Activision must start charging for Call of Duty online play, says Pachter Following the recent NPD sales report, which revealed software sales plummeting 15% for the month of June, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter tried to figure out exactly what the heck has been going on. June marks the fourth negative month of decline this year, but why? IndustryGamers

The state of Windows 7 gaming Don't believe what you've heard---the state of Windows gaming is still strong. Nine months after Windows 7 hit the market, Microsoft has rehabilitated its reputation on desktop PCs. The company has effectively banished memories of Vista's poor performance. Still, PC game sales have been off this year, sometimes by more than a few percentage points, depending on the study. ExtremeTech

AMD reaffirms plans to introduce second-gen DirectX 11 chips in 2010 Advanced Micro Devices said that its ATI graphics business unit has shipped over sixteen million of DirectX 11-compatible graphics processing units and reiterated plans to introduce second-generation DirectX 11 graphics chips later in 2010. Besides, despite rumours, AMD expects supply constraints to ease in the second half of the year. X-bit labs

Google's fight to keep search a secret Conspiracy theorists disinclined to read any further, fire away about the NSA and Wi-Fi-gate. The actual topic of this discussion is more basic to Google's core identity: should it be required to disclose how its secret recipe for organizing the Internet is put together as to assure regulators and Internet publishers that it isn't gaming the results? CNET

Microsoft confirms 'nasty' Windows zero-day bug Microsoft on Friday warned that attackers are exploiting a critical unpatched Windows vulnerability using infected USB flash drives. The bug admission is the first that affects Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) since Microsoft retired the edition from support, researchers said. When Microsoft does fix the flaw, it will not be providing a patch for machines still running XP SP2. ComputerWorld

Intel vs. Nvidia: The tech behind the legal case The graphics chip has become one of the big legal battlegrounds for Intel. To get a better understanding of what all of the legal wrangling is about, I asked an expert to describe the technology underlying the court battle between Intel and the world's largest purveyor of standalone graphics chips, Nvidia. CNET