View: Asus M3N-HT Deluxe/Mempipe 780a Motherboard review

The MPAA accused TorrentSpy of copyright infringement in early 2006.

The $110 million figure, one of the largest judgments ever entered for copyright infringement, was calculated by multiplying the site’s 3,669 “shown” infringements by $30,000, which is the maximum penalty available under certain conditions in the Copyright Act. U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper entered her ruling against the site and its parent company, Valence Media, for willfully and vicariously contributing to the infringement of copyrighted materials.

“This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites,” said MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman. “The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios.”

It remains unclear as to whether or not the MPAA will be able to collect the $110 million: Valence Media announced that it will appeal the judgment, and court records indicate that owners Justin Bunnell and Wes Parker have filed for bankruptcy.

View: Article @ Source Site

Worldwide Telescope is software that allows people to gaze at the universe through the data collected by telescopes all around the world -- and above it: there's even data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

"This is taking data that's very complex, gathered over many years from many telescopes, and making it accessible," said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, at a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia.

View: Article @ Source Site

The software vendor also plans to release a less-critical update for its antivirus products, fixing a flaw that attackers could use to launch a denial of service attack against products such as Windows Live OneCare and Microsoft Forefront Security.

The updates will be released Tuesday, the day set aside for Microsoft's monthly set of security patches. Microsoft provided some early details on the patches Thursday, in a note on its Web site.

View: Article @ Source Site

By 5 p.m. EDT Thursday, the page dedicated to AT&T's subscriber plans for Apple's iPhone has been stripped of all mention of Wi-Fi hotspot access.

Earlier in the day, the AT&T site noted that "Access to AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots" was included in all iPhone subscriber plans, with additional details that spelled out the extent of that access. "Unlimited Data (e-mail and Web), 200 SMS text messages and access to AT&T's more than 17,000 Wi-Fi hot spots, including Starbucks all for use in the U.S. Wi-Fi available at U.S. company operated Starbucks locations equipped with a hot spot."

Hours later, all of that WiFi info had been scrubbed from the site.

An AT&T customer service representative was unable to explain the change during a 15-minute telephone conversation, during which he repeatedly left the line to query his manager.

View: Article @ Source Site

The roadmap was revealed when Toshiba outlined an aggressive mid-term management plan that seeks to push sales to ¥10 trillion (US$96 billion) from last year's ¥7.7 trillion and propel operating profit to ¥500 billion from last year's ¥238 billion.

Toshiba has been developing the fuel cells and Cell chip for several years, and their readiness for commercial use coupled with continuing advances in the company's chip-making expertise are expected to be key drivers behind growth in Toshiba's digital products and electronic devices divisions. Toshiba is targeting annual growth of 12 percent in sales and profits for the businesses over the next three years, it said.

View: Article @ Source Site

The proposal represents an extension of an existing program that adds the fee to the price of blank recordable media and products such as MiniDisc recorders. Consumers end up paying an additional few tens of yens (tens of U.S. cents) for media under the scheme that started in 1992.

The agency, which is part of Japan's central government, wants this expanded to music players and video recorders based on hard-disk drives, an agency spokesman said on customary condition on anonymity. It's not clear how much extra the fee would add to the price of hardware.

However the iPod and other music players are primarily devices for music playback, not music recording, so their potential role in piracy isn't as clear as that of a MiniDisc recorder or video recorder.

View: Article @ Source Site

"There was no wholesale shift to Intel," said Tony Parkinson, vice president and general manager of industry-standard servers at Hewlett-Packard Asia-Pacific. "The AMD guys are very loyal."

That's good news for AMD, but Asian shipments of AMD-based servers still did not grow as fast as the overall market in recent quarters, according to Rajnish Arora, director of enterprise server and workstation research at IDC Asia-Pacific. "That's a sign they're not doing too well. Usually, If someone is doing well they are growing faster than the market," he said.

Server industry sources confirmed that assessment, indicating sales of Opteron-based servers dropped off sharply during the first quarter of 2008.

While IDC has yet to release data for the first quarter of 2008, it found that AMD steadily lost market share through the second half of last year. AMD's share of the Asian x86-server market peaked during the second quarter of 2007, with 9.9 percent of the market, before falling to 8.1 percent during the fourth quarter. That decline was largely due to rising shipments of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 processors, also known as Clovertown, Arora said.

View: Article @ Source Site