It's been almost a year since Microsoft moved its newly acquired Skype for Linux out of beta with the release of version 4.0, surprising more than a few Linux fans with its apparent commitment to maintaining a telephony client for the free and open source operating system.

This week, however, that commitment became even harder to dispute given the release of yet another significant update to the software.

“We rolled up our sleeves and reconsidered the heart of the Skype for Linux client,” wrote Skype software engineer Marco Cimmino in a blog post on Monday. “Not only did we conquer the navigation issues and bugs from previous releases, but we increased the stability when logging in from a Microsoft Account.”

The new version 4.2 of the proprietary Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) client brings a number of tweaks and enhancements, in fact. Here's a rundown of some of the highlights.

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Box has acquired an unreleased application called Folders, designed to give iPhone and iPad users a mobile front-end interface for the cloud storage and file management and sharing service as well as for competitors Google Drive and Dropbox.

The Folders technology will be deeply integrated with Box’s own iOS application, which will be upgraded with the Folders improvements later this year, Box’s Vice President of Engineering Sam Schillace said in a blog post on Thursday.

“When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users,” he wrote, adding that Box’s iOS app will become “cleaner, faster and more beautiful.”

Folders includes a PDF viewer, a music player, document, photo and video viewers, a photo and video recording tool and the capability to create and edit notes.

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Foxit Software's PhantomPDF (in both Standard and Business editions) make a good choice for basic office needs, but it suffers from an identity crisis once you get to the high-end features. Foxit's download page makes the bold claim that it is "Better than Adobe Reader and Acrobat," but a more accurate statement would be that it might be better, in very specific circumstances that may or may not apply to you.

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Samsung released data this morning showing that their newest flagship model, the much hyped Galaxy S4, has been a huge success with consumers.  Since its release on April 27, the S4 has sold 10 million units.  To celebrate the milestone, the manufacturer announced the production of a slew of new colors to supplement the stock white and black models that are currently available.

Ten million sales is a pretty impressive benchmark for the Galaxy S4, and reaching it in under a month shows a clear trend of rising popularity for Samsung’s phones.  The S4’s predecessors, the S3 and S2, took 5 and 2 months, respectively, to reach the same level of sales.

Samsung’s Galaxy series is well known for integrating innovative features like Air View and Air Gesture technology, which economize your finger movements and make for a faster, easier experience.  Each model in the series has also boasted impressive hardware, with the S4 feeding its 5-inch AMOLED screen and 13 MP camera with a super fast Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

Perhaps intended as a gesture of gratitude to Samsung fans, the company also announced the imminent arrival of several new colors to the S4 line.  The stock White Mist and Black Forest models will soon be accompanied by Blue Arctic, Purple Mirage, and Brown Autumn.  There will also be a Red Aurora model, which is being reported as an AT&T exclusive color.  It should make for an exciting summer for Samsung fans.

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Lyft, the ridesharing service known for its fleet of pink mustache-festooned cars, is eyeing international expansion supported by its biggest funding round yet.

The company will be looking at entering new markets, including overseas, between now and the end of 2014, Lyft co-founder John Zimmer said Wednesday.

Specific countries of interest were not named. Lyft currently operates its cars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago.

Zimmer’s remarks were made on the eve of Lyft’s first anniversary, and its official announcement of having secured a new round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The amount of funding, Lyft’s largest yet, was $60 million, Zimmer said.

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Windows 8 has changed the way we navigate the desktop, so it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a pair of new wireless mice designed specifically for Windows 8 (they’re also compatible with Windows 7 and the Mac OS X OS).

Sculpt Mobile Mouse

Microsoft’s Sculpt Mobile Mouse will fit into the tightest backpack or pocket while you’re on the go, and it will keep you from swearing at your notebook’s annoying trackpad or touchscreen when you reach your destination.

Microsoft

The mouse is very small—in fact, it’s almost as long as it is wide. As such, the mouse isn’t the most comfortable to grip if you have large hands: Your palm will drag over the surface, but the high arc will keep your fingers resting happily. Those with smaller paws will appreciate its ambidextrous design and the rubber sides that provide a good grip.

The mouse uses Microsoft’s BlueTrack laser technology, which enables it to track over any almost any surface (except for clear glass or mirrored surfaces). When you’re on the road, the only available mouse pad might be the fabric covering your leg, and the Sculpt Mobile works just fine in that scenario.

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A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes.

Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said.

The office suite was built with NetBeans and uses many popular open source Java libraries, Goubard said. That allowed him to built the program in 30 days, he said, a process that he documented daily on YouTube.

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Ericsson may have a contender for oddest networking product if it commercializes the wireless bus windows it demonstrated at this week's CTIA Wireless trade show.

The windows would have built-in, translucent antennas connected to an internal Wi-Fi system for passenger use while on the road. In the example Ericsson showed at CTIA, the dual-band Wi-Fi antenna was just a square of barely visible red metal embedded between layers of glass.

The mobile infrastructure giant demonstrated the concept on the upper level of its booth at CTIA, above a showcase of other technologies designed for so-called heterogeneous networks with both Wi-Fi and cellular radios. On Tuesday, the company announced enhancements to its network management software that will allow carriers to do a better job shifting subscribers between the two systems for the best possible coverage.

Stephen Lawson

Ericsson's solution had its origin in a problem for wireless users on buses, cars and trains. For insulation and sun protection, some windows are now being built with thin, translucent layers of aluminum sandwiched between glass. Combined with the metal that covers the rest of a vehicle, those windows essentially create a so-called Faraday cage, a box that blocks all outside radio waves, said Bryan Coley, a marketing program manager at Ericsson.

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Europe's Digital Agenda Commissioner on Thursday set out plans for the E.U. to produce more micro- and nano-chips than the U.S. in the next seven years.

"I want to double our chip production to around 20 percent of global production. I want Europe to produce more chips in Europe than the United States produces domestically. It's a realistic goal if we channel our investments properly," said Commissioner Neelie Kroes as she announced a strategy to use public financing to supplement industry funding.

The strategy will see €5 billion ($6.5 billion) in public funds going to R&D. Around 30 percent of that will come from the E.U. with the rest coming from national and regional funds and the European Investment Bank.

In a strategy paper published last December, companies and institutes in Europe's nanoelectronics sector promised to stump up €100 billion over the seven years if the E.U. kept its side of the bargain.

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As Ethernet marks its 40th birthday this week, some of those celebrating will also be looking ahead to yet another use for the nearly ubiquitous technology: the cloud.

On Thursday at the Ethernet Innovation Summit, which will include a commemoration of Ethernet's invention on May 22, 1973, a group of cloud vendors and users are launching the CloudEthernet Forum. It will be announced on the second day of the event in Mountain View, California, with the backing of Alcatel Lucent, Juniper Networks, Tata Communications, Citrix, and other founding members.

Ethernet, originally a LAN, increasingly is also used for WANs (wide-area networks) operated by enterprises and service providers. The CloudEthernet Forum aims to make Ethernet better suited to large-scale cloud services that may operate across many data centers.

Enterprise and service-provider clouds have grown to the point where they may have millions of virtual machines and, in the case of public clouds, thousands of customers. At that level, Ethernet can start to show some limitations, said James Walker, president of the CloudEthernet Forum.

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Cloudian

Cloudian is integrating its platform with Citrix's CloudPortal Business Manager as it aims to make it easier to roll out and manage storage as a service.

CloudPortal Business Manager is a services delivery platform that lets enterprises and service providers control user management, provisioning and other operational aspects of a cloud from a single interface. This is functionality Cloudian will take advantage of, according to Jay Desai, vice president of product management at Cloudian, whose platform is used to provide storage for private, public and hybrid clouds.

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After coming out swinging a few days back with a Surface ad that focused on Office, Microsoft has a new ad that confronts the iPad head-on. And here’s the crazy part: it’s surprisingly amusing.

The commercial is a takeoff of Apple’s iPad Mini piano commercial. In the Microsoft version—entitled “Windows 8: Less talking, more doing”—the company pokes fun at Apple’s personal digital assistant Siri, all the while showing off the advantages of a Windows 8 tablet over the iPad.

“Sorry, I don’t update like that,” Siri says when the disembodied hand often seen in Apple commercials tries to get Live Tile updates from the iPad’s grid of icons. “Sorry, I can only do one thing at a time,” Siri chimes in again while a Windows 8 tablet shows off the Snap feature that lets you view two apps at once.

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Russell Caplan still uses Office 2003, which Microsoft will stop supporting next year. He asked if he will need to upgrade to a more current version.

You probably should upgrade before next April. After that month, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for Office 2003 (or, for that matter, Windows XP). If someone finds a new vulnerability in one of the programs, Microsoft won't make and release a patch for it. Your copy of Office will remain vulnerable.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

How dangerous is it to use old, no-longer-supported software? If the program is obscure, probably not too dangerous. But if it's something that millions use, it can become a tempting target.

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PC sales in China and high growth in smartphones shipments helped boost Lenovo's net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter by 90 percent year-over-year.

For the quarter ended March 31, Lenovo's net profit was $127 million, the company said on Thursday. Revenue broke records and was at $7.8 billion, growing four percent from the same period last year.

In Lenovo's home market of China, the company had an operating margin of 4.9 percent, an increase of 8 percent year-over-year. The company also saw continued profitability in its mobile devices business, which makes up 9 percent of its overall sales. At the end of the quarter, Lenovo's smartphone shipments were up 206 percent year-over-year.

Globally, PC shipments were down 13.9 percent year-over-year in the quarter, the market's steepest decline since research firm IDC began tracking the market in 1994. Lenovo itself posted flat year-over-year PC shipment growth in the period.

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Advanced Micro Devices has opened the door to embrace Google's Android operating system, but said it would continue to focus on Windows with its upcoming tablet and laptop chips.

AMD on multiple occasions has said it had no interest in putting its chips in Android tablets and would focus exclusively on Windows 8. A change of heart could open up a wider market for tablets for the company.

For now, the company's focus remains on optimizing chips for usage on Windows laptops, desktops and tablets, said Kevin Lansing, director of the notebook product line at AMD's client business unit.

In an email, however, AMD spokesman Gary Silcott said OS adoption depends on device makers.

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When Nvidia announced its graphical powerhouse, the $999 GeForce GTX Titan, in February, eyeballs widened. Fortunately Nvidia now offers the lower-performance GeForce GTX 780, which also cuts the price by a third, to $649.

Today Nvidia will begin shipping its new enthusiast cards to partners, in the form of reference designs that its hardware partners will tweak over time. These third-party versions of the GeForce GTX 780 will be available in about a month’s time, Justin Walker, program manager for Nvidia’s GeForce, said in an interview.

Nvidia

Nvidia claims that the GTX 780 will offer, on average, about 35 percent better graphics performance than the GeForce GTX 680, which Nvidia launched a year ago. (That card’s price now hovers at about $470, temporarily providing a lower-cost alternative if the GTX 780 is still too rich for your blood. You’ll have to move fast, though: The GTX 780 will officially replace the GTX 680.) Nvidia also claims that the GTX 780 outperforms the $400 AMD HD7970 graphics card by an average of about 30 to 35 percent; however, that AMD card debuted at the end of 2011. For gamers who really want to shell out, pairing two GTX 780 cards in SLI mode will improve performance by 75 percent over a single GTX 780 card, Nvidia said.

Basically, Nvidia is positioning the GTX 780 for enthusiast PC gamers who are willing to pony up for a superior rig, running at the maximum graphics settings and screen resolutions, with high levels of antialiasing. The 780 supports both DirectX 11.0 tessellation, for improved rendering of 3D objects, and Nvidia’s PhysX physics enhancements.

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Some sim games are hell-bent on putting you in the middle of realistic action scenarios. Others let you experience some of the world's most elite (or obscure) professions. Looking for science fiction or fantasy? You won't find it here.

So grab your mouse, keyboard, joystick, or driving wheel, and step into some of the most dangerous, toughest, and craziest jobs in the (virtual) world.

Seriously, train conducting? Yes, there's a sim game for that.

Microsoft will boost its Azure cloud offering in Japan, adding two domestic data centers to speed response times and improve reliability in the face of natural disasters.

The software giant said Thursday that it would add cloud-based hosting services in two regions, one near Tokyo and one in the Kansai region further south. Redundancy is a priority in earthquake-prone Japan, where the use of online services usually skyrockets after natural disasters.

"By using two sub-regions, customers will be able build configurations with domestic disaster recovery, and performance will be improved," said Yasuyuki Higuchi, President of Microsoft Japan.

Azure competes in Japan with offerings like Amazon's EC2 infrastructure and local cloud providers such as Sakura. Microsoft is a trusted name in corporate Japan but Azure has a reputation for being slower than rival offerings.

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Adobe has acquired Thumb Labs, a small mobile app agency, as part of its broader push to give its new cloud-enabled software offerings a more social flavor.

Thumb Labs, based in New York, posted a message on its website and Twitter feed on Thursday saying the firm had accepted an offer to become part of Adobe. The company said it will fulfill its existing contracts and begin its new role at the end of the month. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Adobe began a major shift last year with the launch of Creative Cloud, part of a transition from being a traditional software house to becoming a creator of cloud-based, collaborative platforms with online components. This month, the company said it was moving away from boxed software sales all together, to a subscription-based model based on the cloud service.

A major part of the Creative Cloud platform is a social layer that allows customers to share their portfolios online. Adobe acquired social platform designers Behance in December as part of its efforts to make its cloud service “the ultimate hub for creatives worldwide.” Thumb Labs built the mobile app for Behance; a message posted Thumb Labs’ website said, “We are looking forward to contributing to these efforts, as Behance’s vibrant community becomes more deeply integrated into Adobe’s tools.”

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The U.S. government is in negotiations with SoftBank for greater control over equipment purchases by Sprint Nextel and the selection of one of the Japanese company's nominee to the U.S. carrier's board, according to a news report.

Dish Network, SoftBank's rival bidder for Sprint, has meanwhile launched an advertising campaign and a website to argue that "the sale of wireless and wireline infrastructure with national strategic importance to a foreign company will weaken the security of the United States."

SoftBank has agreed to give the U.S. government the right to approve one of the directors it names to Sprint's board, who will be responsible for overseeing national security issues, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The government also wants the right to approve some of Sprint's equipment purchases and wants the removal of Chinese equipment from the network of Clearwire, a Sprint affiliate that it intends to acquire, the newspaper said.

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On the same day that HP had to admit to lackluster consumer PC sales, the company is announcing a new raft of consumer notebook computers. Touchscreens will be available even on a lower-end models, a key move for HP to stay on-trend.

The flashiest models are the Envy Touchsmart 15 and 17 Notebooks. Clad in shiny cases, both models will be available with touch or non-touch displays and 6-cell batteries. Laptop multimedia has its challenges, but HP’s equipping these models with Beats Audio, four speakers, and a dual-drive subwoofer. Rock on.

HP

The Envy 15 has a 15-inch Full HD touchscreen display. CPU choices will include Intel’s new 4th-generation Core products or AMD’s latest. Memory will start at 6GB of DDR3, and hard drives will start at 750GB, 5400-rpm models. It’ll go on sale June 5^th for $529 and up.

The Envy 17 has a massive, 17.3-inch Full HD display and a full numeric keypad. It will feature Intel’s new 4th-generation Core CPUs (i5 to i7). In addition to the same memory and storage options as the Envy 15, the Envy 17 will also offer an optional DVD-RW or BluRay drive. On June 5^th, it’ll debut with a starting price of $699.

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HP’s consumer PC sales continue to languish, but the game’s not over yet--certainly not on the company’s new Envy Rove, a 20-inch all-in-one that can lay flat for multiplayer games. The company also announced a raft of other all-in-ones and desktops today.

The Envy Rove all-in-one’s 20-inch LED has a resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels with integrated Intel HD graphics. It’s designed to be portable, with an integrated battery rated to last up to three hours. You’ll likely be tempted to pick it up by its spring-loaded, hinged stand, which is actually designed to set the desktop at an angle or lay it flat on a surface.

HP

The Envy Rove’s 10-point capacitive touchscreen display can function as a gaming table, and it comes preloaded with games including Electronic Arts’ Monopoly, Disney Fairies, and Fingertapps Jigsaw Wars and Musical Instruments. The system will use Intel’s 4th-generation Core CPUs, code-named Haswell. The Envy Rove will be available in July, for a price yet to be announced.

HP

The other all-in-ones announced today are the 20-inch Pavilion Touchsmart 20 and the 23-inch Pavilion Touchsmart 23. These systems use a less-expensive, 5-point optical touchscreen technology and will be offered with a choice of Intel’s 4th-generation Core CPUs and AMD CPUs.

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AMD hopes to have a big second half in 2013, launching three new CPUs featuring integrated graphics that perform on par with the company’s discrete GPUs. On Thursday, AMD revealed key details of these next-generation mobile chips, code-named Temash, Kabini, and Richland.

In a briefing in advance of the announcement, AMD vice-president John Taylor explained how the new chips leverage a number of firsts in AMD’s history: The first CPU with an onboard memory controller, the first dual-core CPU, and the first CPU with an on-die GPU.

These are interesting achievements, but it's worth noting that AMD hasn’t bested Intel in the CPU market since 2006. That's the year Intel introduced the first generation of its Core microarchitecture, and pulled ahead. AMD has performed better in the discrete GPU market, frequently trading the number one spot in the graphics space with arch-rival Nvidia. And now the company is looking to that GPU effort to catch up to Intel in the mobile CPU market.

Taylor says that consumers’ desire for thin and light computers of all types—desktops as well as notebooks and tablets—favors AMD’s APU (accelerated processing unit) effort, a chip design that combines x86-compatible CPUs with AMD’s latest Radeon graphics processors. “If you want low power and long battery life,” said Taylor, “you need an APU. Combining those functions on one chip reduces cost. It reduces power consumption, and it eliminates the complexity of using the PCIe bus to communicate with a separate graphics processor.”

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A mechanical engineering student in Taiwan has found the messaging application called Line warns and stops users in China from sending certain politically sensitive keywords.

The application is developed by a Japanese subsidiary of NHN, a South Korean company that makes a variety of applications and offers Web-based services centered around advertising, including the popular Korean search engine Naver.

The 22-year-old student at National Tsing Hua University, who goes by the Twitter screen name of "Hiraku," said via email he started analyzing Line after he saw Twitter users in China complain about not being able to send certain phrases.

The phrases generated a warning that said the message "contains sensitive terms, please adjust and then send again."

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Hewlett-Packard reported a 32 percent drop in profit for its second fiscal quarter, due partly to slower sales of PCs and servers.

HP’s revenue for the quarter, ended April 30, was $27.6 billion, down 10 percent from the same period last year, the company announced Wednesday.

The company is battling to turn itself around after some strategic missteps, but it’s doing so against the headwinds of a shrinking PC market and lackluster economy.

Revenue from HP's massive PC division fell 20 percent in the quarter, led by a steep drop in laptop sales. Its printer division held more or less steady, with sales down 1 percent, HP said.

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Seeing a “404 error” or the Twitter “Fail Whale” can really kill a good online buzz. Those kinds of service outages, though, occur on the Internet on a daily basis, as the latest numbers from Outage Analyzer illustrate.

Over the last five months, there have been 1413 full outages worldwide, or about nine a day, and nearly 8000 partial outages, or 53 a day, according to figures from the free Internet service tracker. A full outage results when a web service is unavailable; a partial outage happens when only some of a service’s users are affected.

The numbers are down from previous reporting periods, says Ben Grubin, director of product marketing for Compuware APM, which operates Outage Analyzer. But if you’re knocked off line for an hour or more, that trend isn’t likely to offer much comfort to you.

While full-service outages get the most attention, a partial-service outage is more likely to occur and affect a limited number of individual web and mobile transactions while leaving others completely untouched, Outage Analyzer explained in its report.

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