Microsoft said late last week that it will make a change to the licensing terms for Windows Vista, allowing those who purchase a boxed copy of Vista and then upgrade to a pricier version to move that higher-end edition to other machines down the road.

The software maker had already changed the Vista licensing terms to allow retail buyers to move their copy to an unlimited number of new machines, so long as it was only on one PC at a time. However, Windows enthusiasts noted that the terms did not allow users to move a retail copy once it had been enhanced using the Windows Anytime Upgrade feature.

“Now, those customers will be able to uninstall their upgraded copy of Windows Vista and reinstall it on another device,” Nick White said on the Vista team blog.

Toshiba’s HD DVD players are set to become cheaper to buy in the US next month. On 1 April, its will apparently cut the price of its three-machine line-up by up to $200.

The high-end HDX-A2, mid-range HD-A20 and bottom-of-the-line HD-A2 currently retail for $1000, $600 and $500, respectively. But according to a recently published sales brochure from US online retailer OneCall.com, the prices of the lower end machines will fall to $500 and $400 at the start of April.

Mozilla released an update to the open source browser, Firefox. The update includes mostly security patches

Belgians will be able to use their cell phones as debit cards within a few months, Belgian cell phone operators and Banksys, a Belgian firm specialized in electronic payments, said on Tuesday.

Using text messaging, the payment system will allow consumers to pay anything from six euros up to the limit of their bank account, Banksys Chief Executive Vincent Roland told a news conference.

Consumers will pay 0.25 euros ($0.33) per transaction and sellers 0.49 euros.

John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.

Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously “hand-coded” - programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a “high-level” programming language because it abstracted that work - it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

The breakthrough earned Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry’s highest accolades. The citation praised Backus’ “profound, influential, and lasting contributions

At long last, it looks like Apple TV is now available for purchase. The Apple Web site on Tuesday morning listed the set-top box as available for shipment in three to five business days.

Calls to New York- and San Francisco-area Apple Stores confirmed that the box, which is meant to deliver content between a TV and a PC, is so far only available online. A San Francisco Apple Store employee said they expect to have Apple TV “any day now.”

Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It’s just not quite clear who.

It may not be one of the Internet’s grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate, there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy way.

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?

Or did all three merely make incremental improvements on earlier proto-blogs? The answer is most likely “yes” to all of the above. In truth, awarding the title “first blogger” is more than a little tricky because the definitions of blog and blogger are slippery. Any definition should probably include posts sorted by date, with the newest posts at the top and the rest archived for future use (criteria that would eliminate the Drudge Report, for instance).

Winer is a pioneer of Web syndication techniques and editor of Scripting News, which launched on April 1, 1997.

He boasts on his site that Scripting News “bootstrapped the blogging revolution” and that it is the “longest currently running Web log on the Internet.” A decade ago, however, Winer wasn’t actually using the term “Web log,” nor does he claim to have invented the term.

Source: techrepublic.com

Sony Corp on Tuesday moved to head off a public relations disaster by announcing which older PlayStation 2 games will work on the European version of the PlayStation 3 console due out on Friday.

Sony said last month that the PS3 model to be launched in Europe would lack a chip used in the earlier models introduced in Japan and North America in November last year.

The function of the chip would be replaced by software, making the console cheaper to produce but taking away the almost full backward compatibility enabling PS2 games to play on PS3.

Sony’s website lists games that should work. “If your game is not listed here, emulation is not yet supported on PlayStation 3,” it says.

Yahoo Inc. introduced on Monday a new Internet search system for mobile phone users that delivers locally relevant answers, a move that vaults it ahead of what rival Google Inc. now offers.

Starting in the United States, with international markets to follow later this year, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said it planned to take advantage of the inherently local nature of many Web searches performed on phones.

“We are now putting search on every mobile phone that has a browser,” said Marco Boerries, senior vice president of Yahoo’s Connected Life business unit. “We are delivering the results consumers want with just one search, not a list of Web links.”

Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion. It happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue.

While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account - one of Alaska residents’ biggest perks - and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.

There was still hope, until the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.

A married Singaporean woman who met a man in an online chatroom and conned him into giving her about $45,000 after she promised to marry him, was jailed for six months on Monday, court documents showed.

Maliha Ramu, 36, used a false name and photographs of Bollywood actress Gayatri Joshi when she began an online relationship with Bharani Indran, an Indian national living in the United States, according to the Straits Times newspaper.

After Ramu promised in 2004 to marry Indran, she asked him to send her a total of about $45,000 for her mother’s funeral expenses and for a friend’s wedding, according to the court documents.

Indran eventually grew suspicious of Ramu when she asked for more money and filed a police report in Singapore, the Straits Times said. The paper added that Ramu’s husband had no idea she had struck up an online relationship until the police came to their apartment to arrest her in August.

Sprucing up its famously plain Web site, Google Inc. is offering a new option that plants its Internet search box in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the outside weather.

The colorful graphics to be unveiled Tuesday represent the latest bit of pizzaz to be served up on Google’s home page as the Mountain View-based company caters to the digerati who want to customize everything from their cell phones to their computers.