Dell today officially introduced two budget-oriented desktop PCs: the ergonomic and "ultracompact" Studio Hybrid, touted as 80 percent smaller than a typical desktop, and the Inspiron 518, a quad-core processor model featuring an optional removable hard drive.

Although both new products might be described as tower PCs, the Hybrid is a very small tower. Measuring only about 196.5mm by 71.5mm, the Studio Hybrid sports the same kinds of ports and connectors as a more conventional PC despite its size.

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Microsoft is releasing an API that allows third-party Web sites to send location information to MSN Direct-enabled GPS devices wirelessly, a first for such services that previously required a USB sync to work.

One difficulty of using GPS devices is the hassle of typing in a location, or selecting one while driving. Microsoft says the API would make entering destinations easier, as the process could be done on the computer and automatically then transferred to the device.

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Adobe has officially released Photoshop Lightroom 2, following three months of beta testing for the photo management software. It is Adobe's first product supporting 64-bit Windows Vista and OS X.

Lightroom 2 is available now for $299 USD, or $99 USD as an upgrade from the previous release. This workflow enhancing software is billed as "the professional photographer's essential toolbox," and is geared toward users working with large volumes of photos.

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Yahoo told BetaNews that the media was hyping the expiration of the company's DRM certificates and didn't expect a user backlash, but said it has decided to offer refunds to those affected anyway.

Last Week, Yahoo announced in an e-mail to customers that it would remove its DRM keys for authorizing song playback on October 1. This means that although purchased music would continue playing, it cannot be reauthorized, essentially locking it to the current computer. If a user buys a new PC or reinstalls the operating system, the purchased music would no longer be playable.

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The SIIA wants eBay to squelch short-term software auctions. Since the start of its anti-counterfeiting initiative, eBay seems to be practicing some other curbs on software banditry, to various degrees. If the two sides can't see eye to eye, will the battle actually land in court?

Although a lawsuit against eBay isn't "pending or on the immediate horizon," the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) has sued other Web sites before, and Keith Kupferschmidt, senior VP of the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA), is very unhappy over what he views as eBay's failure to take real action against software piracy.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs called a reporter at the New York Times to explain his health situation, but his insistence on only talking off the record has done little to assuage the fears of investors.

To many, Steve Jobs is the driving force behind Apple, and his presence across all areas of the company is undeniable. But Jobs' recent health scares, including a previous bout with cancer, have caused many on Wall Street to question the company's insistence on staying secretive.

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9:00am ET July 29, 2008 - The videos are now live on the Mojave Experiment Web site.

Microsoft has posted actual videos from its "Mojave Experiment," an effort to dispel negative stereotypes about Vista by making Windows users think they were running a newer operating system that was actually Vista.

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Dell has issued a BIOS update to prevent its notebooks equipped with faulty Nvidia graphics cards from overheating.

Notebooks equipped with certain Nvidia GPUs were reportedly failing at abnormally high rates by the graphics company itself in an SEC regulatory filing. At the time, however, the company did not list which configurations were failing, saying only that it was one sold in significant quantities.

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San Francisco again has control of its own FiberWAN network, but as it compiles evidence to keep distraught network administrator Terry Childs in jail, the city could have opened itself up to a slew of new security problems.

The San Francisco District Attorney's office entered up to 150 usernames and passwords into Exhibit A of the ongoing legal case against Childs. Each account is said to be sensitive and private, and the city has gone through a lot of work to get the accounts back, only to enter them into the public domain through the courtroom filings.

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In a bid to quash a proposed merger between Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire around WiMAX, AT&T has now submitted a petition to the FCC.

Sprint announced in May that it would renew its efforts to partner with Clearwire to bring together both companies' WiMAX holdings to build a nationwide broadband wireless network. Valued at about $14.5 billion, the proposed network has financial backing from Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner, and Bright House Networks.

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Computer maker Gateway has moved entirely to an indirect sales model in which it will stop selling PCs online through its own Web site, only offering PCs through retail channels.

After being founded in 1985, Gateway pioneered direct-to-customer computer sales, and enjoyed big success until the dot-com era began to erode. It quickly lost ground to competitors like Dell and HP. The Gateway brand, which is now a subsidiary of Acer, launched its own stores in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the retail channel was not receptive of the stores.

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New search engine Cuil has opened to the public, and with it, the requisite comparisons and challenges to Google, former employer of Cuil's engineering team. But the site is experiencing much downtime in its first day.

Built with $33 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Madrone Capital Partners, and Tugboat Ventures, Cuil is made up of an all-star team of Web technology veterans. The husband and wife founders are Tom Costello, creator of Xift, and Anna Patterson, creator of Recall, a technology now used by Google. Rounding out the team are ex-Google engineers Russell Power and Louis Monier, also the ex-CTO of AltaVista.

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"Make no mistake about it. This isn't cable," said Virginia Ruesterholz, president of Verizon Telecom, in announcing today the immediate start of FiOS services with 100 high-definition channels in parts of New York City, plus the availability of 150 HD channels by the end of this year in sections of New York City and some other areas of the US.

Because nearly 60 percent of New York City residences and businesses are located in multiple dwelling units (MDUs), Verizon is putting an early focus on apartment buildings. More than 100 MDUs will go live with 100 HD-channel TV today, according to Maura Breen, Verizon's general manager for New York.

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In its recently created status blog for MobileMe, which has struggled with downtime since its launch earlier this month, Apple admits it lost some e-mails during a four-day period at the height of the outage.

A poster identifying himself as "David G." continued to stress that restoring full e-mail access to the 1% of users who had lost connectivity was Apple's first priority. Web access for 40 percent of that 1% was turned on Saturday, and feedback was said to be "positive."

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On Saturday, the Associated Press cited "an agency official" reporting that the majority of FCC commissioners had voted in favor of punishing Comcast for blocking subscribers from engaging in certain activities -- namely, peer-to-peer file sharing.

The likely punishments were first reported to be sanctions, but at a press conference shortly thereafter, Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin said a policy change will be the outcome.

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