USB 3.0, which debuted last November, is designed to provide throughput as high as 5GB per second (Gbps), up from just 480Mbps for USB 2.0. Symwave says its USB 3.0 SOC can be used in external storage devices that ship data as fast as 500MB per second.
Symwave is trying to tackle the same problem plaguing many consumers and enterprises as they use more high-definition multimedia content and have to save more data in general. Demand for storage capacity continues to rise, and backing up that data from a laptop or desktop to an external drive can take hours. USB 2.0, nearly ubiquitous on PCs and portable consumer electronics today, can be a barrier.
"You're pretty much communicating through a straw," said Gideon Intrater, Symwave's vice president of solutions architecture. The SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) I/O protocol used with most hard drives can transport about 300MB per second, while USB 2.0 typically delivers just 20MB or 30MB per second, he said. "USB 2 was good as long as you had 100GB on your hard drive, but now it's just way too slow."
By way of comparison, a 25GB high-definition movie would take 13.9 minutes to transport over USB 2.0 and just 70 seconds with the new standard, according to the USB Implementers Forum. The contents of a 1GB thumb drive could be transferred in 3.3 seconds, versus 33 seconds previously.
The SOC that Intrater will discuss on Monday will boost that performance up to and beyond the top speed of SATA. It's a chip for external storage devices that includes several key functions for either HDD (hard disk drive) or SSD (solid-state drive) units. The chip will allow OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) of storage devices and enclosures to offer speeds as high as 500MB per second because it includes support for RAID 0 configurations. Using RAID, the system maker can build an enclosure with two drives and either feed data faster by addressing both drives at once, or feed the same data to both drives so one is a mirror of the other, Intrater said.
RAID hasn't been a realistic option with USB 2.0 because just one SATA drive can easily saturate the USB connection, according to Intrater. In addition, USB 2.0 has been limited in the kinds of devices it can power by itself. USB 3.0 can carry as much as 900 milliamps, up from just 500 milliamps for USB 2.0, he said. That will make it easier to power a portable RAID array of two drives, as well as to power faster-spinning HDDs than before and to charge some smartphones and other devices that the older standard couldn't fill up, Intrater said.
USB 3.0 was also designed to put fewer demands on a system's CPU during backup operations, he said. Products that support the new standard will be backward compatible with USB 2.0, so if any component in a set of linked devices isn't made for the USB 3.0, the connection will fall back to the older standard.
In addition to supporting RAID and the protocol conversion from SATA to USB 3.0, the Symwave chip can perform authentication and encryption. It uses the recently approved IEEE 1667 standard for authentication, which Microsoft has said it will include in Windows 7. For encryption, Symwave is using the XTS-AES technology, based on the Advanced Encryption Standard. System makers can choose to implement it in 128-bit or 256-bit mode, Intrater said.
Symwave, a fabless semiconductor company based in Laguna Niguel, California, was founded in 2004 and restructured itself last year around the goal of designing chips for the emerging USB 3.0 standard. It faced some challenges, including the speed of the protocol itself. At the 5GHz speed of USB 3.0, bits of data travel so fast that on a 10-foot cable there can be multiple bits traveling over the wire at the same time, Intrater said.
Price is another issue. The final products will have to stay close to the price range of USB 2.0 gear, with only a small premium, Intrater said. Despite the huge performance advantage, vendors won't be able to charge twice as much, he said.
The company has made prototypes of the SOC and expects OEMs to ship products based on it by the end of this year.
Advanced Micro Devices' upcoming 12-core chips will draw the same power as existing six-core chips, but will have reduced clock speeds, a company official said Monday.
The company's upcoming 12-core server chips, code-named Magny-Cours, put two six-core chips in one package. The same silicon is used in existing six-core chips, code-named Istanbul, which are part of the Opteron line of server processors. AMD designed Magny-Cours chips to draw the same power as Istanbul chips, said Pat Conway, a member of AMD's technical staff, in a presentation at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.
Responding to an audience question about how Magny-Cours, with two chips, will use the same power as one Istanbul chip, Conway said that AMD is reducing the clock speeds of the Magny-Cours and added that power management features are being added.
However, Conway declined to comment on potential clock speeds of 12-core chips in response to a question. "That's a detail we're going to save for the product launch," Conway said. The chips are aimed at servers and are due out in the first quarter of 2010.
Chip makers like Intel and AMD reverted to adding cores to boost chip performance earlier in the decade, as cranking up clock speed led to excessive heat dissipation and power consumption.
Even though the clock frequencies will fall, Magny-Cours chips will pack more performance compared to existing Opteron chips, Conway said. The larger cache and increased cores will make servers faster, Conway said. For example, a server will be able to execute tasks faster in virtualized environments with a larger number of cores, enabling servers to host a larger number of virtual machines.
Conway also talked about finer details in the Magny-Cours chip. Two six-core chips are connected by four hyperthreaded interconnects and are targeted at two- and four-socket servers, Conway said. It includes a total of 12MB of L3 cache, with each core supporting 512KB of L2 cache. The chips will be manufactured by AMD's spinoff, GlobalFoundries, using existing 45-nanometer technology.
AMD is also working on a new x86 chip architecture code-named Bulldozer. The architecture will be used in chips manufactured using the 32-nm process in 2011. The company has scheduled a 16-core chip code-named Interlagos for release in 2011.
SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft Corp and Yahoo! Inc are joining a group of opponents to a class action settlement that gives Google Inc the right to digitize millions of books, the companies said on Friday.
The companies are becoming part of the Open Book Alliance, made up of nonprofits and libraries that have raised a red flag against Google's plan to digitize books and put them on the Internet.
"Yes, we've agreed to participate in the coalition," a spokesman for Microsoft said. A Yahoo spokeswoman said they had also signed on.
Amazon.com Inc has also reportedly joined, but a spokeswoman said: "We don't comment on rumor or speculation."
Critics say the deal gives Google the unimpeded ability to set prices for libraries, once they scan books and put them on the Internet. If the service becomes a necessity for libraries they would face monopoly pricing, Google's opponents say.
They also say it would also allow Google—and only Google—to digitize so-called orphan works, which could pose an antitrust concern.
Orphan works are books or other materials that are still covered by U.S. copyright law, but it is not clear who owns the rights to them.
Google took issue with the criticism. "The agreement is not exclusive. If improved by the court it will expand access to millions of books in the U.S.," said Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google.
"The agreement stands to inject more competition into the digital book space, so it's understandable why our competitors would fight hard to prevent more competition," he said. New York University law professor James Grimmelmann, who runs thepublicindex.org site, which carries documents on the case, said he is waiting to see the arguments of the Open Books Alliance.
"Google is right that there are access benefits to making books available," said Grimmelmann. "The question of whether this is good or bad for competition is hotly contested. There are clear ways that the settlement could create a concentration of power, especially over orphan books."
The deal is under review or investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, the European Commission and a group of U.S. state attorneys general.
The proposed settlement was reached in October, 2008, to settle a lawsuit filed in 2005 by the Author's Guild, when Google began scanning books.
The Guild and a group of publishers has alleged copyright infringement.
Google has agreed to pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions or book sales. A hearing on approval of the settlement is set for October 7 in U.S. District Court in New York.
Google has begun work on a 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux, a move likely to whip Linux loyalists into a lather of excitement.
"The V8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I've had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks," said Chrome engineer Dean McNamee in a mailing list message Thursday.
V8 is Chrome's engine for running programs written in the JavaScript language common on the Web. Chromium is the open-source project behind Google's branded and supported Chrome browser, and McNamee shared instructions for programmers to build 64-bit Chromium.
Virtually all PCs today come with 64-bit processors from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices, but for desktop computing, 32-bit operating systems and software are common. The transition to 64-bit software is well under way--notably with Linux and Mac OS X--but the change isn't simple. In the browser world, for example, it can be problematic running a 64-bit browser with a 32-bit plug-in such as Adobe Systems' Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight, or Sun Microsystems' Java.
In 64-bit versions, programs can take advantage of larger amounts of memory, performance can benefit from extra storage spaces called registers on processors, and some mathematically intense computing tasks can run faster. But along with issues such as broken plug-ins, 64-bit software can hog more disk space, complicate programmers' testing and support chores, and often doesn't really run appreciably faster, so the transition isn't necessarily a top priority.
For example, Mac OS X already is most of the way through its 64-bit transition, but 64-bit Safari won't arrive until Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, which is due in coming weeks. Apple, by the way, says that JavaScript will run much faster on the 64-bit version of Safari.
But Linux fans, who offset their smaller numbers with higher technical proficiency and a fondness for programming, are champions of 64-bit software. They hammered Adobe until it released a 64-bit version of Flash Player for Linux, and now they're agitating for 64-bit browsers.
Indeed, a discussion emerged on Wednesday about why a 64-bit version of Firefox isn't a higher priority.
"Optimizations such as the Tracemonkey JIT engine (a just-in-time compiler for JavaScript) have yet not been implemented for x86-64, which means that the i686 build will be faster than the x86-64 build," among other reasons, replied Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg.
Windows is another matter altogether for browser makers; although 64-bit Windows is a common option nowadays on new machines, the vast majority of existing ones are still using 32-bit Windows, and there are plenty of late adopters.
A 64-bit version of Internet Explorer ships with Microsoft's 64-bit versions of Windows, but Safari for Windows won't be available alongside the Mac OS X version when it debuts. The work to rebuild JavaScript engines for 64-bit chips applies to multiple operating systems, so producing a version for one operating system does help move a given browser to the others.
So what's standing in the way of 64-bit Chrome for Windows?
"Motivation," according to another message by Google's Marc-Antoine Ruel. Well, not just that. Google or others also need to work on the sandbox security mechanism and gyp programming tools, he said.
Is Intel still interested in developing XML and XSLT products? After the discontinuation of the Intel XML Software Suite earlier this year, many seem to have concluded that Intel has left the game for good. In fact, in a recent XML mailing list discussion about slow adoption of XSLT 2.0 in browsers, Intel was cited as an example of an XSLT vendor that has left the market.
Well, we really haven’t. At the time, we announced that the Intel SOA Expressway product would become the single solution for XML and service oriented architecture (SOA) needs. (See this page on the Intel website: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-xml-software-products/) The functionality of the XML Software Suite has been wrapped into SOA Expressway, so although we no longer have a standalone library product, the capabilities and performance of those libraries continue to power the XML processing needs of SOA applications.
As part of the continuing evolution of SOA Expressway and its XSLT support, we have been busy developing an XSLT 2.0 processor. The development team has made fantastic progress in a short time. In fact, our processor is approaching beta level and will be available in beta form when ready.
Is there interest in another standalone XSLT 2.0 processor? Perhaps, but Intel believes there’s more value for now in tightly integrating this and other XML features into Intel SOA Expressway. Stay tuned for more about our XSLT 2.0 progress!
Microsoft will turn off the download spigot for Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) on Thursday around 11 a.m. ET, the company confirmed on Tuesday.
The company has been sending out e-mails to users who have already downloaded the release candidate, reminding them of the impending deadline. On Monday, a company spokesman repeated the warning, while a spokeswoman today said that the tap would be closed Thursday morning.
Microsoft first offered Windows 7 RC late on May 4, saying then that it would provide a download through at least July. Late in June, however, the company said that it would allow downloads until Aug. 15, then last month quietly extended that deadline by another five days.
Citing company policy, a spokeswoman today declined to specify how many copies of the RC have been downloaded since early May, although she said it was "in the millions."
Although the actual downloads will not be available after Thursday, users who have obtained the disk image file may still request a product activation key after that date, Microsoft has said.
Other users, notably IT professionals and developers who subscribe to the TechNet and Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) services, have already moved on to Windows 7 RTM final version of the new operating system. Those users have been able to grab copies of the English RTM since Aug. 6. (release to manufacturing), the
Windows 7 RC is set to expire March 1, 2010, at which time it will begin to automatically shut down at two-hour intervals. The RC expires on June 1, 2010; after that date, it simply won't boot.
Microsoft has slated Oct. 22 as the on-sale date for new PCs packing Windows 7, as well as for retail copies of upgrades to the operating system. Prior to that date, one of the few ways to obtain a legal, final copy of Windows 7 is to attend one of the 25 launch events Microsoft is hosting in the U.S. Those events begin Sept. 24 in Denver, Miami and Minneapolis, and end Nov. 9 in Baltimore, Houston and St. Louis.
A complete list of the sites and schedule is available on Microsoft's site.
Until Thursday morning, Windows 7 can be downloaded in 32- and 64-bit versions, and in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish editions, from this site.
Google has linked its online applications suite with its Groups service, making it possible to share documents, sites, and calendars among defined groups of people.
Before the new functionality was launched Monday, Google Apps users wanting to share items had either to make them entirely public, or share them on a person-by-person basis.
The change means that, for example, a spreadsheet shared with a Google Group will be accessible immediately to anyone joining that group, or rendered inaccessible to those leaving the group.
"In my work, being able to communicate and collaborate with many groups of people is crucial to productivity, and I often want to use Google Apps to share content with particular groups or teams," Google Groups associate product manager Jeffrey Chang wrote in a blog post Monday. "Typing in every user's e-mail address manually is painstaking and inefficient, and remembering when people leave and join different teams is impossible."
Across Google's various applications, including Docs, Sites, Video for Business, and Calendar, groups can be given access by having an invitation sent to the group's e-mail address, rather than to an individual's e-mail address, Chang said.
Calendars, sites, and other items will then "automatically detect group membership changes," Chang added.
A new season of security suites is upon us, and Kaspersky has made improvements to its Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Anti-Virus programs that include changes indicative of where security software as an industry is leaning. Three new features along with expected upgrades to its antivirus engine keep Kaspersky competitive.
The main window of Kaspersky Internet Security 2010.
The full-feature suite Kaspersky Internet Security offers a complete and competitive range of security options. The new features in the 2010 edition include a behavioral-based detection system called the Urgent Detection System. The UDS utilizes the anonymous data of 10 million Kaspersky customers who choose to participate in submitting their system scans to Kaspersky's central servers for analysis. In fact, the UDS must be opted-out of--there's a check box and data collection statement to read when you install the program.
Although this might sound insidious, it's actually a smart way to leverage a huge consumer base for security purposes as long as the data remains anonymous. Symantec's Norton 2010 will contain a behavioral check, too, and what both do is look at programs installed on your computer and judge their safety based on how many people have them installed and how they behave. Among UDS's better sub-features are the ability to customize how long it takes to pass judgment on a new program and per-user configuration of the rules governing program behavior.
Even if a program has deep penetration and it starts behaving badly, Kaspersky will block it. If it's an unknown, Kaspersky will treat it skeptically, monitoring and restricting the program until it has been proven safe. The Vulnerability Scan option, available under the Scan tab, utilizes tech from Secunia to determine which programs are potential security risks because they lack recent updates or patches. For programs that may not warn you that they have a pending security update, such as Adobe Flash, having this tool baked-in could be exceptionally useful.
The tools offered under the My Protection tab are nothing short of robust. There's antivirus protection for files, e-mail, HTTP traffic, and instant messaging. Application control, the aforementioned UDS, includes options for customization, should you need to force access for a specific program that Kaspersky is identifying as a threat. There are protections against spam, phishing, and banner ads, firewall control, and a network monitor to track network activities for users who like to drill down deep into their system's behavior. There's also a Parental Control filter, with options to outright block children from particular sites or merely log events. By default, the Parental Control filter is off, and when activated it assigns all other users on the computer Child status until directed otherwise. There's a Teenager status, as well, for more granular control of restrictions.
Safe Run is Kaspersky's new sandboxing feature for further securing programs that access the Internet.
The My Security Zone tab is where most of the application control features live. From here, a clean chart organizes your installed programs according to trustworthiness, the Digital Identity Protection feature allows you to uncover which files your personal information resides in according to program, and the Safe Run sandbox can be controlled. Safe Run nearly doubles the amount of RAM the program uses, but provides a secure environment for launching a program. Safe Run also comes with a sandboxed folder into which you can save files without worry. The feature currently will not run on Windows 7 computers, but Kaspersky has told me that it expects to have the feature fixed before the October release of the new operating system.
Programs can be launched into Safe Run in one of two ways. You can add the program manually through the Kaspersky Security Zone panel, or you can launch it on the fly using the context menu. Hopefully, there will be casual launcher added to jump lists in Windows 7, but that feature doesn't exist now.
Scans and definition file updates performed empirically as expected, with the Quick Scan taking less than three minutes. The Vulnerability Scan took less than four minutes, as well. The Full Scan, which was expected to be slow, took less than an hour, but as it approached 80 percent completion it oscillated between telling me that it would finish in one minute and two minutes. In fact, it would take another 11 minutes to finish.
Full benchmarks from the CNET Labs were not available at the time of writing, but I'll update them as soon as they're in.
The Update Center tab offers a smooth update scheduler integrated into the main interface. Click on Run Mode to change the schedule. This isn't remarkable except to point out that only the definition file update offers an update like this. To schedule any other regular scan, you must click on the Settings option at the top right of the main Kaspersky window, choose the feature you want to schedule from the list on the left if it wasn't open in the main window when you hit settings, select Settings from within the window that opens, and then finally click the Run Mode tab on yet one final pop-up window. It's a tedious process and could be streamlined to great effect, but makes one of the basic features of this security program unnecessarily hard to get to.
Setting a scheduled scan in Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 is no simple task.
The program also comes with an auto-run disable feature and a virtual keyboard so that you can enter in passwords without worrying about a keylogger. I think most users will find this superfluous. The new gamer mode, however, isn't. This basically keeps Kaspersky functioning while you play games but kills interrupting pop-ups and strips memory usage down to its minimum.
If you're testing the trial version, a yellow bar announcing that your computer security is at risk can be toggled under the Report link at the top right of the main window, then go to the Status tab.
According to virus and malware detection results at AV-Test.org and AV-Comparatives.org, last year's Kaspersky 2009 has scored average or better in all areas of detection. AV-Test.org noted that it detected more than 98.4 percent of malware on demand and 98.3 percent of spyware on demand, with an average rate of false positives. AV-Comparitives.org awarded Kaspersky 2009 Advanced+ in both February 2009's on-demand comparative and in May 2009's retrospective/pro-active test, noting few false positives and a 50 percent detection rate, behind Microsoft, Eset, Avira, and G Data. The short version of these independent test results is that last year's Kaspersky scored above average in general, and was excellent at malware detection.
If you're interested only in Kaspersky Anti-Virus, it contains the most of the same engines and features as Kaspersky Internet Security. It lacks the personal two-way firewall, parental and privacy control, whitelisting and application control, safe run virtual sandbox, antispam protection, and banner ad blocking.
Using this year's interface and detection numbers for the previous version, I think it's safe to say that Kaspersky is a strong security suite, but that the extra features available in Internet Security make it worthwhile to pay for, whereas the standard Kaspersky Anti-Virus doesn't offer enough on its own to compare favorably against high-performing, free antivirus programs.
Intel is preparing the launch of the new mainstream processors, most of which are based on the holding of the next generation of Lynnfield core. The new CPU models are designed for the company LGA 1156 socket, which means that motherboard makers have been busy for them, trying to increase its market share to new signs. In this respect, it seems that we now more complete picture of what has come from Santa Clara, California-based chip maker.
According to a recent news article on space on the site HKEPC, chip maker in the first round of the LGA 1156-compatible processors include three models, quad-core Core i5 750, Core i7 860 and Core i7 870. Core i7 models are designed for high-end systems and boasts speeds of 2.8GHz and 2.93GHz respectively, and an integrated dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory controller, 8 MB L3 cache and a TDP of 95W. Core i7 models support Hyper-Threading technology (ie, support for multi-threaded applications), while the smaller and cheaper Core i5 is the clock at 2.66 and will not Hyper-Threading function.
Later, during the first quarter of 2010, the company has claimed to promote energy-efficient models (at 82W TDP) of the above i5 Core 750 and Core i7 860, with prices said to begin at U.S. $259 and U.S. $337, respectively.
If the company 32nm layout, Intel seems to be the first 32nm LGA 1156-based processors in Q1 2010, making them available in six variants, all of which will be dual-core processors with DirectX 10 integrated graphics processor, DDR3 - 1333 memory controller and TDP on 73W. The six are part of the i3 Core and Core i5 series with two models in the Core i3 family, three in Core i5 series and one in the Pentium family.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) again trounced rival browsers in a test of their malware-blocking abilities, catching 81% of attack code-infected sites, according to a testing company.
microsoft internet explorer
IE8's skills at sniffing out malware sites improved by 17% since March, said Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs, the firm that conducted the benchmarks. The testing was sponsored by Microsoft's security team.
IE8's improvement, and its dominance over competitors, could make some users reconsider their decision to abandon Microsoft's browser for one of its challengers. "Should people rethink that decision?" Moy asked. "By [this] data, absolutely."
While IE8 blocked eight of 10 of the malware-distributing sites that NSS included in its 12-day test, the nearest competitor, Mozilla's Firefox 3.0, caught just 27% of the same sites. Apple's Safari 4.0 and Google's Chrome 2.0, meanwhile, blocked only 21% and 7% of the sites, respectively. Opera Software's browser properly identified only 1%.
"I think it comes down to resources and the focus of these companies," Moy said in an interview, referring to Microsoft's ability to out-spend rivals on such things as security research and malicious site investigations. "The more researchers you have, the better you'll do. Microsoft has a certain amount of paranoia [about security] because of its footprint of services that get attacked all the time, like Hotmail, and it has the money to hire really smart people."
Opera, which performed the poorest in the malware-blocking benchmarks, is an example on the other end of the spectrum, said Moy. "What resources do they really have to bring to the problem?" Moy said. "There's a lot that can't be solved with software, but requires the human element."
NSS tested five Windows-based browsers -- IE8, Firefox 3.0.11, Safari 4.0.2, Chrome 2.0.0.172.33 and Opera 10 beta -- against more than 2,100 malware sites in 69 test runs over 12 days. Like the tests NSS Labs ran last March, the sites were so-called "socially engineered" malware sites, the type that trick users into downloading attack code. Typically, the download is disguised, often as an update to popular software such as Adobe's Flash Player.
The tests did not include sites that launch "drive-by" attacks that don't require user interaction, an increasingly common tactic by hackers who often infect legitimate sites with kits that try a number of different exploits in the hope of compromising an unpatched browser or PC.
To defend against the kind of sites that NSS tested, browser makers have added anti-malware features to their software. Microsoft, for instance, has aggressively touted its SmartScreen Filter, a new malware-detection feature in IE8.
All browsers that include such a tool -- or anti-phishing tools, which operate in a similar fashion -- rely on a "blacklist" of some sort. The list, which includes known or suspected malware sites, is used to display warnings before a user reaches a site, but after the URL is typed in.
"The foundation is an in-the-cloud reputation-based system that scours the Internet for malicious sites," explained Moy, "then adds them to a black list or white list, or assigns them scores." The browser then uses that information to block or allow access to a site.
IE8 significantly improved its lead over other browsers since March, Moy noted, with its browser's malware-blocking rate up 12 percentage points -- a 17% improvement -- while rivals' scores declined across the board. Firefox dropped three percentage points, for example, as did Safari 4; Chrome fell eight percentage points and Opera, four.
Hackers Put Social Networks Such as Twitter in Crosshairs
Web sites such as Twitter are becoming increasingly favored by hackers as places to plant malicious software in order to infect computers, according to a new study covering Web application security vulnerabilities.
Social-networking sites were the most commonly targeted vertical market according to a study of hacking episodes in the first half of the year. The study is part of the latest Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) report, released on Monday. In 2008, government and law enforcement sites were the most hit vertical.
Social networks are "a target-rich environment if you count the number of users there," said Ryan Barnett, director of application security research for Breach Security, one of the report's sponsors, which also includes the Web Application Security Consortium.
Twitter has been attacked by several worms, and other social-networking platforms such as MySpace and Facebook have also been used to distribute malware. That's often done when an infected computer begins posting links on social-networking sites to other Web sites rigged with malicious software. Users click on the links since they trust their friends who posted the links, not knowing their friend has been hacked.
The WHID sample set is small, encompassing 44 hacking incidents. The report only looks at attacks that are publicly reported and those with which have a measurable impact on an organization. The WHID's data set is "statistically insignificant" compared to the actually number of hacking incidents, but shows overall attacker trends, Barnett said.
Other data showed how Web sites were attacked. The most common attack was SQL injection, where hackers try to input code into Web-based forms or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in order to get back-end systems such as databases to execute it. If the input is not properly validated -- and malicious code ignored -- it can result in a data breach.
Other methods used include cross-site scripting attacks, where malicious code gets push to on a client machine, and cross-site request forgery, in which a malicious command is executed while the victim is logged into a Web site.
The WHID found that defacing Web sites is still the most common motivation for hackers. However, the WHID includes the planting of malware on a Web site as defacement, which also points to a financial motivation. Hacked computers can be used to send spam, conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks and for stealing data.
AMD intros new dual-core processors for the embedded market
Advanced Micro Devices has just announced to expand its processor portfolio with the introduction of two new dual-core chips designed for embedded client ASB1 BGA platform. With a low TDP of just 18W, the new Turion X2 Neo model L625 and L325 Athlon X2 Neo model for PC-like performance in a smaller, less power package, and embedded-friendly ball grid array (BGA) package.
"We are determined to help simplify the development cycle for our customers with an embedded platform that is easy to change from the needs of their markets," said Buddy Broek, director, Embedded Computing Solutions Division, AMD. "System as digital signage, point of sale and thin clients require PC performance and a rich graphical experience. ASB1 PGI Our platform is ready to join a single solution to these markets, while giving flexibility multiple CPU and chipset choice."
PGI ASB1 embedded client platform designed for single computers and thin clients, as well as self-kiosks, where sales of machines and digital signage. The newly introduced AMD processors have a TDP of 18W and will be judged by the clock speeds of 1.6GHz Turion X2 Neo L625 and 1.5GHz for the Athlon X2 Neo L325. Besides these two models are designed to be compatible with the chip maker of M690E and 780E chipset, which provides a complete x86-based solution.
"The rapid adoption of x86 processors in embedded designs, this is a trend that contributed to increase AMD in high-end space, largely driven by the need to simplify designs and make them quickly," says Eric Heikkilä, Director, Embedded Hardware and systems analyst, VDC Research Group. "From the hardware perspective, AMD's approach offers traditional performance and very low power consumption and a large part of the guesses of the development process."
The chips are embedded products are offered with industry-standard 5-years component longevity risk.
Mozilla has released the first alpha version of Firefox 3.6, a browser with speed improvements and new features the organization hopes to finalize faster than its predecessor.
"Unlike the year that passed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5, we expect that this 3.6 releaseChris Blizzard said in a blog post Friday. will be released in a small number of months," Mozilla evangelist
Firefox 3.6, code-named Namoroka, has a variety of changes, but it's not as dramatic a departure as 3.5 was from 3.0. Among the 3.6 features are faster JavaScript, the Web programming language Firefox executes with its TraceMonkey engine; faster page-rendering speed; some new features for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology for controlling some of the look of a Web site; and a feature called the compositor that handles complicated layout circumstances better.
Performance is a big issue with browsers these days as people spend more time using them and programmers create more sophisticated sites and applications that live on the Web. All major browser makers are emphasizing performance improvements in their newest versions.
World's First 2TB 7200 RPM Hard Drive from HitachiWorld's First 2TB 7200 RPM Hard Drive from Hitachi
Friday, August 7, 2009
The demand for higher capacity disk drives is being fueled by the persistent growth of digital information generated by consumers and organizations alike. Therefore to deliver the biggest and fastest hard disk drive (HDD) for capacity-hungry PC users, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has unveiled the world's first, two terabyte (2TB), 7200 RPM HDD.
The Deskstar 7K2000 uses Hitachi's unique five-platter design with relaxed bit density and perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. It also features a 32MB cache and a 3Gb/s SATA interface, making it an ideal desktop drive for power users or anyone looking for a big, fast hard drive. In addition this drive features industry-standard 512-byte sector formatting, a patented ramp load/unload design to increase shock protection, and Thermal Fly-height Control (TFC) to maintain a consistent fly-height during the read/write process for added data reliability.
The Deskstar 7K2000 offers 10 percent idle power savings over previous generations. Also the watt-per-GB and idle power of this HDD is 120 percent better than its predecessors. In addition to being RoHS compliant and low in power, the new Deskstar 7K2000 is Halogen free. For more information about the Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K2000, visit www.hitachigst.com/deskstar.
Microsoft is trying to improve the visuals in Windows 7 by working with hardware makers on a software interface that maximizes the use of graphics cards.
The OS will support a new API (application programming interface) called DirectX 11 that enables better gaming through more realistic graphics and faster playback of multimedia files. The software giant is working with top graphics chip makers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices on those features.
The DirectX 11 graphics drivers are designed to help Windows 7 effectively break up tasks over multiple cores to boost application and graphics performance. For example, Windows 7 will process video faster by unloading the task from the CPU to graphics processor cores.
Nvidia has been able to use DirectX compute capabilities in Windows 7 to accelerate tasks like manipulating images or playing DVDs via its graphics processing unit, said Ned Finkle, vice president of strategic marketing at Nvidia, in a video posted on Microsoft's Windows 7 Web site.
"Microsoft did a number of things within the operating system that allow us to take the computing horsepower we developed for visual computing and apply it to a range of tasks that have never been seen before," Finkle said.
Beyond simple multimedia tasks, AMD said DirectX 11 harnesses the massive parallel processing capabilities of GPUs to improve gaming on PCs, said Neal Robison, director of independent software vendor relations at AMD.
"We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible," Robison said.
He also said that Windows 7 could speed up conversion of video for playback on portable devices. Users will be able to drag and drop video from PCs to portable devices, with DirectX 11 enabling video conversion on the fly.
While Microsoft has built native DirectX 11 support in Windows 7, users will benefit only with capable hardware. AMD in June showed off a prototype DirectX 11 graphics processing unit, but is yet to formally announce a product.
In a blog entry posted Thursday,
AMD's Robin Maffeo, a Microsoft alliance manager, wrote "there are plans to make native DirectX 11 hardware from AMD in its ATI Radeon GPUs available when Windows 7 is released."
Current graphics cards and integrated graphics on chipsets carry support for DirectX 10 or 10.1.
The ability to break up tasks is an evolutionary step for Microsoft in developing operating systems, said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. As users demand heavier graphics from PCs, it is in Microsoft's best interests to offer an operating system that breaks up tasks across multiple graphics cores and CPUs, he said.
"In order to be able to get performance from succeeding generations, you have to have a multicore-aware operating system," Olds said. Execution of tasks on a single core isn't highly efficient, which was a problem that plagued earlier operating systems, Olds said.
The DirectX 11 enhancements could also encourage more developers to build games for Windows 7 and help the company keep pace with competition.
One company competing with Microsoft is Apple, which has changed the basic architecture of its upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 OS, code-named Snow Leopard, to include new features that divvy up graphics and other tasks over multiple CPU and graphics cores. It builds in support for OpenCL, a set of programming tools to develop and manage parallel task execution.
Nvidia and AMD have said they would support DirectX 11 and OpenCL. Intel, which offers integrated graphics on chipsets, in June released updated graphics drivers for Windows 7, but it carried support for only DirectX 10.
Microsoft will issue fixes for five critical holes affecting Windows and a variety of other software on Patch Tuesday next week.
The critical holes, which could allow an attacker to remotely run code on a PC and take control of it, affect Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Windows Client for the Mac, Office 2000, XP and 2003, Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 and 2006, and BizTalk Server 2002, according to a Microsoft security advisory released on Thursday.
Four additional vulnerabilities, rated "important," affect Windows and Windows .NET Framework and could allow an attacker to remotely execute code, launch a denial-of-service attack or elevate system privileges, the company said.
Integrated HD 4200 Radeon graphics improve performance of entry-level PCs built around AMD's newest chipset.
Word of AMD's newest chipset has leaked all over the Web more completely than water from a shattered glass. With this morning's launch, the new 785G chipset is officially released. It's AMD's latest mainstream offering, which aims to bring affordable performance to a wide range of desktop PCs—especially forthcoming ones running Windows 7.So what's new, relative to last year's 780G chipset? The biggest news is improved graphics; the older chipset used the Radeon HD 3200 graphics, while the current one updates to HD 4200, enabling the motherboard to support DirectX 10.1. The new chipset also updates the HDMI port, from HDMI 1.2 to HDMI 1.3. The 785G chipset is in most respects pretty similar to the 780G, carrying around 205 million transistors and 40 stream processors; it's also built using the same 55nm process technology.
A quick peek at the block diagram reveals all the connections you'd expect: The 785G supports PCI Express graphics, 3-Gbps SATA connections as well as USB 2.0, and HD audio. It would be nice to see support for USB 3.0, but you wouldn't expect to see a cutting-edge technology like that in a mainstream chipset.We spoke with Adam Kozak, Desktop Marketing Manager for AMD, about the new chipset. He explained that a lot of the company's efforts had gone into building in support for Windows 7, which AMD understands is very important: "We recognized that inflection point and realized we needed a product for that timeline. One of the things with AMD, there's a lot around this, and our driver schedules and everything are part of the proof that we value this transition. That's why you'll get the WHQL drivers way ahead of launch. We've worked hard with Microsoft to ensure that all these features work. It's been a long process to get to where we are now."
If the 785G chipset doesn't sound like a particularly interesting update, that may be because it's so focused on improving the Windows 7 experience for everyone. It allows for better dynamic power savings, and the nicest, out-of-the-box graphics and 3D animations on budget or midrange computers—requiring (comparatively) a lot less juice than Vista did at launch.Boards using the 785G chipset also support ATI Stream technology, which will provide noticeable performance boosts in software written to take advantage of it, such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft PowerPoint. This list should include Windows 7's Accelerated Video Transcoding feature, which allows for hardware-supported on-the-fly video transcoding. AMD has shipped a proprietary app to enable this feature in the past, called the Avivo Video Converter. Windows 7 incorporates this functionality directly into the OS.The graphics improvements in the 785G chipset also result in more vibrant, realistic colors, as well as improved HD video playback and post processing. This makes the chipset a good choice for those thinking of building home theater PCs. AMD admits the 785G, like the 780G before it, isn't intended for power users and gamers—its graphics capabilities are well-suited for mainstream titles like World of Warcraft and The Sims 3, but not for power-sucking FPSes—but for lower-level builds along those lines, it could be a well-suited, economical choice. (AMD says that good Athlon II X2 CPU and 785-G–based motherboard combos can be had for under $200.)
Apple released an update to its operating system Wednesday, version 10.5.8.
The update is said to fix issues related to compatibility and reliability when trying to connect a Mac to an AirPort network, as well as restore Display System Preferences, and Bluetooth reliability. The latter will likely bring a sigh of relief to users who have complained of their Bluetooth keyboard or mouse periodically disconnecting from their Macs.
Also included in the update: an upgrade to Safari 4.0.2, with improved accuracy of search history; a fix for importing large photo and movie files from cameras; better iCal, iDisk, MobileMe, AFP, Managed Client, Sync Service reliability; more support for RAW images from third-party cameras; and improved compatibility for external USB drives.
Cosmetic changes are, well, cosmetic, but a lot of people like them as a way to add some flair to their machines. Many had been pestering Google to add themes support even though Chrome employs a Spartan user interface without much acreage for artistry. Last week's developer version of Chrome added a "Get themes" button in the Options dialog box, and now Google has flipped the switch to activate the Web page that button points to.
The collection of themes includes Legal Pad, Star Gazing, Transparent (it's not, on my Windows XP machine), Dots, and Pencil Sketch. One monochromatic theme called Minimal downloads nearly instantly, but Grass, at 1.3MB, takes more time.
Why so large? Themes can come with a background image that shows on Chrome's new-tab page that offers a much greater chance for expressiveness, especially since that page is the default when Chrome launches. That could help Google with its attempt to recruit artists to supply their own themes, as some have done with the iGoogle customizable home page.
Mozilla has its own skinning technology in the works, a plug-in called Personas that launched on Mozilla Labs in March. That head start, coupled with its vastly larger and more engaged external audience, gives it a big lead over Chrome when it comes to getting gussied up.
Microsoft has announced that XP Mode, the Windows 7 add-on that will allow users with the proper hardware to run a virtual version of Windows XP within Windows 7, has entered Release Candidate status.
There are several new features in XP Mode RC. XP Mode programs will now offer users a jumplist of most recently opened files with that program. This brings one of Windows 7's more useful productivity features into play with older programs that wouldn't otherwise have it. So, not only will you be able to directly start your most recently used XP Mode programs from the Windows 7 taskbar, but you'll be able to launch specific files from the Windows 7 taskbar, too. You can now use USB devices in XP Mode without having to make it full-screen, directly from the Windows 7 taskbar.
Drive sharing between XP Mode and Windows 7 can be disabled, and a new tutorial has been created on how to use XP Mode that users will first get access to from the XP Mode installation screen. In the XP Mode beta, users couldn't customize where to store differencing disk files. These relate to the virtualization aspects of running XP in Windows 7.
Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc recommends in the blog post announcing the XP Mode RC that users install antivirus and anti-malware protections in XP Mode in addition to whatever protective steps users have taken in the native Windows 7 environment. He also cautions that XP Mode is designed for running productivity applications that won't be upgraded to Windows 7, implying that Microsoft doesn't expect the average consumer to get much mileage out of the feature.
Users who are still interested in testing out the Windows 7 RC can still do so through August.
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