Late this afternoon, Microsoft answered a question oft-asked by investors this month: What about Windows?   Near the end of his Consumer Electronics Show keynote last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer boomed: "There's nothing more important at Microsoft than Windows".  But at the same event, Tami Reller, Windows & Windows Live  CFO,  warned that the division's fourth-quarter results could fall below analysts' estimates, because of weak PC sales. Today's fiscal second quarter 2012 earnings results answered by just how much.

For Q2, ended December 31, Microsoft revenue was $20.89 billion, up 5 percent year over year. Operating income: $7.99 billion, a 2 percent decrease. Net income was $6.62 billion, or 78 cents a share. Both were flat year over year.

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As the internet pats itself on the back for protesting SOPA and changing the minds of a handful of U.S. Senators, file-sharing site Megaupload has been brought down in one of the largest copyright infringement cases of all time.

Seven individuals and two international corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized crime ring dealing exclusively in piracy of copyrighted material.

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Two months ago, I argued here on BetaNews that despite the ever-increasing chorus of negativity surrounding Apple, its best days are ahead. One of my reasons for my belief is the young consumer, where the Cupertino company is building a considerable amount of brand equity.

Today's education-centric announcements only strengthen that argument. While there wasn't much pomp or circumstance, the significance is not the immediate announcements but what they mean for the future.

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The new Metro user interface will make Windows 8 a totally different experience for XP, Vista and 7 users, but it will especially challenge those of us who use a desktop PC. Why? Because we are accustomed to mouse input and Windows 8 emphasizes touch. Metro is much better suited to touch than the mouse.

So how can desktop users today, prepare themselves for when they later upgrade to Windows 8? I'll tell you.

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Everyone needs some form of backup, but while successive versions of the Windows Backup Tool have undoubtedly got better, they’re still not quite as intuitive or as comprehensive as we’d like them to be.

If you want maximum protection for your files, settings and even Windows itself, you need a good third-party tool. A tool like Acronis True Image 2010 Personal, worth $19.95, which will be available exclusively to US and Canadian residents to download for free from the Downloadcrew Giveaway site this Friday (January 20).

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Building your own portable working environment on a USB flash drive is undoubtedly convenient. Equip it with your favorite productivity software, browser, email client, graphics tools and games and it’ll always be ready for use on any nearby PC.

One issue you’ll notice straight away, though, is performance. The USB interface may be fast, but flash drive read and write speeds really aren’t, and even small applications can take quite a while to launch.

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At a private event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Thursday, Apple unveiled its multi-pronged approach for cracking the higher education market with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The result is an environment for creating, distributing, and consuming learning materials that is entirely contained within the Apple product ecosystem.

There were three main parts to Apple's education announcement on Thursday:

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It is now over eight months since I first reported to you my experience of getting hacked on iTunes. Last June, hackers found a way into my iTunes account using Sega's Kingdom Conquest -- a game I never downloaded. I was bilked out of $95.30, which the hackers stole from my account through iOS' in-app purchase mechanism.

Within hours of posting that story, I was flooded with dozens -- if not hundreds -- of similar stories. Initially, they were similar to mine and involved Kingdom Conquest, but additional reports indicated other games are being used to break into iTunes accounts worldwide.

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Motorola Mobility on Wednesday announced its popular Xoom Wi-Fi tablets will be the first of the company's Android-powered devices to receive the upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich,) beginning immediately.

Xoom was actually the first major tablet to be released running Android 3.1 (Honeycomb), the somewhat ill-conceived "tablet only" version of Android. With today's rollout of the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade, it becomes the first Honeycomb tablet to receive the operating system upgrade.

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That's again my reaction to startling US mobile numbers that Nielsen released today. Like comScore, Nielsen shows dramatic -- and I mean absolutely stunning -- changes in Android and iPhone adoption since the 4S shipped. Android share, as measured in smartphone operating systems among new purchasers, plummeted from 61.6 percent in October to 46.9 percent in December. Meanwhile, iPhone rose from 25.1 percent share to 44.5 percent. Distribution -- not release of iPhone 4S -- is reason, or so I say.

Nielsen, naturally sees something else: "The high-profile launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S in the Fall had an enormous impact on the proportion of smartphone owners who chose an Apple iPhone" -- that would be for November and December. But that simplistic analysis overlooks mitigating factors. Among the most important -- 43 percent of new buyers chose older iPhones 4 or 3GS.

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If you’d like to remotely restart or shut down a system on your network then Windows already provides some basic assistance. A command like shutdown /s /m \\hostname, say, will try to close down the named computer, and you can tweak precisely how this will work in many different ways (enter shutdown /? at a command line for the full list).

Command line tools aren’t always the most convenient way to manage your network, though. So if you’d like an easier way to monitor running systems, remotely restart or shut them down whenever you like, and wake them up as well, then you’ll probably prefer the small but surprisingly powerful RemoteRebootX.

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Last week I chimed: "Only Windows 8 can save the PC market now". Weak consumer computer sales forebode market shifts ahead, but so do those in the enterprise. An IDG Connect study reveals just how much: IT and business decision makers are augmenting or replacing PCs with iPads at an alarming rate.

"Fully 51 percent of IT and business decision-makers say they always use their iPad at work", according to the report -- and, of course, that's the number who actually own the tablet. Sixteen percent have replaced their laptop with an iPad and 54 percent supplement it. Remember, these numbers are for people responsible for corporate computing. As the wind shifts in their sails -- or should that be sales -- so does it eventually across the computing infrastructure. The data suggests that iPads are significantly starting to cannibalize PC sales -- and not just among consumers -- and it's consistent with recent global PC buying trends.

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When it comes to sharing files, there are a number of options available to you. If you want to share files with someone nearby, it may make sense to pop them on a USB drive and physically deliver them. For smaller files it is possible to make use of email, but things get trickier when larger files are involved. You could go as far as uploading files to your own web space or even setting up your own FTP server, but this is something that few people would want to go to these lengths. Share is a free tool that enables you to overcome these problems and share files of any size.

Coming from BitTorrent, it should come as no surprise to learn how Share works. It is essentially a personal torrent client that makes it possible to allow people of your choice to connect to your computer and access the files you have chosen to share; this is a great example of personal P2P. having created an account, files can be shared by using nothing more than drag and drop, and all you need to do is to select who you would like to share them with.

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Pay a visit to HP’s download pages and for the most part you know exactly what you’re going to get: drivers, manuals and all the usual installation software you’d expect from the company’s wide range of products.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll also find one or two more generally interesting freebies. And so HP’s Web Security Application Group, for instance, has produced a tool called SwfScan, which can both decompile SWF applets and analyze them for security vulnerabilities.

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SOPA blackout day has arrived, and Wikipedia is going farther than the planned 12-hour protest -- from 8 am to 8 pm. The community encyclopedia is going down for twice as long. Today, we'll all learn just how important Wikipedia is to the Internet community. I find it a valuable resource as a journalist. Will you miss it?

Still, there is a nugget of information to be had from Wikipedia: About why the protest. Like many other sites today, the open encyclopedia stands against two pieces of legislation here in the United States: PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), introduced by senators in May, and October bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), introduced in the House. A delayed House vote, from December, was scheduled for today but postponed following last week's statement from the White House. SOPA is weakened but not done yet. SOPA Strike provides an excellent timeline for both bills. Senate vote is still scheduled for January 24.

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