Napster is back. And it's hungry for a bite of Apple. In little over a year, the music sharing application has resurfaced to become iTunes' closest contender for the music download crown.

Roxio wasn't just buying a name when it bought Napster. It bought instant awareness and a shortcut to Apple's lead. According to Adam Howorth, European communications director of Napster, Roxio bought the name "because it is the biggest name in digital music with a 92 percent recognition rate among Internet users." But Roxio was also buying into Napster's infamous past.

Napster's fortunes began to turn around when it introduced a "Napster to go" alternative. The model works like this: customers can download an unlimited amount of songs from Napster's library for US$ 10 a month. In the words of Napster's latest ad campaign, users can "try before they buy."

But the model has a hefty catch: users don't own the tracks they download. If customers don't renew their subscription every 30 days, they lose their music. The system uses "Janus" technology-software developed by Microsoft to control the distribution and consumption of music. The Janus technology is undeniably clever but it's not without its idiosyncrasies. Perhaps not surprisingly, it's not compatible with the iPod.

Fifty-six thousand of its 410,000 users are university subscribers.

In a short story with a happy ending, the developer of a "free" version of Linspire called Freespire has agreed to change the name of his project, and Linspire Inc. is offering free copies of Linspire Linux "for a few days" (details below).

Freespire, which first popped up on Distrowatch.com last week, originally described itself as a free variant of Linspire Linux, with proprietary components and trademarks removed.

But the "Freespire" name was too close for comfort for Linspire, which is no stranger to trademark issues, having gone through a lengthy confrontation with Microsoft that resulted in its name change from Lindows Inc. to Linspire Inc. last summer.

The state of Massachusetts has laid out a plan to switch all its workers away from Microsoft's Word, Excel and other desktop software applications, delivering what would be one of the most significant setbacks to the software company's battle against open source software in its home market.

The state said on Wednesday that all electronic documents “created and saved” by state employees would have to be based on open formats, with the switch to start at the beginning of 2007.

Documents created using Microsoft's Office software are produced in formats that are controlled by the Microsoft, making them inelligible. In a paper laying out its future technology strategy on Wednesday, the state also specified only two document types that could be used in the future - OpenDocument, which is used in open source applications like Open Office, and PDF, a widely used standard for electronic documents.

Later in September, Apple will pose an even greater challenge to other makers of flash-based music players when it is expected to change its iPod Mini products to flash chips from small hard drives. As a result, the new iPod Mini could be smaller, consume battery power at a slower rate and cost less than Apple's current models.

Hundreds of keen gamers queued outside High Street shops to get their hands on Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) as it went on sale in Europe at midnight.

Major electronics and games shops across the UK opened up at midnight for those who had queued during the day.

Sony expects a million of the gadgets, a games console that plays films and music, and browses the web wirelessly, to be sold before Christmas.

Its European launch was delayed after a supply shortage following its US debut.

Video games store Game opened 250 of its stores at midnight, and had 1,500 staff dealing with the demand. Dixons opened 20 stores at midnight, but had stopped taking pre-orders last week because of demand.

Less than a month after it was an awarded a software patent that covers the user interface Apple uses in its market-leading iPod portable MP3 players, Creative Technologies is accusing Apple of violating that patent. Apple released its first iPod in October 2001. But Creative was first to market with hard drive-based MP3 players over a year earlier, and the UI Apple uses is almost identical to that Creative pioneered.

"We are looking at all our alternatives right now," Craig McHugh, president of Creative's United States operations said, noting that while Apple was the only company it had identified as a patent violator so far, it was investigating others. "We're going to be very vigorous in bringing our new products to market and are going to be very diligent in protecting our intellectual property and our patent rights."

Despite obvious examples of prior art, Apple attempted to patent the iPod user interface in October 2002. But Creative had applied for its MP3 player UI patent in January 2001, before Apple's iPod was even a rumor. Apple's patent request was denied.

Half-Life 2 is one of the most successful video games ever. Valve’s award winning first-person shooter pushes the envelope in graphics, artificial intelligence, immersive surround-sound capabilities, and a riveting storyline. Did we mention you also get to save the world by blowing up aliens and taking out giant robots?

But what interests us most from a Coding4Fun perspective is that Valve makes a Software Developer Kit (or SDK) for their amazing game engine (called “Source”) available for FREE to Half-Life 2 customers! The Source SDK gives us access to a TON of game assets (maps, models, sounds, objects, etc.) and virtually all of the game engine’s C++ source code! By using Visual C++, we can create everything from minor tweaks (called ‘mods’) to completely new games (known as ‘total conversions’). In fact, popular games like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat are two such ‘total conversions’ which were originally based on the first Half-Life game engine and have been subsequently revved to take advantage of the new Source engine.

This page is designed to help you get started and give you some pointers to the best community sites. This way you can get started coding for fun with the Source SDK!

Within a few months, we began to suspect a problem as, one by one, Popular Mechanics's new iMac G5s started to overheat and then die. Eventually, 40 percent of them had to be sent back to Apple for repair or replacement. When we looked into the problem, we found a number of complaints about overheating power supplies and "bloated," apparently heat-damaged, capacitors on the midplane circuit board. These were posted on Apple's own online user forum as well as user groups such as MacOSG, TidBITS and MacInTouch.

Complaints became so numerous that MacInTouch recently conducted its own reliability survey of iMac G5 owners. Of 1948 responses, the site's survey found there was an 18 percent failure rate among the original iMac G5 machines with 17-in. screens, and a troubling 31 percent failure rate for models with a 20-in. screen. (Recently purchased models had far lower failure rates--of around 11 to 12 percent.)

To investigate further, we sought out the services of heat-imaging company Electrophysics. The company brought in a $100,000 thermographic camera. Surface thermographic images of an original iMac G5 with the back cover removed revealed heat buildup around the hard drive and processor, and surrounding the capacitors on the midplane board.

Try it for 30 days - sent it back if you don't love it.

Choose from three Mac mini models starting at just $499 and an optional Apple keyboard and mouse.

We're so confident you'll love your new Mac mini, we'll let you test drive it for 30 days with no risk. If you decide you don’t want it, we'll take it back. Here's how the test drive works:

1. Purchase a new Mac mini from the Apple Store online. You can also get an Apple keyboard and mouse, such as our new Mighty Mouse.

2. Set it up and start enjoying it.

3. If you don't love it, call us within 30 days of your order and we'll arrange for you to return your system — including the Apple keyboard and mouse — for a full refund.

If you have any more questions, call our Mac specialists at 1-800-MY-APPLE.

Hurry — this test drive ends on October 31, 2005.

Apple has released new Safari updates for Tiger and Panther iterations of Mac OS X.

Safari 2.0.1 for Tiger(4.5MB) and Safari 1.3.1 for Panther systems (3.8MB) are available now through Software Update, or for direct download from the company's support website.

Brief notes accompanying both releases say they: "Improve website compatibility, application stability and support for third party Web applications".

Creative Technology said Tuesday it has been awarded a patent for a user interface found in its portable media players and in competing devices, such as Apple Computer's iPod.

The digital entertainment company said that on Aug. 9 it received U.S. Patent No. 6,928,433, described as "automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata." Creative applied for the patent--which it has dubbed the "Zen Patent," named for its Zen music player--on Jan. 5, 2001.

According to a Creative press release, the interface "enables selection of at least one track in a portable media player as a user sequentially navigates through a hierarchy using three or more successive screens on the display of the player." For example, when a person selects the name of an artist, the player then displays a list of albums for that artist. Selecting the album name then brings up a list of the album's tracks.

Creative first started using the interface in its Nomad Jukebox MP3 player, which began shipping in September 2000, according to the press release. Apple did not announce its iPod until more than a year later.

Foxie (fox + ie; pronounced /Foxy/) is a collection of free security, privacy and productivity tools developed by the Foxie Team. It was originally designed to bridge the gap between Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox (an open source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation) but soon grew in scope and size to offer additional unique features not found on any stand alone browser.

Foxie empowers you to browse faster, more safely and more efficiently than with any other browser by blending tabbed browsing, ads & pop-up blocking, Malware cleansing and privacy & security protection with our smart search capabilities to enhance your browsing experience. Foxie is not a web browser and fits seamlessly into your IE browser.

Microsoft's annual Form 10K, filed late last week with the Securities and Exchange Commisson, included this new addition in a passage on the competition faced by the company's PC Windows division: "Competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products."

For the record, that appears to be the first reference to the Mozilla Firefox browser as a competitive risk factor any Microsoft SEC filing. See Microsoft's 10K from last year for comparison.

Also note that it's no longer plain old Internet Explorer -- it's "the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products."

As everyone should know, Internet Explorer is a very insecure browser, and daily use can quickly turn a Microsoft Windows PC into a spyware-ridden, spam-sending slow, unstable abomination.

I don’t use IE at home, because Mozilla Firefox is infinitely better and more secure, but I’ve found that many people, even those otherwise educated and intelligent, think of “the Internet” as “the blue E”, and, when wanting to open a site, open IE without thinking.

So I had to do something about it.

For one day only, you can get an ad-free version of Opera. Simply e-mail registerme@opera.com to obtain a registration code. This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).

Apple Computer and Motorola plan to unveil a long-awaited mobile phone and music player next week that will incorporate Apple's iTunes software, a telecommunications industry analyst who has been briefed on the announcement said on Monday.

After years and years of waiting, we finally have a reasonably stable Windows Vista beta build to work with. Windows Vista Beta 1 doesn't feature many end user features per se, but it does include a nearly complete next-generation Windows shell, instant desktop search, a preliminary version of the new Aero user interface, and other useful functionality. For Windows enthusiasts, Windows Vista Beta 1 is a much-needed demonstration that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases, after years of doubt. For Mac OS X users, however, Windows Vista Beta 1 engenders a sense of déjà vu. Isn't a lot of this stuff already in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"?

Yes and no. For accuracy, I think it's important to compare Windows Vista Beta 1 to both Mac OS X Tiger and the promises that Microsoft made at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003, at which the company publicly revealed its plans for its next-generation Windows version. After all, Apple was clearly influenced by some of the technology Microsoft showed off back then and knew that it could come to market much more quickly than the software giant.

And before you fire up your email client to tell me about Apple patents, ideas from Copland, or other nonsense, relax. I'm not claiming that Microsoft "invented" anything. What I am claiming, however, is that Microsoft legitimatized certain technologies at PDC 2003 by announcing that they will be included in Windows, and that Apple seized on the opportunity to add those features--whether they were previously planned or not--in Tiger, which it knew would ship well before Windows Vista. For Apple, time to market is a competitive advantage and no one should begrudge them that.

Apple Computer is preparing a major announcement next week, dropping hints of something as critical to the company's future as the release of the original iPod in 2001.

The company sent an invitation to reporters on Monday morning for a "special event" being held Sept. 7 in San Francisco.

"1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything," the invitation reads, referring to the release of the first 5GB iPod nearly four years ago. "Here we go again."

As with any planned announcement from Apple, details are scarce and rumors are running rampant. However, some potential clues have emerged.

Record company executives have said recently that Apple has been seeking licenses to distribute a wide variety of music videos through the iTunes music store, and that the computer company has told them of plans to unveil an iPod that plays video.

Halo 2 is broken.

Halo 2 polarizes fans because of its multiplayer mode... and, more to the point, the problems therein.

"Polarizes fans?" you ask. "How so?" Simply put, Halo: Combat Evolved was a better designed, balanced, and tuned multiplayer experience than its sequel. The mass appeal of Halo 2 meant the game had to be designed with a little more flexibility for the consumer's experience. After all, Bungie knew that a vast array of people would be buying the game, and it recognized the need to satisfy the full spectrum of their interest. That flexibility still offered solid gameplay, but also resulted in some serious changes to the fundamental design of Halo's multiplayer experience.

We've narrowed the problems with Halo 2's multiplayer to five specific breaking points. But never let it be said we're simply complainers -- after some careful consideration, we've found ways to make our criticism constructive, too.

Top Chinese personal computer maker Lenovo Group will start to sell its namesake personal computers outside China in the first quarter of next year as part of its long-term plan to build the world's leading PC brand, its chief executive told Reuters.

Lenovo's PC shipments in China were three times those of its closest rival in the second quarter, but it has only recently broken into the international market in a big way, with its $1.25 billion acquisition of International Business Machines Corp.'sPC unit.

Lenovo will make IBM's flagship Thinkpad laptops available in Lenovo stores shortly. The acquisition has made it the third-biggest global PC vendor behind Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

"We want to grow Lenovo into a worldwide brand," CEO Steve Ward said. "In five years, we will have a strong chance to be the leading brand in PC."

Microsoft Corp. is on the prowl for a store in Times Square.

The move would be the software giant's first big stab at retail and may be an attempt to play catch-up with archrival Apple, which has hit a home run with its own branded stores, including its New York City flagship in SoHo.

After dominating the online music service business for over two years, Apple's seminal iTunes Music Store service is about to face it's biggest challenge yet. Unexpectedly, that challenge is not coming from Microsoft or its partners, but rather from the music industry that provided Apple with the contracts it needed to offer digital music to consumers. Apparently, the music industry is tired of Apple's pricing schemes and they'd like to see consumers pay more for newer songs, and less for older songs. Apple is resisting, for now. But the outcome of this battle will likely determine how quickly digital music sales grow in the near future.

To date, Apple's success with iTunes seems astonishing: As of early this month, consumers have purchased over 500 million tracks from the service, and the recent launch of iTunes in Japan saw customers there purchase over 1 million tracks in just four days. The company commands 75 percent of digital music sales, and, thanks to its successful iPod franchise (21 million units sold so far), it owns 80 percent of the MP3 player market as well.

Impressed? As it turns out, those figures are just a drop in the bucket compared to audio CD sales and, interestingly, portable CD player sales, respectively. Total audio CD sales in 2004 were over 3.5 billion units (for comparison, most CDs include 5 to 10 tracks). And total portable audio CD player sales last year alone were approximately 19 million units, and they're expected to hit almost 18 million units sold in 2005.

Sabeer Bhatia, billionaire co-founder of Hotmail, thinks Google is smarter, quicker and hungrier than Microsoft, the company that in 1997 paid him and his partner Jack Smith $US400 million for the email invention that today has 50 million users worldwide.

But Hotmail and Microsoft are now under severe challenge, Mr Bhatia said.

"Microsoft isn't going away any time soon, but the role they will play in the future of software will not be the same as it has been in the past two decades," Mr Bhatia said. "Because Microsoft is so big and slower to move than companies such as Google and Yahoo, their dominance will be less.

"Google is playing a brilliant game and expanding its activities. They have a fantastic revenue stream. They are leveraging their core strength, their enormous distribution, to successfully enter other areas."

The really great ideas in technology do not often come from big companies, he added. World-shifting innovation more often came from the classic Silicon Valley start-up - "a handful of guys in a garage."

It was a mark of Google's genius, and a key to its success, that it encouraged its engineers to spend "20 per cent of their time, one day a week, thinking outside the box, on any idea that interests them", he said. "As a result, they are keeping future, would-be entrepreneurs in-house and innovating within Google."

The ATI TV Wonder Elite ($149) has it all covered. A surprisingly complicated chain of technology is necessary to achieve this amount of functionality at this level of quality, although it is all ultimately transparent to the end user, with a very user-friendly interface to boot. The TV Wonder Elite (TVWE) is also designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

The TVWE delivers quite simply the best-quality analog television images we've ever seen on the PC, rivaling the performance of true high-end home theater gear. It is the only add-in TV card with a motion-adaptive NTSC/PAL 3D comb filter, as well as a superior 12-bit video decoder for a more lifelike picture. Everything, including PVR'd content, looks better with the TVWE. Full on-chip MPEG-2 encoding (both audio and video) handles the recording, which results in better sound/picture, but this on-chip approach also gives your CPU a break. There's also 16 megabytes of memory to ensure full framerate recording plus natural-looking noise reduction, and all this without a heatsink or fan, for those who worry that a "Home Theater PC" might be too noisy for the living room! And to remove all doubt, this is the only PC TV tuner product certified by the notoriously particular folks at the Imaging Science Foundation.

iTunes’ available song ratings of 1 to 5 stars allow users to quickly find their favorites and help the Party Shuffle feature play more of what they like most. This article explores the algorithm iTunes uses to pick what comes next in the playlist.

Many claim to still see patterns as iTunes rambles through their music collection, but the majority of these patterns are simply multiple songs from the same artist. Think of it this way: If you have 2000 songs and 40 of them are from the same artist, there is always a 2% chance of hearing them next with random play. So right after one of their songs finishes, odds almost guarantee they will be played again within the next 50 songs and show a 50% chance they will play again within the next 25 songs. It's simply the mind's tendency to find a pattern that makes you think iTunes has a preference.