Tim Conneally

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) was down for more than eight hours over the weekend, affecting many prominent sites, and the company is still investigating the cause of the problem.

Cloud-based services such as those offered by Amazon provide cost effective solutions in computing and storage. However, the oft-cited drawback of relying on such offerings is that customers are left with little or no control if something goes wrong. The only option is to wait -- and in cases like this, wait nearly half a day.

Not quite a thin client, not quite a full-blown desktop, the two-watt CherryPal C100 "cloud computer" is available for order today.

Silicon Valley startup CherryPal is offering its eponymous system with a profile of only 5.8" x 4.2" x 1.3", weighing only 10 ounces, with a crawling 400MHz processing speed. But it's not designed to replace a full-fledged desktop, and at most resembles an Internet appliance.

Mobile phone video broadcast site Qik, which launched in private testing this spring, has opened today as a public beta.

Qik is a live video streaming site that turns the user's mobile phone camera into something of a remote webcam. Users are encouraged to stream events and other happenings, which can be viewed live and later as video clips, to the Qik Web site.

Social network giant Facebook entered litigation with German site Studivz on Friday for closely copying its design, just in time for Facebook to launch its totally redesigned interface on Monday.

German site StudiVZ took more than a few design cues from Facebook. According to reports, early versions of the site even featured filenames such as fbook.css and poke.php, as the two companies were reportedly "in talks."

Posting a second quarter net loss of $1.19 billion, its seventh money losing quarter in a row, AMD's Hector Ruiz will hand the CEO position over to President and COO Dirk Meyer.

As BetaNews reported last April, AMD's return to dominance is predicated upon its image as a performance leader. Though the company says the transition had been in the works for two years, yesterday's announcement that Ruiz would be stepping down as CEO of AMD and into "Executive Chairman of the Board" position, may play into its efforts to renew its image.

Whenever video game consoles' sales data is released, we often depict the comparison as some kind of war. But with E3 having ended and the holiday season approaching, NPD suggests the battle may be entirely in our minds.

June's total video game sales for the US were $680 million dollars higher than last year, with revenues from consoles and portables combined rising 54% over last year, and revenue from game software 61% higher. One NPD analyst expects total industry sales to be $22 billion this year, making video gaming the single highest-grossing form of entertainment today.

As a part of the v9.4 update to TiVo HD and Series 3 set-top boxes, support was added for YouTube H.264 videos -- a feature TiVo was announced in the spring.

The "summer update" that TiVo announced yesterday will be rolling out over the course of the next few weeks, and will grant native H.264 decoding to S3 and HD DVRs. It has been added under TiVo Central "Find Programs and Downloads" under the "Download TV, Movies & Web Video" icon. While the only option is currently to "Watch YouTube Videos," the result is a YouTube experience unique to TiVo.

Soon, Lionsgate will be joining the ranks of major content providers to partner with YouTube in advertisement and hosting.

YouTube has already partnered with CBS and the BBC, as well as Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and Warner Music Group. The now three-year old video service's system for monetization and content identification appears to be mature enough to sustain major studios, and the inclusion of Lionsgate could foretoken many more.

The first beta of Opera Mobile 9.5, initially only available for touchscreen Windows Pocket PCs running Windows Mobile 5 or WM6, is still missing about a third of Opera Mobile 9.5's expected features.

Though it's still in the early stages of its lifespan, this first beta of Opera Mobile 9.5 maintains Opera's traditional focus on providing a fast browsing experience, while making it more similar to the popular Opera Mini.

The latest project from the leading online retailer allows movies to be streamed directly to PCs. Built upon Amazon's library of Unbox titles, beta testers get a $5 rental credit to check out the streams.

In May, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos mentioned that an a la carte, pay-per-view streaming video service would be coming to the Site, but did not mention if it would be entirely new, or simply a feature upgrade to Unbox.

Today, the Australian Communications and Media Authority approved the Content Services Code, a set of guidelines for ISPs and mobile carriers, which include directives for ISPs to hire so-called "trained content assessors."

The Content Services Code is a code of practices developed by the Internet Industry Association for online and mobile content providers. Within it are guidelines for "self-regulation of content" from commercial ISPs and mobile operators, which include the mandatory hiring of in-house censors, called "trained content assessors."

Download Norton Internet Security 2009 (16.0.0.69) Beta from FileForum now.

This week, Symantec opened the public betas of both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009, products which the company claims run faster and consume fewer resources.

PlayStation 3 users are now able to rent or purchase movie and television content from the PlayStation Store, delivered both in standard and high definition.

Through partnerships with MGM, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Turner Entertainment, PS3 users have access to over 300 movies and 1,200 television episodes.

TiVo HD and Series 3 DVR owners are being treated to a slightly ahead-of-schedule software release. The manufacturer expects its rollout of firmware v9.4 to be complete by the end of the month.

Some new features have been added to improve the user experience. The option to "Play Folder" allows saved episodes of a season to be viewed in succession, and the "Delete Folder" option -- logically enough -- deletes the contents of an entire folder.

Toshiba's new Qosmio G55-Q802 is the first laptop available with the Cell CPU, a technology heretofore known as the PS3 processing technology among consumers, developed jointly by Toshiba, Sony, and IBM.

It's not a PC based on a Cell platform, at least not completely. The Q802 has a Core 2 Duo on board, and is a Windows Vista-based system. The result of this Cell processor architecture, which Toshiba calls its Quad Core HD Processor, is a notebook not designed for gaming, but rather to be a multimedia entertainment unit.