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LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 25, 2003--the number of users of advanced games consoles soared by 128 percent in 2002, reaching 56.3 million worldwide, according to the latest research from Strategy Analytics' Broadband Entertainment Strategies service. 75 percent of users own Sony's PlayStation 2, compared to 13 percent with Nintendo's GameCube, and 12 percent with Microsoft's XBox. Forecasts suggest GameCube will lose ground during 2003. According to the analysts, Nintendo could build a leading position in the $12 billion software market, but it must first abandon its present console strategy.

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"Since last fall, we've seen a real spike in corporate customers purchasing our software because of spyware," said Pete Cafarchio, vice president of business development at Pest Patrol, whose software helps identify and eliminate a long list of "pest" programs, ranging from comparatively benign adware to viruses and Trojan horses. "Their argument is that there can be no unauthorized (network) communication."

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O'Keefe was responding to a questioner who cited statements by shuttle program director Ron Dittemore that nothing could have been done to help Columbia and its crew even if Mission Control had been certain that thermal protection tiles on the space shuttle had been damaged.

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With the space shuttle fleet grounded by the Columbia disaster, Russian spacecraft will be used to exchange crew members aboard the International Space Station, NASA officials said. The next crew to live on the station will have two members instead of the usual three and will be launched in late April or early May. The crew - one American and one Russian - will deliver a fresh Russian Soyuz, the space station's lifeboat.

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The silicate grains were bound up within interplanetary dust particles collected from high up in the Earth's atmosphere using a modified spy plane. "The stardust grains we discovered are typical of the kinds of dust that were available at the beginning of our Solar System; these were the building blocks of the Sun and the planets," says Lindsay Keller, a US space agency (Nasa) co-researcher on the study.

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"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

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"This nepotistic behavior indicates that ant workers are able not only to detect kin relationships, but also to pursue their selfish genetic interests if the costs to their colony are not prohibitive," said researcher Liselotte Sundstrom.

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The coral reef, which attracts vivid tropical fish and thousands of tourists a year to view them, may be being smothered by pollution, the Productivity Commission said in a report on the health of the 2,000-km (1,200-mile) reef along the Queensland coast.

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MSN and Hotmail use spam-filtering software and services from San Francisco-based Brightmail, whose techniques focus on the message's content when filtering spam. Beyond that, MSN's spam-abuse team compiles its own list of IP addresses that are known to generate unsolicited junk messages, and it blocks all messages from them.

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Without knowing the inner workings of an operating system--a fact revealed by its source code--governments like China fear that backdoors may be installed to leak sensitive information.

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Earlier this month, roughly three dozen states and eight major online retailers struck a deal in which the Internet companies agreed to begin collecting sales taxes. As part of the agreement, the e-commerce shops were granted amnesty for any prior uncollected taxes.

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Many designs for minuscule computers aimed at harnessing the massive storage capacity of DNA have been proposed over the years. Earlier schemes have relied on a molecule known as ATP, which is a common source of energy for cellular reactions, as a fuel source. But in the new set up, a DNA molecule provides both the initial data and sufficient energy to complete the computation. Shapiro and his colleagues describe their DNA computer in a report published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Wednesday afternoon, the DOJ said it had taken over the iSoNews.com domain, whose owner pleaded guilty to felony copyright crimes under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). David Rocci, 22, pleaded guilty in December to using his site to sell "mod" chips that let Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation owners modify their devices so they can use them to play illegally copied games, or "warez."

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While many industry observers dismissed the Pentium 4 desknote as a flash in the pan when it first appeared last year, they now say the category will live on. Even Intel has jumped on the bandwagon. The company is expected later this year to introduce a new line of Pentium 4 chips, running at speeds of up to 3.06GHz, for desknotes as an extension to its Pentium 4 mobile processor line.

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So far, OLED has the broadest support from manufacturers, but analysts believe it will be something on the order of 10 years before OLED can be a viable challenger to LCD. OLED screen technology is being used in smaller devices, such as electric shavers and cell phones.

OLED displays don't require a backlight because the polymers used in the display light up when an electrical charge is applied. The light-emitting characteristic means that devices won't need as much power to run and can be thinner than LCDs, which are dependant on a backlight. Screens are the most power-consuming and expensive component in most computing devices.

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Karppinen's study has indicated some improvement by W3C members over the last 18 months. The number of standards-compliant member home pages leaped to 6.5 percent, up from 4.6 percent in August 2002 and 3.7 percent in February 2002.

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PCI Express is a serial link, which doesn't require parallel delivery, and can send more data down fewer wires. A board with six parallel PCI slots will come with more than 1,000 pins, metallic knobs that connect chips to wires. A similar PCI Express board can be made with fewer than 400 pins, said Mike Fister, senior vice president of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group, who demonstrated PCI Express on stage last week for the first time at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose.

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Starkweather has found that using a semicircular monitor three times as wide as the standard one can improve people's productivity, allowing them to take advantage of their peripheral vision and to spend less time opening and closing different windows.

But the main advantage is that users can have several applications open at once, both in the centre and on the sides of the monitor. Or they could even stretch an application across the entire screen. Five pages of a Word document, for example, could be viewed at once.

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VIA Technologies played host to one of the most popular booths at the show, where attendees could see the company's own reference version of a Media Center PC. Built and sold by IDotPC.com, the Hi-Fi PC is housed in a fancy brushed-aluminum box the size of a toaster.

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For the edge-of-network servers, such as Web servers, Microsoft is to release Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, a cut-down operating system sharing some similarities with the embedded version of the operating that is sold by Microsoft's OEM division to manufacturers building Web servers and appliances such as Network Attached Storage devices. Windows Server 2003 Web Edition will be sold as a packaged product, and a new version of the embedded operating system will also launch for OEMs.

The other new versions of Windows will be general purpose server operating systems: Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition for departmental environments, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (replacing Advanced Server) for medium to large enterprises, and at the high end, Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition for heavy database work.

Microsoft will also launch 64-bit versions of the two high-end operating systems; Datacenter Edition 64-bit will be able to scale to 64-way servers, as opposed to the 32-bit version which will, like the current Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition, be confined to 32-way servers. "We've been working with HP on its 64-way SuperDome servers," said Tennant.

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Cell, scheduled to hit the market in late 2004 or early 2005, differs notably from current processors. This finely crafted chunk of silicon will contain multiple chips within a single unit, and will be able to perform in excess of one trillion mathematical calculations a second. Put into perspective, that makes it approximately 100 times more powerful than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU!

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The good folks at PestPatrol have given us several copies of their excellent program and some other goodies that we will be giving away. Five packages of one copy of PestPatrol and some goodies will given away in weekly drawings with a CompUSA cold cathode (color will be up to the winner) given away as a "grand prize" at the end of a sixth week.

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Activision and id Software have announced that Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory won't be released to retail as planned. The multiplayer component is expected to be released in several months as a free downloadable expansion, but Enemy Territory's single-player component--which was in development at Mad Doc Software--won't ever see the light of day. Enemy Territory's single-player struck out in a very different direction from Return to Castle Wolfenstein's, as the player was to be accompanied by a group of AI squadmates who would autonomously accomplish tasks suitable to their weapons and abilities.

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Innovative applications and technologies continue to be developed at an amazing rate, requiring PC clients to have the latest expansion capabilities, said Brad Saunders of Intel Corporation and chairman of the PCMCIA. "By drawing upon USB 2.0 and PCI Express, the NEWCARD specification will bring serial bus technology to a smaller form factor that offers more performance and improved ease of use. This new specification will revolutionize how PC developers and OEMs utilize the expansion slot for next-generation features such as wireless networking, storage and card readers.

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For more than 20 years, the PC has relied on the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), a small set of fixed software routines normally built into a chip on the motherboard. This hangover from a distant past is causing more and more problems, said Mark Doran, Intel's principal engineer behind the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) that aims to humanely kill the antique technology.

"When I started, I got senior managers together from across Intel and asked them what would happen if we had a blank sheet of paper to replace the BIOS," Doran said. "It turned into a three-day bitch session." He said that the original designers of the IBM PC BIOS had no idea that it would survive this long. "They thought that 250,000 machines would see it through to the end of its life," he said.

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All the companies are talking up efforts against spam at a time when consumers and the media are hyperaware of its growing, loathsome presence in e-mail in-boxes. ISPs record an up to threefold increase in the number of unsolicited e-mail sent to members in the last year; and as a result, they're fielding record consumer complaints, despite spam-blocking software that cuts back on the majority of it. Under pressure from rivals, Net access providers are seeking to offer consumers a service that is free of spam.