(Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp announced business software that offers the promise of machines that heal and manage themselves. Built with lessons from IBM's chess-playing supercomputer, the system is hardly plug and play, and setting it up ensures steady employment for the firm's consultants. For half a year, IBM has promised 'self-healing' computers that react to failing parts and rising workloads by finding ways round problems without breaking down or involving technicians -- a key issue amid a tight supply of technology professionals. For technical problems, that could mean letting the computer choose and switch to a backup microchip when one starts to fail. On a business level that could mean telling a computer facing a backlog of work on a priority job to search out free computers on a corporation's network and reschedule low-priority jobs.
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(Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co. has launched an Internet-ready home digital music center that it hopes will build a market where competitors have failed to make it big. The Digital Entertainment Center de100c costs about $1,000 and looks like a large VCR. It stores the equivalent of 750 compact discs on its built-in 40 gigabyte hard drive and plays Internet radio stations included on a list put together by partner RealNetworks Inc.
Through a built-in display or a menu on the television, the center can be programmed to rerecord music from CDs onto the hard drive, converted into the popular MP3 music file format. The machine also will write CDs, but it lacks a DVD player. ''We are going to do one thing, and we are going to do it really well,'' Product Manager George Prokop said. "The primary need is my music, anywhere. It is trapped on the PC today, and people want to move it to another room.''
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Weekly CPU Prices: Did the recent Intel price drops make for any night-and-day differences between this week's guide and last's... no, not really. As mentioned last week, vendors were already starting to absorb the anticipated cuts into prices last week. But those who did wait did enjoy a few drops, while some others unfortunately saw prices on desired processors go up. Check out this week's guide to find out how much.
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(Press Release) SOYO Computer, Inc.has announced a BIOS upgrade to support AMD's new Athlon XP 1800+ microprocessors across a complete line of AMD-compatible motherboards. Six SOYO motherboards, including the new K7V DRAGON-Plus with VIA KT266A chipset, are compatible with the AMD XP processor. SOYO customers can obtain a BIOS upgrade from SOYO's website. SOYO motherboards that will support the AMD Athlon XP CPU with their compatible BIOS upgrade include K7VTA PRO (BIOS ver. 2AA5); K7ADA (ver. 2BA2); K7VEM (ver. 2AA2); K7VEM+ (ver. 2AA2); K7V DRAGON (ver. 2AA3) and K7V DRAGON-Plus (ver. 2AA1).
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