Although netbooks really only hit the market less than a year ago, the pint-sized notebooks seem to be showing signs already of commoditization, though maybe with greater differentiation on the high end.

Acer has just announced price drops of on both the Windows and Linux editions of its Aspire One netbook line. An Aspire One netbook with Windows XP Home, a 120 GB hard disk drive, 1 GB of RAM, and a three-cell battery is now list priced at $349.99.

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It's a new tool from Microsoft that enables photographers to upload photos, but then let other users walk through those photos as though they showed 3D scenes. In some ways, it's close to amazing. Close.

At one level, Microsoft Live Labs' public launch of its Photosynth project is an intriguing test of a commercial software producer's ability to perform supercomputer-style computations as a service for the general public. At another level, it's a clever and somewhat effective scheme for getting more users signed onto Microsoft's Windows Live network, as well as using plentiful amounts of its online storage.

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Vudu, a start-up streaming set top service that launched one year ago with a notably large price tag, is experiencing a shift that may move it away from its pay-per-view movie roots.

Though attention was brought to Vudu this week when reports surfaced that the company had laid off up to 30 percent of its work force (including its vice president of marketing), and that its support lines had gone down, these blurbs were only partially true. The company has, however, made announcements that show the rookie HD streamer is looking to branch out in different directions.

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First a property of ATI that became AMD's through its acquisition of the graphics company, Broadcom announced today that it will be acquiring the Xilleon system-on-a-chip (SoC), as well as the rest of AMD's family of TV-related products, a move that will aid in finally pulling AMD out of debt.

The deal, first announced by Broadcom this morning, was first thought to be part of AMD's effort to move toward profitability by eliminating non-core businesses that will put it in a position for its "Asset Smart" project. It's a move that could aid in finally pulling AMD out of debt.

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The agency will not take action on revising roaming laws which allow a carrier to reject a proposal for "piggy-back" carriage, if the requesting carrier already owned spectrum in the same market.

Earlier, US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin had proposed that the rules would be changed to allow smaller carriers that owned such spectrum a period of four years to use it, or choose to give the spectrum back and continue roaming.

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The latest FCC filings indicate the HTC Dream will be roughly the same length as the iPhone 3G, although slightly thinner.

An iPhone 3G measures in at 115.2 millimeters by 61.2 millimeters: the Dream will be 115 mm by 55 mm, according to documents that were available for a time through the FCC's Web site. No doubt HTC's Dream, widely believed to soon become the first "Googlephone," will likely be thicker than the iPhone since it will include a slide out QWERTY keyboard.

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As Apple rolled out the iPhone 3G to 21 more counties last week, T-Mobile pointed to sales of 120,000 of the phones already in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, despite distribution and connectivity problems.

T-Mobile experienced delivery delays in all three countries, but customers complained about connectivity only in the Netherlands, according to Hamid Akhavan, CEO of T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telecom.

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Early in August, security firms noticed a worm spreading on Facebook through wall posts, claiming to contain a video requiring a new codec to be installed. Variants of this worm are now being spotted on a weekly basis.

The virus appears to be a slightly modified version of what Kaspersky Labs called Koobface; a worm elaborate in its design, but crude in execution.

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Small regional ISP Frontier Communications has now joined Time Warner Cable in floating the idea of instituting monthly user caps even for subscribers who don't use much bandwidth, anyway.

Although Frontier has not yet decided about potential charges for monthly usage above 5 GB, the Rochester, NY-based DSL provider has now revised its usage policy for residential customers to set 5 GB as "a reasonable amount of usage [for] combined upload and download consumption," according to information on the company's Web site.

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"Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee," read the Obama campaign's early morning SMS message to his supporters. Trouble was, even by that time, many already knew it, and some weren't even getting the message.

The original plan was for Barack Obama supporters nationwide to be the first to receive the news of his vice presidential running mate. But well over two hours before many of those supporters received what ended up being, perhaps in an inadvertent tribute to Hillary Clinton, a 3am EDT wake-up call on August 25, CNN correspondent John King was the first to go live with the news that two highly-placed, then anonymous sources within the Democratic Party had confirmed to him that Joseph Biden was Sen. Obama's choice.

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The TV network lagged behind competitor Yahoo in terms of traffic to its Olympic themed Web site, while its decision to limit Web video may have crippled online advertising revenue.

Although during the first three days of the Summer Olympic Games, NBCOlympics.com was able to hold onto the top spot, Yahoo's Olympic-themed site was able to beat NBC's since Day 4 in the race for Web eyeballs, according to Nielsen.

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The yearly technology expo that had become a centerpiece of New York City's Digital Technology Week, and a viable alternative to CES has been postponed for 2008.

This morning, prospective attendees and exhibitors to the annual event, found this notice in small print, on the lower right corner of the event's Web site: "The DigitalLife event planned for September 25-28, 2008 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City has been postponed. Please check back for details on DigitalLife 2009."

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A technology for mobile digital television in Europe may have had a better chance for a full rollout before the EC mandated it as Europe's official standard. Now, a leading analyst reports that hope may be fading for DVB-H.

In March, the European Commission agreed that DVB-H would be the standard for terrestrial mobile television broadcasting, thanks to the directing hand of Commissioner Viviane Reding. Only five months later, German service provider T-Systems, an arm of Deutsche Telekom, rolled out a DVB-T service to its customers despite the EC mandate that providers stick to DVB-H.

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The small country of Niue today became the first nation to provide OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) laptops to all of its public school students -- but then again, that number amounts to only 500.

Niue's 200 secondary school students received their PCs last month, according to a report by Radio New Zealand International.

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An apparent case of DNS poisoning in the caches of a major China-based ISP is causing extra concern today, in light of security engineer Dan Kaminsky's recent warnings about just how serious a cache poisoning exploit could become.

Visual evidence posted by security company WebSense earlier this week shows DNS resolution calls placed to the IP address of Chinese ISP Netcom using the command line tool nslookup, redirected to a completely different source whose IP address is linked to China. There, WebSense says, instead of the user's regular home page or Web mail, he'll see instead some links to exploits for RealPlayer, Adobe Flash Player, and Microsoft Snapshot Viewer.

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