Sixth in a series. In the decade since Microsoft announced Software Assurance, many customers have found it cheaper to skip upgrades rather than pay up front for the rights to them. Essentially, the licensing program does the opposite of its design.

The "Good Enough" Problem

With software developer's updating their applications on a daily basis, it's easy to miss an important update or a minor, but essential, hotfix. We've rounded up some of the key new releases from the last 7 days.

Skype suffered a major outage this week, with some users unable to reconnect. As a result, an urgent "hotfix" was released. Skype for Windows 5.3.0.116 is this hotfix and is essential for anyone who is still unable to connect to the Skype network.

Foxit Software has released version 5 of its popular, lightweight PDF viewer, Foxit Reader. Version 5.0 now boasts XFA electronic form-filling capability, the ability to fit a document to the width of the page and split the screen into two or four panes, and a redesigned interface that includes an option to mimic the ribbon used in Office and Windows 7.

Other highlights include the ability to view thumbnail previews of PDFs in Internet Explorer and previews of PDF file attachments in Microsoft Outlook. Foxit Reader 5.0 also includes additional customization tools, including the ability to skin the application, plus an enhanced search tool.

I've been amused reading reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will only eat meat he kills. The amusement isn't about Zuckerberg's behavior but bloggers, reporters or anyone else treating it like something new or quite odd. Zuckerberg has been eating the meat he kills for years, and it's really cannibalism. The meat he eats is you.

"The only meat I'm eating is from animals I've killed myself," says Zuckerberg. Looking at the founding of Facebook, and some of the controversy surrounding it, Zuckerberg certainly is the hunter. It seems like the one activity where he is sure of himself -- hunting game.

Registration for QuakeCon 2011, the annual PC gaming convention and LAN party is now open, and seats are filling up quickly.

QuakeCon is considered one of the United States' largest bring-your-own-computer (BYOC) PC gaming festivals and it grew from an event with fewer than one hundred attendees to one with just under ten thousand. The focus of the convention has always been the id Software franchise Quake, and since 2008, most of the convention's gaming events have centered on Quake Live.

Evidence is mounting that a Russian payment processing firm may be behind the Mac Defender malware scam that has suddenly brought the issue of Mac viruses into the limelight. Security researchers at Microsoft noted that the software shares some similarities to fake antivirus products intended for Windows machines.

Security researcher Brian Krebs has also been able to trace back the application to ChronoPay, a firm that has been involved in scareware scams in the past. Krebs scanned the WHOIS information of domains that victims were being sent to, and found contact e-mails matching that of other ChronoPay-linked domains.

One year ago, Microsoft announced it had signed a licensing deal with Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC where Microsoft would receive royalties for every Android phone HTC made.

This week, a report from Citigroup analyst Walter Pritchard said that royalty fee amounts to $5 per Android phone.

National video rental chain Blockbuster went bankrupt because of the high price of running video stores when its principal competitors were shipping DVDs by mail, streaming movies online, or operating out of tiny, ubiquitous kiosks.

After being sold off to Dish Network, Blockbuster announced on Friday it is switching its pricing model to one nearly identical to competitor Redbox.

If you thought three builds of Firefox was hard enough to keep up with, you might want to sit down. For those who really want to experience Firefox on the cutting edge -- and by that we mean version 7 of Firefox -- you can access the latest Nightly build, which puts you right on the bleeding edge of development, running code that didn't exist a few days previously.

Firefox Nightly effectly means -- like Google Chrome with its Canary, Dev, Beta and Final releases -- that you have four different builds of Firefox to choose from. Confused? So were we, until we investigated further. Read on, then, for our definitive guide to what version means what, and which version is the best one for you.

Take a long hard, really hard, look at the above chart, which Craig Schmugar posted today at the McAfee Labs blog. Look at the dramatic increase, basically from none, in "rogue" malware (e.g., fake security software) during May.

He asks: "Is this merely a short-term blip on the radar or the beginnings of a trend for Mac threats? Time will tell." Lots of people are asking that question. The answer is easy. It's yes, if there's ongoing money for malware writers to make and no if there isn't.

If you've seen Amazon's new Mac Software Downloads store it's the question to ask. Amazon offers digital downloads from the Mac's two largest developers, Adobe and Microsoft. Apple does not. Well, Windows Phone 7 Connector is available from Apple's shop. But, hey, where's Microsoft Office?

Perhaps the answer to that question will come next month during Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, where Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" takes center stage. The Mac App Store, which debuted in January as an add-on to v10.6 "Snow Leopard," will be built into Lion.

In what could be considered the most modern form of prisoner torture known, prisoners in a labor camp in northeastern China have allegedly been forced to play MMORPG's like World of Warcraft in an elaborate scheme said to net prison bosses approximately $800 to $900 per day.

A former prisoner who identified himself as "Liu Dali" told the Guardian that guards forced prisoners to work 12-hour shifts on a procedure commonly referred to as "gold mining." The process essentially requires long hours of playing the game to build up credits, which are then in turn sold for real money.

In attempt to provide more context when composing e-mails in Gmail, Google on Thursday said that it was adding a new "people widget" to the interface that will provide contextual information on the contact. Information will be culled from a number of sources.

"Email is just as much about the people you communicate with as it is what you communicate about," software engineer Zohair Hyder said in a blog post announcing the new feature. "The people widget surfaces content from friends, family and colleagues that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them."

Sparrow, the minimalist email client for Mac, has been updated to version 1.2. The latest release sees a number of improvements and additions, including the much requested unified inbox. This works in much the same way as the inbox in iOS, displaying all of your emails in one place. A neatly redesigned interface is in keeping with Sparrow's minimalist philosophy.

The app has been labelled 'the social email client' and to this end there are a number of improvements. There is better integration with Facebook meaning that friends' avatars are displayed in the application's chat window. In addition to Facebook avatars, Sparrow 1.2 adds support for contact images in your address book as well as the use of Gravatar.

As expected, Google on Thursday announced Google Wallet, a mobile application for Android that will use near-field communication (NFC) technology to allow users to pay with their mobile phone. The effort is a joint venture between Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint.

Google Wallet is currently in field testing and Google expects to launch it to consumers this summer. Transactions will be secured through the use of an application-specific PIN, ensuring that a stolen phone doesn't subject the user to credit card theft. The first phone to support the functionality will be the Samsung Nexus S, although support for others are expected to be added soon.