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IBM is one of the companies that probably has the most first-hand experience of alternative pricing mechanisms. It has been billing for mainframe use this way for decades, with charges based on computing cycles used rather than on how many processors or physical machines are used to accomplish the task. "We have had a virtualized, shared infrastructure on our mainframe for 40 years now," said Rich Lechner, vice president of virtualization at IBM.

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Will rising costs mean increased sales? Almost every technology driven business relies on the bell curve of early adopters at the front end with high costs and small demand then a transition into the mainstream with dropping costs, increased product supply and broad adoption. Think of anything from PCs to cell phones to DVDs. The game business has the opposite trends now. Currently a minority of released titles are profitable. With the next generation development costs are increasing rapidly, which means more units must be sold of each title to turn a profit. The PS3 requires a level of financial investment that clearly puts it beyond the impulse buy of a mainstream entertainment enthusiast. Will Blu-ray be enough to drive its sales to the mass market?

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There was one small glitch in the pre-landing check out. One of three Auxiliary Power Units (APUs) in Discovery's rear compartment has a small leak - about six drops per hour. The APUs power the hydraulic pump, which controls some of the systems needed for landing, such as the rudder/speed brake and the elevon. Flight controllers are not sure whether the leak is hydrazine fuel or the nitrogen that is used to pressurise the fuel tank. A hydrazine leak would be more serious than a nitrogen leak. Before the de-orbit engine firing, Discovery turned on that APU and it appeared to be working fine.

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Schulze advised admins to upgrade their software if they were using these versions but said the current stable version of Debian was not affected as it run kernel 2.6.8. Wider damage to Debian's infrastructure may have been avoided. "Due to the short window between exploiting the kernel and Debian admins noticing, the attacker hadn't time/inclination to cause much damage," wrote Schulze.

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Five Intel Conroe parts will ship initially: the E6300, E6400, E6600, E6700, and X6800. All of these parts follow Intel's new processor numbering scheme, introduced when the Core Duo mobile processor family arrived earlier this year. The five dual-core Conroe processors are clocked at 1.86, 2.13, 2.40, 2.67GHz and 2.93GHz, respectively, run on a 1066MHz front side bus and contain either 2MB or 4MB of cache shared between the two cores.

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"Basically, you've given everybody a little radio-frequency doodad that silently declares 'Hey, I'm a foreigner,'" says author and futurist Bruce Sterling, who lectures on the future of RFID technology. "If nobody bothers to listen, great. If people figure out they can listen to passport IDs, there will be a lot of strange and inventive ways to exploit that for criminal purposes." RFID chips are used in security passes many companies issue to employees. They don't have to be touched to a reader-machine, only waved near it. Following initial objections by security and privacy experts, the State Department added several security precautions.

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French Prime Minister Dominic de Villepin announced this week that the government plans to provide a "good quality and good value" PC, a cheap Internet connection, training and support for $1.27 (1 euro) per day, for up to three years. The plan will work as a public-private partnership and is scheduled to begin in early 2007.

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On Wednesday, the EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said she had "no alternative" other than to impose new fines. "I sincerely regret that the company has not put an end to its illegal conduct," Kroes told a news conference on Wednesday. "The European Commission cannot allow such illegal conduct to continue indefinitely." "No company is above the law, each and every company, large or small, operating in the European Union must obey EU law, including competition law, for the benefit of all companies and consumers," Kroes added.

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In the fourth quarter, AMD will start to ship chips based on the more advanced 65-nanometer process from its own factories, said Thomas Sonderman, director of Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM) Technology at AMD. Chartered will follow by putting out 65-nanometer Athlon family chips in mid-2007.

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The incentive is part of a new "Microsoft Security Software Advisor Program" that the software giant plans to announce Tuesday at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston. Microsoft has a similar program for resellers of its software for managing customer relationship, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "Our goal is to build the industry's leading security partner ecosystem and to ensure that our customers have the best experience with out Forefront security products," said Steve Brown, the director of product management in the security, access and solutions division at Microsoft. "This is a fairly unique program that we're offering."

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Brussels had warned Microsoft in December that it would face fines of 2m euros a day if the firm failed to meet the commission's demands.Under the 2004 ruling, Microsoft was told to provide rival firms with more information about its software, in order to enable them to write programs that could run more smoothly on Microsoft's widely-used Windows operating system.

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The introduction of RADEON X1900 series brought bannana type smiles to our faces. ATI customers were happy to get more raw power for their SM 2.0 / SM 3.0 games. Beginning of 2006 ATI however offered only high-end boards and no cut down versions were available. Until Q2 2006 if you were in the market for new Canadian processor you were either stuck with X1900 XT or XTX -- great cards, but expensive and bulky. Around May, ATI decided to kick NVIDIA's green buttocks and take on GeForce 7900 GT. With that in mind, RADEON X1900 GT has been introduced.

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That's not a typo, the memory really did reach 900 MHz! The core reached a reasonable 578 MHz. It's interesting to note that the clocks reached are going to give it a huge boost not dissimilar to the 7900 GTX which at stock is 650/800 - you can clearly see that though the core is lower here, the memory is much higher, so you never know, it may even outperform a stock 7900 GTX!

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BFG Tech were gracious enough to provide their OC examples of all three products, two-up for some SLI testing. BFG are staid factory overclockers with the majority of their gamer-led products, bumping things up above stock as a way to appeal. Taking a good look at their versions of GeForce 7600 GT, 7900 GT and 7900 GTX was therefore always going to be interesting.

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One thing that sets EVGA apart from other companies is the support EVGA puts behind each and every product they sell. If you go onto EVGA's message boards, it is clear that they care about the customer. Lifetime Warranty, 24/7 Toll free technical support phone- line, and a 90-day Step-Up program add up to make EVGA the choice for NVIDIA products. That and being the fastest SLI setup available can go a long way. A set of overclocked 7900GTX cards by EVGA is about as fast as it can get for out of the box performance.

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At first glance the MSI Computer NX7600GT-VT2D256E PCI Express videocard is pretty impressive compared to GeForce 6600GT class models. The frame buffer has been increased to 256MB over the original GeForce 6600GT spec of 128MB. While nVIDIA did also release a 256MB version of the 6600GT, this time around the videocard can take advantage of the memory. The MSI NX7600GT-VT2D256E videocard also supports two dual link DVI output connectors as well as a whole host of TV output options; everything from component output to traditional S-Video is rolled in.

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With the release of socket AM2, socket 939 processors have plummeted in price. Given this and the lack of any performance difference between the two sockets and many users are either happy to stick with their existing CPUs and buy new boards or take advantage of the price differences for a completely new 939 system. Today we are looking at Abit's final socket 939 swansong - the AT8 32X.

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Although not likely to recommend this board to someone well versed in overclocking I would still whole heartily recommend it to someone looking to get into overclocking and looking for a user friendly, feature packed board. This is Foxconn's first go at the 975 chipset and I feel for the entry level enthusiast it is a solid choice, there's no doubt that future Foxconn boards based on this chipset will pick up where this one left off.

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As Conroe prepares to hit the streets this next Friday NVIDIA has geared up their chipsets to support this new CPU breed. The new nForce 590/570 chipsets are NVIDIAs latest entry of support for the Intel line and offers some great new features as well. Take a sneak peek at what is coming right around the corner from the good folks over at NVIDIA.

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Chances are that, unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you know who or what OCZ is. If you are one of those that have been living under a rock then you need OCZ and you need to continue reading. OCZ has become a force to be reckoned with as a top ram manufacturer, they consistently put out excellent products and seem to always be releasing something new and even better than before. Well OCZ has done it again, this time they've decided to aim at a specific genre though, the PC Gamer, with their new SPEC OPS limited edition ram. This ram is not only an excellent performer but it really looks cool, OCZ went with a camo motif on the heat spreaders for the SPEC OPS line. So come along as I check this stuff out...

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This review fortunately is in its third and this time final stage of update! Those of you that read either of the first two iterations know that the initial tests were performed using a pre-release version of the ASUS M2N32-SLI motherboard. The board that was used to perform the preliminary series of tests on the Mushkin Redline XP2-8000 DDR2 was very limited limited in its ability to perform at any multiplier with a FSB greater than 230, even with HTT reduced to a 3X multiplier. We had read numerous reviews and reports about this motherboard's vast improvements in the newer, just released version (1.03 G) so we arranged to obtain one for a chance to see really put this memory to test.

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It's now officially the summer of 2006 and it's time to do publish another article on how to build your own gaming notebook. The changes from 2005 to 2006 were significant when it comes to notebooks. Intel started shipping dual-core processors (Yonah) for their Napa based platforms (i945PM/GM) and we finally saw ATI and NVIDIA putting high end graphics in decently sized notebooks. Our previous two articles we used 15.4" widescreen notebooks, but this year I am moving up to a 17" screen with a native resolution of 1920x1200. With an upgradeable NVIDIA GeForce 7900GTX 256MB video card powering the 17.0" WUXGA Wide Screen display at 1920x1200 the notebook I picked out seems worthy enough to replace the one I picked out last year. Without further ado let's meet this year's DIY gaming notebook, the Clevo M57U!

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So states a report from the Department of Defense's Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, which recommends that the DoD move to a roadmap to adopt open source and open standards, maintaining that such a move is not only in the US national interest, but in the interests of US national security. The 79-page report proposes that the DoD adopt what it calls "open technology development," which incorporates open source methodologies and open standards, but also takes into account the fact that the DoD has systems that it would rather keep secret.

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Analyst firms estimate that there are still between 50 million and 70 million computers running either Windows 95, 98 or ME. Hardest hit by the cancellation of support will be home users and schools, according to Michael Silver, research vice president of client platforms at research group Gartner, who agrees that support has been extended to fight off the threat from Linux.

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Some customers want to reduce their reliance on non-renewable energy, so providing customers with a renewable energy choice is important. Cow Power will provide a new income stream to participating farmers, help reduce some of the water quality impacts of farming through the introduction of innovative manure management technologies, and significantly reduce manure odors, particularly during spreading. Participating farms may also reduce bedding costs by using dry byproducts of the process in place of sawdust or other bedding. Funds not supporting farm methane power will support other renewable generation resources.

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Under the deal with the independent movie studios, the titles will be for sale as part of a subscription service. This differs from the pay-per-title service that BitTorrent plans to use with Warner Bros. BitTorrent is building a video store from which customers can download movies at speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, according to the company. The store is expected to launch sometime in the fall, company executives said.

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Under terms of the proposal, which comes amid AOL's quickly depreciating subscriber base, AOL would no longer charge subscription fees to users with high-speed internet access or a dial-up service from another provider. AOL customers with "dial-up" internet access through AOL would still have to pay a monthly fee of as much as $26, the newspaper said.

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"We have a very clean vehicle," shuttle flight director Tony Ceccacci says of the initial safety check, which came on the first full day of orbit. The seven-member crew was checking for possible damage from loose foam that came off the craft a couple of minutes into Tuesday's critical launch. NASA said the team was working very hard to complete the safety check in 24 hours and that initial indications were all good.

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Although Microsoft Office document formats are the most widely used, OpenDocument has emerged as an alternative with significant vendor backing and with high-profile government customers in Massachusetts and Belgium. OpenDocument is an XML-based format developed under the standards group OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. The decision to manage the project is something of a reversal for Microsoft. Until now, it said that it would not natively support OpenDocument in Office, citing lack of demand. Instead, it would rely instead on third parties for format translators.

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Nonetheless, plenty of bloggers and analysts feel confident Jobs will announce that his next operating system will have a significant upgrade to Boot Camp, Apple's free beta software that allows Mac users to run Windows on the newest Intel-based machines. The new Boot Camp could provide a much more seamless process that does not require people to reboot their computer to switch between Mac and Windows operating systems, as they do now with the Apple software. (A third-party software, Parallels Desktop for Mac, now allows people to run Windows on Intel-based Macintosh computers without clicking the restart button.)

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On the ground the focus remained on the shuttle's vexing external fuel tank. One of the safety improvements was the installation of 100 cameras to scrutinise the shuttle for foam debris during its launch. An early review of those images pleased NASA officials. The pictures showed Discovery shed some small pieces of foam as expected a few minutes after launch but officials say they fell off too late to threaten the orbiter.

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"Many enterprises are not thrilled about paying Microsoft what they do for Office, but feel like they have to. ODF by itself does not remove those concerns, but it does begin to open doors that were not there previously, if only from a negotiating standpoint," O'Grady said. Although Gutierrez was not involved in the original decision to choose OpenDocument, he lauded the decision as the right thing to do.

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The vote is (unofficially, and off the record) in. Regulators from the European Union's 25 member countries have, according to reports, unanimously found Microsoft guilty of non-compliance with the commission's landmark 2004 anti-trust ruling. The way is now clear for Microsoft to start paying a $2.51m a day fine backdated to December 15 for failing to meet the terms of the commission's ruling.

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On July 4, 1776, we claimed our independence from Britain and Democracy was born. Every day thousands leave their homeland to come to the "land of the free and the home of the brave" so they can begin their American Dream.

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"Repair is an option, fly as is is an option," LaNasa said. "It is not rare to repair damage on the pad. It is more rare to roll back." LaNasa said the external tank's liquid oxygen feedline is designed to flex during the fuel loading before a launch and unloading after a scrub. That flexibility, he said, allows the 17-inch feedline to handle the super-cold -297 degree Fahrenheit temperature of the liqid oxygen.

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It is the first time that the public has been able to directly contribute to the debate surrounding governance of the internet, and it has already seen dozens of people email their ideas and views. The question of how the internet should be run has recently gained wide international interest following public arguments over the US government's current position as overall authority. The subject is also likely to become all the more important in the next few years as the internet expands to incorporate different languages and different countries more fully.

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There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right. But this service isn't going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free. Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.