Is Microsoft asking too much of consumers and small businesses planning to upgrade existing Windows XP or Vista PCs to Windows 7? That's the question I asked several analysts after reviewing a chart Microsoft provided to veteran technology reviewer Walt Mossberg.

Out of 66 upgrade scenarios, only 14 allow for "in-place" upgrades. The majority of scenarios require "custom install," which means either installing Windows 7 to a new directory or onto a clean hard drive. While data can be backed up and recovered, applications would need to be reinstalled.

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Though the news actually leaked out a bit early in the "AppPack" at the end of July, Geodelic's location-based Android app called Sherpa was officially launched yesterday for all Android users.

Sherpa combines "Web 2.0"-style profiling with location-based and contextual data to suggest nearby attractions, restaurants and retailers. Using a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation), Sherpa automatically learns a user's favorite locations and lifestyle behavior.  If a user eats out more than shops, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores. Sherpa will also only give suggestions that are pertinent to the time of day, so if you run a search at 2:00 am looking for government offices, you're not likely get anything without searching specifically.

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The current three-year working arrangement between the US Dept. of Commerce and the institution that maintains the Internet's top-level domain structure, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), expires at the end of this September. With the Internet being perceived as more of an international platform than an American one, support is growing among overseas legislators including the European Commission for the US Government to let lapse the term of its oversight role, and let ICANN be answerable to an international agency.

In very clear, and perhaps not-so-diplomatically phrased, statement last June, new ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom voiced his support for such a move. Although ICANN's partnerships with the DoC and private firm VeriSign were instrumental in moving past square one on a project to sign and secure the Internet's root zone addresses, Beckstrom said such partnerships could continue anyway if ICANN were answerable to an oversight board made up of its multitude of international stakeholders.

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Microsoft has a problem on its hands. Or more precisely one problem with three seemingly contradictory components:

Windows XP is too good for its own good. It needs to die for the company's sake. It won't die because nothing else -- not even Windows 7 -- currently approaches it.

We're closing in on eight years since XP first hit the market and began the long process of making us finally forget we ever used Windows 95, 98, and Windows Me. By anyone's standards, it's been one of Microsoft's most visibly successful products. It still runs on some 60% of all PCs years after it was supposed to have been retired as a front-line offering. It's sold around 800 million copies since its initial release. And if piracy is the sincerest form of flattery, hundreds of millions more illegal copies are in use across the globe. In an age where icons are in desperately short supply, this is as iconic a product as it gets.

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Right on schedule Thursday morning, what can probably be described as the "latest final edition" of Build 7600 of Windows 7 was made available to subscribers to Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet services for developers and admins. This will enable them to begin the process of finalizing upgrades to applications and to the systems using them, prior to the general availability date for the operating system, which remains set for October 22.

Absent from this morning's distribution, though not surprisingly, was any hint of "Windows 7 E," the browserless build of the OS that had been slated for distribution exclusively in Europe in the event that the European Commission had not reached a decision on the company's browser selection proposal. Last month, Microsoft presented a formal proposal to the EC that modeled a Web-based selection system for installing default browsers, one which presented Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera alongside Internet Explorer 8, in a menu that all European Windows users would see -- not just those with Windows 7.

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Twitter, the popular and ubiquitous (as long as you're over 25) microblogging service was down for several hours on Thursday.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in the site's official blog today.

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Android will be the next mobile platform to receive Opera Mobile 9.7, Opera Software CEO Jon von Tetzchner confirmed yesterday in an interview with PCMag Network.

Opera Mobile 9.7 was released in its first beta in June on Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, adding new server-side optimization called "Opera Turbo" which promised to substantially speed up page rendering when users browse the Web on a 2G connection.

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If the negative global economic trends truly are subsiding, as many analysts believe, then Lenovo may have sustained the worst the world could throw at it. It's scratched, and it's a little bruised, but it's not badly battered. Yesterday, the company posted a loss for the last quarter, but only the equivalent of $16 million USD (and that's just an "m"), on sales that declined nearly 18%.

Since Lenovo's profits had already been low in previous quarters, the company's gross profit decline of 37% may sound more dire than it truly is. As it turns out, cost-cutting enabled the company to shave $103 million in operating expenses in its fiscal first quarter over the same quarter the previous year, which very nearly kept the company in the black. And a 17% sales decline in the US -- a few ticks higher than the 13% analysts attribute to generally weakened PC demand -- was compensated for by a 15% sales gain in China, one tick higher than the number analysts attribute to China's continued economic ascent.

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Today, the Federal Communications Commission is holding the first of more than 20 public workshops focusing on the state of broadband access in the US, which will lead up to the creation of the National Broadband Plan in February 2010.

"From this point forward, there really is no letting up," newly minted FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said yesterday. "This will be a deeply fact-based and data-driven process. We're bringing experts in-house and reaching out to external academic partners. This will be a seriously open and participatory process. Workshops will be streamed online and allow for external participation."

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In its quarterly earnings call, News Corp. reported an annual decline in revenue of $1.7 billion, citing the overall weakness of the economy as a major factor, but highlighting the advertising-related declines in its television, newspaper and information services divisions.

Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation announced in its earnings call that the company is about to make a major change to its online news properties.

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If anyone knows about the pitfalls and headaches of managing evolving platforms for downward compatibility, it's Microsoft. But the Web is a platform that is maintained, effectively, by the publishers that produce content for it; and in recent years, it is they who have been plagued with the task of propping up their HTML code to remain compliant not with what developers consider the "standard," but instead with what analytics firm NetApplications reports, even to the very minute of this writing, is the single most used Microsoft Web browser: Internet Explorer 6.0.

Some 27.21% of global Internet users, based on July data, run IE6, compared to 23.09% using IE7 and 16.21% using Firefox 3.0. That's an astonishing statistic when you take into account how many Windows Vista-based systems are geared, by default, to alert users and administrators of the availability of IE8. Microsoft's U-turn toward very gradually embracing some accepted W3C standards began with the advent of IE7, which itself is leagues behind modern Web browsers including IE8.

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A contributor to the online forum TheHotfix.net has provided visual evidence of what appears to be a serious memory leak caused by the CHKDSK hard disk integrity checking utility included with a build of Windows 7 that has been tagged for RTM. The bug appears to occur during phase 4 of the disk check, and can push resource usage to the 96% level.

Tester Jordan M. Jacob provides a picture of the memory leak in progress, as depicted in Windows Task Manager, a portion of which is excerpted here. (It doesn't bode well for the integrity of the test that Apple's iTunes drivers also appear to be running.) Jacob goes on to warn that the leak is capable of sending the OS into the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD).

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Google operates its Chrome Web browser development process in three channels, all of which are under construction to some degree. The current "stable" channel is Chrome 2, which new users download by default; if they so desire, they can obtain a "beta" version of Chrome 3 instead. And then there's the "dev" channel, which is one step above and contains some code that could very well crash the browser.

With its latest drop of a developed version from the dev channel into the beta channel today, Google claimed a 30% speed differential between release 3.0.195.4 and the current stable release general users are downloading. "Google Chrome is now smarter about prioritizing the requests for the new page -- for instance, fetching text, images, and video for your new page -- ahead of the requests from the older pages," reads a blog post today from Google engineer Glen Murphy. "Loading pages on this beta release should also be faster than ever with DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings, and using V8 for proxy auto-config."

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This afternoon, Nielsen researchers David Martin and Sue MacDonald posted the Nielsen NetView Audience metric for Twitter in 2009, which shows that the majority of Twitter users are in the 25-54 age group.

The graph would otherwise be uninteresting were it not for the fact that 15-year old Morgan Stanley intern Matthew Robson declared that teenagers do not use Twitter, in a non-statistical representation of Teenager media consumption released last month.

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The Amazon Kindle may have achieved dominant mind share in e-book readers, but Sony is hoping to grab the attention of potential adopters by offering the cheapest e-reading device.

The Sony Reader Pocket Edition (PRS-300), a 5-inch e-book reader announced yesterday, will only cost $199, beating Amazon's Kindle 2 by $100. In July, Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle 2 to $299, knocking more than 15% off of its retail price.

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