With six million tracks accrued in its library, Napster's new online retail venture boasts the largest selection of MP3s of any retailer to date, taking a bold step by marketing itself to iPod and iPhone users.

Songs will be made available at 99 cents, with albums generally retailing for $9.95. Encoding is promised to be at a bitrate of 256 kbps, which should be music to many listeners' ears already. While Napster To Go subscriptions would be still encapsulated in DRM, all download sales will be in DRM-free MP3.

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One month ahead of the next round of Top 500 supercomputer rankings, Microsoft has released online its Beta 2 for its high-performance data center version of Windows. But is Windows accelerating fast enough to keep up with Linux clusters?

Windows has historically not been considered the fastest operating system among supercomputers, but there is no doubt it's working to climb the ladder. Microsoft's best performing trial supercomputer to date has been given the nickname "Rainier." It's a cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1855 blades, which are currently running Microsoft's latest test builds of HPC Server 2008 -- its successor to Compute Cluster Server 2003.

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Today, standing up as one of the three mystery partners Netflix mentioned at the end of the first quarter, Roku has released the first Netflix set top box.

At the beginning of this year, Netflix showed that it had a firm grasp on the future of home video market, giving DVD (hard copy media) until about 2013 before it becomes irrelevant, and emphasizing the company's future in streaming on-demand video.

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AMD has launched a labeling campaign that differentiates PCs capable of supporting the latest in high-end gaming and media from the rest.

The labels AMD Game! and AMD Game Ultra will act as easy identifiers for systems that can handle the more demanding games.

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Comcast, an ISP already suspected by many of either blocking or throttling BitTorrent's P2P technology, today announced it has made an investment of an unspecified amount in GridNetworks, another P2P provider.

In a statement released today, Tony Werner, Comcast's CTO, said the company plans to work with GridNetworks to "improve the efficiency of P2P on ISP networks."

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To expand its already large base of listeners, Clear Channel announced it will make content from more than 800 stations available nationwide to users who own Internet radio receivers made by a producer of parts for XM and Sirius.

Clear Channel has historically enabled many of its stations to be listened to through the PC, on-demand services in hotels, or through select mobile phones. Today's deal with Reciva means Clear Channel will now be working with the largest Internet-radio module manufacturer in the world, and will compete with XM and Sirius.

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This week's Society for Information Display conference is under way, and the latest advances in display surfaces are being shown off. Perhaps one of the more intriguing examples looks a little bent...literally.

Early this year, the public was treated to its first peek into the latest developments in the field of panoramic monitors, such as Alienware's "Ultimate Gaming Display", a 2,880 x 900 pixel DLP curved monitor, and NEC's prototype 42-inch CRVD-LMD with the same specs. Shortly after, Polymer Vision announced production had begun on its Readius 3G "e-book phone" with a foldable 254 ppi monochrome screen that has been in development for almost four years.

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At a major display technology symposium this week, Samsung showed off a future HDTV with four times the resolution of a current 1080p screen, plus the first of its "Blue Phase" high-refresh displays.

During the Society for Information Display 2008 International Symposium currently taking place in Los Angeles, Samsung introduced several new products aimed more at grabbing headlines than striking bargains. First was its new 82-inch LCD TV panel that offers an impressive 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution and a 120 Hz refresh rate, though whose price and launch date are still unknown.

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In an effort to give CATV providers more flexibility in using their network capacity for HDTV, broadband, and digital phone, TiVo-branded DVRs will be outfitted with new adapter technology.

In a deal announced today, several makers of external switched digital technology (SDT) tuning adapters -- including Motorola and Cisco -- are submitting their products for testing at CableLabs. Essentially, SDT lets cable providers send individual channels to customers on an "as needed" basis, rather than broadcasting all channels to all subscribers all of the time.

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Download AIM Express 2.0 Beta from BetaNews FileForum now.

The company's newest release will employ an all new Flash-based front end and tabbed IMs, though for now, AOL wants to know whether the no-frills direction it's taking with design will be acceptable to users.

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Whether pulling Dell Computer out of the financial sewer was Don Carty's last miracle remains to be seen. But however the annals of financial history may judge him, there's no doubt that Dell owes him a huge debt of gratitude.

What do you do when you're a legendary and talented former CEO, when you're credited with business decisions that saved a corporation once already, when you've spent three decades at the helm of major airlines and railways in Canada, the US, and the UK, and you're either revered or reviled as a business leader? In the case of Don Carty, you make one more turnaround, and you make sure it's an impossible one: Dell, whose internal politics and curious accounting duplications could have spelled doom for one of America's great success stories.

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A brute force SQL injection onslaught that began on May 13 has infected a reported 10,000 servers, infecting thousands of Chinese and Taiwanese sites with malware.

Originating from 1,000 servers in a single Chinese facility, the attackers are said to be using automated queries to Google's search engine to identify Web sites with exploitable vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the attacks do not target a single vulnerability, but have shown up through more than ten different holes: MS06-014 (CVE-2006-0003), MS07-017 (CVE-2007-1765), RealPlayer IERPCtl.IERPCtl.1 (CVE-2007-5601),GLCHAT.GLChatCtrl.1 (CVE-2007-5722), MPS.StormPlayer.1 (CVE-2007-4816), QvodInsert.QvodCtrl.1, DPClient.Vod (CVE-2007-6144), BaiduBar.Tool.1 (CVE-2007-4105), VML Exploit (CVE-2006-4868) and PPStream (CVE-2007-4748).

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The highly anticipated game will launch first at its company store in New York City on Monday, and will roll out across its entire retail channel by Wednesday.

Wii Fit has already been a huge hit in Japan, where it launched over the last holiday season, selling 1.4 million units. Nintendo says it expects to sell three million copies here in the US.

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Two founding members of the US Congressional Privacy Caucus have asked the US' fourth largest cable provider to hold off on testing a new "enhanced Internet service" that would collect private user data for targeted advertising.

On Friday, US Reps. Edward Markey (D - Mass.) and Joe Barton (R - Texas), senior members of the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent a letter to Charter Communications President Neil Smith requesting the cable company to put a temporary stop on plans for a new service that collects subscribers' Web surfing and search data for targeting ads, until they can learn more about it.

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After reports of Vista refusing to record select programming from NBC, online interest group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the same thing is happening for over-the-air (OTA) programming.

One user has reported that while attempting to record TV shows from Raleigh's WNCN high definition channel -- the NBC affiliate in the area -- an alert shows up saying that the broadcaster has disabled recording of the programming.

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