In a stock market desperately searching for good news, HP's quarterly numbers provided a much needed boost.

Since joining HP in 2005 as the permanent replacement to controversial CEO Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd has engineered a stunning comeback. In fact, this quarter revenue grew at the fastest rate that it had since 2000, amidst the height of the dot-com boom.

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Stinging from its loss in the Russian courts, prosecutors and the recording industry pledged to appeal the dismissal of a case against former Allofmp3 and Mediaservices head Denis Kvasov. According to a spokesperson for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the plaintiffs have one week to file their appeal.

A Russian District Court judge found that the prosecution did not have sufficient evidence to back up their charges and threw the case out earlier this week. The IFPI has not elaborated on what their basis for an appeal would be, however it continued to stress that AllofMP3 operated "in clear violation of copyright law."

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Microsoft on Friday said it had released the final version of its Windows Live ID authentication system, which would allow third-party developers wishing to build applications around Windows Live services to implement the authentication scheme on their sites. The service directs requests to Microsoft to sign in, then directs them back with a unique identifier used to access various Live services.

The release provides samples of code used to integrate Windows Live in various languages including ASP.NET, Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, and PHP. Microsoft has also provided improved documentation over what was provided with the Alpha version of the release provided at Mix 07. The SDK is now available for download from the Microsoft website.

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When a parent finds his child with chocolate on her cheeks saying she hasn't been sneaking candy from the pantry, he may find himself giving the oft-repeated lecture about how small lies are just as bad as big ones. If he then goes to work as the chief financial officer of a corporation, he might find himself in the position of explaining away accounting fraud as a minor deficiency in the context of a major company, reminding stockholders that corporate revenues are big and adjustments to those revenues, real or imaginary, are often small.

Dell Computer CFO Don J. Carty attempted to appear less like a parent yesterday afternoon. At his press conference, he first tried to paint a picture of a company where little men made little adjustments to meet little targets, in the context of a big manufacturer with a big customer base and a big number of outstanding shares.

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Microsoft on Thursday released an updated preview of Expression Blend 2, the next version of its interface design tool that integrates into Silverlight, Microsoft's new Web-based platform for rich media that is competing with Flash. Most notably, the August update supports Visual Studio 2008, which is also in beta.

Expression Studio 1.0 was officially launched at MIX 07 at the end of April, and Microsoft had already prepared Blend 2 specifically for Silverlight. The company hopes to entice developers to build rich Web interfaces using the tool, and then deploying them with Silverlight, which requires a browser plug-in much like Flash. Other updates in the August Blend 2 preview include reusing control content like animations, XAML editing improvements, a Storyboard Picker, and object manipulation. Download Blend 2 from FileForum.

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Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the Compact Disc. However, is there much time left for the format in the age of the digital download?

The first CDs rolled off an assembly line on August 17, 1982 with a copy of Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony. It was hailed as the next big thing in music, replacing the cassette tape and vinyl LP as the de facto format for many music aficionados.

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DivX announced this week that it has certified over 100 million devices to use its video format since 2003, which it began the program with consumer electronics makers. The company estimates that fully 32% of all standalone DVD players sold worldwide now support DivX. This number reaches 90% in Russia, Spain, France and Korea.

But its major success on the hardware side has yet to translate into actual use. DivX has struggled to gain traction among consumers, and a number of its efforts to deliver DivX-encoded video to consumers have floundered. In fact, it could be argued that most of its use on DVD players has been playing back illicitly downloaded movies. The company is now reportedly testing a set-top box to offering streaming video over the Web, but few concrete details are known.

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Internet calling service Skype remained offline for most users Friday morning, as a major outage related to account sign-ins continued into its second day. Skype owner eBay's stock took a hit Thursday from the news, but Skype employees said the service was "on the road to recovery." Interestingly, Skype released a new version of its software Friday, despite the outage.

It's still not clear what exactly happened to cause the downtime, but more details will likely surface the problem is fully resolved. Skype did say that planned maintenance was not the cause, nor was an attack. "An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday," said Skype's Villu Arak.

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Qualcomm found itself in legal trouble yet again Friday, as Nokia said it will ask the US International Trade Commission to investigate claims of patent infringement.

Nokia says Qualcomm's chipsets infringe on five of its patents relating to CDMA2000 and GSM/WCDMA. It is asking the ITC to investigate and bar the importation into the US of these chips.

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In an historic admission of culpability, Dell Computer this afternoon announced that its internal review of accounting practices dating back to its 2003 fiscal year turned up evidence of senior executives having adjusted its balance sheets in order for the company to meet specific financial goals.

This admission, if validated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission which is also investigating Dell, would go way beyond the initial subject matter of the accounting scandal. That investigation looked into whether the issuance of backdated stock options to senior executives was intentionally not reported on the company's balance sheets as expenses.

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Google said Thursday that it had signed on another five universities to its Google Apps Education Edition. The free service for schools offers students of the universities e-mail, calendaring, documents and spreadsheet applications. It was already in use in several schools, including Arizona State and Northwestern, as well as several international colleges.

The schools added Thursday include the University of North Carolina Greensboro, Clemson, University of Texas San Antonio, Kennesaw State University, and Arkansas State.

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IBM and Sun Microsystems did indeed announce an agreement for deploying the Solaris operating system on IBM servers, but it wasn't the system we guessed: IBM will deploy Solaris for its Intel x86-based System x and BladeCenter servers.

It's a significant move, as it validates the presence of Sun's operating system among a broad customer base that few can mistake as a "niche." As Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told reporters today, IBM becomes the first Tier 1 reseller of Solaris products and services for x86 platforms.

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Microsoft is actively getting into the business of lobbying the federal government to reject the Google-DoubleClick merger, government documents indicate.

A Wednesday Associated Press article detailed a lobbying disclosure form that the Redmond company is required to file with Congress. It showed that Microsoft hired Patton Boggs LLP to lobby the government concerning the DoubleClick merger.

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Netflix silently dropped its monthly fee for its three disc out plan on Thursday, sending a e-mail to subscribers. The price will drop by a $1 to $15.99 monthly, a dollar cheaper than a similar plan from Blockbuster. The lower price will take effect with the first statement after today.

The last price decrease by the company was in July, when it lowered it by a dollar to $16.99. This matched a move by Blockbuster the month before. Both sides are locked in a bitter battle for online retail customers, which Blockbuster has showed strength in recent months, adding more customers than its rival.

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McAfee said Wednesday that it was able to confirm an earlier reported zero-day flaw in Yahoo Messenger, which could put users at risk of a code-execution attack.

According to a post on the company's Avert Labs web log, the flaw can be exploited when the victim accepts an invite for a webcam chat. McAfee said that it had informed Yahoo of the issue, which was not available for comment.

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