Cray debuted its smallest and most consumer-oriented "supercomputer" today, the CX1, which will sport Intel Xeon chips and Windows HPC Server 2008. Available immediately, this low end unit embodies the changing state of power computing.

The CX1 chassis has enough room for eight blades of single- or dual-socket Intel Xeon processors. In today's presentation, Cray said the current peak configuration for the chassis is 64 cores with 3.4 GHz bus working at 786 gigaflops. Each chassis can be connected to up to 4 TB of storage.

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The definition of just how free is "free" is once again the subject of debate, triggered this week by the inclusion of a typical-looking end user license agreement from Mozilla Corp. amid the setup for recent builds of Ubuntu Linux.

At issue, for the most part, is this: Can a private interest claim intellectual property rights to certain trademarked elements of code that are distributed as part of an open source package protected by the General Public License?

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3:10 pm EDT September 16, 2008 - A spokesperson for Sonic Solutions told BetaNews this afternoon that DVD videos burned with Qflix drives, including the one sold by Dell, may very well be readable in other brands of console- and PC-based DVD players, although the one way to know for sure is to check for a Qflix logo.

According to Qflix literature, the presence of the logo on a device means it has been Qflix-certified. A warning posted on Dell's Web site yesterday, on the day its external Qflix DVD burner was released, explicitly says that discs burned on that device may not be viewable through players that don't have the Qflix logo.

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Version 2.0 of VMware's Fusion -- a rival to Mac-based desktop virtualization software from Parallels -- adds a new virtual machine control console along with the ability to run multi-OS applications on up to ten monitors.

A day after making a major move into cloud computing, VMware announced today that Fusion 2.0 -- a new edition of its Mac-based desktop virtualization software for running Mac OS, Windows, and Linux applications -- has left beta and entered general release.

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The European Commission yesterday gave permission for Sony to buy full ownership of Sony BMG, turning the former joint venture with German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG into a Sony property.

In August, joint partner Bertelsmann agreed to sell its stake in Sony BMG, turning the rights to all but about 200 of its artists to the re-named Sony Music Entertainment Inc. (SMEI). This gave Sony 100 percent control of the label. Bertlesmann is said to be earning $1.2 billion in its divestiture.

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With greater market share comes greater responsibility; and now the maker of the operating system that analysts believe put Apple back among the US' top five PC producers, finds itself busy addressing some very old-style security holes.

An issue with null pointer dereferencing is among 26 security holes addressed by Apple in its latest Mac OS X 10.5.5 update package, and the details of that little problem are being revealed just today. Usually programs that are terminated clean up after themselves, but if you can find a way to terminate a program cold, it leaves behind pointers to memory that can be abused by malicious users.

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Yesterday, the upper house of the European parliament proposed an update to the now 12-year old Information Technology Agreement (ITA) that eliminates customs duties and tariffs on the export of tech hardware.

The proposal to update the agreement comes just over three months after Japan, the United States, and Taiwan (Republic of China) filed complaints with the World Trade Organization that the ITA is no longer current, claiming that duties continue to be levied on products whose definitions are not included in the document which should otherwise render them exempt from tariffs.

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In an update to his LinkedIn profile, Wei-han Lien seemed to confirm that in-house development on a custom ARM processor for the iPhone is now under way at Apple, in a move that could eventually save it millions.

Is Apple planning to save money on future iPhones by developing its own version of an ARM chip? Evidence from an Apple engineer's LinkedIn profile certainly seems to support that possibility.

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In a highly anticipated move given that Japan and North America have already been treated to price cuts, Microsoft UK is relieving the burden for British gamers, dropping the basic 60 GB HDD-equipped Xbox 360 to £169.99.

Microsoft confirmed to BetaNews this morning that a wave of price cuts that began two weeks ago in Japan and then followed up the following day in the US and Canada, has now officially reached Europe. Beginning this Friday, customers should expect to see price drops of about 15%.

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Microsoft may be "talking the talk" of cloud computing, but VMware and Citrix are already "walking the walk," with new strategies and products launched today at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

VMWare and Citrix handily trumped Microsoft's recent virtualization announcements today by unveiling detailed and comprehensive "cloud" strategies and product families for creating virtualized data centers in both enterprise locations and outside hosting sites.

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As Wall Street wades through what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on Sunday called the worst events he's seen in his career by far, new sites dedicated to financial and business communications have launched.

It appears that online media is a chief beneficiary of the current financial crisis. As the market struggles, online services pertaining to finance are booming.

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Dubbing the initiative a "global effort to connect humanity," Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched the World Wide Web Foundation, a new effort focused on the "next phase" of the Web.

In a speech last Thursday in Washington, DC, the man who is often referred to as "the father of the Web" described his new group's three-fold mission as "to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet."

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As Apple continues to reject applications for its iPhone App Store without any apparent consistency, the developer of a mobile podcasting application has taken matters into his own hands by turning to a little known workaround.

After having squelched more controversial applications, including the "Murderdrome" comic book and a fart joke application dubbed "Pull My Finger," Apple turned around and banned Alex Sokirynsky's 'Podcaster' application from the iPhone App Store. Now, instead of just waiting and hoping that Apple will change its mind, developer Alex Sokirynsky is using a feature of the iPhone/iPod Touch called "Ad Hoc App Distribution" to distribute his "Podcaster" application himself.

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A filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday confirms that retailer Best Buy has entered into a deal to completely purchase online music service Napster, for $121 million including $54 million up front.

According to the SEC filing (HTML copy available here), Napster will have 20 days to reach a firm decision on the deal, although a definitive merger plan has already been agreed upon. Conceivably, opposing bids could be considered during that time, assuming any are forthcoming.

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In countries that know full well how the effects of a cartel can stifle an economy, newspaper editors are raising concerns that a deal between Yahoo and Google could cause the prices of online ads to become prohibitively high.

Though the current agreement between Yahoo and Google calls mainly for Yahoo to open up portions of its search results pages to ads supplied by Google, another press organization is warning this morning that the deal threatens the independence of the world's free press.

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