Microsoft today announced that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone. The software giant still has a lot of work to do, but the bigger responsibility now falls to OEMs that must get PCs ready, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are testing their new apps, and Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) that are preparing their new hardware.

OEMs can get their hands on it this Friday, while MSDN and TechNet subscribers will be able to get it on August 6. Consumers will have to wait until October 22.

Google Inc. is offering a more wide-ranging view of the Moon, 40 years after humans first landed there.

To commemorate Monday’s anniversary of the Apollo 11 crew’s first steps on the lunar surface, Google Earth is adding a guided moon tour with astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmitt, who was a pilot on the later Apollo 17 mission.

The free software also offers panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts, new video footage and other features.

The new features are available with the Google Earth 5.0 download.

Some images already have been available through Google’s online mapping service at http://moon.google.com .

In August, Netgear Inc. plans to introduce a $190 router that will provide the first easy way for users to get a grip on their Internet traffic.

Netgear said it will include the feature on future models, eventually making it a standard, and provide software upgrades for older devices.

Most Internet service providers set a limit for how much their subscribers are allowed to download each month. Those limits are mostly set high - it’s 250 gigabytes per month at Comcast Corp. But some ISPs, led by Time Warner Cable Inc., have tried to set low limits, then charge extra for each gigabyte of data beyond the cap.

That has met with a lot of opposition, not least because most consumers have no idea how many gigabytes they consume each month. In April, Time Warner said it was postponing plans to expand a trial of metered billing beyond Beaumont, Texas, where it continues.

Time Warner Cable tried to educate its users by giving them a Web page where they could track their consumption. Netgear’s routers will give owners a way to monitor their usage independently. The users can read the data in their Web browsers and could get customized alerts at certain levels.

Barnes & Noble Inc. on Monday stepped up its fight in the small but highly competitive market for electronic books with the launch of a new e-bookstore offering titles to be read on a variety of devices.

Barnes & Noble will sell books that shoppers can read on the iPhone, iTouch, BlackBerry and most personal computers, whereas competitors have sold devices designed solely for reading electronic books, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony Corp.’s Sony Reader.

New York-based Barnes & Noble said it also will be the exclusive provider of books for a reader from Mountain View, Calif.-based Plastic Logic, which expects to release it in 2010. And the company expects to make more devices compatible in the coming months.

Yahoo Inc. is sprucing up its Web site’s home page with a long-promised makeover that is supposed to make it easier to see what’s happening at the Internet’s other hot spots.

The revamped home page, scheduled to debut Tuesday in the United States, is part of an overhaul aimed at recapturing some of the buzz that Yahoo has lost to increasingly popular online hangouts like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Even as Yahoo’s star has faded, its Web site has remained among the Internet’s busiest. More than 570 million people worldwide came to Yahoo in May, according to the most recent data available from online research firm comScore Inc.

The retooled page will be introduced in the United Kingdom, India and France later this week. It will roll out to the rest of the world during the next year, with the option to retain the old design starting to phase out this fall.

Visitors should be prepared to have their pictures taken as they enter and leave this picturesque town of million-dollar views and homes along the San Francisco Bay.

Officials want to photograph every car and use the license plate information to solve crimes in the town of 9,000. Critics see the plan as an intrusion into the rights of visitors, but proponents say it is a sensible precaution that absolutely will not cross privacy lines.

“As long as you don’t arrive in a stolen vehicle or go on a crime spree while you’re here, your anonymity will be preserved,” said Town Manager Peggy Curran. “We don’t care who you are and we don’t know who you are.”

Everyone knows the best thing to film at home in 3D is porn. There’s no point arguing — it’s a simple, unavoidable fact. But now it’s more affordable than ever thanks to a £50 3D webcam called Minoru.

We’ve been playing with the cute little Minoru for a while, tolerating people from all over the CBSi offices ditching their work to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at stereoscopic images of their nipples hands.
How does it work?

The Minoru produces something called anaglyph images — images which contain two superimposed pictures, one slightly offset atop the other to give the impression of depth and distance between objects being photographed. This results in a stereoscopic image which, when viewed through 3D glasses, gives the effect of being three-dimensional. And it records video in the same way, too.

On Sept. 1, Millenniata, a start-up company based in Springville, will release a new archive disk technology to preserve data at room temperature for 1,000 years. It’s like writing onto gold plates or chiseling information into stone.

Dubbed the Millennial Disc, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it’s special. Layers of hard, “persistent” materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company’s Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer.

A number of companies hold intellectual property rights in DVD technology. One of those, Philips, manages the combined patents. Millenniata disks and disk writers will be manufactured under a license now in final negotiation.

Big potential

Millenniata, whose name merges terms for “1,000 years” and “data,” plans to market initially to institutions with large digital collections, such as the LDS Church, libraries and government entities requiring long-term archiving. But it expects to be competitive in the retail market as well.

Currently, no disk technology allows a consumer to write into durable, inorganic materials for long-term archiving. Commercial companies stamp out single movies and music albums by the millions using special dies that create physical marks in each disk’s surface. Those disks are long-lasting as well - a couple of centuries, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology - but you can’t write your own data onto them.

Millenniata’s concept brings custom archiving home. It envisions enhancements that will soon include Blu-ray format and eventually larger diameter disks and disk readers to dramatically increase data capacity for specialized applications. Current single-layer Blu-ray disks can hold about 25 gigabytes of data, more than five times the capacity of a standard DVD. Millenniata envisions archive disks of 200 GB or more.

Start-up ooVoo is hoping to take on everybody from Skype, the Internet telephony arm of eBay, to Cisco Systems with a new video conferencing offer for small businesses.

While Skype has the higher profile, New York-based ooVoo has quietly built up 7.5 million registered users in the last few years with a service that supports video chats between up to six people and up to six phone participants.

Now, the fledgling company is adding a desktop sharing option that will let business colleagues view each other’s computer screens and enable remote collaboration. It will also block advertising for business users who pay a monthly fee.

“We took what we had with the consumer and packaged it with a business plan,” said ooVoo CEO Philippe Schwartz who said that about 20 percent of the company’s current users were business customers even before its business-targeted plan.

Cisco’s development of a telepresence video conferencing system, which uses large screens and shows life-like images, has created renewed interest in video communications in recent years. But such systems cost thousands of dollars to install, at a time small businesses are looking to shave costs.

A few years ago, Cisco also bought firm WebEx, which lets people share documents and collaborate online.

Schwartz hopes to double ooVoo’s customer base this year and increase business users to as much as 40 percent of total customers as companies look to cut costs in a weak economy.

One of the world’s largest filesharing Web sites, The Pirate Bay, is going legal through a series of give-and-take payment models that in some cases may even earn its users a bundle of cash, the new owners said Saturday.

“The more you give, the more you get,” said Hans Pandeya, chief executive of Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X, which announced last month it was buying the site and would start paying both content providers and copyright holders.

Pandeya said The Pirate Bay, whose domain name and related Web sites were bought by Global Gaming Factory X for 60 million kronor, will not become like pure pay sites, such as ITunes Store and Napster.

“For the great majority it will be free of charge, for a minority it will actually make them money, and for a small portion it will cost them,” he said.

Pandeya said plans are under way to introduce a monthly fee to be able to use The Pirate Bay, but he said the fee could be worked off by, for example, sharing downloaded content or lending storage capacity to others on their PC’s in exchange.

“We know that unless we’re able to create revenues for the filesharers they’ll just move on to the next free, site,” he said. “Filesharers are our best friends.”

Pandeya also said other give-and-take packages were in the works, but declined to elaborate, saying more details would revealed in the next few weeks.

Breaking into someone’s e-mail can be child’s play for a determined hacker, as Twitter Inc. employees have learned the hard way - again.

For the third time this year, the San Francisco-based company was the victim of a security breach stemming from a simple end-run around its defenses. In the latest case, a hacker got the password for an employee’s personal e-mail account - possibly by guessing, or by correctly answering a security question - and worked from there to steal confidential company documents.

The techniques used by the attackers highlight the dangers of a broader trend promoted by Google Inc. and others toward storing more data online, instead of on computers under your control.

Apple Inc. has shut down one of the most compelling features on Palm Inc.’s rival Pre smart phone, crippling the Pre’s ability to act like an iPod.

Users of the recently released Pre had been able to put music on it by using Apple’s free iTunes software - a unique twist for a device not made by Apple. But Apple updated iTunes on Wednesday to block this feature.

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said the update “disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre.”

Palm spokeswoman Leslie Letts said Apple’s move is a “direct blow to their users, who will be deprived of a seamless synchronization experience.” For a workaround, she noted, Pre owners can stick to the older version of iTunes, move music from computers to a Pre with a USB cable or consider third-party music applications.