People have been avidly feeding music CDs into their computers for years, ripping digital copies of albums and transferring the files to their other computers and mobile devices.

This has not happened nearly as much with DVDs, for both practical and legal reasons. But that may soon change.

On Monday, RealNetworks, the digital media company in Seattle, will introduce RealDVD, a $30 software program for Windows computers that allows users to easily make a digital copy of an entire DVD — down to the extras and artwork from the box.

The software, which will go on sale on Real.com and Amazon.com this month, will allow buyers to make one copy of a DVD, playable only on the computer where it was made. The user can transfer that copy to up to five other Windows computers, but only by buying additional copies of the software for $20 each. The software does not work on high-definition Blu-ray discs, which the movie industry has even more aggressively sought to protect from illicit copying.

Now if you ask me, RealNetworks did not learn anything about the bad feeling people have with regards to DRM. Who on earth would want to buy a software to rip DVDs that limits the user on how to use the copy, when they can get a perfectly good and easy programs free or comercial that do not impose such restrictions.

In the anticipated release of Google’s new and improved Picasa, the company will offer facial recognition technology to help you identify friends and family in your pictures without requiring you to tag them by-hand each time you see them.

A leading printer maker wants to help you do less printing.

Printing an article off the Web often produces several pages of waste, including ads, links and boxes for entering text. So the latest version of a Web toolbar from Lexmark International Inc. gives people more ways to block such images from coming out of the printer, saving ink and paper.

Some of Lexmark’s tools already exist in standard printer settings, but accessing them normally requires several mouse clicks. Lexmark’s free program brings those functions to the forefront. For example, one click converts a Web page into black and white for printing, extending the life of expensive color ink cartridges.

The Web software also extends the “printer-friendly” features many sites offer. Often those printer-friendly versions still carry logos and other graphics; the Lexmark tools let you eliminate those as well.

Although printer companies make much of their money from ink cartridges and other products that consumers constantly have to replace, Lexmark figures it can improve customer satisfaction. Most of the features work regardless of whether your printer was made by Lexmark, Hewlett-Packard Co. or another rival.

Lexmark has versions available for both Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers.

The Firefox version offers more functions. Lexmark says Firefox users tend to be more technically advanced, and thus open to more customization. While the Internet Explorer tool lets you eliminate images, for instance, the Firefox version lets you remove forms, links and other elements, too.

Adobe Systems has announced major updates to its Photoshop Elements suite of video- and photo-editing software, including online sharing and mobile-phone options. In beta now, the software is expected to be on retail shelves in early October.

Photoshop Premiere Elements 7 adds significant features to video editing, while Photoshop Elements 7 incorporates major enhancements to the photo-editing program. Mobile features cover only a limited number of phones.

Have too many grumpy-looking locals in the background of your shot of the Eiffel Tower? Elements 7 promises you can “scrub” unwanted elements from pictures with its new Scene Cleaner feature. Quick Fix tools whiten teeth, enhance colors, and soften details, among other things. A powerful new Smart Brush allows users to assign repetitive tasks to the brush tool, then use it on multiple sections of a photo, like removing wrinkles.

The Premiere video suite gained a few IQ points with a new analysis mode that scans video files for picture quality, number of faces and sound levels, and applies Smart Tags as placeholders for what the software believes are the best clips. If you agree, you can just click a button to assemble a finished movie.

InstantMovie is a quick way to assemble a themed video. Dragging and dropping clips into a theme, such as Birthday, will add appropriate music, transitions and graphics. Green-screen technology has a Videomerge feature to superimpose you and the family going for a stroll on the moon, for example. Version 7 now outputs to DVD, Blu-ray and the AVCHD high-definition tapeless file format, and it supports instant uploads to phones and YouTube accounts.

To compete with online sites such as Flickr, Adobe announced an enhanced online service for Photoshop Elements customers called Photoshop.com. A basic subscription with 5GB of storage is available free for storing and sharing photos and videos. The plus package ups the ante to 20GB for $49.95. Both provide online backups of stored files. Plus members also receive additions to the software, such as new themes, tutorials, movie trailers, and special effects.

With Elements 7 cell-phone users can upload pictures directly to Photoshop.com from their phones. The application runs in the background, and Adobe promises it uploads photos while you talk, instant message, or use other phone options. The Palm Treo, Samsung Blackjacks, and Motorola Qs are supported now. The company Web site promises support for the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Pearl, Motorola Razr, Nokia 5310, and Nokia 6301 in September.

Imagine your laptop is stolen.

Set aside for a second the likelihood that if it was you wouldn’t be able to read this story and think instead about how you might go about tracking it down.

There are existing services, such as LoJack, that are designed to help find purloined laptops by identifying the IP addresses where they are subsequently used and through other assorted methods.

But according to a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington, the price you pay for utilizing such services is a loss of privacy–as well as a reliance on a corporate third party to take care of you.

That’s why the team has come up with its own alternative, which it is calling Adeona, the name for the Roman goddess of safe returns.

The idea behind Adeona, according to Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, who gave a talk about the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, is to give people a method for safeguarding their laptops that relies neither on proprietary commercial software nor the centralized servers of the companies that provide such software.

Adeona, they said, is the world’s first free, open-source laptop-tracking system, and one that can be installed by users themselves, and which doesn’t require a corporate intermediary.

The format used by Microsoft Corp.’s Office 2007 programs to save documents will become an international standard after appeals against the move failed to gather sufficient support, the International Organization for Standardization said Friday.

The decision ends months of wrangling over whether Microsoft’s Office Open XML format should be considered an open standard - a requirement for many lucrative government contracts.

Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela had complained that an international ballot held in April was poorly conducted and rushed them into a decision based on incomplete information.

Technical panels at the Geneva-based ISO and its sister organization, the International Electrotechnical Commission, considered the appeals but concluded that they lacked the necessary support of two-thirds of their membership.

The two bodies said it will take several weeks before OOXML officially becomes an international standard.

VMware Tuesday said it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware’s lead in the virtualization market.

The next version of ESXi, which will come in about two weeks, will be available at no cost, said VMware CEO Paul Maritz on a conference call Tuesday to discuss the company’s second-quarter earnings. ESXi is a basic hypervisor, which is technology that separates the OS from server hardware so multiple OSes can run virtually on one physical server.

Maritz said the move to make the already low-cost product free is part of VMware’s plan to make its virtualization and network infrastructure products “as freely available to everyone in the industry” as possible as it diversifies its products beyond merely enabling virtualization. A former Microsoft executive, Maritz replaced VMware cofounder and former CEO Diane Greene, who was ousted in a sudden move two weeks ago.

VMware is facing some of its toughest competition yet as Microsoft and other companies seek to commoditize the core virtualization technology on which VMware’s business was built by offering it as part of the OS.

Speaking about his “alma mater” Tuesday, Maritz called Microsoft a “formidable” competitor, but “not an invincible” one.

On Monday, Symantec opened two of its Norton 2009 products to public beta. Both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009 feature new code that not only makes the scans and services run faster, but consume fewer system resources, says Tom Powledge, vice president of consumer product management.

As an example, Powledge said that where Norton Internet Security 2006 consumed roughly 300MB of hard-disk space, the 2009 version is coming in around 100MB. Symantec has achieved this, in part, by reducing a number of redundancies introduced over the years. For example, previous versions of NIS contained multiple copies of the antivirus signature database.

For antivirus protection, faster and lighter has been achieved by focusing only on the files that have changed. As hard drives fill with digital photos and songs–files that typically do not change–Norton is able to mark them as trusted and then ignore them on subsequent scans. Powledge says this results in big gains in speed, reducing the time it takes to scan large drives.

Also, in order to keep up with the ever-changing malware loose on the Internet today, the 2009 products with be updated every 15 minutes or so with new signature files.

Although Microsoft officially stopped selling Windows XP as of June 30, retailers can keep selling it as long as they have copies.

Perhaps as a result of its potentially impending scarcity, XP is near the top of Amazon.com’s software list, with the full version of XP Home at No. 15 and the full version of XP Pro at No. 21.

The highest ranked Vista edition doesn’t crack the top 25, although it does come on nearly all new PCs these days so most people don’t need a boxed copy.

For those keeping score, Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard is No. 7 on the software list, while the highest ranking Vista version is the update version of Windows Vista Home Premium, at No. 41.

Adobe Systems’ popular portable document format, or PDF as it’s more well-known, has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard as of Wednesday morning.

Adobe has been the key developer and patent holder of the technology, and on Wednesday passed over the entire specification of version 1.7 to the Geneva-based ISO. This comes just a year and a half after Adobe made plans to open up by giving the specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) which was to lay the groundwork for ISO certification.

The ISO has issued a press release about the new standard (named “ISO 32000-1:2008″), along with a quote from Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch about the move expanding the PDF universe. “As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years,” Lynch said. It’s nearly verbatim with what he said back in the AIIM hand-off, but holds true to what typically happens when any file format is ISO certified. They’ll typically become more attractive to governments and large corporate customers.

Adobe released on Tuesday the first Reader application to bake movies and animation into the Portable Document Format.

With Adobe Reader 9, users can play Flash movies, Shockwave animation, and other rich media content without needing to open a third-party player.

PDFs are reaching new levels of interactivity with this release. Past versions of the nearly ubiquitous and free application, by contrast, have enabled dynamic forms but served largely to open print-ready PDFs.

The update is supposed to load more quickly than version 8, addressing the gripes of many users who felt that Reader slowed down Web surfing.

Adobe has described this release as potentially leading to a one-size-fits-all media player. Acrobat 9, released in June at between $299 to $699, will embed video and animation within PDFs.

A major consumer group, insurers together with Google Inc and Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday they have agreed to standards intended to speed adoption of personal electronic health records.

The electronic medical record field remains in its infancy. While U.S. privacy laws govern actions by medical providers such as doctors, there is little in the way of other established privacy, security and data usage standards despite decades of industry efforts.

Backers, which also include some doctors and employer groups, said they hope to break a stalemate in moving medical records online, sparked by consumer fears that their personal information will be abused, or held against them.

“A policy and privacy logjam … has constricted some of the consumer uptake of these services,” said James Dempsey, deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy rights group that accepts some industry funding.

Principles for personal health records include an audit trail to track use of the data, a dispute resolution process for consumers who believe their personal information has been misused and a ban on using data to discriminate in employment.

Also signing on to the principles are WebMD Health Corp; Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports; seniors’ lobbying group AARP; and America’s Health Insurance Plans, representing big insurers such as Aetna Inc.