Scott M. Fulton

It's an age-old question: Would PC users be willing to invest their time to download a media portal just for the purchase of watching shows produced by the portal's producers...if those shows didn't contain porn? The Spike TV unit of MTV Networks is trying to come up with online programming that "pushes the envelope" without breaking it altogether.

Today, AOL is launching its Music Now service, which incorporates the streaming infrastructure it acquired last November from Circuit City, plus the core of music licenses it acquired from Spinner.com back in 1999. It's being billed as something new, but you don't have to peel back too many layers to see that Music Now already has a deep and tumultuous history.

This morning, Google announced it's opening up a new beta for a set of online collaboration tools, to selected participants. Google Apps for Your Domain, the company says, will enable small businesses to launch simple, effective, intranet-like collaboration at little or no cost. But here again, how much does "free" really cost? And does Microsoft, in the end, have a better idea?

Prices for AMD dual-core processors are taking another pre-weekend dip, according to the latest data from PriceGrabber, with the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ falling the furthest since Monday: down $47 (13.1%) to $313. The trouble for AMD is, Intel prices are continuing to fall at the high end.

In the first test results compiled using Tom's Hardware Guide tests of relative graphics card performance, and average sale prices sampled yesterday by PriceGrabber, ATI-brand graphics cards led Nvidia across the board, with a few noteworthy exceptions. In our new projected price/performance curve for GPUs, ATI takes the lead in both the value and premium segments.

As Dell customer forum members tell the story, at least some customers awaiting their XPS 700 shipments are being told by customer service representatives that last-minute modifications to the on-board Nvidia nForce 590 chipset - not a fix to the cooling assembly - are to blame. Today, an Nvidia spokesperson disputed those claims to TG Daily .

The latest round of seasonal CPU charts updates from Tom's Hardware Guide reveals what we expected, now that we've had a chance to test Intel's Core 2 Duo E6400 dual-core CPU: At $247 average selling price, according to today's figures from PriceGrabber, it could be the most powerful CPU you can buy today for the fewest dollars.

A surprisingly steep single-day average price drop in nearly all AMD dual-core processors, including its top-of-the-line FX series, plus a drop in Intel Pentium D 8xx series prices, characterized the last 24 hours of consumer CPU purchases, according to the latest data obtained by PriceGrabber.

AMD spokesperson Damon Muzny told TG Daily this afternoon that prospects remain good for the company's upcoming double-dual-core platform, code-named "4x4," but that a product launch for that platform "is not on the immediate horizon in the desktop segment."

When CBS re-launches the Evening News broadcast next month, with Katie Couric in the seat that was originally dubbed "the anchor chair" for Walter Cronkite, it will be making the broadcast available on television and online at the same time, for the first time. Is this a long-overdue technological innovation in news delivery? Or will the simulcast create new problems as CBS continues to struggle - along with the other networks - with how to integrate itself with the Web?

Almost one month after AMD signaled it would respond to Intel's then-forthcoming Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme releases with substantial price cuts, based on the latest performance data from Tom's Hardware Guide , TG Daily now projects that average street prices for Athlon 64 X2 processors now fall as much as 41.4% below the price/performance curve set by comparable Intel processors.

A long-time poster to Dell's community forum has reported that he received his Pentium D 930-based XPS 700 unit via next-day air this morning, after a long round of delays.

An estimated 4.1 million Dell notebook computers sold worldwide are being voluntarily recalled by the manufacturer, cooperating with the US Consumer Products Safety Commission, after admitting to having received six reports of notebooks spontaneously catching fire.

It is perhaps the ultimate symbol of the pairing of motorsport and information technologies: the million-dollar NASCAR Technology Center vehicle, used to score every race in the Nextel, Busch, and Craftsman circuits. At last weekend's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, AMD and NASCAR gave TG Daily an up-close and personal look at the highest-tech vehicle this side of the Space Shuttle.

It's Intel Xeon 5100 processors - not Core 2 Duos - that will be at the heart of the new Mac Pro series announced this morning. In fact, they'll have a dual-processor configuration for four simultaneous cores, replacing the old Power G5 "quad" configuration. And confirming speculation from last week, Nvidia's 7300 GT card will come standard, although an ATI Radeon is being offered as an upgrade.

Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme desktop processor prices fall well below the price performance curve set by AMD, according to today's data from PriceGrabber and Froogle. If AMD wants to be the value leader again, then customers may start looking to AMD to set the curve, to see if Intel will follow. As today's chart shows, Intel won't be the one doing the following.

An entire industry has been formed around managing the guessing game of what Apple will announce next. But as with any industry that constitutes a good part of the American economy, when speculation becomes part of the business, meeting the expectations of the best speculators can be interpreted by the market at large as a disappointment. If Apple doesn't give any hints as to an "iPhone" or an e-book next Monday at the WWDC in San Francisco, will that be seen as bad news?

In an elaborate unveiling ceremony featuring no less than the Red Bull Formula 1 racing team, senior executives from IBM and AMD, including AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, introduced a new line of IBM xSeries blade servers - now re-christened "IBM System x" - that promises to slash operations and maintenance costs through the creative use of Opteron processors.

A very small conference, gathering together certain selected AMD technology supporters, including VooDoo PC and Microsoft, was held last Tuesday, the topic of which was the company's upcoming double-dual-core hardware platform, code-named "4x4."