The software firm famous for its proprietary file formats said it wants its HD Photo file format to be a standard for digital photography.

Microsoft got its best spinning machine out of the cupboard to explain what HD Photo is: "This new, next-generation digital image format offers the best solution for digital image editing and storage and unlocks the potential for digital photography on devices, applications and services."

The Vole claims HD Photo is twice as efficient as JPEG at compression and has less "damaging artefacts".

I had read somewhere that a Vista installation would take 20 minutes. Not if you upgrade from XP.

After three-and-a-half hours of churning, at long last the Vista logo filled my screen.

Where was the internet? I could see my router, but nothing beyond - even after a full day of tinkering with various network wizards.

Why did my Philips webcam refuse to work? The Upgrade Advisor had explicitly said it would.

I find myself caught in the Vista trap. Quite apart from the pain of having to reinstall XP, I do like Vista.

I've had two Vista crashes so far - not a blue but a black screen - and that really shouldn't happen. I can't even remember my last XP crash.

And everywhere I look, there are blogs and forums full of people who have problems with software drivers and suffer the poor customer support of the hundreds of hardware and software vendors that make up the Windows ecosystem.

Microsoft's 'super secure' operating system Vista will be plagued by hackers just as much as its predecessor XP, a security boffin has warned.

Marc Maiffret, founder and chief hacking officer of eEye Digital Security said hackers were starting to look at how to turn over Vista and have already found five or six different Vista-specific vulnerabilities.

No other software company does more to secure its code than Microsoft, but it is weird that people think that there is going to be a point where the operating system is impenetrable as this is never going to happen, he said.

Steve Ballmer has played down the hype surounding Vista sales saying some analysts have taken an overly optimistic view.

Ballmer said most sales of Vista were reliant on people buying new PCs and that the short-lived surge in PC sales was unlikely to be long-lived.

However, boxed copies of Vista did less well. Vista sold 59 per cent less copies in its first week in the US than XP did on its debut.

Microsoft shares fell almost 2.5 per cent on the news.

Vista is shiny and its maker can't even come up with a decent list as to why you should care. May I suggest you take your $400 and pick a new hobby using this as seed money? You won't get a DRM infection, you won't sell your soul to licensing agreements, and you will have a computer that is actually more functional. What more do you want?

MS will tell you that Vista is the next great thing in every way, it took billions of dollars to develop, millions of man-hours, and undoubtedly will be the best selling OS ever launched. The problem is that Vista brings almost nothing to the table that can't be described by as three year old as "shiny".

Let's look at it this way, ask yourself what good new features Vista brings to the table. Most will respond that it has Aero Glass, a really pretty UI. How may other things does it bring that are positives? I can't honestly think of one, and I'll bet if you ask the next ten people you run into, they won't be able to tell you any either.

Repeat the same exercise in the negative, what bad new things does Vista bring? Massive crushing DRM infections, unacceptable licence terms, bloated hardware requirements, and a list of cut features long enough to paper your bathroom.

VMware on Monday released version 3 of Converter, its application to move software from ordinary physical computers onto virtual machines. The new version of Converter permits the process to be automated so many servers can be converted at once, lets customers clone a machine's configuration as it runs, and understands Microsoft's virtual-machine storage format so those virtual machines can be imported as well.

We had a chance to chat with Josh Newman, Intel's chipset product marketing director, and he claimed that G965 as well as 945G and 945GM run Vista Aero "beautifully".

Intel believes that Aero Glass is an "exciting new user interface". It is supported by Intel 945 and 965 products and has "the highest quality drivers available" to run "Aero interface beautifully today".

Sometimes we wonder whether the poor hardware vendors are all being led by the nose in some sort of Microsoft cattle market, but that's just a view.

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month.

muslix64 used much the same plaintext attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD-DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG2 file.

In this case, muslix64 didn't even need access to a Blu-ray player to nobble the DRM protection included on the title.

Blu-ray and HD DVD both allow for decryption keys to be updated in reaction to attacks, for example by making it impossible to play high-definition movies via playback software known to be weak or flawed. So muslix64 work has effectively sparked off a car-and-mouse game between hackers and the entertainment industry, where consumers are likely to face compatibility problems while footing the bill for the entertainment industry's insistence on pushing ultimately flawed DRM technology on an unwilling public.

The US governments's cryptologic organisation, the National Security Agency, has admitted that it is behind some of the security changes to Microsoft's operating system Vista.

According to the Washington Post, the agency which was once so secret that it was jokingly referred to as 'No such Agency' has admitted making 'unspecified contributions' to Vista.

The NSA used a red and a blue team to pull apart the software. The red team posed as "the determined, technically competent adversary" to disrupt, corrupt or steal information. The Blue team helped Defense Department system administrators with Vista's configuration.

Vole said that it has sought help from the NSA over the last four years. Apparently its skills can be seen in the Windows XP consumer version and the Windows Server 2003 for corporate customers.

The assistance is at the US taxpayers' expense, although the NSA says it all makes perfect sense. Not only is the NSA protecting United States business, its own Defense Department uses VoleWare so it is in the government's interest to make sure it is as secure as possible.