NEWS, ETC.
February 20001
2/28 Early
Adaptors Put Intel's Itanium Chip Through Its Paces. Webcasts/slides
of the Intel Developer Forum Conference are here.
2/28 IBM
Ups Clock Speed of Embedded PowerPCs
2/28 Amazon
Cranks-up Music Downloads. Offering free songs from hundreds
of artists, such as Paul Simon and Pearl Jam.
2/28 Intel
to Ease Into DDR Memory in 2001. Plans to introduce DDR DRAM
support for the Pentium 4 during the first quarter of 2001.
2/28 First
Peer-to-Peer Virus Hits. Named W32/Gnuman.worm, or by the alias
Mandragore, attacked users of the Gnutella file-sharing service. The
malicious file poses as an ordinary, requested media file.
2/27 Record
Your Own DVD Movies Without a New Computer. Pioneer
plans to start selling around May an add-on version of its drive that
can play and record both DVDs and CDs. DVDs recorded using the drive
can be played back on most consumer DVD players.
2/27 NVIDIA
Introduces GeForce3 for the PC.
2/27 Intel
demonstrates Infiniband Fabric at IDF. An Infiniband fabric is
a central network of connections between servers and remote networking
and storage devices within an Internet data center. Some background
info is here.
2/27 Microsoft
Plans Public Preview Of IE 6.0. Upgraded Internet browser that
offers new Explorer Bars, improved privacy support, virus protection
in Outlook Express and a host of new additions to the Internet options
is expected to be detailed Wednesday.
2/27 Intel
Phasing Out 900-MHz Pentium III
2/26 The
dark side of P2P: Higher access fees? Peer-to-peer computing,
which lets networked computers act as both clients and servers, is the
next great innovation on the Internet... But this could lead to higher
ISP fees.
2/26 Micron
Announces Chipset Development Supporting DDR Memory and Pentium III Server
Processor
2/26 Via
Technologies Uses Rebate to Spur DDR Demand
2/26 Seagate,
Intel and APT Reveal First Serial ATA 1.0-Compliant Prototype Disc Drive
2/26 Germans
to Get Net Access From Power Outlets.
2/25 Out web server in now running
on new hardware... [Feb 25, 2001, 7:25 pm] vuae Upgrade Completed. We
have completed the drive and system upgrade of vuae (www93). It is now
an Athlon Thunderbird 1000 MHz with 256Mb of RAM and a 30 GB hard drive.
Total downtime was about 10 minutes
2/23 Digital
Camera Vendors Offer Peek at Spring Line. Sony,
Canon, Fujifilm highlight new models with lower prices, more storage,
and video functions.
2/23 AMD
to Cut Prices on March 5th.
2/23 IBM
Pulls Digital Tagging Plan. IBM
has withdrawn a proposed method of digitally tagging content to prevent
piracy of copyrighted material.
2/23 DSL
Technology Just Got Faster
2/23 Digital
Audio Players to Add Speech Recognition Features. Speech
recognition will be used for command and control features to navigate
through the thousands of songs that can be stored on digital audio players
equipped with hard-disk drives. Play it
again, Sam...
2/23 Intel's
'McKinley' Processor Grabs Spotlight.
Intel has completed the design of its "McKinley" processor
for servers, according to sources--a manufacturing milestone that will
likely be one of the highlights of the Intel Developer Forum next week.
2/23 Vishay
Offers to Acquire all Shares of Siliconix
2/22 Compaq
now Offering DDR Athlon Presario
2/22 Lasers
Beat Bandwidth Bottleneck. New
laser technology allows high-speed Internet access and corporate network
connections to be beamed to business customers through an office window.
2/22 IDE
RAID - Is There A Benefit?
2/22
2/21 Game
Giants Raise the Score with Networked Arcades. Sony
will join forces with two Japanese arcade game operators, Sega Corp.
and Namco Ltd., to build an advanced version of PlayStation2 to be used
in game centers.
2/21 Engineering
Spirit Makes Valley a Hotspot for Living off the Power Grid. He
never receives a PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) bill.
2/21 New
York Times To Reproduce Full Print Versions Online
2/21 Napster
Offers $1 Billion to Settle Lawsuit. More here.
2/21 Chips
are Down for Intel. Chip
giant is watching the pennies as tech downturn continues. I
also hear of CPU price cuts for both Intel and AMD during the second
week of March.
2/20 The
Key Vanishes: Scientist Outlines Unbreakable Code.
2/20 Internet
Use Soars. 16 million new
users went online in the past six months.
2/19 DDR
SDRAM Comparison - Is it Worth Waiting For?
2/19 ASUS
Ships the First Socket 370 DDR Motherboard
2/19 New
Chips Aimed at Faster Cell Phones.
More here.
2/19 Pentium
4 Picks-up Steam with Chipset Deals
2/19 Chip
News At Platform Conference. Palomino
and Duron processors will include an on-die temperature sensor, like
the Pentium 4...
2/16 Dell
Continues Cheap PC Strategy
2/16 For
sale: Information on 6 Million Domain Name Owners Bought
a domain name lately? Network Solutions is selling its master address
book of Internet domains, a treasure trove for marketers but a potential
privacy boondoggle. We need an injunction
and then a law with teeth ASAP...
2/16 Napster
Says Developing New Member-Based Business Model
2/16 Intel
licenses Pentium 4 Chipset Rights to Acer Laboratories
2/16 To
Protect and Self-Serve. Will
we see hard disks with copy-preventing codes?
2/16 Lighter
Fuel. A shuttle that makes
its own fuel could take off from your local airport. Well, not
quite, but it is an innovative (certainly cool) idea.
2/15 AMD's
HyperTransport: Souping up chip speed from the inside. More
on HyperTransport.
2/15 Hubble. Very
much worth a visit.
2/15 Dean
Kent's February 2001 Industry Update. Several
manufacturers assuming decent Q2, due sales of DDR based products...
AMD distributors expect the 1.2GHz Athlon to be available on February
15th... Indications point to a rollout of DDR parts across
the board at the end of February, or early March... Glut of SDRAM chips
causing prices to drop to the lowest levels in history...
2/15 3Com
Surpasses One Million Cable Modem Mark
2/15 Vishay:
2000 Results Were Wow. But
business is slowing right now.
2/15 Blodget:
Online Ad Market Stabilizing. I
hope so; it's pretty lean here.
2/15 IBM's
Portfolio-Style PC Due Out Next Week. Product
resembles a leather-bound portfolio with a 10.4-inch TFT screen on
the left side and a ThinkScribe digital notepaper, about the size of
a standard letter-sized piece of paper, on the right.
2/15 Chip
Designers' Dream Team: 10GHz or Bust. ...machine
designs that can easily churn out microprocessors running at 10GHz
or faster.
2/15 Gigabyte
Announces 7VTX DDR Athlon Motherboard with VIA KT266 Chipset. 200/266MHz
FSB, Creative 4-channel sound...
2/14 AMD
Athlon Processors with 266 Mhz FSB Now Available in the U.S.
2/14 Napster
Battle Shifts to Capitol Hill
2/14 Dutch
Hacker Arrested for Anna Kournikova Virus
2/14 Peer-to-Peer
Moves Beyond Napster. In
simple terms, P2P (peer-to-peer) describes a model of computing in which
computers talk to each other over the Web in order to share information
and computing resources.
2/14 A
Hitchhiker's Guide To The Genome. Mapping
the Human Genome on the Web. A
draft of the human DNA sequence is now accessible at Human
Genome (interesting stuff).
2/14 Toy
Makers Survive Chip Shortage, Gadgets Thrive
2/14 Broadcom,
Cisco, Nvidia, Sun Among First Adopters of AMD's HyperTransport. HyperTransport,
formerly code-named Lightning Data Transport (LDT), is a technology
that moves information faster. With a peak data transfer rate of 6.4GB
per second possible, it is designed to enable the chips inside of PCs,
networking, and communications devices to communicate with each other
up to 24 times faster than with existing technologies. More here. And here.
2/14 Top
5 PC Card Games
2/13 Virus
Spreading Quickly Via Unprotected Users. The
Anna Kournikova visual basic script (VBS) virus, which was first reported
around midday in the US Monday, is spreading quickly.
2/13 Touch
Down! Against the odds, NASA
completes the first landing on an asteroid.
2/13 Study:
Paper Voting Better Than Using Computers.
2/13 Tiny
Bots for Big Tasks. Robots
can go places humans can't, especially when they fit in a space the size
of a quarter.
2/13 A
Sharper View of the Stars. A
new generation of optical interferometers is letting astronomers study
stars in 100 times finer detail than is possible with the Hubble Space
Telescope.
2/12 Genes
that Count. The first analysis
of the entire sequence of human DNA reveals we have far fewer genes than
expected. Humans have as few as 300 more genes than a mouse and only
twice the genes of a fruit fly. Our ancestors appear to have inherited
223 genes directly from bacteria. The finding deals a heavy blow to genetic
determinism, the idea that many aspects of a person's life are controlled
by their genes. More here.
2/12 From
Russia with love? Kournikova virus smashes Net.
A virus posing as a photo of Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova spreads
aggressively...
2/12 Paper
Maps in a Digital Age
2/12 Amazon
Opens Software Download Store
2/12 Court
Rules Napster Infringed But Won't Lift Stay. Napster
loses battle, is still alive. More here.
2/12 Peer-to-Peer
Boosts Web Services. XDegrees will
preview a new Internet service that allows applications and business
processes to automatically locate one another on the Web.
2/12 Future
of Memory Market Hangs on Rambus Trials. Rambus
will square-off in court this week against Micron and Hyundai.
2/12 Intel
Speeds up Launch of Brookdale DDR Chipset. Pulling
in the launch date from the first quarter of 2002 to October of this
year.
2/12 Windows
XP Beta 2 To Ship On Feb 28. Interesting
details in this story. More here.
2/12 VIA
CEO Interview with Business Week. In
the future, the chipset and the graphics and the processor will integrate.
2/9 Spacecraft
Visible to Naked Eye Tonight. More here. Ham
Radio Section Now Online. With
the first full-time occupants onboard the International Space Station,
amateur radio enthusiasts will have the opportunity to communicate
with the Expedition One crew and future crews. Shuttle
Delivers New Lab to Space Station.
2/9 Love
and Rockets. Around
Valentine's Day, a spacecraft will land on Eros, an asteroid named
after the Greek god of love, to snap photos of the terrain that can
be seen online.
2/9 Prominent
Analyst Takes Aim At Microsoft's .NET. "The
way Microsoft has presented this .NET initiative is complex and has
left people bewildered." I thought
I was the only one who was puzzled by the .net propaganda.
2/9 Is
American Express crazy- Free Net access?
2/9 HP
To Replace Some Power Distribution Units. Electric
shock could occur through contact with rack system.
2/9 Cut
in China-US Fiber-optic Cable Affects 5 Million Users
2/9 Prototype
Tips Sony's Hand on Organic EL Displays. May
eventually replace TV picture tubes. Related
story.
2/9 Canadians'
Test 'Disk Drive' is 5,000 Miles In Diameter
2/9 AMD-
New CPU Price Drop Planned
2/9 Cookie
Monster: Gnutella May Expose Users to Data Theft. Surfers
trading music, etc. over one of the Web's most popular file-swapping
networks are sharing much more: sensitive data files that could expose
them to identity theft.
2/8 Modules
for DDR PC2100 Expected Soon
2/8 266
MHz FSB Athlons Will Flood the Market Soon.
2/8 Can
Chip Design Get Faster? Can
100 million transistors in a 100-square-millimeter die be designed in
100 days?
2/8 Which
Country has the Most Virus Infected PCs? One
in five PCs has a virus! Click here for
the map.
2/8 Where's
Intel's "McKinley"?
2/8 DDR Memory Summit Presentation. The
DDR Summit was a gathering of industry leaders along with the display of
over 40 DDR product demonstrations. It looks like DDR memory is
finally about to start happening big time. I have culled-out the more
interesting slides from the various presentations. You can view them here.
2/7 Sick
of crap DSL? Start your own service! Even
governments can do it better... in some places...
2/7 Star
date: The minimum age of the
Universe is calculated using a new radiometric approach.
2/7 DOS
Fix for Windows Millennium. A
Patch which Adds DOS Capabilities to Win Me. I haven't tried it yet.
2/7 Verizon
to Build Out Global Broadband Network
2/7 Taxpayer
PINs Being Rejected. About
half of the tax returns H&R Block submitted electronically with PINs
since Jan. 15 have been rejected.
2/7 Motorola
Set to Lead Industry with 256k MRAM Universal Memory Chip
2/7 Vishay
Projects Flat Sales for 2001
2/7 Sony
Unveils Beastly Graphics Engine. The
device contains 256-Mbit of on-chip embedded DRAM, or eight times more
than the current Graphics Synthesizer. The DRAM and wide 2,000-bit internal
buses can deliver 48 gigabytes per second of bandwidth.
2/7 Memory
Makers Tout DDR at Via Gathering. Major
DRAM suppliers Micron, Samsung and Hyundai have indicated that this is
the year volume production of DDR DRAMs will take off. Bringing DDR DRAM
pricing in line with SDRAM — expected to happen by the second half.
2/7 Motorola-AMD
Partnership Picks Applied. More
copper...
2/7 High-tech
Copper Seen at Heart of New Microchips. New
technology from IBM speeds up chip operations 25 to 30 times.
2/6 Lovebug
Warning for Valentine's Day
2/6 PC2100
DDR SDRAM Getting Cheaper
2/6 Get
Serious About Security. ISPs
are demanding that IT shops get their security policies in order--and
companies are complying.
2/6 Microsoft
Moving Into Embedded Chips
2/6 Micron
Sees Further Decline in Memory Prices
2/6 A
New Business Cycle. Unemployment's
up, confidence is down, the economy seems headed for a tailspin. But
this time it's different.
2/5 AMD
Server Processors Could Make Prices Lower.
2/5 Intel
Sees Roadblocks Ahead: Heat, Power. "...
we think Moore's Law will take us to well in excess of a billion transistors
by 2010," Gelsinger said. "However, to do so and to stay on
that track and not be delivering nuclear reactors, we're going to have
to address this limitation of power and power efficiency..." More
here. Still
more here.
2/5 Final
Destiny. The scientific centrepiece
of the International Space Station is set for launch on Wednesday.
2/5 Widespread
E-mail Glitch Allows Spying. "E-mail
wiretapping" bug that enables users to spy on other users' e-mail.
2/5 AMD
News Updates
2/5 VIA
vs Videocard Troubleshooting Guide
2/5 Get
HDTV on Your PC. New tech brings high definition broadcast
to your desktop.
2/5 32MB
on 1.44MB Floppy Disks...
2/5 Microsoft
Rebrands Products with 'Experience' Theme. Windows
XP, previously code-named ``Whistler,'' will be launched in the second
half of 2001. Press
Release. To reduces
confusion, I wish they would just use plain old version numbers. Hmmm, Win
eXPlicitive...
2/5 Boot
of your NIC? VenturCom Introduces Boot-NIC
2/5 Technical
Hurdles Slow DDR SDRAM's Debut. NICs
with boot ROMs have been around for a long time. Apparently, this
one will extend the functions that can be done with diskless workstations.
2/2 Computer
Prank Slips Past Security Experts. A
Trojan horse posing as a security tool did just that Wednesday night,
when experts at SecurityFocus.com -- which moderates the popular Bugtraq
security list -- sent the mildly malicious code to the list's 37,000
users.
2/2 Microsoft
Reports E-Mail Delays. Employees
say outgoing e-mail from company accounts took as long as four days to
reach recipients last week.
2/2 Strike
Up the Broadband. The collapse
of several free ISPs didn't stop consumer cravings for fast Net access
in 2000, studies show, with cable proving more popular than DSL.
2/2 Oracle,
VA Linux Initiatives Change The Linux Game. VA Linux Systems
has teamed with Oracle and other Linux vendors to further the commercial
agenda of Linux.
2/1 U.S.
Manufacturing Slumps Into Recession. U.S.
manufacturing activity contracted for a sixth straight month in January,
signaling that a sector accounting for one-fifth of the world's largest
economy is in recession... You may have
to setup a login on the NY times, but it is free and well worth the little
effort that it takes.
2/1 Electrical
Signals from Human Cells Coupled to Silicon Chips. "Having
solved the principal problem of coupling cellular electrical signals
with silicon electrical signals, we can now proceed to develop cellular
biosensors."
2/1 Election
Reform Act Raises Stakes. Lawmakers
want to spend more than half a billion dollars on new voting machines
and create a federal commission.
2/1 Trojan
Horse Virus Targets AOL Subscribers
2/1 New
Java Silicon Is 55 Times Faster Than Software
2/1 Motherboard
Manufacturers Indicate Demand is Strong for AMD Processors. Stock
climbs.
2/1 IBM
Chief Says Linux Rready for Mission-critical Apps
2/1 Warp
Up Your Workday with Turbo Speed. "This
handy, global file-management package renders everything from your
hard drive to remote FTP servers to your favorite sites a mere mouse
click away..."
January
2001
2000
1998 & 1999
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