Napster, which pioneered the concept of free music shared via the web, has moved back to that model -- with a catch.
 
Napster's basic service is now entirely advertising-subsidized, allowing users to stream music from the company's library of about 2 million songs, for free.

The catch, however, is

The open-source Mozilla project this week will release an update to its Firefox browser that will fix a publicly disclosed security issue in the software. News of the update came as developers also confirmed that they were dropping a highly anticipated bookmarking feature, called Places, from the next major Firefox release, due later this

Apple has updated the two applications included with its iWork ‘06 application suite: Pages and Keynote. Pages 2.0.1 is now available for download, and Keynote 3.0.1 has been released as well. Both are available for download from Apple’s Web site or through the Software Update system preference.
 
Pages is Apple’s

Sony is preparing to take another swing at Apple’s iPod digital music player, a top Sony executive said Friday.
 
The company is developing a new music player that will go on sale in the U.S. and other markets over the next year, alongside a companion download service and software, said

Google Inc. on Thursday launched a free version of the 3D modeling software the search engine acquired when it bought @Last Software last month.
 
Google SketchUp, which is free for personal use, includes simple tools for creating 3D models of a variety of items, including houses, sheds, decks, home additions

If digital files are the new vinyl records, then term searching is the new crate digging. Background knowledge once helped collectors and connoisseurs plumb a local record store's stock. Now they might use it to pick the right keyword when they're online.
 
But even that know-how won't necessarily help them

The price paid for a high ranking Google's search list, can be counterproductive, because the often-deceptive methods to generate hits don't reflect real Web site content, according to a speaker at this week's Search Engine Meeting in Boston.

"You can try to trick Web sites by embedding tag spam," said Steve Arnold,

A key shortcoming of IBM's DB2 database is that it requires massive storage, but the company is promising to change that with its forthcoming release, due out this summer.

A new feature in that next version, code-named Viper, will apply compression to data at the row level, according to Jeff Jones, director of

Any merger or acquisition can stress an IT staff, but few have to deal with combining 30 organizations in one shot.

That's what happened when Allied Capital Corp. acquired Advantage Sales and Marketing for $257 million and decided to consolidate what had been an umbrella group of 30 marketing firms into one

Integrators that have tested the new release of AMX's VisualArchitect, a drag-and-drop programming software designed to simplify complex coding tasks, increase the number of jobs integrators can handle and improve overall productivity and efficiency, say it lives up to its promise.
 
Jeff Skalny, IT manager at Spire Integrated Systems, a Pleasant