End nears for XP, Office 2003 support

Microsoft will drop mainstream support for Office 2003 on April 14--the same day that the retirement process begins for Windows XP.

Although mainstream support for the Office 2003 applications suite will come to an end, Microsoft has the product scheduled to remain in "extended support" until April 8, 2014.

Under extended support, Microsoft only plans to deliver patches and bug fixes. Any other maintenance will be available only to users who have signed support contracts with Microsoft.

The Windows XP operating system has similar contractual terms. As with Office 2003, mainstream support will end for XP on April 14, and only users who have signed up for extended support with Microsoft will continue to receive help after that.
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Acer's first Nvidia Ion-based Revo desktop

Just as Netbooks are catching up with traditional ultraportables when it comes to features and performance, the latest Nettop from Acer poses a serious threat to mainstream desktops. The Acer Revo may be only a fraction of the size of a standard mid-tower chassis and use much less power, but its 1.6GHz 230 Atom processor and Nvidia Ion chipset are powerful enough to render 1080p full-HD videos without a flutter.
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YouTube, Sony Pictures in talks over feature films

YouTube is in talks to acquire licensing rights to full-length content from Sony Pictures, home of such films as The International and Spider-Man, sources familiar with the negotiations told CNET News. Details about what a final agreement could look like are sparse, but any partnership between the two powerhouses would likely benefit both.

Representatives from both companies declined to comment.

Word of the negotiations comes a week after Disney announced it had licensed short-form content to YouTube. Those clips will come from a range of Disney brands, including ABC and ESPN. For YouTube, obtaining short-form clips from Disney is an important step but still doesn't provide what YouTube needs most.
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Microsoft puts finger on better gestures

While much of the attention on multitouch surrounds what devices the interface will next find its way onto, Microsoft is also looking at how to improve the gestures themselves.

At a computer interface conference in Boston, Microsoft is presenting ideas for how to perform 27 different commands--ideas that stemmed by showing test subjects a set of commands and asking them to do the most logical gesture. Those that were popular among multiple people were the ones the researchers said made the most sense.

"If they are going to be universal gestures we want them to be very natural," Microsoft researcher Meredith Morris said in an interview last week.

The research comes as the use of such gestures is starting to take off. Multitouch gesture controls are already an integrated part of the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface and are also supported on some notebook trackpads. Windows 7 adds operating system-level support for multitouch gestures.

While widely praised as intuitive, Microsoft's research shows only some of the gestures used on multitouch devices make sense, Morris said.
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First hands-on with Pogoplug

The Pogoplug, which I first covered from the Consumer Electronics Show, connects any USB hard drive to your local network and also puts it on the Internet so you can share files.

As I said before, this is not a new idea, but Pogoplug is supposed to be uncommonly easy to set up and use. It's shipping today, and I've had a few days to preview the device to check out the claims.

It's a good product. It actually does combine the speed of a local drive with the convenience of Web-accessible storage, and it requires barely any geek skills to get running.

The US$99 product (no monthly fees) has two connections besides power: USB and Ethernet. It should be pretty clear what you plug into each. Once connected, you go online to the Pogoplug site to register your particular unit based on its serial number. This gives you password-controlled access over the Web to the storage device you have plugged into it. If you attach a USB hub, you can use it to access multiple hard drives or memory sticks.

The real benefit of using the Pogoplug over the Web is that it's easy to share files stored on it. You can share directories on your drive just by clicking a Share button and optionally entering an e-mail address to send out invitations, and you can also get an RSS feed for any shared directory.
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