Intel is planning price cuts to its lower-end mainstream quad-core processors on January 18.

Barron’s Tech Trader Daily first reported the news, citing Pacific Crest analyst Michael McConnell.

These cuts are happening because of the recent introduction of Advanced Micro Devices’ 45-nanometer Phenom II and “Shanghai” Opteron processors.

AMD’s quad-core Phenom II “Dragon” processor platform has been garnering solid reviews and its Shanghai server chip has been adopted by top-tier server suppliers including Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Dell, IBM, and Fujitsu.

Cuts are expected mainly on quad-core processors, though other processors may also receive cuts.

Microsoft said Tuesday that it has begun early outside testing of some of the server products that will make up the next version of Office.

The software maker did not offer details or say when a test version of the software, code-named Office 14, will be made more broadly available.

Symantec is turning to virtualization and cloud computing to protect Web surfers and let them access Web-based applications from one site.

The company demonstrated the technologies, along with another one designed to block malware from getting into corporate networks, to reporters and briefed them on its research and development strategy at an event it dubbed “Innovation Showcase” on Wednesday.

Virtualization technology that essentially creates different machines on the same computer offers a good platform for securing PCs by providing different protected environments, said Joe Pasqua, vice president of research at Symantec Research Labs.

Taking advantage of this trend, the company has developed Virtualization-based endpoint security, VIBES, technology that works with machines already running virtualization hardware and software to isolate three different areas on a computer for doing activities that require different levels of security.

The VIBES prototype protects Web surfers from downloading malware and having sensitive data stolen, all behind the scenes. For instance, when a user wants to open or execute files downloaded from the Internet the system copies the file to a “Playground” virtual machine and executes it there. Any viruses or other malware that might get downloaded stay within that one area and are unable to infect the rest of the computer, said Pasqua.

When a user accesses a Web site using https, the protocol for encrypting sensitive data transactions, the VIBES system moves the operation to a Trusted Virtual Machine that provides a higher level of security. All other activities are carried out in a mode that offers the level of security offered by the antivirus and other security software installed on the computer. The isolating of the activities is all invisible to the end user.

The VIBES technology is based on Linux/VMWare Workstation and is being developed by the Symantec Research Labs Core Research group. Pasqua said he could not speculate on when it might end up as a product.

Symantec also showed off a service called GoEverywhere, an online workspace for accessing Web applications from any Internet-connected device. GoEverywhere, a project that will be in beta testing in a week or two, is designed as a subscription-based hosted service that offers a secure entry point with single sign on to any application on the Web, said Don Kleinschnitz, vice president and general manager of GoEverywhere.

Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it’s rough going. Information isn’t necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Google, which actually has a “data liberation team,” announced the Blog Converters project to deal with the situation. It released a collection of libraries and scripts, written in the Python language, that converts between the export formats of LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, and Google’s own Blogger service, said J.J. Lueck of the team in a blog posting about the Blog Converters project.

That means that a person could convert an exported file into a format another blog system comprehends, permitting the data to be imported into the new system. That could make it easier for a person to move to Google’s own service–but also to move off it.

Of course, you’ll have to be proficient in running Python scripts to use the technology. But it could get easier soon: Google said the scripts can be hosted on Google App Engine, its service for running Web-based applications written in Python, so perhaps somebody will set up some tools to make blog migration easier for the non-programmers out there.

In November, 2004, several judges in the federal court in Austin, Texas, got together and ordered the RIAA to cease and desist from its practice of joining multiple ‘John Does’ in a single case.

The RIAA blithely ignored the order, and continued the illegal practice for the next four years, but steering clear of Austin. In 2008, however, circumstances conspired to force the record companies back to that venue. In Arista v. Does 1-22, in Providence, Rhode Island, they were hoping to get the student identities from Rhode Island College.

After the first round, however, they learned that the College was not the ISP; rather, the ISP was an Austin-based company, Apogee Telecom Inc., meaning the RIAA would have to serve its subpoena in Austin. The RIAA did just that, but Apogee — unlike so many other ISP’s — did not turn over its subscribers’ identities in response to the subpoena, instead filing objections. This meant the RIAA would have to go to court, to try to get the Court to overrule Apogee’s objections. Instead, it opted to withdraw the subpoena and drop its case.

Blockbuster Inc. is stamping its brand on CinemaNow’s system for delivering movies over the Internet, providing the video rental chain with another avenue for reaching consumers who want to rent and buy movies without traveling to a store.

The alliance with CinemaNow, to be announced Wednesday, accelerates Blockbuster’s push to catch up with rival Netflix Inc., which has diversified beyond its DVD-by-mail service by piping more than 12,000 movies and TV shows over high-speed Internet connections.

Dallas-based Blockbuster took its first step toward matching Netflix in late November when it introduced a gadget, made by 2Wire Inc., that connects to television sets and temporarily saves video after it’s downloaded over high-speed Internet connections. Netflix already had been marketing a similar box made by Roku Inc.

“We put our toe in the water and now this gives us a significant leap forward in our consumer offerings” for digital delivery, Blockbuster Chairman Jim Keyes said in an interview.

The partnership comes just two months after digital video and audio specialist Sonic Solutions acquired CinemaNow for $3 million from a group of investors that included movie studio Lionsgate and Internet gear maker Cisco Systems Inc. Novato-based Sonic will still oversee the technology powering CinemaNow’s re-branded system.

The chance to be the caretaker of a tiny tropical island in Australia has sparked so much interest around the world that a rush of applications crashed the website advertising the post.

The job, which offers a salary of $105,000 to spend six months on the Great Barrier Reef island of Hamilton, has been inundated with hundreds of thousands of prospective candidates.

An official from the state of Queensland, which is offering the position, said the job was created as an antidote to the global economic slump and was being advertised in 18 countries including the United States and China.

Local media said technicians had to restore the website after it could not cope with the volume of interest and crashed for several hours. Some sections are still not up and running.

Even as Apple Inc. acknowledges that all is not well, the extent of Steve Jobs’ health problems remains a closely guarded secret.

The Apple chief executive, a cancer survivor, said Wednesday he is taking medical leave until June, a move that sent the company’s shares plunging 7 percent.

Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, will take over Jobs’ responsibilities while he is on leave, though Jobs said he plans to remain involved in major strategic decisions.

The announcement marks a reversal from just a week ago, when Jobs, 53, tried to assure investors and employees his recent weight loss was caused by an easily treatable hormone deficiency.