software package

Sales of Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows 7 operating system have been "fantastic" in Japan since its launch last month, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday.

He declined to provide specific numbers for Japan, which is Microsoft's second-largest market, but said features like quicker start-up times were luring consumers to the newest version of the world's dominate software package. He added new computers were also helping attract buyers.

"People don't buy operating systems, they buy computers with operating systems on them," Ballmer told reporters during a presentation in Tokyo.

Computer giant IBM on Wednesday announced a challenge to Microsoft in Africa with a new open-standards software package for netbooks that would help Africa "bridge the digital divide."

IBM said it was partnering with Canonical Ubuntu, the company of South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, to provide a "new, flexible personal computing software package for netbooks and other thin client devices."

Netbooks are small, low-cost, low-power notebook computers.

Facing a barrage of international criticism, the Chinese government is apparently backing down from its earlier announcement that all PCs sold in the country must have censoring software installed.

According to an anonymous official in the government's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), it's "misleading" to say that China is requiring PC owners to use the software.

Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase "you're not the boss of me." Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google's book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story in "The Church," a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library, at the University of Oxford.

Promises of the paperless office have been circulating ever since the first IBM clones started showing up on desks in the early 1980s. Yet we're still tied to printed documents and there's no sign that's going to change.

With that in mind, the Xpaper PDF digital writing system from Talario Inc. ($400 for use with Windows XP, $450 for Vista) is designed to improve a computer's relationship with the paper document.

Here's how it works.