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A Complete Guide to Setting Up Your Own Home Server : "Setting up a home server running an open-source operating system is a popular and useful activity. Useful in what ways, you may ask. You could use it to run a website, collect and send e-mail messages, store your OpenID credentials or serve your music around the home."

Engineers and physicists from Germany have demonstrated the quickest prototype yet of an advanced form of RAM tipped by hardware manufacturers to be the future of computing. The device is so fast it brushes against a fundamental speed-limit for the process. Magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) is a faster and more energy efficient version of the RAM used in computers today, and hardware companies think it will in a few years dominate the market. Its speed and low power will in particular boost mobile computing. Whereas conventional RAM stores a digital 1 or 0 as the level of charge in the capacitor, MRAM stores it by changing the north-south direction of a tiny magnet's magnetic field. Each variable magnet is positioned next to one with a fixed field. Reading a stored value involves running a current through the pair to discover the direction of the variable magnet's field."

"As the prices of educational laptops for children in developing countries creep upward, a group of researchers attempts to create a new, even lower-tech computer that would cost as little as $12."

For some time, Mac fans have argued that, feature-for-feature, Apple's computers aren't really that much more expensive than their PC competitors. When the processors, memory, hard drive and screens are all matched up, the price premium on a Mac was negligible, they insist, and sometimes non-existent. But does that still hold true? read more | digg story

It appears that AMD’s engineers in Dresden, Markham and Sunnyvale have been making lots of trips to little island of Formosa lately - the home of contract manufacturer TSMC, which will be producing Fusion CPUs. Our sources indicated that both companies are quite busy laying out the productions scenarios of AMD’s first CPU+GPU chip. read more | digg story

The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project plan to release the machine on general sale next year. But customers will have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world. read more  |  digg story

A Windows Home Server is a simple box that lies at the center of your home network. The Server works without interaction (it doesn ’t run programs like typical operating systems, doesn’t even have a monitor port), simplifying some very complex tasks among all the computers in your home. read more  |  digg story

Judging by details revealed in a chip conference agenda, the clock frequency race isn't over yet. IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz, according to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco. Chipmakers have run into problems increasing chip clock speed--essentially an electronic heartbeat that synchronizes operations in a processor--because higher frequencies have led to unmanageable power consumption and waste heat . To compensate, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have turned instead to the addition of multiple processing cores on each slice of silicon. That's effective when computers are juggling numerous tasks at the same time, but increasing the clock speed means an individual task can run faster. The first-generation Cell Broadband Engine chip,...

Wired is carrying a story about a method developed by security researchers to identify computers hiding behind anonymity services . From the article: 'His victim is the Onion Router, or "Tor" — a sophisticated privacy system that lets users surf the web anonymously. Tor encrypts a user's traffic, and bounces it through multiple servers, so the final destination doesn't know where it came from. Murdoch set up a Tor network at Cambridge to test his technique, which works like this: If an attacker wants to learn the IP address of a hidden server on the Tor network, he'll suddenly request something difficult or intensive from that server. The added load will cause it to warm up. "When a crystal is manufactured, it has a clock skew, and it's different for each crystal (throughout its) lifetime," explains Steven J. Murdoch, a Cambridge University researcher who discussed his work at the Chaos Communications Congress on Thursday. - [Via Slashdot.org ]

A device the size of a sugar cube will be able to record and store high resolution video footage of every second of a human life within two decades, experts say. A nice way to chronicle your life, or a step towards the nanny state? read more  |  digg story

According to APC magazine, every new Windows Vista computer will be given its own domain name to access files remotely. There is a catch though: to use it one must be using IPv6. Is the push for Vista also going to be the push finally to switch everything from IPv4 to IPv6?"Microsoft, meanwhile, is trying to convince businesses to adopt both Vista and Office 2007 at once. An analyst is quoted: 'In all likelihood, enterprises will tie deployment of both Vista and Office 2007 with a hardware upgrade cycle.' His reasoning is that it will be easier for companies to handle one disruption to IT systems than two. Or three. read more  |  digg story

So many software downloads, so little time. Who likes to download, launch and click through that installation wizard application after application? No one, that's who - especially when you've got a computer to get set up and running quick. read more  |  digg story

A hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs has found a way to unlock the code that prevents iPod users from playing songs from download music stores other than Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes, his company said on Tuesday. Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple's FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses. 'What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay,' she said. 'This allows other companies to offer content for the iPod.' At the moment, Apple aims to keep music bought from its iTunes online music store only available for Apple products, while songs bought from other online stores typically do not work on iPods. But Johansen's technology could help rivals sell competing products that play music from iTunes and offer songs for download that work on iPods as they seek to take a bite out of ...

It's dress-down Friday at Sunbelt Software's Clearwater, Fla., headquarters. In a bland cubicle on the 12th floor, Eric Sites stares at the screen of a "dirty box," a Microsoft Windows machine infected with the self-replicating Wootbot network worm. Within seconds, there is a significant spike in CPU usage as the infected computer starts scanning the network, looking for vulnerable hosts. In a cubicle across the hall, Patrick Jordan's unpatched test machine is hit by the worm, prompting a chuckle from the veteran spyware researcher. Almost simultaneously, the contaminated machine connects to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and joins a channel to receive commands, which resemble strings of gibberish, from an unknown attacker. "Welcome to the world of botnets," said Sites, vice president of research and development at Sunbelt, a company that sells anti-spam and anti-spyware software. "Basically, this machine is now owned by a criminal. It's no...

More than one in eight adults in the US show signs of being addicted to the internet, a study has shown. "Addicts" showed signs of compulsive internet use, habitually checking e-mail, websites and chat rooms. More than 8% of the 2,513 respondents to the Stanford University phone survey said they hid their use from partners. A typical addict is a single, white college-educated male in his 30s, who spends more than 30 hours a week on "non-essential" computer use, it found. "We often focus on how wonderful the internet is; how simple and efficient it can make things," said Dr Elias Aboujaoude of the Stanford University School of Medicine and one of the researchers behind the study. "But we need to consider the fact that it creates real problems for a subset of people."

A recent interview between Apple founding CEO Steven Jobs and Newsweek editor Steven Levy was most instructive with respect to the differences between Apple and Microsoft when it comes to fighting piracy of music and software. To be clear on what we are talking about, both Microsoft and Apple have been wildly successful in creating dominant - in Microsoft's case monopolistic - market shares in their respective areas of desktop software and portable music players. In the case of both companies they have had to contend with the thorny issue of piracy. In many ways, their successful approach has been exactly the same - to turn a blind eye to it. The Jobs interview, which marked the fifth anniversary of iPod, revealed that the Apple co-founder claims that if you charge the market a price it will accept for music, users will forgo illegal downloads and pay iTunes to download tracks. Jobs is indeed correct when he says this strategy has worked - iTunes has had something like 1.5 billion...

Security professionals warned developers on Thursday that they need to be aware that their open-source repositories can now be easily mined, allowing attackers to target programs that are likely to be flawed. While Google could previously be used to look for specific strings, now the search engine riffles through code that much better. "It is going deeper into places where code is publicly available, and it's clearly picking up stuff really well," said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer of security startup Veracode. "This makes it easier and faster for attackers to find vulnerabilities--not for people that want to attack a (specific) Web site, but for people that want to attack any Web site." read more  |  digg story

People familiar with the software maker's plans say the suite is currently tracking for a release towards the end of March, ahead of the 2007 Photoshop World conference scheduled for April 4-6 at the John B. Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Mass. The rumblings are contrary to comments from Adobe chief executive Bruce Chizen, who in a March 2006 interview with Forbes magazine said the San Jose-based company would not launch the next generation suite until the second quarter of 2007. Mixing the best of both worlds Code-named Banana Split, Creative Suite 3.0 will offer the first versions of popular applications like Photoshop and Illustrator that will run natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macintosh systems from Apple Computer. It will also mark the first formal integration of products Adobe acquired from rival Macromedia in its $3.4 billion acquisition of the company last year."

'IBM has announced that they are gearing up to build the world's fastest supercomputer, more than four times faster than the reigning champ, IBM's BlueGene/L. Nicknamed 'Roadrunner,' the new machine will be a hybrid of off-the-shelf CPUs and Cell chips designed for the PS3. Roadrunner is to be installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, occupying 1,100 square metres of floorspace (that's a square about 110 feet on a side). According to the BBC: 'The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 Cell processors... each Cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second.''