1 Billion PCs in use by end of 2008

It's taken 27 years to reach 1 billion PCs in use, and market researchers say it will take only five to reach the next billion.
Forrester Research is set to release a report Monday titled, "Worldwide PC Adoption Forecast to 2015," saying that many of those next billion will be used by first-time PC users in emerging nations like Brazil, Russia, India and China. At least 775 million new PCs will be in use in those countries by 2015, according to Forrester.
Not only is access to computers beneficial to those users, it also will represent a big bump in sales for PC manufacturers and sellers. Though the computer industry can still profit from selling replacement machines to existing users, the big money to be made is in the far greater number of users who have never owned one.
There are, of course, drawbacks in entering new markets, the report warns. Computer sellers in mature markets can count on a fairly predictable cycle of PC buying, but untapped markets are hardly as predictable and vendors will likely need to work together to scale production appropriately over the next decade, says Forrester.

Look out 2D Search 3rd Dimention

SpaceTime is a new tool for searching the Web in three dimensions. You can search using Google and Yahoo, or dig deeper into niche services like eBay and Flickr. Results show up in a swirling sky-like environment where you can sort through rendered pages in stacks, similar to Windows Vista's Flip 3D window-shuffling effect and the upcoming Time Machine in OSX Leopard. You can maneuver around any page, and zoom back and forth. To see any result up close, just double-click on it and it will revert to a customized browser window that's running a shelled version of Internet Explorer.
SpaceTime installs as an extension, and is by no means a lightweight Web app. The minimum hardware specs will likely put it out of the range of most computers that are over two or three years old. In our testing, we found it to hog a considerable amount of RAM and CPU, so unless your machine is beefy, you're likely to have an undesirable experience. It's also limited to Windows machines, so Mac users are out of luck.
This is by no means the first venture into the world of turning the internet into 3D. 3B, which launched at last year's Web 2.0 conference, turns bookmarked pages into walls in a Doom-like 3D world. Users of the popular MMORPG Second Life are also able to put up live Web pages inside the virtual world.
Frankly, I really don't find a use for these services. When I am searching for something, I want it to be as quick and easy as possible. If I have time to dedicate to a search, I'm often using multiple search engines or the built-in search on Web sites. While SpaceTime is visually appealing, the amount of resources used and slow search speeds make it too prohibitive to take the place of something like your browser's built-in search box.

Malicious software targeting OpenOffice.org Documents

Malicious software targeting OpenOffice.org documents is spreading through multiple operating systems, according to Symantec.
"A new worm is being distributed within malicious OpenOffice documents. The worm can infect Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems," according to a Symantec Security Response advisory. "Be cautious when handling OpenOffice files from unknown sources."
Apple's Mac OS is not a virus-free platform, said Jan Hruska, who co-founded rival antivirus firm Sophos and was one of the first ever PC antivirus experts.
"Viruses on the Mac are here and now. They are available, and they are moving around. It is not as though the Mac is in some miraculous way a virus-free environment," Hruska said. "The number of viruses coming out for non-Mac platforms is higher. It gives a false impression that somehow, Apple Macs are all virus-free."
The worm was first spotted late last month, but at the time, it was not thought to be "in the wild."
Once opened, the OpenOffice file, called badbunny.odg, launches a macro that behaves in several different ways, depending on the user's operating system.
On Windows systems, it drops a file called drop.bad, which is moved to the system.ini file in the user's mIRC folder. It also executes the JavaScript virus badbunny.js, which replicates to other files in the folder.
On Apple Mac systems, the worm drops one of two Ruby script viruses in files respectively called badbunny.rb and badbunnya.rb.
On Linux systems, the worm drops both badbunny.py as an XChat script and badbunny.pl as a Perl virus.
Symantec rates the worm as a "medium risk."