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A federal judge today issued an injunction that would bar Internet phone company Vonage from signing up additional customers as punishment for infringing on patents held by Verizon Communications.

Vonage, of Holmdel, planned an immediate appeal.

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Aliens are out to destroy the Earth and only you can stop them.

It’s a familiar video game plot. But in this case you must complete seven chemistry-based challenges in order to blow up their reactor and save the world. Sound like fun?

Good because that’s your homework.

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Google has quietly launched Google Voice Local Search, an experimental service that allows people to search for local businesses over the phone. There are no ads on the service, which is available only in the U.S. To use it people can dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone and search for a business by name or category and be connected to the business at no charge.

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"As far as software vulnerabilities go, Vista's cover is blown," said Nand Mulchandani, a vice president at Determina, the company that discovered the latest security bug. "It is not Superman; it is just a human being. It is just software. Vista is going to be very similar to the other operating systems Microsoft has delivered in terms of bugs." Microsoft officially launched Vista for consumers in January, promoting the operating system as the most secure version of Windows yet. It is the first client version of Windows built with security in mind, meaning that it should have fewer coding errors that might be exploited in attacks, Microsoft has said.

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"Vonage has signed an agreement with a VoIP network services provider to carry calls placed by Vonage customers, giving the troubled VoIP provider an out on two of the three Verizon patents it was found to have infringed. According to a Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Vonage and VoIP, Inc. have inked a two-year contract under which VoIP, Inc.—likely under its VOICEONE brand—will provide network services for Vonage customers."

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"It was originally thought about as an eight-bit chip (Intel's and Advanced Micro Devices' current chips are 64-bits) designed to run spreadsheets," said Phil Hester, chief technology officer at AMD. Accordingly, the original design lacked support for, among other things, an appropriate number of general-purpose registers that would be needed for the modern computing era. Registers are essentially small holding stations for data as it awaits processing, and general-purpose registers are useful because they can store either data or an address where that data is stored. As the number of people using PCs made by IBM and so-called clone manufacturers grew, the x86 became the irreplaceable heart of the PC market. In the mid-1990s, Intel's entry into the server market with x86 chips cemented the ISA's dominance. Today, more than 90 percent of all servers shipped in the world use an x86 processor from either Intel or AMD.

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Consumers who have already purchased EMI tracks containing Apple's FairPlay copy protection will be able to upgrade them to the premium version for 30 cents, EMI said. Full albums in DRM-free form can be bought at the same price as standard iTunes albums. "We are committed to embracing change, and to developing products and services that consumers really want to buy," said Eric Nicoli, chief executive of EMI. Nicoli cited internal EMI tests in which higher-quality, DRM-free songs outsold its lower-quality, copy-protected counterparts 10-to-1.

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Microsoft Corp. is in talks to buy DoubleClick Inc., the Internet advertising company owned by private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. DoubleClick hired Morgan Stanley to explore its options, including a possible stock-market listing, the Journal said, citing the people, who indicated there are other potential suitors. Hellman & Friedman is seeking at least $2 billion, almost double the $1.1 billion it paid for the New York-based company in 2005, the newspaper said.

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Dell has heard you and we will expand our Linux support beyond our existing servers and Precision workstation line. Our first step in this effort is offering Linux pre-installed on select desktop and notebook systems. We will provide an update in the coming weeks that includes detailed information on which systems we will offer, our testing and certification efforts, and the Linux distribution(s) that will be available. The countdown begins today.

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With 250 million users, Yahoo Mail is the largest global e-mail provider and the largest in the U.S., according to comScore. The unlimited storage will begin rolling out globally in May, and Yahoo expects to have all of its customers covered within a month, except for China and Japan. "We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans," Kremer said.

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The Hiper HPU-4M730 is designed to be a no nonsense, all business, Quad SLI capable PSU that won't break the bank, and it would seem that Hiper have succeeded. While no one is saying a PC that needs 730Watts of power is great for the environment, Hiper have also done their bit for the green team and kept the packaging to a minimum as well as used recycled cardboard for the box. RoHS compliance rounds out the green side of things.

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The aim of this article is to make the process of buying a monitor simpler for you, the buyer, by demystifying some of the more important aspects to consider when looking for a TFT, as well as looking at some of the recent trends in the market which may impact your purchasing decision -- which panel technology is most suited to your needs?

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Sapphire's new X1950 GT is based on ATI's RV570 GPU. It comes with 256 MB of GDDR3 memory and is cheaper than the Radeon X1900 GT. Of course you can not expect performance wonders from a $140 card, but it is a great way to survive the wait for ATI's next-gen products while being able to play all the latest games.

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Sony revolutionized the world of ultra-thin digicams with its very popular T series. Although Casio, Nikon, Kodak, Pentax and others try to match them, they always seem to fall a bit short. I=92ve always loved the sliding front door that powers-up the camera. And although this design has been around for a few years, it=92s still as fresh as ever. The DSC-T100 is the latest edition and it has a number of new features we wanted to try out including higher 8.2MP resolution, a more powerful zoom, a better processor and Face Detection--the new setting almost all camera makers are touting in 2007. Now does all this add up to something special or just more of the same? Let=92s find out.

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The U.L.N.A (Ultra-Low-Noise Adaptor) is a power cable that has a resister in line with the fan, cutting the amount of power that the fans uses, which slows it down. If you use those, there is not a way to speed up the fan without powering it down and removing it.

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Quote: Kingwin has updated their line up to include a new enclosure (the JET Model JT-35EU-BK) that supports a SATA hard drive that can connect via both eSATA and USB. Taking it one step further, this unit also includes a one touch back-up feature which can allow you to keep your precious data in two locations.

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In less than three weeks it will have been a year since ATI Technologies had added it's Radeon X1000 family (R500) support to their Linux binary drivers. When that support was finally added it came about six months after the hardware was actually introduced to the public accompanied by the Windows Catalyst drivers. Even with this six months time that developers had to work on the Linux package, the fglrx v8.24.8 driver (the version that had introduced R500 support) resulted in ATI's flagship GPU series facing a miserable beating by NVIDIA's 7800GTX and even the GeForce 6800GT. However, a year later and what will be twelve driver releases with R500 support, how does the performance now compare? In this article we will be comparing several R500 parts to see how the performance stacks up using the latest driver.

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Computers are one of those things which have its novelty wear off pretty fast. Upgrade is not always a viable solution. As your system grows old, most of its components are no longer compatible with the latest available on the market. After a few years or so, you'll usually find yourself heaps of computer relics in the corner of your garage, and wondering what you are going do with them.

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Quote: There really isn't too much more to say about the nForce 680i LT SLI as there isn't really anything new about the product itself! NVIDIA wanted a part that would fill the void between the 680i and 650i and the 680i LT SLI does just that with a reasonable price-tag for the performance level that is offers. At $199 this board will peak the interest of many gamers that want to have a board that supports SLI Technology!

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Ever since the launch of NVIDIA's famous 8800GTX and 8800GTS cards, even diehard ATI fans had to admit that NVIDIA was offering some very powerful graphics cards. However to the dismay of most people, NVIDIA had launched these cards at a MSRP of $600 and $450 respectively, putting them out of reach and consideration for most. Ever since then enthusiasts have demanded a more affordable DX10 part for the masses, and in turn nVidia delivered with the 320mb 8800GTS.

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So how did the Ultra X-Pro 800watt power supply do? Price-wise, it's not cheap at $200, but not too expensive either. Performance is good, even with the 12v rails running on the high side. Connectivity is excellent, with plenty of legacy connectors. And, the brushed case looks good, giving the XPro the look of higher-end units. Ultra's AST technology is also a neat tool, and does its' job well.

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The Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 is a high performance keyboard and mouse combination that is currently Microsoft's flagship hardware product, at least until the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 arrives (later this year). This kit pairs Microsoft's brand new keyboard design with their top-shelf mouse, the Wireless Laser Mouse 8000. Throw in some very cool design, a lot of innovative features, and Bluetooth connectivity and Microsoft is betting they have a product that can't miss.

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With more fanfare and consumer enthusiasm than most companies could ever hope to muster, in late 2006 Apple announced the Apple TV. The Apple TV is Apple's opening foray into the near-trillion-dollar industry of television and movie entertainment and is billed as a product that'll revolutionize the home media experience. The Apple TV, like the iPhone, represents a bold and risky move away from the controlled and perfected realm of computing and into the generic and saturated media streamer markets. Will this new $299 Apple TV be the quintessential blockbuster hit, or will it quietly struggle for survival amongst consumers with ever-soaring expectations?

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ASUS is a brand known for quality and excellence in all of their products. With the launch of NVIDIA's 680i chipset ASUS presented enthusiasts with the Strike Extreme board with the price tag of around $400. This price tag made it very unreasonable for most consumers out there. Because ASUS knows everyone is not made of money they released the P5N-E SLI board, which uses the less expensive 650i chipset. This is a very great option for consumers who want to SLI support on the Core 2 Duo platform. So let's take a look at this budget board from ASUS.

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For time to time, one comes up with a killer idea for modding that doesn't cost much and improves the original product in ways such as looks, usability, functionalty or all these combined. I believe this following mod fits at least one of those categories. For me, this has been a true life saver even though I came up with the idea just only couple of days ago. I hope that you will find this little project worth doing for and get all the benefits out from it like I did.

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For years now we have been accustom to seeing Tyan motherboards in some of the best workstations and servers, but recently they have been introducing a couple FlexATX/microATX motherboards. The first microATX Tyan motherboard we had reviewed was the Tomcat i845GV S3098, which was about two years ago, while earlier this year we featured a preview of the Tomcat i945GM S3095. Now in hand today we will be reviewing the Tyan Toledo i965R S5180. The Toledo i965R is a FlexATX solution with an LGA-775 socket, one PCI Express x16 slot, two DDR2 sockets, and is powered by Intel's Q965 + ICH8 Chipset. The Tyan i965R motherboard also supports Intel's Core 2 Duo processors.

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In a sense, these long-range Wi-Fi antennas would perform the same function as WiMax, a long-range wireless technology that many, including Intel, are experimenting with now. The difference is that a WiMax tower costs about $15,000 to $20,000. The long range Wi-Fi towers might only cost $700 to $800. Additionally, long range Wi-Fi could spread faster, Brewer said. The radio spectrum employed by WiMax is regulated by local telecommunications authorities. Putting up towers or offering services can require getting governmental permission.

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As reported earlier, the plant will be located in an industrial rust-belt hub in northeast China called Dalian in the Liaoning Province and will cost around $2.5 billion to build. The Chinese government is providing financial incentives to Intel, according to company spokesman Chuck Mulloy, and has built up the infrastructure around the city. Chips will start coming out of the factory in the first half of 2010. Initially, Intel will make chipsets--which shuttle data back and forth across the processor to the microprocessor of the computer--and possibly communications chips.

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The new box will go on sale in limited quantities soon for $479. The details may not be precise here, but I believe it will have an HDMI connector so that you can connect at the highest speed to a high-definition TV. It will come with a 120-gigabyte hard disk drive and will have IPTV capability. Bill Gates announced in January that the Xbox 360 was capable of serving as a set-top box for IPTV, or Internet Protocol TV, which phone companies such as AT&T are using to offer high-definition movies and scores of channels in competition with TV.

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"The information was a part of Symantec's 11th Internet Security Threat Report. The report, released this week, covered a huge range of security and vulnerability issues over the last six months of 2006, including operating systems. The report found that Microsoft Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006. During this period, 39 vulnerabilities, 12 of which were ranked high priority or severe, were found in Microsoft Windows and the company took an average of 21 days to fix them. It's an increase of the 22 vulnerabilities and 13-day turnaround time for the first half of 2006 but still bested the competition handily."

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"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall. The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards." The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

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"Recently, there have been reports of fraudulent activity and account theft taking place on the Xbox Live network. Security is a top priority for Xbox Live, and we are actively investigating all reports of fraudulent behaviour and theft," a Microsoft spokesperson told the news service."

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Mozilla on Monday released security updates for Firefox 2 and Firefox 1.5. Security updates for Firefox 1.5 will be available only until April 24, 2007, when Mozilla will stop supporting the earlier version. Mozilla is encouraging current 1.5 users to upgrade to 2.0 soon. Current users of Firefox 2.0 and 1.5 will receive an automatic update notification and will need to reload the browser for the changes to take effect. Changes in this update patch a flaw in the FTP protocol used by Firefox.

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Additionally, the new PS3 software will support Folding@home, a distributed computing project created by Stanford University in 2000 in order to better understand the process of protein folding and how it correlates to serious diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and various forms of cancer. Research into protein folding, however, requires an enormous amount of computing power. Similar to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence's famed SETI@home project, in which thousands of PC users are donating a slice of their computers' processing time to aid in the hunt for intelligent life in outer space, Folding@home has been relying on contributions from PC users around the world since its inception.

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"To be sure, feverish speculation about Google products has been wrong before. Google was widely reported to be building its own line of personal computers a little over a year ago. What in fact materialized was a set of free software programs designed to make any existing Windows PCs easier to use. But Richard Windsor, a phone analyst with brokerage Nomura in London, told clients late last week that unspecified Google representatives at a major European conference in Germany had confirmed the company is working on its own phone device. "Google has come out of the closet at the CeBIT trade fair admitting that it is working on a mobile phone of its own," Windsor said in a note entitled "Google Phone: From myth to reality." "This is not going to be a high-end device but a mass market device aimed at bringing Google to users who don't have a PC," he said."

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"Take Two plans to release Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV later this year, and they would love nothing more than to avoid another Thompson lawsuit. After Thompson made public statements about his intent to block both games from being released, the company asked a judge to "enjoin him from bringing suit on behalf of the State of Florida to enjoin the sale of GTA IV or Manhunt 2." Take Two claims that Thompson is misusing Florida's "nuisance" law, and they point out that attempts to regulate the sale of violent video games have repeatedly faltered, including cases in which the law was drafted by Thompson himself."

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Although Microsoft did not disclose how much it is spending to buy Tellme, it is one of its biggest purchases in years. Several media outlets estimated the deal at $800 million, while one Wall Street analyst claimed the purchase price topped $1 billion. Microsoft's bets on the potential of voice recognition go well beyond Tellme. The company has spent years building its own voice interface into products like Windows and Exchange Server. Speech recognition has also been a longtime priority for Microsoft's research unit. Kai-Fu Lee, the Chinese executive whose departure for Google sparked a multiple-state legal battle, is among those who have focused on voice recognition work at the company.

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"The French parliament has said au revoir to Microsoft Relevant Products/Services. Starting in June of next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers Relevant Products/Services running Linux, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, and OpenOffice.org, a free open-source alternative to Microsoft's Office software. For day-to-day documents, French members of parliament and their staff will use OpenOffice.org, currently in version 2.0.4 and designed to compete directly with Microsoft's Office System. With versions available in languages from Arabic to Welsh, OpenOffice.org includes several modules to compete with Microsoft Office: Writer, a word processor; Calc, a spreadsheet program; Impress, a presentation package; and Draw, a software package for designing graphics. OpenOffice.org also includes Base, a database tool that competes with Microsoft's Access. Why the change? The French parliament, composed of an upper chamber (le Senat, or Senate) and a lower chamber (l'Assemblee Nationale, or National Assembly), believes it can save money using open-source software, despite the near-term costs of switching from Microsoft systems and retraining all employees. But that is a matter of some debate."

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"The Seagate drives are equipped with the company's new "DriveTrust" technology, which the company promotes as a simpler way to safeguard data stored on laptops. The encryption technology is designed to make life tougher for computer thieves and to prevent embarrassing breaches. Seagate is also in discussions with major, brand name laptop makers and expects to announce more deals for its new hard drive midyear.

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"The maker of the popular iPod music player and Macintosh computers hopes to introduce so-called flash memory in small computers known as subnotebooks in the second half of 2007, Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research who has a "buy" rating on Apple shares and does not own any stock, said in investor notes Wednesday and Thursday. A shift to flash memory in place of much slower hard-disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers. Apple, known as a technology innovator, would be among the first personal computer makers to use flash memory for storing data in computers, a step that some chip memory makers, including Micron Technology Inc., have said is inevitable as prices for flash decline and storage capacity increases."

Said By CNet

The FBI has repeatedly misused the Patriot Act's extraordinary surveillance powers by obtaining information on Americans unlawfully, the Justice Department's inspector general said Friday in a report that already has drawn promises of a congressional investigation.

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The threat of an injunction and a long legal battle could adversely impact the company's sales, as new customers may be reluctant to sign up for a service that could be shut down. That's what happened to Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry email devices and service. In 2002, a jury found that RIM had infringed on patents held by the patent holding company NTP. A judge then imposed an injunction, which was stayed pending RIM's appeals. The situation came to a head some three and a half years later when the judge in the case was about to impose the injunction. In the eleventh hour, RIM and NTP settled the case. But the ongoing threat of a shutdown spooked potential customers, causing RIM's sales to dip during the quarter preceding the settlement, RIM said after the case was settled.

Said By Cnet News

"Microsoft...intends to standardize the technology and will be submitting HD Photo to an appropriate standards organization shortly," the company said in a statement. The company plans to announce the move Thursday at the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas.

The standardization move makes sense, given Microsoft's ambitions, said InfoTrends analyst Ed Lee. "If Microsoft is looking for wider adoption of the format, it needs to be divorced from Microsoft itself," he said. "They're going to have to loosen the strings on it."

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On Feb. 6, when the Senate held hearings on the issue of prosecutorial independence, former judiciary committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., proudly claimed to have been as clueless as the rest of us. Denying New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer's claim that he or his staff had "slipped the new provision into the Patriot Act in the dead of night," Specter asserted, "The first I found out about the change in the Patriot Act occurred a few weeks ago when Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein approached me on the floor." Specter added that he only looked into how the provision was altered after Feinstein told him about it. As he explained, "I then contacted my very able chief counsel, Michael O'Neill, to find out exactly what had happened. And Mr. O'Neill advised me that the requested change had come from the Department of Justice, that it had been handled by Brett Tolman, who is now the U.S. attorney for Utah, and that the change had been requested by the Department of Justice because there had been difficulty with the replacement of a U.S. attorney in South Dakota."