Digital video recorder maker TiVo Inc. on Friday said it added 698,000 subscribers in its fiscal fourth quarter, bringing its total to over 3 million.

The Alviso, California-based company said it added 447,000 customers through satellite television provider DirecTV Group Inc., and 251,000 "TiVo-owned," or stand-alone, users in the period ended on Jan. 31.

The stand-alone users, who typically buy a TiVo DVR at a retail store and pay about $13 a month for the service, typically generate far more profits for the company than do the DirecTV users.

Napster is now offering consumers the option of renting as much music as they like and taking it on the road.

There's no hestitation with Napster To Go. Download a track — heck, you may as well transfer the whole album — and give it a listen while you look for more music.

Or build a playlist and load songs onto one of about a dozen supported digtal music players, including devices from Dell Inc., Creative Labs Inc. and Reigncom Ltd.'s iRiver. (Sadly, Apple Computer's popular iPod isn't among them.)

Napster is selling this [service] by saying it's cheaper to pay the [$14.95] monthly fee for unlimited downloads than to buy each track outright at iTunes, where you get about 15 songs a month for the same price — though you keep them forever.

Most other all-you-can-eat plans, including Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s MusicMatch, won't let you move music directly to MP3 devices unless you've purchased individual tracks for an added fee.

Napster To Go's software, while slightly more difficult to navigate than iTunes, is easy to use.

If you get bored with your own music, Napster also lets you search the libraries and playlists of other members.

Born as a free file-sharing network that spawned a heavyweight legal bout with the recording industry, the one-time pioneer may have found a way to reclaim its place at the top.

Thank you for your interest in the StarOffice 8 Beta Program. StarOffice Office Suite is the world's leading office productivity suite on Linux and the Solaris OS, and the leading alternative office suite on Windows.

StarOffice software is affordable, easy to use, and based on open standards. It offers word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database capabilities. Its familiar interface enables quick productivity and results for the business user, and elegant output for the consumer.

StarOffice 8 software increases usability and MS Office compatibility, adds productivity increasing wizards and tools and supports select Lotus and WordPerfect versions. It also introduces a new database engine and front-end tool, easier multilanguage installation and two new scripting languages for developers.

Sun Monday said that the newest edition of its alternative to Microsoft Office, StarOffice 8, will be available for downloading in a beta version on Thursday.

StarOffice, which shares a code base with the open-source OpenOffice application suite, will feature enhanced compatibility with Microsoft Office, including importation of password-protected documents and a database module much more like Microsoft's own Access.

The beta will be available for several weeks, and will be replaced by a final version of the for-fee StarOffice 8 by mid-2005, Sun said.

StarOffice 8 can be downloaded starting Thursday from the Sun Web site.

Security starts with the user. If you aren't willing to ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive systems, then you deserve what you get if your systems are penetrated. If you refuse to put locks on your door and someone steals your stuff, isn't that your fault?

The belief that open source is more secure is largely unfounded. Take Firefox -- a 1.0 product with two active support folks and a key designer who just left to work for Google. Yes, it works on a lot of sites just as Opera did when it was the hot browser; yes, it isn't (or wasn't) targeted by as many exploits; yes, it does seem faster (so did Opera). But if it used to be obscure, it certainly isn't today, and that means it will increasingly be targeted.

It is hard to figure out how many security vulnerabilities the product actually has. You can go to Security Focus and search on Mozilla as the vendor and then Firefox as the title and come up with 39. On Secunia, you'll see not only that the number of reported vulnerabilities is increasing, but also that 88 percent remain unpatched or only partially fixed. Internet Security Systems documents 62 security exposures, but I can't tell easily how many of those 62 have been corrected in the 1.0 product. At least some of the Mac folks are asking this question and concluding that the Apple browser is vastly more secure.

In the world I thought I lived in, if you ran around telling people to migrate to a 1.0 product over a 6+ product from a branded vendor, particularly when the 1.0 product only had two full-time support people, you'd be taken to a quiet padded cell. Firefox is getting a ton of press, and people will attack it. How will two people and a handful of volunteers be able to protect you? If you are in a company and are audited for this choice, the word "oops" doesn't protect you.

In the end it is your privacy, or your company's privacy, you are protecting. Stay focused on the bad guys, the people who want to steal your stuff, your identity and your piece of mind. Do your own research and think through the process. Don't think just of the exposures that exist today -- think ahead to the exposures you will need to address next week, next month and next year. You may make the same choices, but at least you'll be vastly better at defending those choices. Given the career implications, this approach will do a lot to cover your assets.

Most customers of creative Technologies don't even know it. They're the millions who have the Sound Blaster circuit boards in their PCs that process the audio boomed through the speakers. The Singapore-based company has thrown its energies into digital music players, a field it entered well before Apple's introduction of the market leader, the iPod. Nonetheless, founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo thinks his own products—the flash-based MuVo as well as the direct iPod competitor, the Zen Micro—can hold their own with Steve Jobs. We phoned the outspoken 49-year-old Sim, whose Zen playlist is heavy on Chinese and New Age music, at his Singapore headquarters.

In the December quarter we had no problems selling [all of the MP3 players] that we could ship out.

Steve Jobs ... was not the first to come out with this MP3. We started way back in 1999. We paid a lot of school fees for our mistakes along the way, but [our] company has transformed from a sound-card company into a company where we do all kinds of external products.

[The iPod shuffle] turned out totally opposite [what we expected], something like our first-generation product—no display, no radio, very simple. I believe we had this kind of thing more than three years or four years ago. You can say it's cool; I say it's plain-Jane.

From all the initial feedback we have [on Portable Media Centers], this is a media type that people want to have ... whenever I tell them they can bring all their photos with them, their perception changes. It's the same thing when we saw the first MP3 player. It may take one or two years more, but we are patient, and in the meantime we're selling a respectable number.

I'm betting on the Microsoft camp. They want to win this whole MP3 war. With all the cash they have, with all the clout they have, they are going to win—if not the first time, if not the second time, the third time, and that's why we're working very closely with them.