Apple Inc’s iPhone outsold all smartphones in the United States in July, its first full month on sale, accounting for 1.8 percent of all U.S. mobile handset sales, research group iSuppli said on Tuesday.

ISuppli reiterated its forecast that Apple would sell 4.5 million iPhones this year, rising to more than 30 million in 2011.

The two models of the iPhone on the market sold more than Research in Motion’s Blackberry series, the entire Palm portfolio and any individual smartphone model from Motorola, Nokia or Samsung.

Microsoft is releasing its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in for video on the Web Wednesday and also will participate in Novell’s porting of Silverlight to Linux via the Moonlight project.

Silverlight represents Microsoft’s efforts to present multimedia experiences on the Web, offering enhanced audio and video streaming and playback using Windows Media Technologies. The technology aims squarely at rival Adobe Systems and its ubiquitous Flash Player for multimedia on the Web.

“We’re finally shipping the plug-in,” said Parimal Desphande, group product manager for the User Experience Platform and Tools team at Microsoft

The 1.0 version of Silverlight, which is being released to the Web, is geared to providing video. Accessible at the Silverlight Web page, it has been available in a beta release. A more potent successor, Silverlight 1.1, will provide for more interactive content, including support for .Net development and transactional capabilities. It remains only available in an early alpha release format.

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday that it is “not unreasonable” for the company to introduce a mobile phone combined with features of its Zune digital music player to compete with Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

The Zune phone, a topic of speculation for months since Microsoft introduced its first digital music player last year, could be driven by consumer demand for one multimedia device to make phone calls, play music and take pictures.

The iPhone can be bought in China, even though Apple Inc. isn’t selling it there and the gadget doesn’t function properly despite costing twice as much as in the United States.

Enthusiasts willing to pay 8,800 yuan ($1,170) can buy the iPhone at electronics markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the computer and electronics newspaper Dian Nao Bao reported in its Monday editions.

In the United States, the combination cell phone-iPod media player can be had for as little as $499. The Chinese version can make calls and send text messages, but it can’t receive calls. The voicemail function also doesn’t work.

Apple is currently selling the iPhone only in the United States, where it’s restricted to AT&T Inc.’s cellular network. Last month, hackers were successful in unlocking the device so that it could be used on other carriers.

NBC Universal said Tuesday it will sell episodes of its new fall television shows using Amazon’s Unbox digital download service, after the network failed to reach an agreement with Apple Inc. last week to offer the shows on iTunes.

Amazon.com Inc. and NBC Universal said that episodes of programs such as “The Office” and “Heroes” are currently available for $1.99 on Unbox, and that new episodes will be added to the site they day after they air. Customers will be able to buy an entire season of a show at once.

Microsoft Corp. has failed in a first step to win enough support to make the data format behind its flagship Office software a global standard, the International Standards Organization said Tuesday.

This weekend’s vote by standards agencies from 104 nations did not provide the two-thirds majority needed to give Microsoft’s format the ISO stamp of approval. But they will meet again in February to try to seek a consensus, and Microsoft could win them over at last.

ISO approval for Microsoft’s Open Office XML would encourage governments and libraries to recognize the format for archiving documents, which in turn could help ensure that people using different technologies in the future could still open and read documents written today in Open Office XML.

Yahoo Inc. is buying online advertising network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash, building upon an expansion aimed at ending a financial malaise that has ravaged the Internet pioneer’s stock price.

The deal announced late Tuesday marks the latest step in Yahoo’s attempt to regain some of the ground that it has lost during the past three years to Google Inc., whose Internet-leading search engine propels the most lucrative online ad network.

Active Virus Shield is an AOL rebranded Kaspersky anti virus. Recently AOL stopped offering the anti virus and starting September people who installed AVS can not obtain signature updates since AOL do not post them on their servers.

Since AVS is basically a Kaspersky anti virus you can make a simple hack that will make AVS to update the signature files from Kaspersky servers instead of the AOL server, thus keeping your anti virus program updated with the latest virus signatures.

All you need to do is update your HOSTS file. Follow these steps:

• Open your file explorer and navigate to: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
• In the etc folder you’ll find a file named hosts. Edit this file in Notepad
• Add the following line to the bottom of the hosts file:
  127.0.0.1 download.newaol.com
• Save the hosts file and close Notepad
• Right click your Active Virus Shield tray icon and select Update in the menu

That is it. Now AVS will obtain the updates from Kaspersky server