In a sign that Microsoft will indeed be marching to a new and different drum after Bill Gates exits the scene, its Business Division President will step down, and the former head of the company that created Flash will take his spot.

He was not President of Microsoft for all that long, but Jeff Raikes has easily been as much a part of the character of his company as Steve Ballmer. Having joined the company 27 years ago to forge what today could be considered its most successful and powerful product line after Windows, Microsoft Office, Raikes helped bring the "suits" into Microsoft.

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Before the CES show floor closed for the year, we got some face time with D-Link's DivX Connected device, which as the name suggests, is a display extender for DivX content. The device has been available in parts of Europe since November and will ship in the US before the summer with a price of "under $250."

DivX has long had its codecs integrated into DVD players and other consumer electronics devices, but the DivX Connected platform is different. The company has developed the software and handled the hardware design itself through a partner ODM. That means manufacturers such as D-Link can easily put a DivX Connected device on the market.

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Is Linux and open source software really more 'secure' than commercial software products? Maybe, yet maybe not. The US Dept. of Homeland Security and two research partners have now detected significant flaws in Samba, Python, Perl, and about 180 other open source projects -- but fixes are on the way.

Although some have claimed that Linux and other open source projects are more "secure" than commercial software, a bug-finding program sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has now discovered significant flaws in 180 different open source software projects.

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The case against Intel's right to pay its channel clients for exclusivity has been a matter for a civil court. But if the New York Attorney General finds what he's looking for, the company could find the case against it both upgraded and multithreaded.

The spotlight will no doubt be turned on full for what is likely to become the next huge platform for technology litigation: Newly elected Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whose surname is already monumental in his home state of New York, has issued subpoenas for documents in a criminal investigation against Intel's conduct.

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The maker of some of the most popular RSS and Atom tools for both Windows and Mac stunned everyone yesterday by declaring all of its consumer-grade software to be available free-of-charge.

The entire suite of RSS reader client products produced by NewsGator has been made free of charge, in a stunning though perhaps brilliant move by the company to draw attention to its enterprise-class RSS servers, which constitute the bulk of the company's revenue.

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With the last remaining label of the big four to join the online retailer's new music store, it could be argued that DRM is essentially dead.

Last week, Sony announced its plans to go DRM-free. It did not name any distribution points at the time, although analysts speculated that Amazon would eventually carry Sony's content.

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The memory chip manufacturer will use technology from Eye-Fi to add network connectivity for users of its own memory cards.

With wireless built onto the card, users will be able to send pictures directly from the camera to the computer. While Eye-Fi already has released its own card based on its technology, it sees Lexar as a way for Eye-Fi to gain mass appeal.

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Although AMD didn't have a major presence at CES, the chipmaker did have a reference design of its upcoming Puma platform on hand to show how it out-performs Intel's Centrino platform.

Puma is essentially the company's new "Griffin" processor paired with an ATI graphics chipset and designed for laptops. It also adds a chip dedicated for high-definition video that sits right on the GPU. The platform will be the first to support DirectX 10.1 in a mobile environment.

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5:00 pm ET January 10, 2008 -- Universal Studios has officially dispelled the rumors from Variety that it will drop HD DVD and switch to Blu-ray.

"Contrary to unsubstantiated rumors from unnamed sources, Universal's current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format," said Ken Graffeo, executive vice president of HD strategic marketing for Universal Studios Home Entertainment and also co-president of the HD DVD Promotional Group.

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The service had already been offering users a way to stream photos and music from their computers, and its provider announced at CES that it will soon add video to the mix.

The new functionality was demoed on a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, for which WeBot built a custom interface in order to take advantage of the device's feature set. Video would be integrated with the other content types already supported.

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Want to know what the weather is like right now somewhere else? Today, you can just click around on a radar-enabled Google map to quickly get the lowdown on temperature, humidity, wind conditions, and a lot more.

When you're heading out of town, you're interested in what kind of weather to expect when you get there, right? Well, starting today, answering questions like that is as easy as clicking on a Google map, due to a new "mapplet" rolled out by The Weather Channel Interactive, Inc. (TWCI).

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Scott Fulton, BetaNews: Every year, solid-state storage advances just a little bit further, often just enough to prompt analysts to ask yet again, when will it be time to declare spinning platters of magnetic data obsolete? If only hard drive technology would just stop rapidly evolving on its own for a little while, perhaps we'd have an answer.

Samsung made some waves at the start of CES week by announcing it's boosting its solid state drive (SSD) capacity to 128 GB, with a new model whose SATA II interface enables it to read data at 100 Mbps. Seek times have never been a problem for memory-based storage, but sustained throughput continues to dog the SSD.

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It may not be exactly possible for high-definition discs to pick up where their lofty goals of 2005 left off. Transmission technology has evolved very rapidly during that time, partly due to the format war's very existence.

In the midst of the spat between different groups of intellectual property holders over extremely esoteric matters, the effect of which was to effectively stall the advancement of high-definition disc technology, telecommunications companies, CATV providers, and a few bold startup companies planned to pick up the pieces of both formats. Their plan is to bypass Blu-ray 2.0's connection to the Internet, and provide "all-on-demand" service for a huge library of movies and recorded shows, apparently for subscription rates.

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The electronics maker is making some changes to its product lineup in its home market, deciding to focus on the 40 GB model.

While there are no immediate plans to replace the discontinued models in the immediate future, Sony says that it would launch new models based on the preferences of its customers based on demand.

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Despite the generally bad news thus far from many US retailers about this holiday season's sales, the nation's largest gaming retailer has posted stellar results.

Holiday same-store sales for GameStop shot up some 20% over the previous year, with total sales increasing 35%. GameStop's success even gave it enough confidence to raise its 2007 fiscal guidance by 13 cents per share.

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