Microsoft Corp. has announced plans to bundle two “family” video games with its Xbox 360 Elite game console during the holiday season. The company hopes to attract more attention of non-core audience to its premium game console. The success of the plan is not obvious, to say at least.

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Access 2007 introduced a new concept called Layouts. The most useful scenario for the feature was tabular reports. It makes it very easy to resize and rearrange columns compared to the pre-Access 2007 days with absolute position. Layouts in Access 2010 are much more flexible—allowing you to split columns and cells similar to tables. In many ways, this makes it easier to keep controls aligned.

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Mozilla has announced that Firefox, the little browser that could, has nearly reached a sizeable milestone – one billion downloads.

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Although most of us are waiting for Microsoft to release Windows 7, the software giant is still hard at work maintaining the current versions of Windows; namely Vista and Server 2008.

Today it has made Service Pack 2 available for download after a fairly lengthy beta period – we first looked SP2 performance back in December last year and we found very little difference between SP1 and the SP2 beta.
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Although it has not been confirmed until now it was expected that Microsoft would take advantage of some of the new features of Windows 7 in upcoming software releases. The first application to take advantage of Jump Lists is Office 2010 according to Robert’s Windows Now blog. Jump Lists provide quick access to program features. In the case of Outlook 2010 those are quick links to write a new email message, create a new appointment, contact or task and to go to various sections in Outlook like the inbox or the calendar.

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Microsoft Learning is providing three Windows 7 E-Learning clinics. The courses have been designed with three different audiences in mind and can be accessed by following the links below. Please note that a Windows Live ID and the latest version of Adobe Flash are required to access and view the clinics.

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A new credit card has been developed in the battle against credit card fraud
Credit card companies use a variety of methods to help battle credit card fraud. Some have implemented the placement of an owner’s photo on their individual card, and others offer hotlines, along with “tips for protection” guidance. Now, Visa is testing another security measure: the Emue Card.
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Micros Systems, a provider of information technology services for the hospitality and retail industries, said it has acquired Fry Inc. for $31.3 million plus the assumption of $18.4 million in debt.

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Google’s Gmail Labs adds a Google Web search bar to the e-mail service.

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Microsoft shows off coming updates to its Visio diagramming tool, including support for Office 2007’s vaunted “ribbon” UI.

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