Blockbuster last week introduced a set-top box that brings movie rentals from the Internet to the television. Today it announced a partnership with Microsoft that will let users watch Internet movies on a variety of mobile devices. The ultimate goal, Blockbuster said, was to give "instant access" to any movie to any device that had the broadband link and a screen.

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We have a great set of giveaways to offer Microsoft Subnet readers as a special holiday thank you.

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The same Malaysian Web site that successfully predicted release dates for Vista SP1 and XP SP3 earlier this year, said that Microsoft will finish the Vista SP2 service pack in April and will post a generally available release candidate in February. A release candidate was posted for select testers/developers about a month ago.

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While Microsoft can write all the patches it wants, it can’t make users install them. But hackers can push that button, which brings us to the gory little problem going on today with Win32/Conficker.A and a clock ticking toward Turkey Day. (Read more about the worm here.)

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Microsoft was issued 146 patents in November as of November 25, according to the Patents.com site ... and this isn't a particularly blockbuster month. In October, Redmond staked its intellectual property claim by acquiring 220 patents.

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Steve Ballmer has been ordered to testify in the “Vista Capable” class action suit. In September Ballmer tried to get out of exactly this by claiming that he had no direct involvement in Microsoft’s marketing campaign for the operating system.

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The current beta version of IE8 was released in August. Speculators at that time said this meant a final version would be ready in 2008. However, Microsoft yesterday promised that the next version of IE8 will be a release candidate (RC) and will appear in the first quarter of 2009.

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Microsoft's annual shareholder's meeting occurred yesterday and given that the stock traded today at $17.50, its lowest point since 1998, you can imagine the tone among those that attended. Fed up might describe it, if this TechFlash blog post by a long-term shareholder is representative of the crowd.

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The most worrisome hole is the kind that doesn't need a user to be logged in with administrative rights. A researcher says he found such a hole in Windows Vista that could allow an attacker to load a PC up with unauthorized code.

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Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell announced their voucher-based partnership between SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Windows. At the time, the announcement caused much anger among "opensourceilites," who had been understandably angry at Microsoft's anti-Linux, threats-to-sue marketing tactics. A lot has changed since then -- and we won't take you down memory lane about it.

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Microsoft will be offering a free, stripped-down version of its Windows Live OneCare PC security tool, code-named "Morro," in the second half of 2009. Microsoft will also discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service effective June 30, 2009.

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Until today, only large companies could get SharePoint or Exchange as an online service available directly from Microsoft. Smaller customers could get hosted Exchange from numerous other suppliers (Intermedia, for example) and hosted SharePoint from numerous others (Apptix, for example) but not from Microsoft.

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The controversial ISO vote that accepted Microsoft's Office Open XML as a standard continues to have fallout effects. Norway's government today announced it was setting aside 2 million kroner -- about $285,000 -- to encourage its public sector to adopt OpenOffice to reduce dependency on Microsoft Office, the AP reports.

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Can IPv6 change the world? Reduce excessive energy consumption? Spend a little time chatting with IPv6 champion extraordinaire Geof Lambert and you will soon be convinced it can. Lambert, an executive recruiter by trade, has always had a love of technology. He combined that with his philanthropic leanings to become one of the best–known advocates of IPv6 as a tool for ending the digital divide.

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If Microsoft could create a social networking site that would be the grandaddy of all social networking sites, it might convince more users to join. Of course, all of this has been tried before. Facebook wants to be your main stop. FriendFeed wants to be your main stop. Twitter applications like Twhirl want to help you link to multiple networks. And on and on it goes. Social networking mania is prevailing.

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When credit is unavailable logic would say that interest rates rise. But there's a growing trend in the IT world where the vendors themselves are willing to become the bank at very favorable rates to book business from their credit crunched customers. If there's an upside to an economic stumble this could be it.

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Microsoft today committed to spending $1 billion in research and development in China over the next three years and finaly named a replacement of its chief executive of greater China. Former Motorola executive Simon Leung has been hired to replace the top China slot, left vacant for over a year, reports the Wall Street Journal.

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Now here's a fact to both amaze and annoy you. As we all suspected, the power to stop the tidal wave of spam rests squarely in the hands of ISPs, if they ever chose to act on it. The point is proven by the following graphic sent to Microsoft Subnet from anti-spam vendor MessageLabs (a company acquired by Symantec in October). Yesterday spam kingpin McColo Corp. was at least partially taken offline. McColo is a Web hosting service that has been credited with enabling 75 percent of the world's e-mail spam and scams.

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Today, Nov.

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Enterprise IT pros might be breathing a sign of relief. Some Patch Tuesdays are loaded with critical and important fixes, but today's consists only of two patches (although there was an emergency patch issued mid-cycle, MS08-067, on October 23.) The strange news in this set of patches is that one of them seems to be from a problem first reported seven years ago.

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