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Comcast just bought itself a nice little present for the holidays: NBC Universal. The cable network will have a controlling stake in NBC once the deal is flattened out, and in return, it's giving General Electric $6.5 billion along with $7.25 billion worth of programming. If everything passes muster...

Intel and AMD have finally put a long and bitter disagreement to bed, and in the end, all it took was a little open communication and understanding, along with one and a quarter billion dollars. The two have been at it for years -- accusations, threats, lawsuits. AMD said Intel engaged in anticompet...

For years, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 have been gut-punching each other with price cuts while the Nintendo Wii just sits on the sidelines with a smug little grin on its face. While the two bigger consoles entered the market with huge MSRPs, the Wii planted itself at $250 and stayed there for...

Congratulations, patient cheapskates: You've won the waiting game. Now you can get a well-equipped video game system for a somewhat reasonable price. The two most-advanced consoles on the market have dropped in price over the last few days, just in time for all of that back-to-school homework to get...

A Toronto company aptly named "i4i" is getting its revenge on Microsoft by kicking it square in the monkeymaker. i4i has sued Redmond, claiming that Microsoft Word infringes on its patents. Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas -- where else? -- has given Microsoft two mon...

Odd couple Google and Yahoo late on Friday reportedly opted to delay their proposed partnership, under which Google would essentially devour part of Yahoo's advertising business and create an online ad behemoth that critics say no rival could possibly compete against. On Thursday, Sen. Herb Kohl, D-...

Beaumont, Texas, has become the testing ground for a new way to charge Internet users for access. It's meant to make heavy users pay more. Time Warner will begin rolling out an experimental program that will meter users' Web usage and bill them extra if they download or upload more than a set amount...

Last year, when Viacom visited YouTube and spotted shows from MTV, Comedy Central and other content producers it owns, it decided to act quickly -- and the only quick reaction a company of Viacom's size is capable of in that sort of situation is to sue. Only after many months did other giant TV netw...

Having your private information leaked is bad enough, but having it put on BitTorrent is really the final insult. It happened before with MySpace photos. By most accounts, the private images made available earlier this year via peer-to-peer networks consisted mostly of poorly snapped photos of peopl...

My sympathies to those out there who used last month's announcements from T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon as an excuse to quickly jump ship from Sprint Nextel and sign a contract with someone else for an all-you-can-eat talk plan at $100 a month. Sprint was the only major U.S. wireless carrier that d...

For advertisers, the mobile Web is full of possibilities -- and problems. U.S. adoption of the mobile Web lags behind European and Asian countries. Closed systems have hindered application development, as has the field's wide array of competing standards, platforms and browsers. Small screens necess...

Buying sponsored links on a major search engine isn't cheap. Getting to the top of the search engine pile without paying your way requires mastery of search engine optimization -- a craft that often seems to fall somewhere between advanced calculus and alchemy. However, for small businesses catering...

For a small business that serves a local area -- a restaurant or gardening service, for example -- word of mouth can quickly make or break a reputation. When the conversation happens online in organized and professionally managed forums like Citysearch and YellowPages.com, reputations can be made an...

It's no secret that an awful lot of TV shows and movies can be found on file-sharing networks like BitTorrent and Kazaa. It's also no secret that the producers of those shows really, really hate it when people share them without permission. Is there a way for content makers to cash in on what is a c...