"We feel we are achieving parity in how Office treats the format, by making them all part of just one simple list of formats supported by Office," said Microsoft Office Product Manager Doug Mahugh, in an interview with BetaNews.

For the history of applications up until now, the specification of the format used to encode documents was defined largely and almost inescapably by the functionality of the programs which utilize them. A format represented what an application was designed to do, and that format changed when the application changed.

Western Digital today introduced its 320 GB My Passport Studio Portable line of hard drives for Mac computers, which eliminate the need for an external power adapter.

At less than five ounces and measuring 3.2" x 5.0" x .71", the FireWire 400- and USB 2.0-powered hard drives. Since the HDDs have been designed to be portable, WD used a shock-resistant enclosure that will allow it to take a minimal amount of damage.

Leading US wireless carrier AT&T said Wednesday it would complete the roll-out of HSUPA technology on its 3G network by the end of June, which will boost possible upload speeds to 800 kilobits per second.

HSUPA will complement HSDPA, which has already reached all of the 275 markets currently served by AT&T's 3G network. The addition completes the company's deployment of HSPA technology, which will eventually make way for HSPA+ and at some point in the future, LTE.

Details have emerged about the Communications Data Bill currently in pre-legislation in the UK. Home Office representatives have declined to address whether passage of this bill will mean keeping a central database of all e-mails and texts sent, calls made, and Web pages viewed.

More details have emerged about the Communications Data Bill currently in pre-legislation in the UK, leading many to speculate that the British government is assembling the means to spy on its citizens.

The company says that the reason why it's been so secretive is competition. However, at the same time, it realizes questions remain over how it is providing search results.

In a post to the official Google blog, search quality chief Udi Manber said that the company has been purposely quiet on its ranking practices to protect its product. On one hand, knowledge of how Google works could allow webmasters to game the system -- while knowledge of search practices could help competitors.

With the $13.9 billion buyout of IT outsourcer EDS now in progress, HP this week posted a strong second fiscal quarter across most of of its wide-ranging product areas, despite experiencing what CEO Mark Hurd called a "spotty" US market.

With total revenues of $28.3 billion, Hewlett-Packard increased its earnings per share by 24% over the same quarter last year, Hurd said in a conference call with financial analysts yesterday afternoon.

On Monday during a press conference at its Zeitgeist Partner Forum in Great Britain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-Presidents Sergey Brin and Larry Page were widely cited as having opened up the door to a possible partnership, or even something more, with Yahoo.

But this afternoon, a Google spokesperson denied to BetaNews that any of its executives made such overtures. And a YouTube video of the conference which re-emerged this morning after having been absent from public view for most of yesterday, would appear to confirm the spokesperson's take on the story. In fact, Brin and Page were openly reluctant to comment, deferring to Schmidt who made a brief reference to what was then considered a rumor -- later confirmed -- that Microsoft would be open to a purchase of part of Yahoo.

In an effort to capitalize on the steady popularity of virtualization, the makers of low-power, thin client PCs announced Wyse Thin OS 6.2 has added for virtual desktop environments from VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix Systems.

The official announcement was made during the Citrix Synergy '08 convention in Houston, where companies are meeting to discuss virtualization and application delivery to clients. Wyse is one of Citrix's longstanding and most trusted partners.

The latest version of the company's commercial version of Linux for businesses offers new hardware support, several new features, and performance and stability improvements.

The company's Enterprise version is the premium edition of its Linux distribution. Back in 2003, the company split its business up into the Enterprise effort and Fedora, its sponsored open source project.

Recently relegated to also-ran status among social networks behind competitors MySpace and Facebook, Friendster launched a mobile version of its site globally on Wednesday.

While the site is among the top 10 largest in the world and the largest social network in Asia, according to comScore Media Metrix, it lags far behind its competitors. The mobile site is obviously an attempt to catch up.

Redlasso, a service that syndicates live television and radio and which also allows users to create their own clips from footage to embed in their own sites, has received a cease-and-desist order from three major TV networks.

Fox, CBS, and NBC have jointly sent Redlasso a written demand giving it until May 29th to shape up or get sued for, among other things, unfair competition, false designation of origin, and trademark infringement. The networks charge that copyright law has been violated because the service syndicates video and audio material that neither belongs to it, nor that it has been given permission to use.

In a breakthrough development, Microsoft has announced its future editions of Microsoft Office, beginning with Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, will enable users to choose OpenDocument support as an alternate default option.

Microsoft's director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, and its senior product manager for ISO 29500-based products, Doug Mahugh, jointly confirmed the news to BetaNews personally.

Microsoft wants you to start using Windows Live Search to shop instead of rivals Google and Yahoo, and in return is willing to pay you cash.

The new program, called Live Search cashback and rolled out at the Advance 08 advertising conference in San Francisco Wednesday morning, promises to pay back users who find and buy products using its search engine between 2% and 30% of the purchase price.

With the sad status of being the world's #4 browser settling hard upon it, how does Opera find a niche? This morning, it answered that question by demonstrating itself literally picking up the pieces of an old project, and calling them an SDK.

According to recent statistics from the Web developers' educational site W3Schools.com, about 1.4% of the world's browsers last month responded as being Opera. That on the low side of where Opera's share of HTTP requests has been hovering for at least the last five years.

In broadband access, the United States has now slipped from twelfth to fifteen place versus other countries, according to new research released this week by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The OECD study points to factors ranging from pricing to download speeds as possible reasons why the US may be losing ground, at least compared against other countries. Unlike some other broadband studies, which compare access rates across wider numbers of countries, the OECD research looks only at penetration rates among its own 30 member nations.