"Time Warner Cable is testing a new pricing structure where heavy broadband users will be charged based on how much data they transfer, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

A trial for the new pricing scheme is expected to begin in Beaumont, Texas, later this year. Time Warner is testing the new pricing model to see if it can curb usage of peer-to-peer applications on its network, said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for the company.

Peer-to-peer protocols allow users to access content that is distributed throughout the network on other computers running the same application. It's commonly used to transfer music and video files, as well as other large data files."

"Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping $1 billion.

f the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?

Sun has toyed with the idea of a database offering of its own for at least two years. But in a market where basic relational database functionality is increasingly considered a commodity, competing successfully is no mean feat, even when playing the open source card."

"Another group of South Korean scientists has cloned cats with a florescent protein gene that makes them glow red in ultra violet light. Similar techniques have been used in everything from roundworms to goldfish to pigs. The procedure used in the cloning process is hoped to be able to help develop treatments for genetic diseases.

The lead scientist on the project, Kong Il-keun from the Gyeongsang National University was able to produce a trio of cats with the altered glowing gene. The cats were born in January and February, two grew to adult and one cat was still born."

"FireWire-based data transfer speeds seem set to quadruple, reaching 3.2 Gigabits per second, according to the trade body that nurtures the standard.

The 1394 Trade Association last week announced its new S32 specification, which uses the existing cables and connectors already deployed for FireWire 800 products in order to make for a faster transition to the new speed. The specification is expected to be ratified by early February.

Current FireWire 800 hard drives can easily move over 90 megabytes per second."

"I have completed my first Eee PC modification, this modification adds Bluetooth functionality and 16GB of flash storage.

At first I intended to solder the two USB devices directly to the motherboard but after careful consideration I decided the ability to easily replace the modules should take priority.

Both ports are 5V and use the USB connections from the unused Mini PCI Express port and the USB connections from the Mini PCI Express port used by the wireless card."

"The 17" notebook uses Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, comes equipped with dual NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT graphics cards in SLI mode and features an AGEIA PhysX 100M physics processor.

Prices start at $2,699 for the base Core 2 Duo T7500 model and creep up to $4,431 for a Core 2 Extreme X7900 with Windows Vista Ultimate and 400GB of HDD space."

"The latest iteration of the browser relies on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering engine, which is designed to enhance performance and stability, among other things. The latest version also includes a variety of improved security features, such as the ability to click on the site favicon (the graphic displayed in the URL address bar) to show site ownership information.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 also includes malware protection. But the effectiveness of using a blacklist to identify sites that distribute malware remains to be seen, given that new malware sites appear and disappear on a daily basis specifically to avoid blacklisting."