Pc News

[Rasputin]

Survey: Vista Used Less than 1 percent of PCs

Windows Vista may yet prove to be an unstoppable juggernaut, but statistics released Thursday by a market research firm show that the new operating system hasn't even licked its nine-year old ancestor.

Vista was being used on less than 1 percent of PCs tracked in February by Aliso Viejo-based Net Applications Inc., making it the sixth most-popular operating system. That puts it behind Windows 98, which is still used on 1.5 percent of computers.

Vista's exact share was 0.93 percent. Windows XP continued to lead, with 84.3 percent, followed by Windows 2000, with 4.8 percent. Mac OS X on PowerPC machines had 4.3 percent, while newer Intel-based PCs running OS X had 2.1 percent.

Net Applications collects its data from the browsers of visitors to its network of more than 40,000 Web sites.

Vista's February share of PCs connected to the Internet -- a month after its consumer release and three months after its release to businesses -- represents a big leap over January, when it was used by just 0.2 percent of PCs. At the time, it lagged behind Windows ME, the 13-year-old Windows NT and various flavors of Linux.

"The big question is if and when are the masses going to switch?" Net Applications analyst Vince Vizzacarro said in a newsletter accompanying the statistics. "While Microsoft was late to market with Vista, Apple's taken advantage and is now up to a combined 6.38 percent market share. It looks like the market is buying Vista on new PC purchases, but there isn't a significant percentage of people upgrading existing PCs. I expect this trend to continue through the rest of 2007."

Some analysts have predicted that despite Microsoft's intention to spend half a billion dollars marketing Vista, conversions from XP won't be the norm until 2009.

Statistics for the first week of February -- Vista officially launched Jan. 30 -- were mixed. Current Analysis found sales of PCs -- with Vista preinstalled -- were up 173 percent from the week before. PC sales were also up 67 percent from the same time frame in 2006. But Current Analysis itself pointed out that the sales leaps were exaggerated partly by slowing sales as retailers and OEMs wound down their XP-based inventory.

By comparison, NPD Group Inc. found that first-week sales of boxed copies of Vista were down 60 percent compared with first-week boxed copies of Windows XP five years earlier.

Neither group has released statistics of Vista sales in subsequent weeks, though NPD analyst Chris Swenson is expected to release first-month retail sales of the new OS soon.

[Rasputin]

Microsoft OneCare Last in Antivirus Tests

Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare came in dead last out of a group of 17 antivirus programs tested against hundreds of thousands of worms, viruses, Trojan horses and other malware, an Austrian antivirus researcher reported Wednesday.

The AV Comparatives Web site, which is maintained by Andreas Cleminti from Innsbruck, Austria, posts quarterly results of tests that pit the top antivirus products against a dynamic list of nearly half a million individual pieces of malware.

Top dog, according to Cleminti's tests, was G Data Security's AntiVirusKit (AVK), which nailed 99.5 percent of the malicious code. Not far behind were AEC's TrustPort AV WS, at 99.4 percent, Avira's AntiVir PE Premium, at 98.9 percent, MicroWorld's eScan antivirus, at 97.9 percent, F-Secure's antivirus, at 97.9 percent, and Kaspersky Labs' AV, which stopped 97.9 percent of the malware.

Better known products such as Symantec's Norton antivirus and McAfee's VirusScan posted results of 96.8 percent and 91.6 percent, respectively.

Holding the bottom spot was Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare, the consumer security suite that the Redmond, Wash. developer launched last year. OneCare took care of just 82.4 percent of the malware.

Cleminti also tested the 17 products against polymorphic viruses, those which produce sometimes vast numbers of variants as they try to sneak by scanners. "The results of the polymorphic test are of importance because they how flexible an antivirus scan engine is and how good the detection quality of complex viruses is," said Cleminti in his write-up.

Only Symantec's Norton AntiVirus and ESET's NO D32 antivirus caught every variant of the 12 polymorphic families, he said. In that test, OneCare placed 15th, detecting every version of only two families, and missing seven of the polymorphic families completely.

Cleminti's report is available online.

This is not the first evaluation to give a Microsoft security program a black eye. Last week, for example, Australian security company PC Tools released research that claimed Windows Defender--Microsoft's anti-spyware title--detected just 46 percent to 53 percent of spyware.

"We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests," a Microsoft spokesperson said.

[Rasputin]

How's Your Disaster Recovery Plan?

Is your disaster recovery plan dependent on people showing up at your site to perform the recovery? If so, you might want to rethink that strategy and keep the lights on.

Most companies are going through ever-greater lengths to ensure that they can recover their primary data centers. They are creating recovery plans, building disaster recovery sites and, in some cases, actually testing them to make sure they work. It can be economical to go with a collocation facility that not only acts as a disaster recovery site, but also houses some of our business applications.

Without a collocation facility, in almost every case, you'll still need people to carry out the recovery. So when I was recently told by an individual familiar with the situation in New Orleans that some corporate managers had not considered what would happen if no one came in to carry out their company's disaster recovery, it makes me wonder what they are thinking.

Granted, major disasters like Hurricane Katrina don't happen every day, but they do happen, and most enterprise shops now need round-the-clock availability. And like it or not, relying on people to show up at a specific data center by a certain time to execute a recovery plan in the middle of a crisis reveals a certain lack of foresight.


In these situations, the first thoughts on the minds of people affected by a disaster are the survival and welfare of family and friends. While conscientious employees generally do not forsake going to work when tragedy strikes, showing up for work may not be their top priority.

I am all for disaster recovery plans, and with all of the technologies available today, there is no reason why each business, no matter its size, shouldn't have one in place. But always-on enterprises that are running leaner by the day need to account for the fact that when disasters strike, no one may show up at their companies' disaster recovery sites for quite some time.

[Rasputin]

Slot-Machine Maker Asked to Halt Subliminal Messages

Charges that video slot machines were programmed to flash subliminal signals of jackpot messages to gamblers has led to a casino operator to temporarily pull several types of the devices off the floor.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. (OLG), the state agency that operates the province's casinos, temporarily took 87 machines from casino floors on Feb. 22 after Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) filmed these machines and recorded images of them flashing jackpot signals for a fraction of a second while in use. Some officials feared that the messages may have been aimed at convincing gamblers to remain at the machines.

The three shuttered video slot-machine models, called Sgt. Fritters, Most Wanted and Billionaires, are all manufactured by Las Vegas-based Konami Gaming Inc.

An OLG spokeswoman said Friday that that the machines were carried from the casino floors after the agency was informed of the messages by province's gaming regulator, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO). "There are 87 machines out of 22,000 across Ontario," she said. "It's a very small number. In no way does it interfere with the integrity of the machines, and nobody has said that it had any effect on the outcome of the games."

The spokeswoman said the machines are expected to be returned to the casino floors after Konami "produces a software upgrade to eliminate the potential glitch."

The jackpot messages were discovered during a slow-motion viewing of a CBC film of machines being operated at Ontario casinos, said a spokesman for the AGCO. The news organization showed the film to the regulatory agency early last month, then aired the footage on television during a news segment on Feb. 26.

The slow-motion video revealed that the image of five alike symbols -- the winning hand -- was flashed for a fifth of a second as gamblers started the machine, the spokesman said. Such messages could signal to a gambler's unconscious mind that he has won the jackpot no matter what the true outcome of the spin, he said.

The spokesman said the image is invisible to the naked eye. "You can stand there for 20 hours and never see it," he said. "Some experts say that it's subliminal. The gambler supposedly sees it [unknowingly], and it induces them to play more and more. We don't condone subliminal messaging."

AGCO doesn't test for subliminal messaging in gaming devices, the spokesman noted. After viewing the film, AGCO officials immediately contacted Konami about the matter, he said. A software patch that corrects the "coding error" to be shipped to the casinos within a few days, the ACGO pokesman said.

A Konami spokesman denied that the machine sends subliminal messages to convince people to use their gambling machines. "There is no subliminal message in the software," said a spokesman. The company nevertheless is building a software patch that will scatter the symbols before the reel starts, he said.

[Rasputin]

Microsoft Cuts Price of Daylight Savings Time Patches

Microsoft slashed the fee it's charging some customers for daylight-saving time (DST) fixes to a tenth of last year's price because it needed "to do the right thing" as the time-change deadline approaches, a company executive said Thursday.

A new federal law takes effect this month that moves the start of daylight savings time (DST) up by several weeks, and shifts it back a week in November. Rather than move clocks forward an hour in early April, as has been the case in recent years, DST begins March 11. That's left companies scrambling for software fixes that change the pre-set DST changes hard-coded in operating systems and applications, including every version of Windows except for the just-released Vista.

"Unlike Y2K, which was a bug, many companies and parts of the government just didn't blow the horn on the impact the changes would have," said M3 Sweatt, the chief of staff of the Windows core development group. Microsoft products still getting mainstream support -- meaning software within the first five years of its release -- have received free patches. But operating systems and applications now getting what Microsoft dubs extended support receive only security fixes for free; Corporate customers who want non-security patches must fork over large fees to Microsoft.

Among the titles in that extended support category are Windows 2000, Exchange Server 2000 and Outlook 2000, the e-mail and calendar client included with Office 2000.

For users running that software, Microsoft charges $4,000 per product for DST fixes. For that amount, customers can apply the patches to all systems in their organizations, including branch offices and affiliates, said Sweatt. "All they can't do is redistribute them," he said.

The $4,000 fee is a dramatic price cut from the $40,000-per-product charge that Microsoft set in 2006. "We believe we had to do the right thing for our customers, so we did something on the fee," explained Sweatt. "There is a cost involved in producing this, but we're not making money on [the $4,000]. It recovers just a part of the cost of development and providing support."

That largess, however, doesn't extend to users still relying on even older Microsoft software, namely those products that have rolled off the support list entirely. Windows NT, for instance, which exited extended support more than two years ago, must be modified manually, as do other unsupported apps affected by the DST changes, including Exchange Server 5.5, which left support in January 2006, and Outlook 97, which lost support in February 2002.

Microsoft will not be writing a fix for those products. "It's just too difficult" to support obsolete software, said Sweatt. "It would involve significant" resources and apply to a very small group. Microsoft has previously urged those users to update to newer software.

As an option, Microsoft points some of those users to a support document posted last May and updated again Wednesday, in particular the "tzedit.exe" utility linked from the document. Microsoft states that Tzedit.exe works on all versions of Windows

There are no similar tools for aged Exchange Server or Outlook, however.

Windows Vista and Outlook 2007, released in January to retail customers and in November to business, do not need to be updated, since they were coded after Congress passed the 2005 Energy Policy Act that revised DST's start and stop dates.

[Rasputin]

FCC Orders Telcos to Support VoIP

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has ruled that incumbent local exchange carriers must connect to VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services, overruling two state public service commission opinions.

The FCC on Thursday granted a petition from Time Warner Cable Inc., which had complained that the South Carolina and Nebraska public service commissions had allowed rural local exchange carriers to refuse access to wholesale telecom vendors connecting to Time Warner's VOIP service.

The rural carriers had argued that FCC rules don't require them to connect to the wholesale vendors because they don't provide direct voice service to residents.

But the FCC said that argument was a misinterpretation of its rules.

The FCC "must promote competition in every sector it oversees and create a level playing field among service providers," said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, in a statement. The FCC decision "ensures that consumers in all areas of the country reap the benefits of competition in the form of lower prices, innovative services and more choice," he added.

Time Warner Cable, which was using wholesale transport services from MCI, now part of Verizon Communications Inc., and Sprint Nextel Corp., filed a petition with the FCC last March. The two state commissions had ruled that the services provided by MCI and Sprint did not quality as telecommunications services, and therefore, rural incumbent local exchange carriers were not required to interconnect with them.

But four other states required local carriers to connect with the wholesale vendors, Time Warner argued.

The FCC, in its decision, said interconnection requirements should apply to both retail and wholesale telecom services. "A contrary decision would impede the important development of wholesale telecommunications and facilities-based VoIP competition," the FCC said in its order.

[Rasputin]

'Cliffs Notes' for Business Tasks Goes Mobile

Need quick help on hammering out a marketing plan, making a cold call or disciplining an employee? Now you can check your cell phone for expert advice on how best to complete the task.

EduCel LLC this week brought out a new mobile interface for its Willitfly.com Web site, which provides more than 1,200 tutorials on common business tasks in nine categories including accounting, finance, human resources and marketing.

The goal of the site, according to EduCel, is to provide users with expert information on setting product pricing, hiring and firing employees, contingency planning, breaking an office lease and other corporate tasks without forcing them to sift through mountains of documents or multiple Web sites.

"It's all about the utility of knowledge," said Evan Berglund, CEO of EduCel and Willitfly.com in a statement. "High stakes negotiations, a thorny audit or disciplining an employee - whatever important business tasks our users are involved in, wherever they might be, the mobile interface at Willitfly now makes it easier to get the upper hand."

The Willitfly site, which was launched in June, has 7,200 questions designed to help ascertain what the user needs to learn and 1,250 educational briefings on several subjects, such as accounting, entrepreneurship, finance, insurance, legal issues, marketing, operations and products.

[Rasputin]

Three Minutes With eBay Innovator Max Mancini

EBay has big plans to provide more programming tools, like new SDKs (software development kits) and APIs (application programming interfaces), to its community of about 45,000 third-party developers. The goal is to help external developers increase the volume and variety of applications they create for the company's marketplace, and in particular to increase applications for eBay buyers. Max Mancini, the recently appointed senior director of platform and innovation at eBay, spoke to IDG News Service about these developer plans and about another group he heads called the Disruptive Innovation team, started last year.

What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

IDG News Service:What does the Disruptive Innovation team do at eBay?

Max Mancini:If we look at the evolution of innovation on eBay, it started with innovating around consumer-to-consumer commerce and the auction format online. Then over the last 5 or 6 years, eBay has had to innovate around technology just to keep up from scale and growth perspectives. So it has been focused on scalability, performance and also search. In that sense, many of our investments and efforts around innovation have been focused on building up the platform. Now, as the company has gotten up to about 12,000 employees, what we need to do is make sure that we continue to innovate around new business and feature ideas. We have teams for each of the major eBay areas, like our Buyer team, Seller team and eBay Express team. Each team works on its own innovations, which are focused on keeping up with the customer demands and, as the market evolves, on what comes next. That's part of their normal product road maps.

But my team is looking 12 to 18 months out to identify trends that we think are relevant to our business. We're creating a more structured innovation program so that when people come up with ideas, they can submit them to a database and an environment that we review on a regular basis, usually weekly or bi-weekly. And if things are pretty interesting we're able to bring people into a rotation on an innovation team to work on their ideas. My Disruptive Innovation team is part of this.

IDGNS: You head both the Disruptive Innovation team and the Developers Program. Why?

Mancini: We feel that, organizationally, it made sense to combine the Developers Program and the Disruptive Innovation team because the Developers Program and Web services are things that enable us to innovate on top of eBay's marketplace platform.

IDGNS: Are there any specific projects currently ongoing at the Disruptive Innovation team?

Mancini: Yes. As part of our 2007 strategic planning for the company, the innovation team identified what we felt were the two most important areas for us to invest our time in: buyer experience and social commerce.

Overall buyer experience is very important to us as a business, but independent of that, it's one of those areas we need to invest in because, from a technology trend perspective, there's a fundamental shift in the way people expect to interact on the Internet, and we need to get ahead of that. Internet users are evolving past just going through page flows, in other words, clicking on five links to get something done: filling out a form here and going to the next page and so on. They're going to more of a rich media, interactive experience that we have traditionally seen on desktop applications but that can be delivered to the Web. Think AJAX and Flash. So we're spending a fair amount of time investing in buyer experience, specifically around rich media experiences delivered via the Web.

Regarding social commerce, it's not social networking. If you look at things like LinkedIn, Plaxo, your Skype client, your AOL client, your Yahoo address book, your e-mail, all of these things define relationships you have. But no one is looking at how these relationship definitions affect trust relationships in commerce. Let's say you have tickets for sale for a local sporting event but don't want to go through the hassle of listing them. You know you have friends who might be interested in the tickets but you don't want to spam all your friends. Making those tickets available to your buddies in your IM buddy list or your address book, and letting them discover what's available out there is an interesting model. The other piece is if you're going to transact with somebody and you don't have a relationship with that person. The fact that people are comfortable sharing and defining their relationships online makes that a potential disruptor to a reputation system [like eBay's feedback system]. So it's very important from my perspective to explore and understand how these trust definitions can affect an online reputation system.

[Rasputin]

Security Tip: Think Like Hacker

The best way to develop software applications that can defend themselves against malicious attacks is to think like an attacker.

More than just being aware of vulnerabilities in software that attackers often exploit, security analysts should strive to understand the actual attacks -- the motive, method, tools used, desired result -- and feed that information to software developers so defenses can be built into an application during the design phase, says Sean Barnum, managing consultant with Cigital, a software security consulting firm. Barnum spoke at the Black Hat DC 2007 conference held here on Thursday during a presentation about attack patterns, which are detailed descriptions of specific attacks.

"Attack patterns are great guides for implementing secure code and validating" the security of the code, said Barnum. "You need a good view of the attacker's perspective and use it to build better defenses."

Much like design patterns -- tools used by developers to help them solve recurring problems when writing software -- attack patterns serve to aid developers in building code that is secure, Barnum said. These tools, a combination of diagrams, code excerpts, and written descriptions, describe the techniques attackers may use to break software, he said.

While the information gathered in an attack pattern is most useful for software developers, security analysts and other security professionals are best equipped to create the pattern, said Barnum. Gathering information about attackers involves exploring some "shady places" that only professionals well versed in security should attempt, he warned.

Currently the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is funding a project called Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC) to collect and classify attack patterns and make them widely available to the software-development community. Barnum, who is working with DHS on the project, said a Web site with more information about CAPEC will go live as soon as next week.

[Rasputin]

Rivals Launch Competing Windows-on-Mac Products

Two makers of virtualization software for running the Windows operating system on Apple's computers have issued dueling upgrades.

VMware said last week it will release in June a beta 2 upgrade to its VMware virtualization software for the Mac, code named Fusion. It will be an upgrade to the desktop virtualization for Macs product it first introduced in April 2006.

Rival Parallels unveiled an update to its Desktop for Macs software on Feb. 27.

Both use virtualization to run Microsoft Windows on an Apple computer and make it possible for the user to switch from Mac to Windows without having to reboot.

Among the improvements in VMware's Fusion is its ability to run Windows-designed 3-D gaming software on a Mac, said Dan Chu, VMware's vice president of emerging products and markets.

"There's been a ton of traffic about this on the blogs," said Chu, about discussions by end-users anticipating the beta 2 release.

Chu also noted that Fusion will be able to run software programs written in the 64-bit and 32-bit encryption protocols, while Parallels only supports the older 32-bit standard.

True, admits Benjamin Rudolph, a Parallels spokesperson, but said his company will add the 64-bit standard in its upgrade, due later this year. It will also offer the 3-D graphics capability Fusion, announced Friday.

But a key feature of the new Parallels Desktop announced Tuesday is a program it calls Coherence, which runs Windows applications on Mac's OS X as though they were native. When users switch to Coherence mode, Rudolph said, the Windows desktop disappears but Windows applications, such as Word, Outlook or Internet Explorer run on the Mac desktop and their icons appear in the Mac application dock.

"Coherence in particular, speaks to the innovation we put out here at Parallels," he said. "That's something nobody really has done before."

Fusion also enables merging of Mac and Windows applications, but "it has a different user interface" than Parallels, said Chu. The Mac desktop will be visible and a Windows window will open in a portion of the screen from which the Windows applications can be launched.

Although VMware is clearly the industry leader in virtualization, it's largely focused on enterprise virtualization of servers. Parallels focuses on the niche Fusion is going after, that of running Windows on a Mac. "I think we're far ahead of them on virtualizing the Mac," Rudolph said.

Parallels' newest version of its Mac product lists for $79.99, although existing users can download the upgrade for free. VMware's currently available version is free, but Chu would not disclose the price at which VMware's beta 2 will sell when it hits the market.

[Rasputin]

'Turkey' Worm Targets Solaris

A new worm targeting a flaw in Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris 10 OS delivers crude artsy payloads, including a drawing of a turkey in ASCII text.

The use of an ASCII drawing by a hacker is "a bit old school," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos PLC.

The worm -- called Unix/Froot-A or Wanuk -- takes advantage of a zero-day flaw that was patched by Sun three days after exploit code was published last month.

The vulnerability lies within the Telnet daemon, a process that runs in the background and waits for another Telnet client to connect, which can allow a hacker to log in without a password. An attacker could eventually gain complete control over the machine.

The worm scans port 23 to see if Telnet is running, then sends data to exploit the vulnerability, Cluley said. Infected computers then scan for more vulnerable machines, he said.

The drawings -- some of which are more offensive than the turkey -- can appear on the monitors of other machines connected to the infected machine, Cluley said.

Sophos hasn't heard of any companies being affected. Users of Solaris are advised to apply the patch and disable Telnet, Cluley said.

[Rasputin]

Forced Software Upgrades Can Add Up for Vista Users

Windows users contemplating the cost of upgrading to Vista may need a fatter wallet than they thought.

Besides shelling out for faster hardware, users should expect to pay for Vista upgrades for many of their favorite Windows software.

Rather than releasing free patches to update existing versions, leading vendors such as Adobe Systems, Symantec, and Intuit are choosing to add Vista compatibility only to new releases or still-in-development future products. Most of these new versions will add significant features along with Vista compatibility. And, vendors will argue, if Vista compatibility is a new feature, what's unfair about packaging a new feature only in new versions of their software, rather than going back and patching aging versions nearing the end of their product life cycle?

Still, many customers who are happy with their existing software may look askance at what they consider less-than-subtle attempts to coerce them to upgrade. And that, according to analysts, could rebound on Microsoft as well as Windows software vendors by prompting users to hold off Vista upgrades or consider switching to another operating system altogether.

Technical Shift from XP to Vista 'Incremental'
How software vendors handle transitions for operating systems has long been a delicate, high-stakes issue. Move to a new platform too slowly, and you risk ending up like Lotus Software's 1-2-3, the dominant spreadsheet on DOS in the late 1980s that lost its lead to Microsoft Excel in part because it was belatedly ported to Windows.

But abandon an older platform too quickly, and you risk alienating loyal, long-term users.

Microsoft claims that there are already "thousands of applications" compatible with Vista, according to a spokeswoman. She acknowledged, however, that few have been formally tested.

Some outside experts agree, pointing out that in the grand scheme of Windows' evolution, the shift from XP to Vista is relatively minor. "Going from Windows 95 and 98 to Windows 2000 and XP was a revolutionary shift. The move from XP and Vista is more incremental," said Scott Matsumoto, a principal consultant at software consulting firm Cigital Inc. In general, porting software from XP to Vista will require developers to "make lots of little changes," rather than massive rewrites, he said.

That's unlikely to be the view shared by vendors actually bearing the cost of developing, testing and supporting their software on different platforms.

Most Affected: Security and Multimedia Software
Enhancements to Vista's security and installation process are causing extra work for security and disk utility vendors. Meanwhile, a new graphics infrastructure such as the DirectX 10 API and Windows Presentation Foundation are creating headaches for game and multimedia vendors.

Take Adobe. About a third of Adobe's software doesn't run on Vista today. Another half runs, but with some known issues (download PDF).

The company has released free Vista updates for some of its lower-priced consumer products, such as Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. It also plans to release free updates to Acrobat 8 and Reader 8 by the middle of the year.

But Adobe also has no plans to update existing versions of its pricey professional and prosumer products, such as Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash and After Effects for Vista. Instead, it plans to issue new Vista-compatible upgrades within the next six months that will cost between $100 and $200 for an upgrade, with full versions costing more.

Some products that Adobe was already planning to discontinue, such as PageMaker and Macromedia FreeHand, won't be ported to Vista at all.

Adobe declined to comment, saying it will make another announcement in several months.

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

Adobe to Announce Creative Suite 3

Adobe will announce Creative Suite 3 on March 27 during a live Webcast from New York city, the company said Monday.

The Webcast will take place at 3:30 pm ET where Adobe will reveal the features and suite configurations that "make this the largest software release in Adobe's 25 year history," the company said on its blog .

Details on the Webcast will be made available later this week. While the announcement is being made this month, Adobe said the product would not ship until later this spring.

Adobe did not disclose any highlights about features and applications to be included in the new suite. However, the company has previously put out a public beta of Photoshop CS3 , which will be part of the next version of Creative Suite. (Read PC World's review of Photoshop CS3 or watch a video explaining its features.)

[Rasputin]

Weather.com Launches Interactive Weather Maps

The Weather Channel Interactive Inc. Tuesday launched a new interactive online weather map that allows users to access and manipulate weather data down to the street level.

The tool, which uses Microsoft Virtual Earth and is available from all of the city pages at the weather.com Web site, links satellite and radar data to allow users to pan, zoom and animate weather information, according to The Weather Channel. Users can view road or photographic aerial maps to pinpoint weather in a user's immediate area, it said.

"Maps are one of the most viewed areas on weather.com, so we are constantly looking for ways to enhance them with the latest technology," Deslie Quinby, vice president of weather.com and marketing at The Weather Channel, said in a statement.

Virtual Earth is Microsoft's mapping and location service that the company uses in its own Windows Live Local online local search and mapping Web site.