After the debacle that was Windows Vista, Microsoft needed a hit, and it got one in the form of Windows 7, which debuted to solid reviews and sales in and out of the enterprise back in the fall of 2009. With Windows XP finally falling to the wayside after ten years and Windows Vista a bad dream many organizations skipped altogether, Windows 7 appears to be poised to take its place as the preeminent PC platform.

According to analyst firm Gartner, Windows 7 will hit that major milestone by the end of 2011. At that time, the platform will be running on 42% of all business and consumer PCs worldwide, making it the leading desktop and laptop operating system for the first time.

Greatly contributing to the explosion of Windows 7 PCs is an escalation in information technology spending and the follow through by enterprises with planned Windows 7 deployments. Late last year, Gartner predicted IT spending globally would rise by 3.1% to $2.5 trillion in 2011 from $2.4 trillion in 2010.

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The brief word on the street was that ODMs/OEMs were having trouble making Ultrabooks (essentially laptops with a form like a MacBook Air) for under $1,000. Then a report popped up of Acer’s offering that should creep in at $768 to $960, helping to put to rest the fears of a ballooned budget.

According to Digitimes, Intel has put together a reference design and bill of materials that range from $475 to $710. Mind you, that’s the just the material cost, so the final product will definitely reflect further value-added cost on top.

The Taiwanese publication details that the 0.8-inch (21 mm) notebooks have a BOM of $475 to $650 and the 0.7-inch (18 mm) design has one $493 to $710.

It looks like a sub-$1000 Ultrabook will be real after all, though it still remains to be seen how much you will have to pay to get the configuration you desire.

Wednesday in a public announcement, “hactivist” group Anonymous promised to “destroy” Facebook once and for all on November 5, 2011. Why? Because the popular social website has allegedly been selling information to government agencies and providing back-door access for information security firms so that they can spy on people worldwide.

“Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your ‘privacy’ settings, and deleting your account is impossible, even if you ‘delete’ your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time,” the statement reads. “Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family.”

“The riots are underway,” the message continues. “It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being raped, tickled, molested, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely false. It gives users the illusion of and hides the details away from them “for their own good” while they then make millions off of you. When a service is “free,” it really means they’re making money off of you and your information.”

Village Voice was actually one of the first to discover the Anonymous statement and brings up a very good point: killing Facebook for the sake of preserving privacy by a group of people who routinely steal private information sounds a bit odd. If anything, user data is bounced around like a beach ball and governments, corporations and even private citizens are virtual pawns in a game of “because we can and you can’t stop us.” As LulzSec previously pointed out, we’re mere peons to hackers, mere toys.

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Wednesday Amazon launched the Kindle Cloud Reader, an HTML5-based app that runs within Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers. And while the launch seemingly spits in Apple’s face by bypassing the App Store “tax,” don’t pull out the torches and pitchforks just yet: this reader app is rather limited in its overall reach to Kindle users.

As it stands now, the Kindle Cloud Reader works with Chrome for the Mac, PC, Linux and Chromebook. On the Safari front, it works on the Mac, PC and iPad using iOS 4 or greater. That said, you can’t use the app on the iPhone, iPod Touch or any of the Android devices. Consumers trying to access the HTML5 reader with anything other than what’s listed will receive a “your browser isn’t supported yet” error.

But it’s a start. Users can get instant access to their Kindle library and read books either online or offline – Kindle will automatically synchronize your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights regardless the device or connection. Kindle Cloud Reader is even optimized for the iPad and lets all users shop for books within the integrated Kindle Store. (How you like them apples, Apple?)

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On Tuesday, the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) made two announcements: the development of a new SATA Express specification that combines SATA software infrastructure with a PCI Express (PCIe) interface, and the SATA μSSD specification for producing a single-chip SATA implementation for embedded storage solutions.

On the SATA Express front, the new technology will provide a cost-effective means to increase device interface speeds to 8 Gb/s and 16 Gb/s – SSDs and hybrid drives will likely benefit the most. Devices that don’t require the speed produced by SATA Express will continue to rely on the current SATA technology.

“The SATA Express specification provides SSD and hybrid drive manufacturers the advantages of performance and scalability enabled by PCIe 3.0 – which is available now – and the ubiquity of SATA,” said Mladen Luksic, SATA-IO president. “We expect the SATA Express specification to be completed by the end of 2011.”

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The new GoFlex is available in two flavors, with 500 GB capacity for $120 and with 750 GB capacity for $140. The “Performance” part of the name stems from the fact that these USB 3.0 drives rotate their platters with 7200 RPM, and not with 5400 RPM as their USB 2.0 siblings do.

However, the big news in those drives is Seagate’s decision to bundle them with SafetyNet, which is a 2-year subscription to a data recovery service. Seagate considers the service as a bonus that provides “peace of mind” as far as the data security is concerned. I am not sure how much of a buying incentive the recovery service really is, but could be bringing in fence sitters who are storing valuable data on those drives – even if the SafetyNet program may not be exactly what you would want to have access to in the case of sudden data loss.

According to the terms of the program, customers have to call Seagate, talk to a tech rep, who then determines if the case is eligible for data recovery service and whether any data is likely to be recovered. The drive may have to be shipped to Seagate and you may have to wait two weeks until you get your drive and data, if it is recoverable, back.

A hard drive can fail at any time, but the industry tells us that the risk of a failure dramatically increases after about five years of operation, at which a data recovery service may really be something you would want to invest in (or buy a new hard drive). Personally, I always found hard drive failures (I had plenty of them over the past 15 years) a pain in the neck to deal with and the more recent ones ended up at a local data recovery service, which was able to recover my data (not always in its entirety) within a few hours and less than $100 per case.

Car alarms aren’t perfect systems, but security researchers Don Bailey and Mathew Solnik of iSec Partners have set out to prove how imperfect they really are.

The researchers have uncovered a way to hack a car’s security system to remotely open or even start the engine. This happens by way of hacking a car’s GSM mobile network that connects to a service like OnStar. A Subaru Outback was used as proof of their hack, but similar systems exist in cars from other manufacturers, such as GM, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW.

Through reverse engineering of the protocol, the researchers were able to take control of some of the car’s security systems simply by sending it an SMS.

“When we looked at this car security and control system we determined within the first few hours that it was completely ownable, front to back,” Bailey told Cnet. “This is not just a theoretical attack. This is a practical attack we’ve used on more than one system now.”

While having a car stolen or tampered with via a text message is terrible, there could be even more far-reaching implications in other applications of the now-vulnerable technology.

“We are seeing more GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications]-enabled systems popping up in consumer culture and industrial control systems. They’re not just in Zoombak [Global Positioning System] location devices and personal security control systems, but also in sensors deployed for waste treatment facilities, SCADA [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition] and call-back systems, physical security systems, industrial control systems,” Bailey said. “These GSM modules open up that world to attacks in a whole new way.”