It seems there are a looot of people waiting for Microsoft to show us a better operating system in the future, and the first stop is - obviously - Windows 7. A few minutes ago, I was amazed to find a site started last year dedicated entirely to this subject - Windows 7 news, but that site is not my topic now, as you can easily figure out. The news is that, despite what Bill Gates previously said, it seems Windows 7 will arrive in 2010.


Getting back to Bill Gates' previous declarations, is enough to quote the following: "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version [with] the ability to be lower-power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections."

Various reports claim this week we may even see a Windows 7 demo, at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital Conference, aka D6, while others say Microsoft will only show some future technologies, and not Windows 7 itself.

Next, I have some sad news for you - Windows 7 won't be rewritten from scratch, so it's going to use the same foundation as Vista. Obviously, considering the above, it shouldn't be a surprise the fact that Windows 7 will support a wide range of hardware already compatible with Vista at the time of its launch, in 2010, and hardware requirements should be pretty light, when that moment comes.

At last, let's see the funny part of it all - when asked about a future Windows version, Bill Gates said "sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version," but now, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky told CNET "We've been very clear, and will continue to say, that the next release of Windows, Windows 7, is about three years after the general availability of Windows Vista, and we're committed to that, and we've signed up publicly to do that."

Ehem...what am I missing here? Who's right and who's wrong? Probably there's no accurate answer to that, and it still seems a very long way until 2010...

As long as our right to privacy is not hung, drawn and quartered, I have nothing against MPAA and RIAA chasing down and sending into court all those downloading illegal content, but I think we're still far from the truth. Did they try to work with every ISP, so that every new Internet user can be accurately informed about the legal risks involved by downloading various things, and - most important - explain exactly what is legal, and what is not? As far as I know, they didn't do such a thing, but fortunately, today it's not about someone sent into court for downloading songs he (or she) was thinking of being completely free. Today, it's about two more websites that have been shut down by the MPAA...


The sites we're talking about are ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net. Well, it's better to say "have been ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net," because if we try to visit them, the first one displays a parked domain page, and the other, the following message: "This site has been permanently shut down because it was operated in violation of copyright laws. On May 7, 2008, a federal judge in Los Angeles issued a $1.375 million judgment against Cinematube.net for the infringement of numerous popular copyrighted motion pictures and television shows. There are plenty of sites that offer legal downloads and streaming of premium film and television content. A list of these sites can be found at http://www.mpaa.org/piracy_LegalOpt.asp."

Oh, my! MPAA is helping us, by giving away that precious list of "premium film and television content!" Thank you very much, but now, let's get back to ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, shall we?

So, what did they do so wrong, after all? They weren't hosting a single bit of copyrighted content, but they were both showing the path to such content. Basically, we're talking about the same thing as a Torrent tracker that has torrents with illegal content, so ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, despite the fact they weren't hosting anything illegal, ended up by being found guilty of contributory copyright infringement, simply for searching, finding, collecting and indexing links to illegal copies of various movies and TV shows. Ta-taa!

That's it. The money? Well, damages totaled $2.7 million for ShowStash and $1.3 million for Cinematube, and the most funny part is that none of them was particularly well-known - at least I never heard those names until now!

If you know anything about this deal, please don't hesitate to enlighten the rest of us. Some details about these two sites I mentioned today would also be great, so feel free to drop those comments!

While the Yahoo vs. Microsoft affair, previously known to be finally over, seems to have some dark areas yet to be discovered, another incident involving Microsoft has been brought into the light once again - the European Comission has just added Microsoft's promise to improve the compatibility of Office applications with competing programs to its concerns list...


Expected to become reality next year, Microsoft's promises include the ability to save PDF files in Office 2007, together with other non-Microsoft formats, in addition to its Office Open XML format, shortly known as OOXML.

On Thursday, the European Union's executive arm said "In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office, the commission will investigate whether the announced support of PDF in Office leads to better interoperability."

So far, Microsoft was forced to pay no less than $2.63 billion in fines in the E.U, so they should be extra-careful this time. It seems Europe shouldn't be taken lightly...