Rivals wanted to 'castrate' Vista

Windows Vista will make it to market largely unscathed, despite attempts by Microsoft's rivals to take it to pieces, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said yesterday, reports CNet News.com.

"Competitors tried to get regulators to castrate the product," the Associated Press reported Gates as saying. But, according to Gates, they failed.

"I wouldn't say anti-trust played any dramatic role," he said. Gates made the comments during a European tour to promote Vista, the long-awaited successor to Windows XP.

When Sony launches the PlayStation 3 in Japan this weekend, they will likely fly off store shelves in no time. But the road to profitability is expected to be a long and rocky one for Sony's game business.

Sony will roll-out the latest version of its games machine in Japan on Saturday in a three-way showdown with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's upcoming Wii in the nearly $30 billion video-game market.

The stakes are high for Sony, reports Mail and Guardian Online. With its Walkman music players trailing far behind Apple's iPod in a market the Tokyo-based company created more than a quarter of a century ago, losing its leading position in another key market would be nothing less than a nightmare.

Google on Tuesday inadvertently sent the Kama Sutra e-mail worm to the 50 000 subscribers of a Google Video e-mail group, reports silicon.com.

Three postings were made on Tuesday evening to an e-mail list that sends out postings to the Google Video blog. In a note on its Web site apologising for the incident, Google said: "Some of these posts may have contained a virus called W32/Kapser.A@mm - a mass-mailing worm."

W32/Kapser.A is better known as the Kama Sutra worm. Some anti-virus companies raised an alarm about the threat in February, but it ultimately shrivelled. Kama Sutra was designed to overwrite files on infected computers on a specific date. However, the worm, which spread under the guise of pornographic content, caused virtually no damage.