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Torvalds also griped about Intel's decision to push its high-end Itanium "IA-64" processors over its current Pentium and Xeon "IA-32" lines. The Itanium processor, codeveloped by Hewlett-Packard, is a 64-bit chip built to accommodate vast amounts of memory, but the commands it understands are drastically different from those understood by the 32-bit Pentium line. Torvalds said he preferred AMD's approach to 64-bit computers, keeping the same commands, or "instruction set," but adding 64-bit abilities.

"I really dislike IA-64. I think it's a losing strategy," Torvalds said. "My personal hope is that IA-64 withers and dies because there's no point. It performs badly; it's expensive; it's an all-new instruction set."

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Microsoft Corp. apologized to New York City for blanketing public property with hundreds of butterfly decals used to promote the company's new MSN 8 Internet service.

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A developer of bulk-mail software has figured out how to blast computers with pop-up spam over the Internet through a messaging function on many Windows operating systems.

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This method allowed the scientists to create digital-logic elements that are 260,000 times smaller than the ones used in the most advanced semiconductor chips available today. Putting that in perspective, the most complex circuit they built--a 12-by-17 nanometer three-input sorter--is so miniscule that 190 billion of them could fit on top of a standard pencil-top eraser. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, which is the length of about five to 10 atoms in a line.

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Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory. Due in 2004 or 2005, the system will be able to perform 200 trillion calculations per second. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use the system for performing nuclear weapons simulations.

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The fact that our card only has 64MB of usable DDR RAM on it will mean that retail boards with 128MB standard can only perform better than the results we've shown you here today. Even with only 64MB of RAM though, I'm sure some of these results have impressed some of you out there. The anti-aliasing and anisotropic performance results show that the GeForce4 Ti4600 is quickly becoming the card not to buy for gaming. Keep in mind that money-wise, the 9500 and 9500 Pro are posistioned to take on the Ti4200 cards that are out there. While this card is targeting the Ti4200 market segment, the results we've seen here today show us the 9500s can really go up against the Ti 4600. Once you factor in the price at $199 MSRP and the features you get, you can easily see how it could go up against NVIDIA’s best at this point in time.

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Critics point out that Fujitsu and other hardware companies already have tablet PC devices on the market--yet most run a standard version of the Windows operating system. Price may be a factor in keeping tablet PCs from catching on; current tablets cost from $4,000 to $5,000. Machines running the Tablet PC operating system are expected to cost around $2,000, Promisel said.

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The idea of tapping spare processing power from ordinary PCs has seized the imagination of the computing industry, luring thousands of volunteers into donating their spare CPU cycles to the search for extraterrestrial life and to the battle against diseases such as cancer. But none of those efforts has contributed to publishable scientific results, Pande said.

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While Vixie took issue with reports that the attack had been the "largest ever," he did say that aspects of the data flood made it unusual. "There have been (previous) attacks against the root domain servers--yes," he said. "But it is rare to have attacks against all 13 at the same time."

Still, the results of the latest attack were not severe. At the attack's peak, access to the entire DNS network dropped to an average of 94 percent, down only slightly from normal levels near 100 percent, according to Matrix NetSystems.

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ATI also announced a DDR-2 variant for mobile graphics and mid-range desktop graphics, code-named DDR-2M, and demonstrated the technology working on a desktop graphics card. DDR-2M delivers DDR-2 performance with lower power consumption, reduced heat dissipation and simplified board design. ATI worked closely with Elpida Memory Inc to develop DDR-2M as part of ATI's ongoing commitment to moving technology innovation aggressively out to the masses.

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By manipulating swine sperm, Italian researchers have made a strain of pigs that carry human genes in their hearts, livers and kidneys, an advance that could lead to creating herds of pigs that could provide organs for transplanting into humans.

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Intel itself will jump into the Wi-Fi chip market early next year with its Banias processor for notebooks. Most Banias notebooks will contain an integrated Wi-Fi module from Intel, code-named Calexico, that will contain Intel's first 802.11a and 802.11b chips Other 802.11 chips will work with Banias, but Intel has only qualified, or intricately tested, Banias with Calexico, which will likely make it the default choice for PC makers.

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The new screens use Sharp's CGS (continuous grain silicon) technology, which is already moving into mass production in displays containing built-in driver circuits.

Display drivers, which help turn a screen's pixels on and off, usually reside in separate microchips.

Sharp is betting heavily on CGS technology, which permits on-screen circuitry that can save space, cut production costs and produce ultra-fine resolutions for showing maps or photos.

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Building this kind of network harkens back to the move from a telephone system operated by a person working a switchboard to one that automatically routes calls. Autonomic networks would be able to sense a company's needs for bandwidth or storage and distribute them on the fly. The computers making up this network would each have built-in abilities to recognize, isolate and recover from problems, with as little human intervention as possible.

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DaimlerChrysler has been using computers to simulate crashes since the early 1990s, first with single supercomputers, then with clusters of systems running Unix. Now the company is switching to less-expensive systems with Intel processors running Red Hat's version of the Linux operating system, DaimlerChrysler said.

The Chrysler system uses 108 IBM IntelliStation M Pro 6850 workstations, each with two 2.2GHz processors and 1 gigabit-per-second network adapters. The system also uses an IBM TotalStorage FastT500 storage system with 2.6 terabytes of capacity.