A New York Times story published yesterday cited a report from Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff, which inferred that since the ratio of iTunes songs sold per iPod sold has been steadily rising, a disconnect could be occurring between the two products in a changing portable media market.

"The numbers suggest that iPods are not driving iTunes sales as much as early supporters may have expected," the Times' Alex Mindlin wrote.

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As many as 800,000 current and former employees and students of the University of California Los Angeles may be at risk after a hacker gained access to their private information, the school disclosed on Tuesday.

Although there is no evidence that any of the data has actually been misused, the school is taking the indicident seriously. UCLA joins companies like Citigroup, DSW Shoe Warehouse, and ChoicePoint, which have also either lost or had customer data compromised in the last year.

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Following its successful promotion through the end of this month that allows for free phone calls to the US and Canada, Skype is now offering an unlimited calling plan that will allow users to make calls to both regions for a period of 12 months for under $30 USD.

The new plan is the first time that the company is offering an unlimited service package, and is aimed at luring more of its 136 million plus global users to sign up for premium services.

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Customers who have purchased an HP Pavilion or Digital Entertainment Center PC, or a Compaq Pavilion PC -- all desktop models only -- on or after October 26, with Windows XP pre-installed, will be eligible for upgrade kits for corresponding editions of Windows Vista next month, HP announced this morning

The upgrade plan addresses the "coupon" problem that PC vendors are facing this season: having to sell computers to customers with the promise of their being able to run a "full Vista experience" they can't yet see for themselves.

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Hoping to spur development of Web sites using the AJAX development platform, Google on Tuesday released the Google Web Toolkit. The offering is a software development framework that would allow developers to create Web applications much more easily. Knowledge of only the Java programming language is necessary: the GWT would convert the code to compliant JavaScript and HTML for browsers.

The project is open source, and Google is asking developers to contribute in order to improve its offerings. "We've been working hard to build great tools for AJAX development, and now we're happy to begin working with the open source community towards the same goal," product manager Dan Peterson said.

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Having just emerged from a public beta process that began in the spring of 2005, and especially now that Java is an open-source project, developers will find little to be surprised about in Sun's newest Java SE 6, released yesterday. But one sign that even Java is adapting with the times - besides its smaller size, which early adopters are applauding - is its new support for external scripting engines, which adopters might not be aware of.

For the first time, Java is "aware" of the presence of scripting languages, including JavaScript - which recently became part of the Java bundle. With scripting languages like Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) rapidly becoming common in the creation of browser-based front ends, Java SE 6's new recognition for scripting engines like JavaScript that follow a standard API to provide scriptable, server-driven functionality.

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Adobe may already own the market for electronic documents thanks to PDF, but the company knows that Microsoft has a habit of showing up late to the party and stealing the crown. In turn, Adobe is beta testing a new project it calls "Mars," which is an answer to Microsoft's new XPS format.

XPS, formerly known as Metro, is an XML-based "electronic paper" format that will allow documents to be displayed as they were saved on any platform. Many of the features of XPS mirror those in PDF, and Microsoft is working with printer manufacturers to include native support for the format - much like Adobe PostScript.

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Microsoft on Tuesday issued a patch for an earlier discovered flaw in Visual Studio 2005, while yet another cumulative patch for Internet Explorer was released, as well as one for a vulnerability within the Windows Media Format.

The Visual Studio flaw covers an issue that was first disclosed by researchers in early November. A remote code execution issue exists within a feature called the WMI Object Broker that is used by the WMI Wizard within Visual Studio.

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REVIEW For many seniors, using a cell phone can be a challenging and intimidating experience. Thus, they opt to not carry a cell phone; or if they do, refrain from using it much. A company called Jitterbug aims to change that.

Every part of the Jitterbug phone -- built by Samsung -- is designed to take into account the needs of this group. From the design of the handset to the simplified user interface, and even features that attempt to make it as much like a regular phone as possible, the learning curve is much less steep than a traditional cellular handset.

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The successor to Live Communications Server 2005, the component of Microsoft's Office System that handles communication between office workers, has entered private beta testing. Now simply called Office Communications Server 2007, the software integrates voice over IP calling with traditional phone setups.

While VoIP telephony has started to gain traction in the enterprise, the largest barrier to entry has remained the initial cost of migrating current systems. In addition, while businesses may save on calls themselves, the associated hardware costs are still sky high.

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In an announcement before semiconductor engineers in San Francisco this morning, AMD and IBM put forth proof of what could be their breakthrough process - their response to Intel in the race to reduction. It could pull AMD back even with Intel by 2008, if Intel doesn't respond in the intervening months.

In terms of semiconductor production process advancements, Intel's catapult to 65nm, culminating in last July's release of the first Core 2 Duo processors, put competitor AMD years behind, after it had enjoyed a comfortable lead for many months. For AMD to remain competitive, analysts believe it needs to catch up within no more than two product cycles.

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Just one month after a BetaNews report led retiring Windows chief Jim Allchin to explain his comments on Vista not needing antivirus software, an e-mail that is being used as evidence in one of the antitrust cases against Microsoft has him once again explaining his words.

This time, it has been discovered that Allchin said that he would buy a Macintosh computer in a January 7, 2004 e-mail to CEO Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates, had he not worked for the Redmond software maker. He lamented in the missive that Microsoft had lost its way.

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