Microsoft released the third service pack for Windows XP to the Web after last week delaying its scheduled release because of an incompatibility with one of its other software applications. It also resumed automatic distribution of Windows Vista, Service Pack 1, which had been halted because of a similar problem.

Windows XP SP3 is now available through Windows Update and also on the Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft had expected to release the software on April 29; however, it discovered it conflicted with an application called Microsoft Dynamics RMS. The problem also affected Windows Vista SP1. Dynamics RMS is a retail-chain-management software for small and midsized businesses.

Microsoft is beta-testing a new version of its Microsoft Download Center Web site using Silverlight technology, a browser plug-in and development runtime for adding multimedia and high-definition video to Web-based applications.

A visit to the Microsoft Download Center on Tuesday opened a page inviting users to test the new site, which Microsoft said is being enhanced by Silverlight.

Excel4U.Net Solutions announced Pivot4U, an add-in for Microsoft Excel that enhances it with a new feature–editable pivot tables. With Pivot4U Add-in, any pivot table, using an Excel sheet as source data, will grow into a powerful tool for planning, calculations or form of data entry. All the power of calculations and planning "FROM ABOVE-DOWNWARD" will become readily accessible without complex and costly software.

A pivot table is a data summarization tool that, among other functions, can automatically sort, count, and total the data stored in one table or spreadsheet and create a second table displaying the summarized data. Pivot4U Add-in 1.2 requires Microsoft Office 2007 and .NET Framework 2.0. The product is available immediately as a free evaluation version from www.excel4u.net. The evaluation version can be tried for 14 days before making the purchase of $79.99 (US).

For those of you who happen to be awake at 4am Rocky Mountain time, David will be broadcasting on the 50,000 watt radio station KOA-850AM, doing the after-midnight show with Rick Barber and talking about White House email and the Mexican theft of White House BlackBerrys. Just so you know, in order to do this at 4am Rocky Mountain time, David’s got to be conscious and lucid at 6am Florida time.

If you know our fearless leader, you know he’s definitely not a 6am kinda guy, so the only way this is going to fly is stay up and do the show before going to bed. In any case, if you happen to be up at 4am and located pretty much anywhere on the western side of the US (50,000 watts reaches a long distance at night), you can tune in. You can also listen via their Web feed, should you be in a different part of the world. David promises to do his best to keep you awake throughout the full hour.

And, if you’re mature and sleeping, like all good people should be at that hour, we’ll post the download link sometime in the next day or so when it makes it online.

A company that develops cameras that produce 360-degree videos is suing Microsoft for alleged patent infringement in its RoundTable conferencing product.

In a filing this week with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, FullView asks the court to require Microsoft to stop selling RoundTable and to award FullView triple damages.

FullView’s patent, which builds on other patent applications dating back to 1995, covers a camera system that combines the fields of view of several cameras to form a continuous 360-degree view.

Microsoft and Yahoo have intensified talks in a last-minute effort to reach a friendly agreement on a buyout of Yahoo, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Yahoo shares rose 7 percent on news of the accelerated talks. Investors had feared Microsoft might walk away from its unsolicited bid, now worth about $42.2 billion, or launch a hostile takeover battle. The software maker had set a deadline for Yahoo that passed last Saturday.

Microsoft has since increased its offer by several dollars per share, though the talks could yet fall apart, the New York Times’s DealBook blog reported, citing a person involved in the discussions. Microsoft declined to comment.

The competition between Microsoft and Adobe heated up some more recently when Microsoft scored a key hire from its competitor.

Mark Hamburg, who had been chief architect of Adobe Photoshop and who launched the Adobe effort that became Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, resigned from Adobe after 17 years and is joining Microsoft.

Samuel King and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown that they could gain control of a computer by adding malicious circuits to its processor. Because these circuits interfere with the computer at a deeper level than a virus, they effectively operate "below the radar" of AV software.

To evaluate the risk from such hardware, King’s team designed their own malicious circuits. They used a processor called a field programmable gate array (FPGA), whose logic circuits can be rearranged, to create a replica of an existing open source processor called Leon3, which contains around 1.7 million circuits. They then added about 1000 malicious circuits not present in Leon3.

The team found that the circuits allowed them to bypass security controls on Leon3 in a similar way to how a virus hands control of a computer to a hacker, but without requiring a flaw in a software application. When they hooked the FPGA up to another computer, they were able to steal passwords stored in its memory and install malicious software that would allow the operating system it was running to be remotely controlled.

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a working unit of a memory circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it has retained.

The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events.

For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave the heating time for different food types based on the information it has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP.[Can you say Skynet?]

A Colorado man accused of sending hundreds of thousands of spam emails has been sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and falsifying email headers.

Thirty-five-year-old Edward "Eddie" Davidson of Louisville was also ordered to pay nearly $715,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced Monday and ordered to report to prison authorities in May.