Those eager to get their hands on the first ever HD DVD players in the United States cleared shelves quickly at Best Buy stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

An employee at the Best Buy store in Midtown Manhattan said Tuesday that all 10 Toshiba HD DVD players were sold out on Monday, the day before the players’ official launch.

Customers also bought up all the HD DVD movie titles, the employee said.

Source: News.com

Last week, the software giant launched a new search engine for scholars. This week, news has emerged that Microsoft’s MSN Search division is working busily on a new “social” search service.

The new social search promises to produce more relevant results by incorporating preferences of like-minded Web surfers. The question-and-answer service should be ready for launch in the next few months.

While Microsoft has not revealed the name of the service, Justin Omer, MSN’s senior product manager, told Business Week that it is “one of the larger projects” for the company this year.

Source: Yahoo

The rate of click fraud–fraudulent clicks on pay-per-click-based online ads–is less than 14 percent rather than 20 to 30 percent or higher, as some companies have said, according to a new report from a service that monitors click fraud for advertisers.

The Click Fraud Index shows that the overall, industry-wide average click fraud rate is 13.7 percent. The click fraud rate at top-tier search engines such as Google and Yahoo is even less, at 12.1 percent, the data show. The rate rises to 21.3 percent at so-called Tier 2 search providers and 29.8 percent at Tier 3 search companies, according to the Index.

Source: News.com

A U.S. judge has quashed Microsoft’s attempts to obtain documents in its antitrust battle against the European Commission, ruling the software giant was trying to undermine European Union law.

District Court Judge Mark Wolf in Boston rejected Microsoft’s attempts to subpoena sensitive information from Novell, which provided information to the European Commission for use in an antitrust case against the Redmond, Washington, firm.

“Enforcing Microsoft’s … subpoena to Novell would circumvent and undermine the law of the European Community concerning how a litigant may obtain third-party documents…,” the judge said in a harshly-worded 12-page decision issued on Monday.

Source: eWeek

Microsoft has made changes to the latest test version of Windows Defender, an always-on spyware detection tool that will be part of its Vista update. The new Beta 2 includes the ability to display the program icon in the taskbar; improvements in data collection from its SpyNet spyware-reporting network; and revisions to how signature updates are tracked.

Source: News.com

It seems that online dermatological images, intended as a references for doctors, are sometimes being used pruriently.

The idea that a searchable archive of clinical photographs was being misused first occurred to the site’s curators when they noticed a marked jump in queries for images of genital areas.

An analysis of the top 43 referring sites to the dermatology service revealed that 9 (21 percent) were pornographic/fetish sites. However, these sites only accounted for 14.3 percent of all 141,285 referrals.

Source: ABC

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has hit Symantec Corp. with a $1 billion tax bill for allegedly under-reporting the value of intellectual property that the software vendor transferred to two Irish subsidiaries.

The IRS believes that Symantec owes about $900 million, excluding penalties and interest, in connection with the Veritas claim, which covers the 2000 and 2001 Veritas tax returns. Another $100 million is due in connection with Symantec’s fiscal 2003 and 2004 reports.

Source: Yahoo

AMD is working on a way to make a multi-core processor appear to the host operating system as a single-chip chip, it has been claimed. If true, the move turns on its head the drive to develop multi-threaded apps the better to take advantage of multiple cores.

Source: The Register

Intel-based Macs can now play host to three operating systems and boot into any one of them at will. The triple-boot technique has been outlined on the OnMac.net website, home of the first code to allow the new machines to run Windows XP.

Source: The Register

The first HD-DVD titles are slated to go on sale Tuesday and, contrary to speculation, Toshiba players have arrived at Best Buy and should be on sale in at least some of the chain’s locations.

Sources say players were shipped out beginning Sunday and are scheduled to go on sale at all Best Buy stores and select Sears, Wal-Mart, Costco and Tweeters locations by week’s end. Software also will be available at those retailers.

Source: Reuters

One of the members of the Homeplug Powerline Alliance, Intellon, said this week that it has sold over 5 million integrated circuits (ICs) to date, evidence that the technology is succeeding.

“This technology competes against two factions: wired vs. wireless,” said In-Stat Residental Connectivity analyst Joyce Putscher. “There are a number of different uses for it and it’s very easy for consumers to understand.”

Intellon is marketing its technology as a simple and secure alternative to Wi-Fi. The company’s powerline technology turns each electrical socket in a user’s home into a potential network port, turning the home’s existing infrastructure into a networking alternative.

Source: Yahoo