News

Quote

The alliance shows what companies can--and often will--do to push mainstream acceptance for new technologies. Linux, a clone of the venerable Unix operating system, has emerged in recent years as a viable contender to Windows and Unix in some markets but still isn't as well established. The Itanium line, meanwhile, is a completely different design from other Intel processors and software companies are just beginning to support it.

Quote

None of these companies has fully committed to adopting these sort of transistors for future chips, partly because engineers can still squeeze additional performance out of existing transistors. Other alternatives also exist, Marcyk said. Nonetheless, the early research is promising, he added. Tri-gate transistors can also be made on the existing lithographic processes, which means no breakthrough in manufacturing technology is necessary.

Quote

The bug reveals the URL of the page someone is viewing to the Web server of the site last visited. This allows a Web server to track where people go after they leave the site, even if the next Web address comes from a bookmark or is manually typed into the browser.

Quote

The software will be built into a forthcoming new version of Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net development tool package, allowing programmers for the first time to use the same tools to build software for PCs, servers and mobile devices. Previously, programmers needed to buy or download a separate development tool package for mobile devices. The more general .Net Framework for software that runs on PCs and servers is already built into Visual Studio.Net.

Quote

The campaign will tout, among other things, AMD's approach to building 64-bit processors, which can increase computing performance by boosting a computer's memory capacity over that of a 32-bit chip like an Athlon or a Pentium. Companies such as IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems offer dedicated 64-bit chips for their high-end server gear.

Quote

Mass storage media are currently pushing the envelope of parallel interfaces. Cable properties, connector legacies and signaling protocols have reached a point where trading off one potential problem spot against another has left no more room for technical and design navigation. Cross talk, ground bouncing and signal ringing, along with too tight timing windows have left no margins for improvement beyond ATA PI-7 (UATA-133) and, thus, the industry is confronted with the paradox that the actual storage media such as hard disk drives outperform the connectivity. Other issues like lack of hot swap capability and difficult trace routing on the PCB have done the rest to call for a radical change of guards. Within the next few weeks / months, we will experience a somewhat radical transition from parallel to serial ATA that will deliver higher speed, improved reliability and easier installation along with the introduction of some other nifty features like tagged command queuing to the commodity drive world.

Quote

IDF is an industry training event for Intel, with much of the time devoted to classes, some of which are highly technical sessions of interest only to specialists in the area. It is also a marketing event where hardware and software companies show off their latest efforts incorporating the newest technologies. From a big picture perspective, it is also one of the many ways by which Intel tries to maintain its hegemony in the computing world.

Quote

While benchmarking our test platforms with Sysmark, we got some unexpected results that we are still investigating more in detail. It seems the bigger cache and higher FSB of the Barton severly skew the results of this popular benchmark. We suspect AMD improved the Barton core specifically to perform better on this benchmark. Therefore, we refrain from publishing our results until AMD can give us a a good explication why the Barton outperforms the P4 on this test.

Quote

The worm targets Apache Web server installations on a variety of Linux systems, including those from Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake and Slackware. By exploiting a security hole in the Apache OpenSSL module that enables a widely used encrypted communications service known as the secure socket layer, the worm can take copy itself to new servers.

Quote

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

Quote

We have a Pentium 4 in the lab that is completely unlocked. This makes it possible to choose a multiplier of any value as desired (higher and lower values), as long as you make the necessary manipulations to the core voltage on the motherboard. Our source had originally asked us not to publish a photo of this special CPU. Now the situation has changed - we will show a photo of the CPU, but we still refrain from naming our source. By the way, the results of a Pentium 4 3.6 GHz (at standard FSB clock) are still valid.

Quote

The desktop version of Hammer, which is code-named Clawhammer and will be marketed under the Athlon brand name, will ship to PC manufacturers in the first quarter of 2003 and will hit store shelves toward the end of that quarter or at the beginning of the next, said John Crank, senior branding associate at AMD.

Quote

Prior to its acquisition of Compaq Computer, HP sold directly only to its largest business customers, but the company is abandoning that policy. The company said it will now sell most products directly to all businesses, as well as through resellers.

Quote

The first generation of the Intel gadget will let people view and play PC-stored image and audio files on a television or stereo receiver, said Vogel. A subsequent generation will also permit the transfer of video. By offering video and photo capabilities, the Intel adapter serves up more bang for the buck than current devices, which mainly store and play music.

Quote

They are expected to be popular in East Asia, where character-based languages such as Chinese and Japanese are awkward to type on traditional keyboards, said Olivier Richard, a Microsoft spokesman based in Hong Kong.

Quote

Of course if you are looking at building a system and running at a 200FSB, this would be a perfect match for some high quality DDR400 sticks that could reach CAS 2 and 1T Command settings. We tried pushing the bus higher than 200MHz but ran into PCI speed problems as well as some apparent AGP issues. If you do not want to unlock your CPU, we ran some tests at 166*15 as well, giving us 2.5GHz and of course the CPU ran just as stable.

Quote

But as we've pointed out on numerous occasions, controlled computing is not at all about protecting you and your stuff, but very much about protecting digital content from you. The software and media industries are convinced that you're a criminal, and they're determined to control in minute detail what you can do with content you've paid for, by controlling minutely what you can do with your machine.

You've bought some music and you want to listen to the MP3 on your computer and the CD on your DiscMan. Forget it. There will be no more ripping and burning except under conditions of which the labels approve, like if you pay a surcharge, say. This technology is just too well suited to industry extortion for that not to be a significant driving force behind it.

Here's a simple example: let's say studio X sells you a CD for $15.00 with no copying permitted. Perhaps for $20.00 they'll sell you almost the same CD, but one which can be copied twice (allowing for the accidental loss of the copied content); but of course you won't be able to duplicate the data files. Your trustworthy set-top box masquerading as a computer simply won't do it, and the bloody CD won't copy to an untrusted machine at all.

Quote

Dual-core designs could help Intel lower Itanium's price tag enough so that it becomes appropriate for cost-conscious markets, where server sales are currently high, said Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood.
"Right now, Itanium is stuck in a relatively low-volume niche. The challenge for Intel is how to migrate Itanium down into all but maybe the $2,000-to-$3,000 price bands," Brookwood said. "A dual-core chip could help them do that."

Quote

Corel's Grafigo graphics software is scheduled to debut with the first Tablet PC devices Nov. 7. Pricing has not been set, but a Corel representative said the application, which handles graphics creation, viewing and editing, may be offered as a free download.

Quote

More significantly, though, it allows computer manufacturers and consumers to switch off and conceal Microsoft's e-mail, Web browser, Internet audio-video player and other software programs. That gives computer vendors and users the option to select rival software -- instead of Microsoft applications -- as default programs.

The changes are part of a settlement reached by Microsoft, the Justice Department and nine states to resolve the government's landmark antitrust litigation against the software giant, which was found to have used illegal means against its competition.