Microsoft has confirmed today that they will be releasing Zune software for Macs by the end of the year, following many months of speculation.

Says the software giant: "Later in 2010 Microsoft will make a public beta available of a tool that allows Windows Phone 7 to sync select content with Mac computers."

Windows Phone 7 owners should be able to quickly connect their smartphones to their Macs, and sync media content stored on their hard drives.

Microsoft first announced the news via Twitter: "Daily #WP7 Announcement: I'm glad to confirm that Mac users would be able to use Zune on their Macs to sync with #WP7. More details soon."

The company finally unveiled its initial WP7 lineup earlier this week, with two phones headed to T-Mobile, three headed to AT&T and one each on Verizon and Sprint next year.

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Evan Williams, Twitter's co-founder, has said this week that he expects the microblogging site to hit 1 billion users, although he would not give a time frame.

Earlier in the month, Williams stepped down as CEO.

Twitter currently has just over 165 million members, but the service has been seeing exponential growth since 2008.

Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group Research says the goal is huge but possible: "A billion does seem a bit aggressive. But I do think, over time, social networking will overtake e-mail as the most popular communication tool. In that light, 1 billion isn't out of reach. Younger people will choose Twitter and Facebook over e-mail."

Kerravala also said e-mail was becoming an "old people's" tool, while Twitter was the modern equivalent.

"Over the next five years, as high school kids go to college and college kids enter the workforce, we'll see a rapid shift away from 'old people' communication tools like e-mail and the phone," he continued. "Twitter allows you to reach out to thousands of people at once."

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Wal-Mart has started taking pre-orders for the Apple iPad via their website today, with the retailer having the tablet in stores starting on Friday.

The retailer is not allowing for home delivery of the device, however, meaning you will need to pick it up in-store.

Furthermore, Wal-Mart will reportedly sell the tablet through its gigantic Sam's Club warehouses.

All six models of the device are listed up for pre-order, starting with the 16GB/Wi-Fi version at $500 all the way up to the 64GB/Wi-Fi/3G model at $830.

The iPad has quickly made its way into major retailers in the United States such as Best Buy, Target, Amazon and now Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the nation.

Estimates have placed overall iPad sales at 8.5 million to date.

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Google's dashboard service has made it clear this week that almost three-quarters of all Android devices now run either versions 2.1 or 2.2, the latest updates to the popular mobile operating system.

In April, that number was just around 25 percent.

Android 2.2 adoption has jumped to about 30 percent, with the remaining 43.8 percent going to Android 2.1.

Around 10 percent of Android smartphone owners are still running the terribly outdated 1.5 with another 15 percent running the equally as outdated 1.6.

The strong adoption rate for 2.1 and 2.2 comes right as Android 3.0 Gingerbread prepares for its eventual launch by the end of the year.

Besides adding new features, Gingerbread should focus on improving the user experience and interface.

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Just weeks after it started selling the iPad in brick-and-mortar stores around the nation, AppleInsider is reporting that the large retailer Target is set to start selling the iPhone, as well.

Target has recently begun re-fitting 850 of their outlets with mobile phone centers, and having the iPhone alongside Android and other smartphones would certainly help drive traffic.

The centers are run together with Radio Shack, which provide the system needed for in-store activations on phones that require it.

Target would not confirm the rumor, just saying they have "nothing to announce at this time."

Apple has made it a priority to offer their products in an increasing amount of retailers, recently offering the iPad tablet in Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy and of course, Target.

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Both O2 and Vodafone have announced their plans to sell the Apple iPhone 4 in Germany, breaking T-Mobile's long time exclusivity on the smartphone in the nation.

T-Mobile has offered the iPhone in Germany since its launch in 2007.

Unfortunately, neither carrier has unveiled plans or pricing.

Most nations now have multiple carriers for the iPhone, with the biggest exception being AT&T in the U.S. That is expected to change soon, as Apple readies a dual-GSM/CDMA iPhone 4 that can be released for T-Mobile USA and Verizon.

T-Mobile is Germany's largest carrier, at 37 million subscribers.

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LG has unveiled the world's largest LED-backlit 3D HDTV this week.

The 72-inch Infinia 72LEX9 is available in Korea, and is now the largest commercially available 3D HDTV using LED.

Among the specs (says Crunch) of the television are a 480Hz TruMotion panel, full LED backlighting, 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, four HDMI ports, one USB port, a wireless AV link, DLNA support and YouTube, Google Picasa support.

It is unclear if 3D HDTV will come bundled with the necessary stereoscopic 3D glasses.

Mitsubishi currently offers two 3D-ready HDTVs, at 75 and 82-inches, which hold the record.

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The Lower Merion School District has settled litigation brought against it by the families of two students for allegedly spying on them at home using a webcam built into laptops issued by the district.

The Pennsylvania school district has agreed to a settlement of $610,000. Of that settlement, $175,000 is to be placed in a trust for Harriton High School student Blake Robbins, and $10,000 goes to a second student, Jalil Hassan. who sued later on.

The students' attorney, Mark Haltzman, will get $425,000 in legal fees. "A major impetus behind settling this matter now is the recent agreement by our insurance carrier, Graphic Arts, to cover more than $1.2M of the fees and costs associated with this litigation to date," Lower Merion School Board President David Ebby said in a statement.

The district provided high school students with laptops as part of a technology initiative, but did not alert families that the laptops were equipped with webcams that could be turned on remotely. Robbins, who was 15 at the time, did not know about this until school officials allegedly accused him of "improper behavior in his home," citing a photograph taken from the webcam while he was at home.

In August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said it wouldn't bring charges in the case after several months. "Although we would have valued the opportunity to finally share an important, untold story in the courtroom, we recognize that in this case, a lengthy, costly trial would benefit no one," Ebby said.

"It would have been an unfair distraction for our students and staff and it would have cost taxpayers additional dollars that are better devoted to education. We also wanted to be sensitive to the welfare of the student involved in the case, given the possible ramifications of what would have been a highly-publicized trial."

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Sony has announced that it will not meet the November release date for the Gran Turismo 5 title that has been eagerly awaited by PS3 owners for some time now.

"We sincerely apologize to GT fans for the delay, however, creator Kazunori Yamauchi and the team at Polyphony Digital want to make certain they are creating the perfect racing experience, and we are confident that this ambitious game will exceed expectations when it launches," the official PlayStation blog reads.

However, the blog did say that despite not meeting the November 2 release date, the title "will" be released this coming holiday season.

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A report compiled by Microsoft Corp. says there are 2.2 million personal computers in the United States that have been infected and are counted as part of botnets. Brazil has the second highest level of infections at 550,000, while 14.6 out of every 1,000 in South Korea are part of botnets.

Microsoft's 240-page report takes an in-depth analysis of botnets, and is intended to alert people and organizations to the growth and danger of malicious botnets. "Most people have this idea of a virus and how it used to announce itself," said Cliff Evans, head of security and identity at Microsoft UK. "Few people know about botnets."

Botnets are used to spew spam around the world, carrying out DDoS attacks on web services and sending phishing e-mails. Personal and private information can also be hoarded from infected machines and uploaded to locations for bot herders to retrieve and sell on in underground markets online.

"Once they have control of the machine they have the potential to put any kind of malicious code on there," said Mr Evans. "It becomes a distributed computing resource they then sell on to others." Some put more pressure on their bots than others. The report cites the Lethic botnet, which was responsible for 56 percent of all botnet spam sent between March and June, despite only accounting for 8.3 percent of known botnet IP addresses.

"It's phenomenal the amount of grip that thing has," said Mr Evans. In the three months between April and June 2010, Microsoft software has cleaned up more than 6.5 million infections, more than twice as much for the same period last year.

Defending against infections like this is pretty straight-forward according to Evans, who suggests that users simply ensure Automatic Updates on their operating system is on, firewall software is running, an A/V tool is installed and that users keep all third party applications (particularly those used in web browsers such as flash) up to date.

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Google has had to push back some hardware acceleration features for the Chrome web browser. It had promised some of the features to be included in version 8 of the Chrome browser. The Mountain View-based web giant said it had to pull back on planned hardware acceleration APIs for CSS rendering, large layers and opacity fixes in version 8.

The hardware acceleration functionality will now be pushed to version 9. Given the speed at which Google pushes out new iterations of its browser in several channels, it is still likely that the code will be included in a build before the end of the year.

Microsoft, on the other hand, was awarded a patent for GPU-accelerated video encoding technology today, and it's Internet Explorer 9 web browser puts a huge emphasis on hardware acceleration to push up performance for web applications and multimedia content.

The news for Microsoft comes at a very good time, when the hardware acceleration race is heating up. How the patent will affect Google software (if at all) remains to be seen, but it is being seen as a major score for Microsoft.

The Redmond-based software giant filed for the patent in 2004.

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Microsoft Corp. has been awarded a patent for a GPU-accelerated video encoding system. The Redmond-based giant applied for the patent titled "Accelerated video encoding using a graphics processing unit," back in October 2004 and now six years later it has been granted the patent.

The Microsoft patent outlines a concept where the graphics unit is utilized to perform motion estimation on videos, as well as other vital aspects of encoding. It covers all bases of GPU-accelerated video encoding, giving Microsoft control of a major new technology that is already used in prosumer applications on the market.

After the release of Windows Vista and DirectX 10, NVIDIA and AMD released GPUs with support for general purpose GPU computing (GPGPU). NVIDIA released the GeFore 8800GTX card with underlying CUDA architecture, while AMD's ATI unit loaded GPU acceleration technology into its HD 2000, 3000 and 4000 cards.

Microsoft has embraced the technology in Windows 7, which has native support for GPU-acceleration tasks. It also promises GPU-acceleration in Internet Explorer 9 will dramatically improve the performance of web applications and multimedia content.

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Sony has made several moves to combat piracy on the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console following the release of PSJailBreak and other solutions based on the same trick. Firstly, it closed the USB exploit with firmware 3.42. Later on, another firmware change included a whitelist of USB devices, which also caused some controller incompatibilities.

Now some game titles are also reportedly prepared to tackle attempted piracy. Medal of Honor is one confirmed example. While there are copies of the game available to download online, only newer firmware can be used to play it. Instead of just being a case of refusing to boot on lower firmware, it is reported that only newer firmware can actually decrypt the content due to the use of a new crypto key.

Other new titles like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West do still work using the hack however. Other soon to be released titles will probably require the latest firmware be installed first too as Sony and publishers will look to impact piracy on the platform for the busy holiday season.

It's unclear how long it will take for an effective response from the hacker community to the measures taken by Sony, but it's a certainty that neither side will give in any time soon.

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Intel Corporation yesterday reported that third-quarter revenue exceeded $11 billion for the first time, up 18 percent year-over-year to $11.1 billion. The company reported operating income of $4.1 billion, net income of $3.0 billion and EPS of 52 cents.

The company predicted a stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter too, fueling hopes that the sector could end 2010 on a strong note. Intel's forecast for a December quarter gross margin of 67 percent affirmed hopes that the loss in personal computer sales could be made up with spending on servers or data centers.

The world's largest chipmaker forecast revenue of $11.0 billion to $11.8 billion in the final three months of 2010, in line with analysts' expectations of $11.32 billion.

"We'll see the consumer market growing but likely a little less than you'd normally expect. I attribute that to consumers pulling back a little bit based on economic uncertainty," Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith told Reuters.

In the long term, Wall Street investors are still concerned about the competition from tablets and other portable devices that generally use ARM architecture microprocessors.

"Consumers will have a limited amount of discretionary income and some will choose to purchase a tablet instead of upgrading an existing PC or purchasing a netbook in any given period," Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini conceded on the conference call.

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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announced today the industry's first production of a 3-bit-cell (3bit), 64 gigabit NAND flash using 20 nanometer-class process technology. The highly advanced new chip can be used in high-density flash solutions such as USB flash drives (UFDs) and Secure Digital (SD) memory cards.

"Samsung has repeatedly provided the market with leading-edge NAND flash solutions, including the introduction of 30nm-class, 32Gb 3-bit NAND flash last November," said Seijin Kim, vice president, Flash Memory Planning/Enabling, Samsung Electronics.

"By now entering into full production of 20nm-class 64Gb 3-bit devices, we expect to accelerate adoption of our high-performance NAND solutions that use Toggle DDR technology, for applications that also require high-density NAND."

Samsung's 20nm-class, 64Gb 3-bit NAND has a 60 percent higher productivity level than 30nm-class, 32Gb 3-bit NAND. The device also offers improved performance by applying Toggle DDR (Double Data Rate) 1.0 specifications, compared to those of SDR (Single Data Rate) based 30nm-class NAND chips.

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