Apple Computer Inc. on Monday said it would prepay $1.25 billion to secure its supply of flash memory used in its market-dominating iPod music players amid an expected surge in demand for the chips.

Apple said it would make the payment over the next three months in a series of agreements to

More and more Americans are googling and yahooing their way through life, according to a new survey which shows a massive increase in the use of Internet search engines over two years.

Nearly 60 million Americans every day were using such programs, which help surfers navigate the Internet, in September this year,

A unpatched flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser that first surfaced in late May was upgraded Monday by a security firm to "extremely critical" status after proof-of-concept code for a working exploit hit the Web.

Originally, vulnerability researcher Benjamin Tobias Franz detailed a bug in IE 5.01 and 6.0 editions could result

KLA-Tencor Corp. said Monday (Nov. 21) that it has identified a new application for its MicroLoop electrical defect detection methodology that can detect critical bridging defects on advanced flash memory wafers nearly twice as fast as current methods.

KLA (San Jose, Calif.) said the new application was developed through collaboration with Spansion

Micron Technology Inc. and Intel Corp. have announced plans to create a joint venture to manufacture NAND flash memory for use in consumer electronics, removable storage and handheld communications devices, and in particular to manufacture for Apple Computer Inc.

The move is intended to bolster U.S. interests in the non-volatile memory market

Microsoft Corp. will not back down even if the launch of its Xbox 360 video game console fails to propel it to first place in the $25 billion global market, Chairman Bill Gates said on Monday.

"We'll play again," Gates told Reuters in a telephone interview ahead of the Xbox 360 launch

In 2005, the news got out that Google Inc. had purchased a jet airplane. Jokes immediately circulated about Google becoming a commercial airliner.

Google Air? Maybe not, but a Google airfare listing and fare comparison service made its debut that year.

Behind the humor, though, is a very serious point about

Shares of Wave Systems Corp. jumped Monday after Dell Inc. agreed to distribute Wave Systems' security software on its business computers equipped with trusted computing chips, or TPMs.
 
Shares of Wave rose 8 cents, or 11 percent, to close at 80 cents on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

As part

Sony BMG Music's controversial copy-protection scheme can be defeated with a small piece of tape, a research firm said Monday in a demonstration of the futility of digital rights management (DRM).

According to Gartner analysts Martin Reynolds and Mike McGuire, Sony's XCP technology is stymied by sticking a fingernail-size piece of opaque

Intel remained the largest semiconductor supplier in the world, with estimated 2005 revenue of $35.5 billion; AMD is the 12th largest with estimated 2005 revenue of $5.8 billion.
  
Among the 12 largest suppliers of microprocessors in the world, rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. were two of the fastest