Microsoft wants more 'standard` users

Microsoft wants more desktop business users to be "standard" in order to create a more secure environment, ComputerWorld reports.

The company`s Longhorn system will allow users to perform more tasks under the standard setting in an effort to reduce the amount of users running software under the administrative setting.

Under some Windows standard settings, users cannot load new software on a machine or make changes to Internet settings, for example, preventing them from accidentally downloading malicious programs or opening the network up to attack.

However, limitations cause around 80% of business users to run Windows under administrative settings.

Microsoft plans to reduce this number to around 20% with Longhorn by expanding standard users` capabilities while still protecting some functions that are best left in administrators` hands.

Hollywood executives say the day may not be far off when some major films are available on DVD at the same time as the theatrical release in a bid to combat the growing threat of piracy, BBC reports.

Warner Bros Entertainment chairman Barry Meyer says movie premieres "may soon be at Wal-Mart", adding that movies make more money on DVD than in cinemas in some territories.

"Right now theatrical is the main way we set values in these movies, and video is the first aftermarket. It might well be that in certain territories it should be exactly the reverse - that theatrical is the added value. The day you have a public performance of a movie, there will be a physical product on the streets within a few days."

According to the Hollywood Reporter, box office revenue in the US hit a record R57 billion last year, but that figure was dwarfed by the estimated R150 billion in DVD and video rental sales.

Samsung executives say the concept of a hard drive incorporating flash memory will be commercially available by mid-2006.

The hybrid hard drive will feature a 1Gb flash chip inside a hard drive, which will serve dual duty both as a write buffer and as a solid-state boot disk for the operating system.

Writing data to the hard disk - such as user files or cached images while Web browsing - will be intercepted by the hard disk instead. Only when the flash memory`s "write buffer" was full would the hard disk be spun up, minimising the time and power that would be spent keeping the drive`s rotating media spinning.

According to ExtremeTech, the drive will be manufactured by Samsung`s hard disk drive division, and will be initially targeted at notebooks, where the drive`s low power consumption will yield the most benefit.