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If the strange feeling that Vista was less secure than XP was topmost on critics' gripe lists over the last three years -- regardless of the facts which contra-indicate that feeling -- running a close second was the feeling that very little, if anything, outside of the PC worked with Vista when you plugged it in.

Here, the facts aren't all there to compensate for the feeling. Even in recent months, Palm Centro users complained about the lack of a Vista driver for connecting Centro to the PC outside of a very slow Bluetooth; Minolta scanner users were advised to hack their own .INF files with Notepad in order to get Vista to recognize their brands; and Canon digital camera owners are being told by that company's tech support staff that Microsoft was supposed to make the Vista drivers for their cameras, but didn't.

British Television broadcaster Sky is reportedly working to offer both live and on-demand IPTV programming through Xbox Live in the UK. The BBC reports that it will be similar to Sky Player, a piece of PC/Mac software that allows subscribers to consume Sky IPTV anywhere they have an Internet connection.

But the project sounds much more like one presumed to still be in testing from Sky competitor BT. In 2008, British Telecom announced that its BT Vision service, based upon Microsoft Mediaroom, would bring IPTV to the Xbox 360. However, no completed product has yet been revealed. Exactly one year later at CES 2009, the trials were reported to be ongoing.

Some of us would admit, Bing is a better choice for a big search engine name than "Kumo," which was apparently a serious candidate. But if Microsoft was truly listening to its customers to the degree it has been with Windows 7 of late, would it have come up with an even better brand? Could you Name That Search Engine in four notes or less?

We thought we'd give you a shot at it. Here's your chance to out-ping Bing. The Betanews staff will judge your submissions for a possible better name. But we're going to throw a monkey wrench in the equation: Along with your name, we're challenging you to create a 140-character-or-less tagline, which you would imagine would appear on the front page of the site to replace Windows Live Search, as well as in TV, radio, and Internet display ads.

The pairing of Sprint and Palm for the launch of the Pre was romantic. Don't laugh, you thought it too. Erstwhile smartphone leader Palm put its best hope for survival in the underdog wireless carrier who, without the Pre, has no ultra-competitive exclusive touchphone. Both companies have endured declining market share, and together they could take on the world and get some of it back.

Well that romance is over, and it ended a little more than a week before the Pre even hit consumer availability. Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless, yesterday announced that his company will offer the Pre "in the next six months."

With a national plan for broadband Internet deployment due in just nine months, a report published Wednesday by FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps -- still serving as Acting Chairman until the confirmation of Julius Genachowski gets back on track -- admits that the data on just how sparse broadband service is in the nation's rural areas has yet to be compiled. Less than a year before the deadline on action, the government literally doesn't know.

"Our efforts to bring robust and affordable broadband to rural America begin with a simple question: What is the current state of broadband in rural America?" Commissioner Copps writes (PDF available here). "We would like to answer this question definitively, and detail where broadband facilities are deployed, their speeds, and the number of broadband subscribers throughout rural America. Regrettably, we cannot. The Commission and other federal agencies simply have not collected the comprehensive and reliable data needed to answer this question. As the Commission has indicated, more needs to be done to obtain an accurate picture of broadband deployment and usage in America, including its rural areas."

With hours (if not minutes) to go before President Obama reveals the results of a comprehensive study of federal cybersecurity, consumer gadgets take the stage on a sleepy Friday to cap off a noisy week. We now know, for instance, just how long Sprint's exclusivity over the Palm Pre will last in the US. Did anyone have dibs on six months? No, not even that.

It's no longer the "Sprint Pre"

Pre-Vista versions of Windows are vulnerable to a hole in Microsoft DirectX that's currently under limited attack, the company has announced. The vulnerability in quartz.dll could allow an attacker to strike through QuickTime playback plug-ins for any browser using the affected platform.

The problem, according to the security advisory, lies in the QuickTime Movie Parser Filter that DirectShow uses to process files in that format, specifically in the quartz.dll file. It's available for exploitation even if the system doesn't have QuickTime installed. For the moment, there's no patch, but a post on Microsoft's Security Research & Defense blog details the currently recommended workarounds.

It's not unusual to see something emerging from Google's laboratories that folks in the general press fail to understand, and the company's marketing is partly to blame there. The public introduction during this morning's I/O Developers' conference of a Web programming construct called Google Wave generated headlines ranging in scope from a new competitor for Microsoft SharePoint, to a next generation social network, to a series of browser extensions for Chrome to rival the Mozilla Jetpack project, and finally to the company's evil plan to conquer and corrupt HTML 5.

Excluding the latter, it could very well be all of these items. Essentially, Wave is an architecture, and not really a very new one. It's an old solution to a very old problem: that of synchronicity in distributed applications. As database architects know better than anyone, the problem with maintaining a distributed database is that multiple users may make changes that conflict with each other, leading to disparity and multiple versions. Currently, transactional modeling solves that problem, but a more direct and simpler approach from a mathematical standpoint would be simply to translate every operation, or every change a user requests to a database -- every command from client to server -- into a figurative mathematical language so that the terms of the command take into account the changes simultaneously being ordered by all the others.

After Boxee tried to pull studio-encumbered Hulu out of the browser and into a media center application, Hulu has released a desktop application for Windows and Mac.

Today, the beta of Hulu Desktop was released, a Flash 9-based application that allows users to browse and consume the popular streaming TV site's content with a Windows Media Center- or Apple Remote.

Download Google Chrome 3.0.182.2 Beta for Windows from Fileforum now.

It has been hard to tell, since Google pulled the "beta" flag from its Chrome browser back in December, where we are in that software's development process. So, clarifying for all the good folks in Fileforum: Welcome to 3.0.182.2, the current version of the browser not to be found in the stable download channel. Remember that Google is the first to say they "don't give to much weight to version numbers," and enjoy the latest rev for what it is: A few fixes, a few tweaks, and a lot of anticipation for Extensions, coming soon to a How-Did-I-Live-Without-This? near you.

Sony Ericsson today officially announced Satio, its new 12 megapixel camera-equipped flagship mobile device that was formerly known as Idou.

All the details of the S60-based device have been revealed. Formerly, it was simply known as a 3.5" 16x9 touchscreen device with the aforementioned high pixel density camera and associated xenon flash that dropped Sony Ericsson's customary M2 memory card in favor of MicroSD.

If you've been testing the final Windows 7 Release Candidate on your own physical platforms, and you wonder what's giving you that feeling that it's just a bit peppier, a tad zippier, it's not an illusion. Betanews tests all this week, concluding today, comparing all the major stable release and development Windows-based Web browsers, running on exactly the same physical computer with fresh Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 RC partitions, confirmed what our eyes and gut feelings were telling us: On average, most browsers ran 11.9% faster in Windows 7 than on the same machine running Vista SP2, with most speed gains falling right around that mark.

Internet Explorer 8, for example, runs 15% faster in Windows 7 than in Vista SP2, in multiple tests whose results were within one another by a hundredth of a point. Using our performance index as a guide, if you consider the relatively slow Internet Explorer 7 in Vista SP2 as a 1.00, then in a fresh test of IE8 on the same platform, the newer browser in Vista SP2 scored a 2.03 -- performing generally better than double its predecessor. But in Windows 7, the score for IE8 rises to a 2.27.

Since March 2009, our Windows Web browser performance test suite has utilized four components which score different aspects of the browser engine: the HowToCreate.uk CSS rendering test, the Celtic Kane basic speed comparison, the Web Standards Project's Acid3 standards compliance test, and the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. We've received approximately equivalent numbers of praises and complaints for our having chosen all four of these independent analyses for our suite, though we see no reason at present to discredit any of them.

We did have to modify the HowToCreate.uk test internally, because the way it typically accounts for its own speed does not take into account how the onLoad event fires differently with various browsers' JavaScript interpreters. Our modifications account for the discrepancy, and we applied those modifications to all the browsers we test, not just those (Google Chrome, Apple Safari) which fire differently.

Poor Windows 7. Months before its official launch, it's already fighting to live down the reputation of its older siblings. It's bad enough it has to fight perceptions of insecurity (I'm looking at you, XP) and bloated incompatibility (Vista, anyone?). But like the poor kid entering a high school after his older brothers have spent years being serially suspended for misbehaviour and general hooliganism, Windows 7 has an uphill battle ahead of it. Whether the perceptions are earned or not is irrelevant. Undoing them is a monumental process either way, and it all rests on the shoulders of a kid whose only mistake seems to lie in carrying the family name.

But undo these perceptions it must. Windows 7 promises to be Microsoft's most crucial launch ever because the company's very future has never been in as much question as it is now. Its two cash cow franchises, Windows and Office, are mooing a little less deeply these days thanks to a seismic shift away from the traditional PC model. While Vista's problems are more perception than anything else, there's no escaping the cruel reality that the age of Windows-everywhere-by-default is over. As conventional desktop and laptop PCs give way to all sorts of new form factors running all sorts of new operating systems and connecting to the outside world in all sorts of unconventional ways, Microsoft can't afford another lukewarm Windows launch.

Today, Microsoft officially unleashed Bing upon the world. It's a brand that will be associated with intelligent search, and is hence classified as a "Decision Engine," rather than a search engine. Rollout of the new service (to be located at www.bing.com) begins over the next few days and will be completed in under a week, with the target deployment date of June third.

Click the Bing logo for slideshow.