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Ever since Microsoft released Vista to the masses, most people knew just how bad the operating system was. Instead of offering the kind of functionality already found on Linux or Mac OS X and the stability that we had come to welcome in XP, Vista was nothing more than a Beta release on day one and very few improvements have been made to change that.

To make matters worse, most companies and individuals are more than happy to keep XP running and even Apple has been able to capitalize somewhat on the issues people have had with Microsoft’s latest operating system.

Obviously realizing that there is some trouble afoot, Microsoft on Thursday announced price cuts on its most expensive versions of Vista and said those discounts will range from 20 percent to 48 percent. Ironically, those discounts are designed to coincide with the release of Vista Service Pack 1, which according to Microsoft, will usher in a slew of security fixes and improvements that should make the Vista experience much better.

And while I applaud Microsoft for finally dropping the price on its ill-fated software, the price drop looks more like a PR move than something that will have an impact on consumers and most importantly, shows just how much trouble this company is in with Windows.

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Ah, a breath of fresh air from a former Financial Times reporter:

We spend way too much time inside our small Silicon Valley worlds. It often feels as if I constantly see the 400 or so people that run this place, and that drive the main conversations here, it is like a high school cafeteria.

I liked it a lot last year, I still like the life here, but increasingly I think the best advice is to get out into the real world occasionally. Yet I know plenty of people that hardly ever, except for family occasions, spend any time outside of the closeted worlds of Silicon Valley.

What do you discover outside the Valley and the technology world it venerates?

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(Credit: HP)

Remember that $40 HP photo printer from a couple months back? For an extra $5.99, you can get one that’s similar but way better: The HP A716 churns out snapshots as large as 5×7 (panoramas, too) and comes with 4 gigabytes of internal storage.

The big …

Although streaming video on the Web is nothing new, it has yet to make its way onto YouTube. But that could change over the next 10 months, co-founder Steve Chen tells Sarah Meyers in a Pop17.com video report posted Thursday.

Meyers’ report, cited on Friday by one of Pop17′…

So what happened to all the settlement money that Napster and Kazaa were forced to pay the record labels?

That’s the question some music artists are asking, according to a story that appeared Wednesday in The New York Post.

The Post quoted two talent managers who said that artists

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Want to make more money as an enterprise application developer? You’re in luck–if you know open source.

According to a recent report from Bluewolf Consulting, enterprises increasingly deploy open-source software, and look to specialized application development on top of it, to drive business value:

The rise of open-source software

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On February 28, Microsoft started to distribute Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 via Microsoft Update. As
I noted earlier, it’s safer to avoid new software, including new bug fixes and
new service packs (a big collection of bug fixes).

In the current issue* of the Windows Secrets newsletter,
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In spite of the wild success around server virtualization, many users perceived that security was a server virtualization achilles heel. The hypervisor (i.e. guts of server virtualization) was a bit of a black box where security technologies had no visibility. As a result, security tools assumed that each virtual …

Google is partnering with homeless shelters in San Francisco to distribute free phone numbers and voicemail accounts to those without homes, the company said Wednesday.

The Internet giant is expanding a service that was started by Grand Central, a San Francisco-based start-up that Google acquired last year. Grand Central’s …

AMD’s quad-core “Barcelona” chip for servers is ready to launch. Really launch this time.

AMD is shipping the quad-core “Barcelona” Opteron to channel and distribution partners this week, according to an AMD spokesperson on Thursday. System vendors such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP) are readying systems for shipment in …