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Atlantis arrived with the new girder on Wednesday, along with a fresh supply of salsa. After four months of bland, canned food, the space station's lone American, Peggy Whitson, had requested some spice.

"We've got your salsa," Atlantis' skipper, Jeffrey Ashby, radioed as the shuttle drew near.

"OK, we'll let you in then," Whitson replied.

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The service, T-Mobile Hotspot, currently provides high-speed wireless Internet access in more than 1,600 locations in the United States, including airports and more than 1,200 Starbucks cafes. The service lets people access the signal via laptops or handheld computers equipped with a wireless card.

Most cell phone carriers such as T-Mobile are now embracing Wi-Fi, also known as 802.11b, for their wireless networks. The networking technology is used to create Internet access through the air within a radius of about 300 feet from a Wi-Fi device.

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Ballmer said Microsoft has a group chartered with developing additional security products. Currently, he said, there is no plan in place to charge customers a fee for additional security services. But Microsoft most likely will introduce new security software, similar to its existing firewall software.
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Asked why it has taken Microsoft 25 years to put secure computing at the forefront of its efforts, he said it's "because customers wouldn't pay for it until recently."

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Continuing its efforts in the portable device market, VIA Technologies on October 8 announced at the VIA Technology Forum (VTF) that it will launch a new RISC (reduced instruction set computing)-architecture processor line in the first quarter of 2003 for PDAs (personal digital assistants) and mobile phones.

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Russia's space program is desperately strapped for cash. In the past, the space agency has offered a trip to the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket to civilians who can pay a $20 million fee.

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Bidder fraud, as the problem of deadbeat bidders is sometimes referred, has generally been overshadowed by reports of seller fraud in online auctions. eBay has taken steps this year to counteract seller fraud, where sellers list items they have no intention of selling, then take off with payments from unsuspecting bidders. In June, the online auction giant added some new fraud detection software, and in May, the company announced that it's developing a new authentication service with VeriSign.

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Storage also garnered heavy support from NIST. Five companies won almost $12 million from the federal government for a proposal to increase the amount of information that can fit on an old technology: tape systems. The project seeks to deliver multi-terabyte storage--a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes of data--by increasing the density of information that can be recorded to tape by a factor of 250.

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Code-named Nehalem, the chip will embody a new architecture that will substantially differ from the current Pentium 4, according to sources. Concepts in the current chip line will be found in Nehalem, but it will contain new, and largely unknown, features such as improved power management that will mark it as a distinct evolutionary step, similar to the changeover from the Pentium II to the Pentium III.

In the meantime, Intel is also working on updates to the Pentium 4. In the second half of 2003, the company will release "Prescott," a Pentium 4 variant that will feature a new security system and "strained silicon," a chipmaking method that speeds up transistors.

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Analysts have speculated that Dell could reduce profit margins in HP's lucrative printer business by cutting prices on both printers and printer cartridges. Analysts said a printer cartridge that retails for $35 may only cost $3 to make.

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A 350 MB installation CD of Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 is available for download free of charge from the Xbox Linux website. It corresponds to a standard installation of the (free) 3 CD version of the well-known Mandrake Linux distribution (http://www.mandrake.com/), which has only been released a week ago, so it contains the graphical environments Gnome and KDE, as well as software packages such as OpenOffice.org, XMMS and Mozilla. Since Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 is 100% compatible with Mandrake Linux 9, all additional packages from the official Mandrake Linux 9 installation CDs or the Mandrake website can be installed into Xbox Mandrake Linux.

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Toshiba hasn't yet released the configuration of the DVD-burning 5205, but the machine is expected to offer Toshiba's new mobile DVD-RW/R drive introduced last week, along with a larger 60GB hard drive and 32MB of extra video memory for a total of 64MB. The upgrades are expected to add about $500 to the price, bringing it to $2,699.

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Overall performance was on par with other Pentium 4 solutions although I did expect to see somewhat better scores. I believe the full potential of the P4PE goes unrealized at this time because features like Serial ATA are not able to be fully utilized along with Hyper-Threading performance going untested at this time until HT enabled processors come out of Intel. Still, DDR333 was needed on the Intel chipset platform and we did not think they were going to work miracles with it...as we are sure they are waiting for dual channel DDR to do that.

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Recently introduced as the first application of its wire-free electric power technology, the Wire-Free-Electricity Base is a flat surface which resembles a small desk blotter calendar. Once a MobileWise-enabled device is placed anywhere on the Base, it will be powered and charged, as if it is plugged to an electric outlet. The Wire-free Electricity Base's power delivery counterpart, the Wire-Free-Electricity Adapter, integrates into a mobile device, enabling the mobile device to draw power from the Wire-free Electricity Base.

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The newest variant, dubbed "Mighty," exploits the same Linux Web server flaw that other versions of the Slapper worm have used to slice through the security on vulnerable servers. Russian antivirus company Kaspersky Labs said in a release Friday that more than 1,600 servers had been infected by this latest variant as of Friday morning and are now controlled by the worm via special channels on the Internet relay chat system.

"In this way, 'Mighty' is able to leak out confidential information, corrupt important data, and also use infected machines to conduct distributed (denial of service) attacks and other nasty activities," Kaspersky Labs said in the advisory.

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The focus was a binary star system called XTE J1550-564. The star system lies within the Milky Way galaxy, but it is still 17,000 light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, at the rate of 186,282 miles per second.)

In this star system, a normal star orbits an older, collapsed star.

As the younger star's gases are pulled toward the black hole, they form a spinning disk, like water being sucked into a drain.

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While experienced security administrators will find the Top Twenty to be a valuable resource in their arsenal, the list is especially intended for those organizations that lack the resources to train, or those without technically-advanced security administrators. The individuals with responsibility for networks in those organizations often report that they have not corrected many of these flaws because they simply do not know which vulnerabilities are most dangerous, they are too busy to correct them all, or they do not know how to correct them safely. Traditionally, auditors and security managers have used vulnerability scanners to search for five hundred or a thousand or even two thousand very specific vulnerabilities, blunting the focus administrators need to ensure that all systems are protected against the most common attacks. When a system administrator receives a report showing thousands of vulnerabilities across hundreds of machines, he is often paralyzed.

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Brun developed a program for such a computer to solve extremely difficult mathematical problems, such as factoring very large numbers. At the start, the computer checks the wormhole. If in the future, the computer solved the equation, it sends the answer encoded in bursts of particles back in time through the wormhole.

The program essentially works because of steps "which are never actually executed," Brun said. Such a computer essentially works similarly to a familiar time travel paradox.

"A brilliant young inventor receives a message from her future self, telling her that she is going to invent a time machine, and giving her the details of its construction," Brun said. "She duly builds the machine and demonstrates it. When she is old and famous, she sends a message back to her younger self, telling her that she is going to invent a time machine, and giving her the details of its construction.

"This situation is self-consistent, but still very strange. The information on how to build a time machine appears out of nowhere," he explained.

While this may seem "quite bizarre," Brun said such computers "don't defy logic, only common sense."

What happens if the computer is approached with a problem that would take so long to solve, the wormhole or the universe would end first? Or what happens if the wormhole can only send information backward for a short amount of time? Steps in the program break such incredibly difficult problems into smaller and smaller issues, until each is reduced enough to be solved within the computer's lifetime, at which point the answer is sent back in time.

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In the last few months, the company has had difficulty in releasing new chips in volume. The Athlon XP 2400+, originally due in the second quarter, has only begun to appear in small volumes on the market. PCs featuring two new chips, the Athlon XP 2700+ and 2800+, won't come out until late November. "Clawhammer," a hotly anticipated chip for desktops, has been delayed until late in the first quarter or early in the second quarter.

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Version numbers, while in one sense mere labels, carry a message about the magnitude of improvements and changes from one version of software to the next. For that reason, corporate marketing departments often have a hand in choosing them. Sun Microsystems, for example, took its Solaris operating system from 2.5 to 2.6, but when it got to 2.7, it changed its naming convention, labeling the product Solaris 7 to signal it was an important new release.

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The first laptop, seized in the February 1995 raid that captured the notorious hacker, has been on the block since Sept. 26. The Toshiba Satellite computer comes with a 486DX processor, 4MB of RAM and a 200MB hard drive in addition to a copy of Windows 95 that has recently been installed. Bidding on the machine reached $9,200 by midday Wednesday.