Intel showed off developments with its latest Mobile Internet Device platform, Moorestown, at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei yesterday, highlighting the connectivity it will offer.

"The full internet in your pocket is a major, major transformation," Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Ultra Mobility said, while holding up a device that looked more like an iPhone than an Internet tablet, "It is not possible today. It requires some fundamental innovation to happen to make this pocketable. We're engaging in that innovation, and it's a big transformation."

IBM is today rolling out a sub-$100,000 "business class" edition of the System z10, an innovative "baby mainframe" first unveiled as an "enterprise class" machine in February, geared to mid-sized companies and emerging markets.

At press conferences in Switzerland, South Africa, and Singapore, IBM is today launching what it's calling a "baby mainframe" priced at below $100,000. IBM's new System z10 Business Class (z10 BC) is an entry-level edition of the System z10 Enterprise Class (EC) announced earlier this year at a New York City press event, which is priced more in the $1,000,000 bracket.

The open network era officially begins for Verizon Wireless, as the company's first choice for testing and certification of anyone's CDMA devices, for customers to bring to the network at will, begins testing new equipment today.

The first independent laboratory for the certification of wireless devices for enrollment by customers to Verizon Wireless' CDMA network, is now officially online. As previously announced as early as November of last year, that lab will be run by Intertek, an established global testing and certification service headquartered in London.

The stock tickers Tuesday morning are just long stretches of red text with downward arrows, and Sun Microsystems said its numbers for the quarter will follow this downward trend.

On Monday, Sun released its preliminary results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2009, preparing investors for a larger drop than had been previously anticipated. The original revenue forecast for Sun was $3.14 billion, but the company estimates the actual numbers will fall between $2.95 -$3.05 billion, or a loss of between 25¢-35¢ per share.

Case modders know all about water cooling systems for their overclocked CPUs, but how about dunking the thing? Enter the Hardcore Reactor, which officially debuted on Monday.

Yes, desktop PC components submerged in liquid...please stop twitching. The Rochester, Minn.-based startup has two patents for submersion-cooled electronics, including a circuit board designed to operate in the depths of what a company representative describes as "a mineral oil-like substance." (She also says it's potable, but this reporter will not be testing that theory.)

Boingo's worldwide Wi-Fi service will cost a bit more for users in Europe and a bit less for certain users elsewhere under the terms of new pricing arrangements.

Europe is a special place, as many Boingo users well know. However, the fee system for wireless in Europe is also rather special, with operators charging by the minute for Wi-Fi time even at the wholesale level.

During a trip to Australia, the CEO of Red Hat predicted that open source will be better off than proprietary software after the end of the financial crisis. But lately, other observers have been saying open source carries its own costs.

Will open source software gain more business due to the current economic crunch? While in Australia this month, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst appeared to say so. Yet open source isn't necessarily less costly at all than proprietary alternatives, some analysts suggest.

Circuit City is considering closing 150 stores or more, according to a report today. Even worse, the retailer could be facing bankruptcy if holiday sales fizzle as expected, say some financial analysts.

After posting a $162.7 million quarterly loss even before the financial crisis hit, Circuit City might either land in bankruptcy court or be forced to close more stores soon after the New Year, some financial experts are predicting.

Yahoo's in the middle of rolling out a new front page -- a phrase that ought to enter the lexicon next to "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" if rumors of significant layoffs are true.

The rumor mill is having its way with Yahoo again this week, as talk of staffing cuts sets nerves on edge before Tuesday's quarterly earnings call. A report in The Wall Street Journal following days of Silicon Valley whisperings states that a person "familiar with the matter" (boilerplate language when the call is coming from, as they say, inside the house) expects over 1,000 jobs to be cut in coming months, while managers in-house have allegedly been asked to pare their budgets by at least 15 percent.

Tenacious Taiwanese MP3 player company Luxpro has yet again engaged in litigation with Apple over its Super Tangent (nee Super Shuffle) MP3 player.

In 2005, Luxpro debuted an MP3 device called the "Super Shuffle," a screenless media player that looked nearly identical to Apple's First Generation iPod Shuffle. Apple won an injunction against the device for its use of "shuffle" in the name.

Due to the stinging blows dealt by the economy these days, some analysts are now predicting bleak sales, both for the holiday season and 2008 as a whole, for Blu-ray players and many other CE products in the not-so-cheap category.

Back in about the second quarter of this year, Parks Associates predicted that Blu-ray player unit sales, not including Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, would total about 5 million globally this year, up from about 800,000 Blu-ray players and 800,000 players for Toshiba's competing HD DVD format sold in 2007.

Download Adobe Flash 10 Player for Windows from FileForum now.

How many times, the old Ronco TV spokesperson used to ask, has this happened to you? You're playing a Flash video in Firefox for Windows, and for a moment, you think it's actually going to start up.

Download Microsoft Web Installer Beta from FileForum now.

There are dozens of little tools and services you need to download from Microsoft in order to actually start developing Web applications on your own. Finally, the company has decided to make them all available through a single form.

Thanks to the depth of coverage given to Microsoft's "Windows, Not Walls" advertising campaign, Apple has come forward with its own ads addressing the palaver.

Humorous and to the point, Apple's advertisements echo comments frequently heard throughout the blogosphere regarding Microsoft's $300 million "Life Without Walls" campaign: "That money could have been used on fixing Vista," and "Why don't the ads address Vista directly?"

It lacks access to Firefox's vast collection of add-ons, but if your time online centers around social networking, Flock's browser may already have precisely the features you need.

The Flock browser is designed to manage one's ever-expanding presence on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter, along with more traditional online conduits such as Yahoo Mail and Gmail. The software's available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; for now only English users have a 2.0 version available for download, but there are currently 15 international versions of the previous 1.2.6 edition.