Have you vowed to watch less television in 2009? Time Warner Cable might be able to help you with that.

The cable provider is currently locked in a dispute with Viacom over licensing fees for access to channels like MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central. If it goes unresolved, Time Warner customers could see their Viacom channels go dark at midnight.

"The renewal we are seeking is reasonable and modest relative to the profits TWC enjoys from our networks," according to a statement from Viacom. "We have asked for an increase of less than 25 cents per month, per subscriber, which adds up to less than a penny per day for all 19 of MTV Networks' channels."

Viacom wants the rate hike because Time Warner "has so greatly undervalued our channels for so long," the company said. "Our fees amount to less than 2.5 percent of what Time Warner generates from their average customer."

Time Warner accused Viacom of extortion, and said the move was an attempt to make up for declining ad dollars.

"Viacom claims their demands equate to 'pennies,' but that is misleading and insulting to our customers, from whom Viacom is trying to extort another $39 million annually – on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars our customers already pay to Viacom each year," Time Warner said in a statement.

If you are holding your breath while waiting for the successor of IE7, feel free to exhale at any time because Microsoft is by no means in any hurry to deliver the RTW (release to web) version of Internet Explorer 8. In fact, a recent move from the Redmond company reveals that the gold release of IE8 might come as late as over a year after the launch of the Beta 1 build, if not even later. Of course, with no official confirmation, anticipating the final release of IE8 is nothing short of examining chicken entrails. However, the Redmond company does provide indications pointing to the availability of Internet Explorer 8 closer to, or even well into, the second quarter of 2009.

The giant is offering free and unlimited support for issues related to the deployment and usage of pre-released versions of IE8. Although the official help and support is currently focused on Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (All Languages), Microsoft does emphasize that pre-released versions of the browser are in fact supported, and not just the second Beta. Up to this point in time the company has promised to support development milestones of IE8 until March 31, 2009.
 

LG Display said Tuesday that it has developed a 480-Hz LCD TV panel, which it will showcase at the Consumer Electronics Show (CE) in January.

The "Trumotion 480Hz" is a first for the industry, which has begun selling 120-Hz LCD TVs in volume. LG said that its 480-Hz panel would begin shipping as a product in the second half of 2009. On the face of it, the technology should display video four times as smoothly as today's 120-Hz LCD TVs.

Technically, the panel appears to use 240-Hz technology. But a scanning backlight turns on and off rapidly, allowing the display to refresh 480 times per second. The display's motion picture response time is 4 ms, the company said.

Microsoft Corp. last week applied for a patent that spells out a "pay-as-you-go" concept where users would be charged for both the software they run and the computing horsepower they use.

According to the patent application filed last week with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience" scheme would meter software use and access to specific computer hardware. Fees would be charged against a pre-paid or billed account.

"The current business model for computer hardware and software relies on a user purchasing a computer with hardware and software that is suited to the most demanding applications that the user expects to encounter," said Microsoft in the application. "Therefore, a user may buy a multi-core processor with a significant amount of memory and advanced video support for gaming applications that are only used on the weekend, while the user's day-in, day-out activities may involve little more than word processing or web-browsing."

Microsoft's plan would instead monitor the machine to track things such as disk storage space, processor cores and memory used, then bill the user for what was consumed during a set period.

"A different business model may allow a more granular approach to hardware and software sales," Microsoft argued. "A computer may have individually metered hardware and software components that a user can select and activate based on current need. When the need is browsing, a low level of performance may be used and when network-based interactive gaming is the need of the moment, the highest available performance may be made available to the user."

Fees would be lower for low-performance chores, such as writing e-mail or surfing the Internet, and higher for high-performance tasks.

Windows, windows 7, microsoftPirated copies of a Windows 7 build pegged by many as the beta Microsoft will release next month have leaked to the Internet, according to searches at several BitTorrent sites today.

A search on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, returned two Windows 7 Build 7000 listings, both of which had been posted Friday.

As of Saturday afternoon, one torrent on Pirate Bay showed more than 1,800 "seeders" -- the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file -- and about 8,500 "leechers," or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. The torrent is a disk image of the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate, Build 7000, according to users commenting on the site and elsewhere on the Internet.

Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites, including Mininova, listed the beta build as a 2.44GB download.

This is not the first time Windows 7 has escaped from Microsoft's limited testing pool. Just hours after the company unveiled an earlier version at its Professional Developers Conference in late October, the alpha edition hit BitTorrent.

Users first reported the newest Windows 7 leak on Neowin.net's forums Friday, with the opening message and screenshots coming from someone identified as "+fivestarVIP", who said he was from Beijing, China.