One of Vista's biggest faults in consumers' minds has been that so-called "supporting devices" don't truly seem to support the operating system -- turning them on the first time means fighting the OS. Microsoft wants that to change.

With much of the Windows 7 news actually having been divulged the week before at PDC, it was left for Microsoft corporate vice president and Windows chief Steven Sinofsky and his new partner, Core Operating System manager John DeVaan, to set a theme for WinHEC 2008 in Los Angeles that distinguished their efforts from Windows Vista while at the same time maintaining a respectable level of enthusiasm.

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On Tuesday, Adobe Systems Inc. issued patches for a five-month old vulnerability in Reader and Acrobat 8.1.2, and today, six critical patches were released for Flash Player 9.

JavaScript vulnerabilities in older versions of Acrobat and Reader could allow remote code execution if not properly patched. This is the fifth update to Reader this year that addresses JavaScript issues. NCircle security expert Andrew Storms told Computerworld in June that Adobe's repeated JavaScript bugs amounted to an epidemic. "Since JavaScript has been a target for so many years, why hasn't Adobe flushed out these vulnerabilities already?" he questioned.

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Yesterday, chip designer AMD said it will be continuing its re-structuring efforts by cutting 500 jobs internationally, in addition to cuts it had already announced in the spring.

Sunnyvale, California's Advanced Micro Devices is the second largest producer of x86 microprocessors worldwide, behind Intel. Since last year, the company has been going through various stages of what it called its "Asset Light/Asset Smart" move, to streamline business and return it to profitability.

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Is the pricing of TV services fair to consumers? The FCC is launching a probe to find out whether the wallets of home subscribers are getting corralled in the stampede by Verizon and cable providers to HDTV.

Are US consumers being forced to pay for higher-end TV services they don't really want? The Federal Communications Commission is about to examine an emerging practice among cable providers of moving old-fashioned analog TV programming into digital tiers and pricing structures so as to make room for HDTV.

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Though no reports of substantial problems have emerged, the tech behind Tuesday's election didn't necessarily cover itself in glory.

OurVoteLive.org blogged that it had received over 75,000 calls since Tuesday, though causes varied and only a minority of calls received concerned e-voting trouble -- 1,730 since yesterday. The VoterAction hotline reported 16,000 calls, with as many as 3,000 in just one hour, again with a fraction of those reflecting machine problems.

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WiMAX users in the US will be getting their 4G wireless services not from Sprint -- and not from the "old" Clearwire -- but from a combined entity known as "New Clearwire."

The long sought after FCC approval of a $14.5 billion WiMAX merger between Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire opens the door to the start of nationwide 4G services to be offered through a new provider called New Clearwire, an entity that will compete with 4G LTE services from Verizon Wireless and AT&T.

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Phoenix Technologies, makers of the BIOS of the same name, announced today a partnership with Opera software that will give its Hyperspace virtual Linux environment instant-on Internet browsing.

Last week, Phoenix Technologies announced Hyperspace would be receiving Corel LinDVD, enabling systems running Hyperspace to access DVD drives while the core OS is asleep, rebooting, or even if it has failed.

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It's a race now to be the first to implement an evidence-proofing feature in an RTM of a Web browser. The fellow in charge of making it work for Firefox made his suggestions known over the weekend, and he wants to keep things simple.

It's rare that Mozilla Firefox finds itself in the role of playing catch-up in the feature department. But with a special private mode that suspends the recording of cache and history data already showing up in both Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and even the earliest betas of Google Chrome, the open source developers at Mozilla are stepping on the gas for a feature they've actually considered for several years.

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Before sealing a $28.1B deal to buy Alltel Communications on Tuesday, Verizon needed to make concessions to both the FCC and Justice Department so as to allay the competitive concerns of other wireless providers.

Verizon is now the largest wireless carrier in the US, following hard won approval by the federal government on Tuesday of its controversial merger with Alltel.

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For the first time ever, the Firefox browser accounted for 20 percent of browser usage over a sustained period. The browser topped the one-fifth mark for two weeks in October.

The numbers for the rest of the month weren't too shabby either, according to numbers released by analytics provider NetApplications. At no point during the month did the browser represent less than 19.23 percent of browser usage. On its best day, October 19, Firefox's share of the browser universe was 21.78 percent.

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The DMP-BD50, Panasonic's entry-level BD-Live player, has still to be officially released, but has surfaced several times online at various price points. It has again appeared, at its lowest price yet.

Panasonic's first BD-Live Blu-Ray machine premiered at CES this year, showing off the extra features that can be obtained by connecting a Blu-ray player to the Internet. At the time, there was no launch date or price, but Panasonic told BetaNews that it would be watching how the market changes before deciding on anything.

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Google's Android Market online store is slated to gain some new software applications over the next few months, and it looks as though a native e-book reader will be one of them. But developers may want to fix some glitches first.

An Android edition of a well-acclaimed e-book reader is on its way to Google's Android Market, but not as quickly as software developers first hoped.

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In the United Kingdom this week, the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) unveiled the "MP3 Compatible" campaign, to easily inform customers whether the content they're downloading is actually in MP3 format.

Digital music vendors Play.com, HMV, 7digital, Digitalstores.co.uk, Tescodigital, Woolworthsdownload.co.uk, and Tunetribe.com have all adopted the ERA's new "MP3 Compatible" seal, to indicate that their content is MP3 and not another format that is less universally compatible or protected by DRM.

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Citing the possibility of protracted scrutiny from government investigators, Google's senior counsel this morning stated his company has decided to back away from its AdSense sharing deal with Yahoo.

"After four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it's clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement," reads a statement from Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond this morning. "Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn't have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement."

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After a price reduction over the weekend for the shrink-wrapped System Builder Edition of Windows Home Server, at least one online retailer extended that discount to customers, while others sell out their inventories at 62% higher.

The OEM editions of Microsoft operating systems and applications are typically sold without the fancy box, and with licenses that stipulate their use in pre-installation for computers that are to be resold, but that stipulation has historically never been enforced. Almost a decade ago, the OSR2 bundle of Windows 98 -- what many at the time called the most stable edition of that system, even though it wasn't really a separate build -- ended up being sold in retail establishments such as Egghead and CompUSA.

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