Is the mainstream market going to see that $100 PC that everyone has been talking about? Not quite yet, said Current Analysis senior analyst Toni Duboise. "All I can say is, watch the promotions... what you will see are extremely aggressive prices."

Potentially, the situation could lead to promotional prices of $199 for entry-level desktops with an Intel Celeron or AMD Sempron processor, 256MB of RAM, a hard drive with at least 40GB, and Windows Home Edition in the package. The PC would also be bundled with a 17-inch CRT display and, possibly, a printer, Duboise said. Approximately 18 percent of the desktops selling at retail at this moment are priced at less than $500 after rebate, she added.

Midrange and high-end desktops and notebook PCs would have even more wiggle room, according to Duboise, meaning that mainstream PCs with Intel's Pentium 4 or AMD's Athlon 64 chip, 512 RAM and 80GB or 100GB hard drive could see price drops of 10 percent to about $583. Entry-level Media Center PCs with integrated graphics cards from ATI Technologies could also see price reductions, from $599 to $539, the analyst said.

The AOL job cuts, which fall in line with similar cuts made periodically over the last few years, reflect a dropping user base that has been driven by a number of factors, Grey Consulting founder and principal analyst Maurene Caplan Grey told the E-Commerce Times.

The analyst, who doubted increased user savvy was behind the cuts, indicated a recent instant messaging deal for interoperability between Microsoft and Yahoo may have also contributed to the job cuts, and further subscriber loss is likely to increase the chances of an acquisition.

Grey added that, although its user base is dropping, AOL still retains a substantial subscriber base of millions, which may be attractive, particularly to the ever-expanding Google.

In a few short years, users can expect to make telephone calls for free, with no per-minute charges, as part of a package of services through which carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees, eBay's chief executive said on Wednesday.

Seeking to justify eBay's $4 billion purchase last week of Web-based communications phenomenon Skype Technologies, Meg Whitman countered criticism by a financial analyst during the company's quarterly conference call by agreeing with some of his points.

"The percentage of users that you can actually charge for (phone services) will actually go down, so I actually agree with that and we understood that when we looked at Skype," Whitman said in responding to the analyst's question.

"In the end, the price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the 'Net will trend toward zero," eBay's top executive said.

And actually, I think podcasting or whatever it morphs into over the next two or three years is here to stay and will remain popular. What was interesting about podcasting was that, while everyone was waiting for digital video for so many years, kind of like waiting for Godot, podcasting arrived. And it tapped this latent demand for being able to hear what you wanted when you wanted it. It unleased all these indie voices and encouraged the traditional media companies to let their content go mobile.

Like the record labels, television stations are now lamenting the iPod, and are worried about lost revenues, reports the Wall Street Journal. Shouldn't they be worrying about lost audiences, thanks to bad programing, instead of blaming the technology. I agree with Mark Cuban when he says, "Bob Iger has saved Network TV ... By completely changing the economic model." This is the new economic model that takes into account that most consumption patterns are changing, and media like everything has to fit our supremely busy lives.

Shipments of personal computers grew by 17.1 percent during the third quarter of 2005, according to IDC, driven by the popularity of notebooks, low-cost systems and international sales. As a result, IDC also boosted its annual forecast for shipment growth to 17.1 percent, well over the 13.3 percent growth rate the research firm predicted in August.

In the year to October the web grew by more than 17 million sites, says monitoring firm Netcraft.

This figure exceeds the growth of 16 million sites seen in 2000 when net fever reached its most intense pitch.

Netcraft said the rise was caused by small businesses going online, firms making the most of web advertising schemes and spammers.

The company is calling Version 5 its most significant upgrade yet. It adds a handful of features considered important for enterprises that have long been available from market leaders Oracle (Profile, Products, Articles), IBM (Profile, Products, Articles), and Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles). Chief among them are triggers, views, and stored procedures.

MySQL has also changed the way its database performs some common tasks, such as error checking, to make it behave like other databases. The idea is to make it easier for a database administrator to switch from another platform, encouraging migrations. The "old" ways of doing things will still be an option, and the vast majority of current MySQL applications will run unchanged on Version 5, according to David Axmark, a MySQL co-founder who has the job title "open sorcerer."

Mr Jobs said the 30 GB iPod should be able to store 75 hours' worth of video and the 60 GB version twice that. Despite both versions having more storage on board they are thinner than the existing 20 GB iPod.

To give people something to watch on their video-playing iPod Apple is planning to make available more than 2,000 music videos on the iTunes store that will cost £1.89 ($1.99 in the US) each.

Apple has also set up a deal with US television company ABC to let Americans purchase episodes of shows for $1.99. The shows will be available the day after broadcast. There was no information about when, or if, this service would come to Europe.

The forecast is based on spending trends, which show that IT markets are driven mainly by overall economic growth and adoption of new technology. The current period of Internet adoption, which began in 2001, has seen overall tech spending averaging the 7 percent growth in nominal U.S. gross domestic product.

Forrester expects gross domestic product growth to slow over the next two to three years due to factors such as spiraling interest rates, rising energy prices and a likely drop in the housing market. This, in turn, will slow growth in tech spending as 2007 approaches.

"Technology spending is currently very brittle," Andrew Bartels, vice president at Forrester, said in a statement. "Without a 'must-have technology,' most businesses are only investing in technologies with tangible (return on investment). That means they will respond quickly if corporate revenues and earnings start to slow in an economic slowdown, which seems likely at some point in the next couple of years."

Many analysts have said Apple is all but certain to introduce a version of the No. 1 digital music player that can also play video. Most models of the current iPods, in addition to playing music, can also display photos and perform other functions with accessories that are sold separately.

"There's a whole generation coming up that doesn't have a lot in their checking account but will some day, who think this is a cool idea," said Roger Kay, president of market research firm Endpoint Technology Associates, referring to a video iPod.

"Apple Computer has begun production of a new version of its iPod digital. music player that will be capable of playing videos, AppleInsider has learned," according to a Tuesday post on the AppleInsider Web site. "Sources who claim to have seen the new iPod describe it as being similar to Apple's 60 GB iPod photo player, but several millimeters thinner."

The invitation itself from Apple gave no indication what the announcement might be, but in a separate post on Tuesday on AppleInsider, the site said: "Recent information suggests that Apple may be preparing to introduce a version of its iPod with video capabilities."

I spent a fun hour talking with Sam Schillace of Writely. We talked about the uptake (enormous) and different approaches to the idea of word processing on the web, but two things really stuck with me: platform and people. Every entrepreneur wants there to be a secret sauce for success -- if you use Ajax, or Linux, or tagging, or (insert delicious top tag du jour) you'll have a great product. Sam's secret sauce isn't platform.

That said, the platform is interesting. Writely is written in C# and deployed on Windows boxes. This isn't interesting because of "oooh, he's using The Enemy" or any nonsense like that, it's interesting because this makes it the first Web 2.0 success that I can think of that was written in .NET. That's an interesting datapoint in and of itself. The reason for choosing C#, other than "we had Visual Studio laying around", was the integrated debugging of browser and server components. He demo'd it for me, and it's mindblowingly useful. It is to Venkman as Venkman is to alert("foo has value " + foo).

Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today.

Such an attack is possible, the researchers say, because cellphone companies provide the text-messaging service to their networks in a way that could allow an attacker who jams the message system to disable the voice network as well.

And because the message services are accessible through the Internet, cellular networks are open to the denial-of-service attacks that occur regularly online, in which computers send so many messages or commands to a target that the rogue data blocks other machines from connecting.

By pushing 165 messages a second into the network, said Patrick D. McDaniel, a professor of computer science and engineering at Pennsylvania State University and the lead researcher on the paper, "you can congest all of Manhattan."

Are larger attacks possible?
Certainly. While the paper gives all of the necessary specifics, it would be theoretically possible to knock out cellular service for the continent with a data rate of approximately 370 Mbps. Such bandwidth could be harnessed from a moderately sized "zombie" network. Much larger Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have already been seen, making this attack plausible.

So why have we not seen widescale attacks on the cellular network?
The answer is that simply sending SMS messages to every possible number is not effective. A successful adversary would have to collect data on the phones available in a given area. While the full details of such "hit-list" creation is given in extensive detail in the paper, suffice it to say that all of the necessary data can be collected through a variety of means via the Internet.

First, by dramatically lowering the cost of the display. The first-generation machine may use a novel, dual-mode LCD display commonly found in inexpensive DVD players, but that can also be used in black and white, in bright sunlight, and at four times the normal resolution—all at a cost of approximately $35.

Second, we will get the fat out of the systems. Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways.

Third, we will market the laptops in very large numbers (millions), directly to ministries of education, which can distribute them like textbooks.