Hamburg - It's a bit like buying property with just a building frame on it. The dimensions are predetermined, but what kind of heating to use, wood floors or tiles, how the windows should look - that's all left for the customer to decide. Barebones PCs work on the same principle. They contain only the case, power supply and motherboard. Everything else is customer selected.

While the term "Barebones" technically applies to all PCs that do not come with a complete preinstalled set-up, the term has come to take on a different meaning. Tom Seiffert from the hardwaremaker Shuttle near Hamburg notes that the term now refers to PCs with a distinctively small physical profile regardless of whether they come fully configured.

This is the week of the geeks, as the Apple iPhone finally made entry into the Indian market amidst fanfare.

Both
the official Indian operators for the phone Bharti Airtel and Vodafone
Essar rolled out the much-awaited phone at midnight across eight cities.

But
the response was far away from that was seen in international markets
where iPhone buffs queued up the whole night to have their coveted
smartphone. Only a few people reached to grab their iPhone on the
midnight of Thursday.

The reason was clear that the majority
of people think that iPhone is out of the reach of their pockets. In
India, iPhone is available at a price of Rs 31,000 for the 8 GB
version, while the 16 GB version costs Rs 36,100.

Available in

Berlin - While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as clients. They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more.

Ratingen, G

Bonn, Germany - The German Federal Agency for Security in Information Technology (BSI) in Bonn is warning about a new and especially tricky security hole affecting internet users. The hole is related to the Domain Name System (DNS) and hence potentially affects all web users.

The DNS translates the names typed by the user into a numeric-based IP address. It's has been no secret for some time that hackers can manipulate DNS servers to redirect users to different sites without the users' knowledge.

"But now there are malicious programs that actually exploit this hole in the DNS," says BSI's Matthias Gaertner. "And unfortunately, not all providers have patched the hole on their DNS servers."

Washington, August 23 : NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has scooped up a soil sample from an intermediate depth between the ground surface and a subsurface icy layer and delivered it to a laboratory oven on the spacecraft for analysis.

The robotic arm on Phoenix collected the sample, dubbed “Burning Coals,” from a trench named “Burn Alive 3.”

In part of the trench, the arm had dug down to the hard, icy layer about 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) below the ground surface.