November 21 - 12:05pm EST   Best known for its integrated video in recent years, VIA's graphics label S3 late yesterday introduced the Chrome 500 series of graphics chips. The hardware is built to challenge the Radeon HD 4350 and other budget dedicated cards both in the feature set and performance with a newer unified shader (effects) processor design that supports DirectX 10.1+ and OpenGL 3 for graphics as well as general-purpose computing tasks written to support the Chrome hardware. [full story]

June 6 - 3:50pm EDT   (Update: service back late in the afternoon) Amazon has been suffering an ongoing shortage that has both affected its main business as well as hurt its Kindle e-book reader, according to user reports. The outage began earlier this afternoon and has left Amazon's main page nearly, blank, with only a "service unavailable" message at the front. Kindle users in turn note an inability to access the company's site for downloading e-books. [full story]