The FCC is gearing up to auction off exclusive use to a spectrum of airwaves (2155 – 2175MHz, a.k.a. the AWS-3 band), and it is considering requiring the purchaser to provide high-speed (768Kbps) Internet access to most of the U.S. for free: ”We’re hoping there will be increased interest (in the proposal) and because this will provide wireless broadband services to more Americans it is certainly something we want to see,” said FCC spokesman Rob Kenny.Kenny said he didn’t know when the auction would be held

Apple issued a large patch yesterday for its Leopard operating system. While the iCal calendar exploit got a good bit of press back when it was discovered in January, most of the over forty bugs and vulnerabilities addressed in the patch haven’t really been front page news, although many of them seem fairly serious. The days of “security by obscurity” for Apple users are gone now as Apple gains market share, so if you’re running Leopard make sure your computer is patched and up to date. While Security Update

While other hard drive manufacturers have been busy churning out Solid State Drives (SSD), Seagate has been sitting on the SSD sidelines because it felt that the cost was still too high to produce and sell drives using this relatively new storage technology. The company has announced that it will finally be getting its SSD feet wet when it releases a its first SSD drive sometime in 2009. Before consumers get too excited about the prospect of another hard drive manufacturer producing SSDs and helping to bring

Growth in Asia and strong sales of notebook computers helped Dell Inc. beat Wall Street expectations for first-quarter sales and profit.

That strong report pushed shares of Dell, the world's second-largest seller of personal computers, up 9.9 percent in late trading Thursday.

Now, investors will try to determine if the results were a one-term wonder or a sign that founder and CEO Michael Dell's turnaround plan is working.

Notebook shipments jumped 43 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier. Dell had made them a priority, developing products for emerging markets, and the Round Rock, Texas-based company rang up more sales overseas than at home for the first time in the first quarter.

Revenue rose 19 percent in Asia and 15 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, helping Dell overcome a weak U.S. market where businesses were cutting back on technology spending.

“Dell did relatively well, but it was against low expectations,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research who rates the shares “neutral.”

They rose 12 cents Thursday, closing at $21.81 in regular trading before the results were released, then jumped $2.16 to $23.97 in late trading.

Still, the results added to the sense that technology spending “is turning out a little better than expected,” Wu said.

Dell’s been in a kind of funk. They lost the title of largest computer maker to HP last year, cut a  bunch of jobs, talked a lot about restructuring. Whatever they’re doing seems to be working. They’re still in second place, but they’re making money at it; their first quarter numbers are in and they outperformed analysts’ expectations for profit and sales. The company’s first-quarter revenue was $16.08 billion, up 9 percent from $14.72 billion in the year-earlier quarter. Net income was $784 million, or

Our friends at ZEROtherm have sent us their newest CPU cooler to look at, the Zen FZ120 CPU cooler. At just $39.99 the FZ120 was designed to meet and exceed competitor price vs. performance. Can ZEROtherm make an award winning cooling solution that does not send you racing to break the piggy bank? That is what we set off to figure out and the results are impressive! What did you expect from a heat sink with a 120mm fan and eight heat pipes!

Ever lose your saved games? Frustrating, right? On Thursday Valve Software announced a solution, the Steam Cloud.  It will be an an upcoming update to their Steam download service and it will not only store saved games, but also graphics settings, and key binding in the “cloud,” or server-side.The biggest news is that game-generated data will now be stored with your Steam accounts in Valve servers. This includes game profiles, configuration settings, and even savegames! Valve will first be rolling this

This isn’t technically a story on tech, or even on science, but how could we not write about the death of Alexander Courage, composer of the theme of the original Star Trek series (ST:TOS)? He was 88.Courage died May 15 at the Sunrise assisted-living facility in Pacific Palisades, his stepdaughter Renata Pompelli of Los Angeles, said Thursday. He had been in poor health for three years.Over a decades-long career, Courage collaborated on dozens of movies and orchestrated some of the greatest musicals of the 1950s

Video: Asus EN9800GTX 512MB Videocard Review @ HardwareLogic MSI Radeon HD 3650 Graphics Card Review @ X-bit LabsMotherboards and Chipsets: ASRock A780FullDisplayPort Motherboard @ CPU3D ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i SLI Motherboard @ BmRProcessors: VIA Nano Processor Preview – Isaiah Gets Official @ PC Perspective VIA Nano CPU – Codename Isaiah @ Benchmark ReviewsMemory and Storage: Mitron Drive Selector Review @ FusionMods.Net Lite-On EZ DUB External CD/DVD Writer Review @ OCIA.net GeIL PC2-8500 1066MHz

Benchmark Reviews has reviewed the VIA Nano CPU – Codename Isaiah! Find this and other reviews by visiting our forums!

On the 29th of May 2008 VIA announced the Nano CPU, a processor built from Isaiah architecture. Building on the market-leading energy efficiency of their existing VIA C7 processor family, the VIA Nano processor family offers as much as four times the performance within the same power range to extend VIA's performance per watt leadership, while identical pin compatibility with VIA C7 processors will ensure a smooth transition for OEMs and motherboard vendors, and provides them with an easy upgrade path for current system or board designs.