MS cuts Xbox 360 prices

Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console will be $50 cheaper from tomorrow, confirming fuzzy snapshots of leaked advertisements posted by bloggers in late July, reports USA Today.

The company said its most popular console, which comes with a 20GB hard drive, will cost $349.

A basic console, without a hard drive or wireless controllers, will retail for $279, $20 less than its current price, while the Xbox 360 Elite, a black version with a 120GB hard drive and high-definition video support, will drop $50 to $449.

The first iPhone lawsuit might have been somewhat laughable, but the second one may be a little more serious, says CNET News.com.

SP Technologies has sued Apple over the touch-screen keyboard at the heart of the iPhone, claiming Apple is infringing on a patent held by the company for a similar keyboard.

AppleInsider dug up the SP patent filing from 2000, which claims the company developed a "method of providing a user interface for receiving information from a user using a user immutable graphical keyboard linked to an input area".

Lenovo will offer a wide selection of low- to high-end machines loaded with Linux software from Novell, reports China View.

This announcement was made at the start of LinuxWorld, an annual conference for IT managers being held in San Francisco.

This is the first time Lenovo has provided support for both the hardware and operating system, an extension of its current support, providing a help centre for the SUSE operating system.

Microsoft last week slammed the door on a free utility out of Australia that outflanked one of the company's touted security features in Windows Vista, by having the program's digital certificate revoked.

According to Computerworld, users took Microsoft to task for the move, noting the slippery slope the company was walking on, with some blasting the vendor for playing "software police".

Linchpin Labs' Atsiv utility, released 20 July, used a signed driver to load other, unsigned code into the Vista kernel, according to US-based Symantec researcher Ollie Whitehouse. Atsiv, said Whitehouse, lets users circumvent a feature of the 64-bit version of Vista that allows only digitally signed code to be loaded into the operating system's kernel.