Microsoft's designs on Adobe's turf

Microsoft is building a suite of products for Web designers and creative professionals that should step up its challenge to market leader Adobe Systems, says ZDNet.

The company has released Expression Web, a tool for designing user interfaces, and is offering the product as an upgrade to its Microsoft FrontPage Web authoring tool.

In addition, Microsoft posted a public beta download of Expression Blend, its Windows-specific design software.

Dell has unveiled a premium "Energy Smart" line of servers that consume less power than regular models, becoming the latest company to jump aboard the energy-efficiency bandwagon, reports ZDNet.

The company began with two rack-mountable systems: the 1.75-inch thick PowerEdge 1950 and the 3.5-inch-thick 2950.

The systems use higher-efficiency Intel processors, power supplies and fans, Dell said. They also include components to increase airflow in the chassis and have system settings to increase efficiency.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has started to ship chips made on the 65nm process, as the manufacturing spat with Intel heats up, reports CNET.

AMD chips made on the 65nm process will consume about 30% less energy than the same chips produced on the 90nm process when running at the same speed. In the first chips shipped on this process, virtually all of the benefit comes in reduced power consumption, said Nick Kepler, VP of logic technology development at AMD.

Later, the company will balance energy conservation and performance gain, depending on what the designers want to achieve with various desktop, notebook and server chip designs, he said.

An International Telecommunications Union (ITU) report warns the growing use of the Web is stripping people of their personal privacy, reports the BBC.

The number of passwords and logins Web users need makes it inevitable they will re-use phrases, warns the ITU. Re-using these identifiers puts people at serious risk of falling victim to identity theft, it says.

The report called on regulators and businesses to find better ways for people to identify themselves to Web sites.

A month after the historic deal between the companies, Novell said it would support the proprietary document format in Microsoft Office 2007, Open XML, in its open source version of the OpenOffice productivity suite, by the end of January, reports PCWorld.

Novell will also release software that will bi-directionally translate word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between its version of OpenOffice.org's productivity suite and Microsoft Office to the OpenOffice.org project so Open XML can become a part of that open source project, the company said.