Media Center PCs Approaching 50% of Total Desktop PC Sales. For the week ending August 20, 2005, Media Center PCs accounted for 42.60% of all desktop personal computers sold in the US retail market, up from 16.28% for the week ending July 2, 2005.

Creative Ships Worm-Ridden Music Players. 4,000 of its Zen Neon portable music players had a ready-to-roll Windows worm.

Microsoft Moves Deeper into VoIP. Its acquisition of VoIP start-up Teleo moves Microsoft deeper into the burgeoning world of Internet communications...

Zotob Worm Linked to Credit Card Fraud Ring. Authorities have linked one of the Zotob suspects to individuals thought to be part of a credit card fraud ring.

Ozone Layer has Stopped Shrinking

Study Rejects Link Between Mobile Phones and Cancer

Parasites Brainwash Grasshoppers into Death Dive

Dell Won't Recall Defective Motherboards

Quarterly LCD TV Shipments Pass the One-million Mark. LCD TV shipments in the US market are expected to grow 20-30% this quarter and are likely to reach 1.4 million units in the fourth quarter.

Hollywood, Microsoft Align on New Windows. Microsoft is building unprecedented levels of safeguards against video piracy in the next Windows.

Computer Worm Is Stealing Corporate Info. A computer worm is on the prowl to steal intellectual property from corporate documents, a software group warned.

L.A. Cracks Internet Warez Ring. Dealer faces up to three years in prison in California's first criminal file-sharing case.

Nano-material is Harder than Diamonds

Albireo: A Bright and Beautiful Double

Lenovo Plans to Dominate PC Market by 2010. Chinese personal computer maker Lenovo Group will start to sell its namesake PCs outside China in the first quarter of 2006 as part of its long-term plan to build the world's leading PC brand.

Don't Look Now: WinFS Rears Its Head Again. Remember WinFS? The all-powerful, all-encompassing unified file system for Longhorn is back. Kind of.

Judge OKs Settlement in iPod Battery Suit. Buyers of players with faulty batteries will be eligible for checks or credit from an Apple store.

Hurricane Katrina Batters Gulf Coast

China Market: 32-inch LCD TV Prices Fall Below US$1000

Suspected Zotob Worm Authors Arrested. Two men were arrested on suspicion of releasing the "Zotob" and "Mytob" worms, variants of which have infected thousands of computers.

Three Indicted in U.S. Spam Crackdown. Three people have been indicted in Arizona on federal charges of violating the antispam law.

FCC Delays Cutoff Deadline for VoIP Providers. Federal regulators on Friday extended a disconnection deadline that could have left tens of thousands of people without their Internet phone service next week.

Hard Drives Slim Down. One-inch hard drives have broken into the mainstream, shipping as standalone products in the form of external, highly portable, USB devices.

New PC Power Supplies Compete with Air Conditioners. Feed the Need of Speed for (power) Greed.

IDF: Day Three

Intuit Debuts New QuickBooks

Scale Buildings in a Single Bound

Telescope May Bring View of Early Universe

Cost Cuts Likely to Dim Space Telescope’s Vision

IP PBXs are Eclipsing Traditional PBXs. The IP PBX has reached a new stage of maturity with shipments of IP lines expected to exceed those of traditional PBXs this year. Whatis Internet Protocol Private Branch eXchange (IP PBX).

VoIP Promises Are Overhyped. New survey says that despite all the publicity, 70% of consumers have no interest in switching to a VoIP service.

Vonage Planning IPO. Voice over IP leader Vonage Holdings is readying paperwork to file for an initial public offering.

FCC Requirement Could Strand VoIP Customers. As many as 100,000 Internet phone customers who haven't formally acknowledged possible obstacles to making 911 calls could find their service disconnected starting next week.

WiMAX. How does the 802.16 WiMAX standard compare to the 802.11 WLAN standard?

Multi-core Processing to Jolt Industry. Analysts believe chips with more than one core will shake up the industry, creating new revenue opportunities.

Google Talk: Instant Message Lite. Google goes for clean, simple, and effective in its first chat/VoIP client.

Intel's New Xhip Will Offer Fixability. Intel demonstrated its eagerness to move away from the traditional race for raw computing speed by showing off a number of newer features. IDF Fall 2005 Day 2.

Retail Prices for 32-inch LCD TVs to Fall to US$799 in 4Q

Robotic Spy-planes Use Shape-shifting Wings

Millions of Bacterial Species Revealed Underfoot

Trees Don't Suck-up Carbon Dioxide as Hoped

Chemical Could Revolutionize Polymer Fuel Cells

The Force is Now with HP and AMD. HP will sell over 1,000 workstations and storage arrays to Star Wars' film company Lucasfilm in a three-year deal.

For LCD TV, Wide Screen is the Winner. After five quarters of dominating the LCD TV market is terms of sales value, the 16×9 aspect ratio segment finally topped the 4×3 ratio segment in unit sales last quarter.

Google Unveils Instant Messaging, Phone App. Google Talk, for instant message and PC-to-PC phone calls, will use the open Jabber protocol, and it'll be ad-free.

LED Use for Light Bulbs Years Away. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) are slated to become a significant part of the general purpose lighting market, but not until 2010.

IDF Fall 2005 Coverage

Japan to Test Supersonic Airliner Prototype

Japanese House-Sitter Robot Hits Stores

Brain's Own Pain Relievers at Work in Placebo Effect

Too Scared to be a Millionaire?

Intel Unveils New Low-power Chips. A new chip architecture and a new class of computer were announced at the opening of the Intel developer Forum.

DVD Format War Escalates as Talks Fail. Rival Japanese electronics giants say they will go ahead with incompatible formats for next-generation DVDs, echoing the Betamax versus VHS battle of the 70s.

Fuel Cell Developer Claims Methanol Advance

Coal-powered Fuel Cell Aims for Efficiency

Gartner Ups PC Shipments Forecast Despite Flat Sales. Research firm Gartner raised its forecast for worldwide PC unit shipments for 2005 and 2006, despite flat revenue growth in the sector.

Hacker Hits Air Force Officer Database. An online intruder has disappeared into the wild blue yonder with personal data on approximately half of the U.S. Air Force's 70,000 officers.

North American TV Market Strong, but CRTs Fading. Sales of CRT TVs fell 9 percent from last year to account for 71 percent of the total TV market.

U.S. Air Force Purchases 10,000 HP Athlon 64 Desktop PCs

Microsoft Works To Patch New IE Flaw

Carbon Nanotubes Key to Future Flat TVs

Dual-core P4 Rushed to Market. The dual-core Pentium 4 was a hack.

Wal-Mart and Best Buy Schedule $999 32-inch LCD TV Rollout. Street prices for LCD TVs, by size 2005-2008.

Samsung Becomes Top TV Supplier. Korea-based Samsung overtook Japan-based Sony as the leading global supplier of TVs on a revenue basis in the second quarter.

Gas Price Hikes Spur Interest in Telecommuting. As gas prices surged this week, some companies say they are ready and open to more teleworkers.

Cities Join Intel's Wi-Fi Program. Thirteen municipalities participate in a pilot program, called "Digital Communities," to build commercially viable wireless networks.

Just Say 'No' to DMV-ization of Broadband. If City Hall can barely afford to provide services that matter most, such as police, fire protection, and public transportation, why would anyone think it will be able to maintain broadband network?

First Look at the Zalman CNPS9500 LED: the Power of Air, the Efficiency of Water

Bite-Sized MobiBLU DAH-1500i Flash Player

Chemists Look for Better Ways to Store Solar Energy

From Russia with Rockets. More.

Transparent Carbon Nanotube Sheets Created

Microbe Has Huge Role in Ocean Life, Carbon Cycle

Infection Rates in New Windows Worm Lower than Thought. New variants of a computer worm that attacks a vulnerability in Windows 2000 appear, but infection rates appeared to be relatively low and damage minor.

Microsoft Releases Zotob Cleaning Tool. Microsoft rushed out a new version of its Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool as one response to a bot worm attack that began earlier this week.

LCD Overtakes Plasma in 37-inch TV Segment; Now to the 42-inch Segment. For the first time, LCD TVs captured 51% share of the 37-inch market segment that includes HD (high-definition) PDP (plasma display panel) TV and ED (enhanced Definition) PDP TV products in May 2005. Is LCD-TV Dream on Its Way to Coming True?

Dissecting the Core of Apple's Mac Mini. The sleek Mac Mini from Apple Computer costs $499 at retail, but the total sum of the parts is less.

More Good Financial News. U.S. electronics production was sharply higher in July, setting the stage for what appears to be a strong rebound in the second half.

Hard Disk Drive Shipments Were Unusually Strong in Q2. The global hard-disk drive industry benefitted from unusually strong demand between April and the end of June, normally the weakest season for the industry.

Apple Security Update Re-issued. Apple re-released its massive Mac OS X security update after the upgrade broke 64-bit applications.

Adobe Patches Critical Reader, Acrobat Flaws. Users of the Adobe Reader and Acrobat applications should patch the software to plug a highly critical vulnerability that could let attackers crash systems and inject malicious code into PCs and Macs.

Google Plans Big New Stock Sale. Seeking to raise over $4 billion, the search giant says it plans to sell 14.2 million shares on the public market.

Domain Registrations Reach All-Time High of 83.9 Million

Novaled Develops LED with High Power, Long Life

Next Space Shuttle Mission Delayed to March 2006

Creating Life from Scratch, One Molecule at a Time

Breakthrough in High-Temperature Superconductivity

A Picture Does Not Automatically Activate a Thousand Words

As the Worm Turns. Since Sunday, when Security Fix first warned readers about the emergence of the Zotob worm, nearly a dozen variants have emerged, each slightly more dangerous or sneaky than the next. Windows Worm Goes Global. The worm and its variants are now using chat channels to allow hackers to control infected PCs.

Plasma TV Sales Overtake Projection Units. Shipments of plasma TVs reached 1.13 million units in the second quarter, rising 24 percent sequentially and 89 percent year-to-year.

Samsungs Looking to Set 40-inch LCD Panel Standard. Retail prices for 40-inch LCD TVs recently dropped as much as 20%, with some prices dropping below 20,000 yuan (US$2,456) in the China market.

AMD Puts Former IBM Exec In Charge of Silicon Design. AMD has tapped a former IBM executive to take charge of its silicon design efforts.

H-P Flexes Muscle Following Report. Shares pace Dow gains; results top Street expectations.

AOL Worker Who Stole E-Mail List Sentenced. A former America Online software engineer was sentenced Wednesday to a year and three months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers.

High Growth Predicted In Color Laser Printer Market

Symantec Scoops-up Sygate Technologies

Oops. That DVD should have caused the toilet to flush.

Master Gene for Skin May Hold Key to Youth

A Bar at the Heart of the Milky Way

Printed TVs at Your Store Soon? A key benefit of pioneer of polymer-OLED (PLED) technology is the ability to deposit layers in the display using printing processes such as ink-jet printing.

Gateway Posts Second-Quarter Profit. Gateway turned a profit for the first time in more than three years but also jolted investors by slicing its full-year sales and earnings outlook.

Dell Customer Rating Plunges, Apple Leads Pack. U.S. consumers lambasted Dell for poor customer service in a survey conducted last quarter.

Apple Release Mega-Fix For Mac OS X, Patches 43 Vulnerabilities. Apple's newest operating system, Mac OS X 10.4 -- dubbed Tiger -- has faced security fixes each month since its April 2005 release.

Mobile Users Are Less Mobile. The survey found that two-thirds of those with laptops have built-in Wi-Fi capabilities, but one-third of those rarely or never use Wi-Fi.

Kodak Extends Lead Over Japanese in U.S. digital-camera Market. Its market share rose to 23.8 percent from 18.3 percent a year ago. The ones I've seen say Made in China on them.

Copy-Protection Gear Sneaks into Products. Controversial copy-protection technology is quietly being added to e-books, CDs, DVDs, and other products.

Feds Crack Down on 'Free' Credit Reports. FTC announces a settlement with a company that allegedly misled customers in search of free reports online.

Universal Codec to Set Sound Free. A unique piece of software that will code any piece of recorded music, or speech, for any device, has been created by a team of European researchers.

July Inflation Jumps on Higher Gas Prices

Universal Music Backs Sony's Next-Generation Blu-ray DVD

The International Space Station from Orbit

Flexible 'E-skin' Could Endow Robots with Humanlike Sense of Touch

Mysteries of Garlic Are Revealed

Intel Slashes Pentium 4 600 Series Pricing. Intel has slashed up to a third off the list price of its Pentium 4 600 series for desktops, one of its most aggressive pricing moves in the Pentium 4 lineup in recent memory.

Zotob Worm Hits Windows Users. The latest worm exploits security holes in Microsoft's Windows 95, 98, ME, NE, 2000 and XP platforms and can give computer attackers remote access to affected systems.

Hacker Found Guilty in Massive Data Theft Case. The prosecution estimates that Scott Levine and his defunct bulk e-mail marketing firm Snipermail.com stole more than 1.6 billion customer records by hacking into an Acxiom server.

Pirated Version of Mac OS for PCs Available. An unauthorized version of Mac OS X for Intel or AMD-powered PCs is floating around the Net.

Visual Studio Ready or Not. Developers petition for Visual Studio beta 3 and product delay to fix bugs. Microsoft says "no" and adds another significant feature.

Logitech Offers New Webcam and Laser Mice

Branching Is Key to Carbon Nanotube Transistors

The Beginnings of a New Phase in Medical Imaging?

Intel To Shift Microprocessor Technology. Intel will switch to a new design that promises better performance and lower power consumption than today's Pentium 4.

Dell Misses Q2 Revenue Expectations on Lower Prices. Second-quarter revenue was $13.4 billion, up 15 percent from revenue of $11.7 billion last year but lower than analyst estimates of $13.7 billion in revenue.

NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: Full-Throttle Graphics for $449. NVIDIA has just launched its new high-end graphics card that offers performance similar to the top-of-the-range GeForce 7800 GTX.

Successful Launch for New Mars Spacecraft

New Scam Asks People to Fax Data. Phishers have added a new lure to their tackle boxes: e-mails that ask people to fax sensitive information to bogus security investigators.

Digital Terrestrial TV and Free-to-Air Satellite Services to Drive PC-TV Tuners. By 2009, the worldwide retail value of the PC-TV Tuner market is expected to reach US$ 3.7 billion, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 42.6%.

Ex-WorldCom CFO Gets Five Years In Prison. Scott Sullivan was sentenced to five years in prison for his high-ranking role in the largest accounting fraud in U.S. history.

Europeans Launch Largest Satellite on Record

Unique Triple Asteroid System Discovered

HP, Gateway Tussle Over Intellectual Property. Hewlett-Packard and Gateway exchanged shots this week in the latest round of an ongoing battle over PC-related intellectual property.

Gigabit Ethernet Transceivers Ignite Port Count Explosion. Ethernet's expanding bandwidth requirement is driving switch-router equipment designers to build scalable systems.

Blu-ray Discs to Adopt Robust Content Protection. Designed to guard against mass production piracy or the mass duplication and sale of unauthorized copies of pre-recorded media.

Six Security Patches for Windows. Microsoft Corp. Three of the patches are "critical."

Lenovo Profit Rises After IBM Purchase. Chinese PC maker posts 6 percent rise in profit after including for the first time the struggling PC business it bought from IBM.

Cameraphones Set to Replace Low-end Standalone Digicams

Portable Media Players 101

Our Galaxy May Be Bigger Than We Thought

Home Networking Revenue to Jump . Revenue derived from annual home networking will jump to over $21 billion in 2009.

'Spam King' to Pay Microsoft $7M. One of the world's biggest spammers to pay $7 million in settlement, Microsoft says.

Korea Fair Trade Commission Investigating Intel. The world's largest chipmaker acknowledges that South Korea is conducting an investigation similar to the one underway in Europe.

Security Firm Warns of IM Worm. Chode-D is moving rapidly over public IM networks and could hijack users' computers.

Apple to Return 'Piracy Tax' to iPod Buyers. A refund process soon will be implemented for a Canadian tax that ranged from $15 to $25 per iPod

The Wireless Dorm Room

Discovery's Home, Now What?

Making Paper Waterproof--and Writable

Model Gives Clearer Idea of How Oxygen Came to Dominate Earth’s Atmosphere

Fed Boosts Key Interest Rate for 10th Consecutive Time

Looking for Resumes. Hiring is up at U.S. electronics factories for the first time in years, a signal that not all manufacturing is heading overseas.

Computer Users Warned Over US Daylight Saving Hours. Computer users are being warned to make sure that they are ready for a change in US daylight saving hours, to be introduced in 2007.

Blade Price Drops Shake Up Server Market. Falling blade server prices and improved cooling features on blade systems are shaking up the server hardware market.

Antispyware Firm Warns of Massive ID Theft Ring. Sunbelt Software said it discovered a major ID theft operation yesterday while doing research on spyware and has asked the FBI to look into the matter.

Washington Debates Future of Manned Space Flight

Microsoft Needs to Reissue Windows 2000 Rollup. Microsoft will release an updated Update Rollup for Windows 2000 as soon as it's figured out fixes for glitches plaguing some users and preventing some third-party applications from working.

Notebook Prices Breaking the $500 Barrier. PC vendors are aggressively promoting notebooks for under $500 in August.

FCC: Telecoms won't have to share DSL lines. Federal regulators eased rules governing high-speed Internet services offered by phone companies.

Much Ado Over Apple-Intel Developer Box. Apple fans are upset over a security chip found in a special x86-based PowerMac designed to prevent loading the OS onto non-Apple machines.

Intel to Temporarily Cut Desktop Chip-set Production. The company denies reports that it's planning to exit the low-end chip-set business.

Fighting Elephants with Chili

Let the Good Times Roll. The economy is in better shape than anyone thought, which means overall growth should speed past earlier projections.

Exploits For CA Backup Bug Appear. Several exploits against the just-disclosed vulnerability in Computer Associates' enterprise backup software are in circulation, raising the risk of attack on unpatched systems.

Yahoo Debuts Audio Search Feature. The free service has an index of over 50 million audio files, which include songs, newscasts, and speeches.

Fourth Shuttle Spacewalk Not Needed

Sunlight Used to Smelt Zinc

Mozilla Forms Corporate Subsidiary to Focus on Development. The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that organizes the development of the Firefox Web browser said it has formed a corporate subsidiary not to make money but to better focus its activities.

Intel Phasing-out Low-end Chipsets. Intel will phase out production of three low-end chipsets for desktop PCs in favor of selling its higher-end and Centrino-based products.

Tiles Fixed, Shuttle Managers Eye Blanket

The Busy Center of the Lagoon Nebula

Electronics Factory Orders Up. Computers, telecom and instruments grow significantly.

Samsung Invests $975 Million in 46-inch LCD Panel Production. Samsung is delivering on its promise to standardize on 40- and 46-inch LCD panels for the mass TV market.

Flash Memory to Speed Up Hard Drives. Hard drives turn to flash memory for faster boot times and longer battery life.

Apple Rolls Out Mighty Mouse

Shocking Airport Scans

A Shuttle Back Flip at the Space Station

NASA to Redesign Space Vehicles

Your Body Is Younger Than You Think

Strong First Half. June chip sales may have slipped, but that didn’t put too much of a damper the first half’s 6.5 percent growth.

AMD Introduces The AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 3800+. The AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor line is targeted primarily towards the prosumer and digital media segments. AMD Cuts Desktop CPU Prices by up to 25%.

US Charges Eight Members of 'World Wide Piracy Operations. The US Department of Justice has announced that eight people have been charged with criminal copyright infringement in Charlotte, North Carolina.

64-bit Windows Anti-virus not yet Mainstream. Companies looking to become adopters of Microsoft’s Windows x64 Edition OSes may find their favorite anti-virus software no longer works.

Copyright Crackdown. New technology on music CDs limits the number of copies you can make--and gets in the way of putting tunes on an IPod.

The Long and Short of Broadband Speeds

NASA May Try Shuttle Repair

Cosmic Rays May Prevent Long-haul Space Travel

Hurricanes Growing Fiercer with Global Warming