NEWS, ETC.
July 2001

7/31 Maxtor Announces Release of Ultra ATA/133 Hard Drive Interface Specification

7/31 NEC To Withdraw From DRAM Business By 2004. And will cut another 4,000 jobs.

7/31 Kodak Unhappy with Microsoft's Digital Photo Plans. Kodak contends that Microsoft's operating system unfairly promotes its own digital photo software and photo finishing Web site over competing applications and services from Kodak. MS Press Release: Photo Industry and Windows XP Help Users "XPerience" the Magic of Photos.

7/31 AMD's Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany Ships 10 Millionth AMD Athlon Processor Die. 130-nanometer and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process technologies are on track.

7/31 Researchers Strive for Computer-on-a-chip With MEMS Memory. A microelectromechanical memory now in development could eventually put an entire computer system — CPU, RAM, I/O and hard drive — on a single chip.

7/31 Microsoft, AOL Jousting in Digital Photography Arena. While Microsoft and friends were touting XP's imaging features as consumer-friendly and easy-to-use, one of those companies -- namely Kodak -- was also helping Microsoft rival America Online launch the new version of its "You've Got Pictures" service.

7/31 Experts: Justice Department Pressing Ahead on Microsoft Case

7/31 AT&T Unveils Voice Re-Creation Technology. The "most human-sounding" speech system in the world, and can re-create any voice.

7/31 Dell Releases One-processor Server for Small Businesses. Starts at $699.

7/31 The HyperTransport Revolution.  An easy to understand introduction to AMD's HyperTransport.

7/31 Intel Content to Let Rambus Sink or Swim

7/30 Microsoft Wants MSN Icons on Some PCs. 'What the previous announcement, allowing computer makers to remove on-screen links to its browser and allow them to post links to competing software, didn't say was that computer makers who choose to post competing desktop icons will be required to include an icon linking users to MSN as well.'

7/30 New Software, New Scrutiny for Microsoft. Federal and state regulators are again considering legal action to force Microsoft to alter a new operating system... You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

7/30 Microsoft May Block Deal Between AOL and AT&T. Microsoft may financial muscle to prevent AOL Time Warner from buying AT&T's cable business.

7/30 ISPs Reluctant to Offer Relief for Dial-up Users.  ISP reluctant to spend the money for the V.92 standard,  ratified in November 2000. V.92 offers users faster connects (about 10 seconds), faster upstream speeds (48 vs. 33.6 Kbit/sec), and Internet call waiting, the ability to put a data connection on hold to answer a voice call.

7/30 Intel Sees Computer Pick-Up, Telecoms Depressed. "...We anticipate the normal seasonal uptick in the second half -- the back-to-school portion and then the holiday buying season at the end of the year," Barrett told CNN.  Inventories down.

7/30 Intel Ups Ante in Notebook Race. Launch event Monday morning in San Francisco to discuss the chips in detail.

7/30 FBI, CERT, Others Alert Reawakening of Code Red Worm. Likely to start spreading again at 8 p.m. EDT Tuesday (7/31/01) and that it has mutated so that it "may be even more dangerous."

7/30 Flextronics Breaks the Mold. There are skeptics, but the company's admirers see its work on Microsoft's X-Box as the future of contract manufacturing.

7/29 Windows XP Release Candidate 2 (RCP2):  Microsoft E-Mail: "Customers who registered for the WPP [Windows XP Preview Program] prior to 7:00 p.m. on July 25 will begin receiving RC2 notification e-mails from Conxion on Tuesday, July 31. Notifications will continue in waves through the end of the week and will be processed according to the date you registered for the program. Customers who registered for the WPP after 7:00 p.m. on July 25 will begin receiving their notifications on or after August 3.  Beginning August 6, we hope to process new WPP orders within three business days."

7/29 (updated) The Sircam Virus/Worm is for Real!  This is a nasty virus that is spreading all over the Internet and can destroy your data.  My inbox continues to receive infected mail and many repeated mailings from people who probably do not realize the messages are being sent and do not know that the virus is randomly choosing files from their computer and sending them to the world.  I have tried to contact the originators of these messages, but many have full mailboxes or invalid E-Mail addresses.  I have tried to trace the E-Mail from those people and to contact their ISPs, but have not been successful in all cases.  Please update your anti-virus program and scan your mailbox!  The most recent McAfee, which I use, works well.  Some versions of Norton have problems and need another update, which I understand is now available.  Click here for more information.

7/28 Thank you President George W. Bush!!!  Our income tax rebate arrived in the mail today.  Larry and Claudia Byard

7/28 You Have Not Seen the Last of SirCam. Antivirus experts expect the SirCam virus to take a breather over the weekend, but it may pick up new steam as vacationing Europeans return to work Monday.

7/28 Semiconductor Alert! (July 23-27). Commentary & analysis of week's chip news.  "I'm really getting bummed out by all the disturbing trends now battering the semiconductor industry. So I've been looking harder for a few rays of hope that may have been buried by the current landslide of layoffs, and lower sequential sales and profits. And I found a handful..."  ...executives from the big Japanese chip maker[s?] believe that both its SDRAMs and double-data-rate SDRAMs will leave Rambus DRAMs in the dust next year... "I worry about Hewlett-Packard..."

7/28 Windows XP RC2 Takes Off.  Released to beta-testers at midnight last night. Microsoft Moves Ahead With Windows XP.

7/28 Earlier Orders From OEMs Causes DDR Memory Shortage at Micron. Most market observers believe that OEM system manufacturers have begun to place large DDR orders to Micron because they have new product lines to be released around the end of the third quarter. Micron Confirms DDR Memory Shortage.

7/28 PCI SIG Close to Adopting 3GIO. The PCI Special Interest Group (SIG) is expected to vote Friday (July 27) to formally adopt the 3GIO proposal from Intel Corp. and its partners as the next generation of its desktop I/O technology... While the timing of the two announcements suggests a bus war, some analysts believe that HyperTransport will be the preferred bus solution in the near term, while volume silicon supporting 3GIO may be years away — more toward the end of the decade.

7/28 Industry Facing Another I/O Bus Collision

7/28 VIA to Support PC2700 DDR SDRAM in First Half of 2002. Memory bus at 333MHz (166MHz DDR).

7/27 U.S. Economy Slows To A Crawl. Grew 0.7% in 2nd quarter; deep drop in spending on new plants and equipment; worst performance In eight years.

7/27 Sircam Virus Eludes Symantec Anti-virus Scanning Update. "The uniqueness of Sircam is something we haven't seen before -- it supplies its own SMTP server." said Miller. "It doesn't use the existing SMTP infrastructure, so it eluded some of our detections."

7/27 Motherboard Makers Look to Phase-out Rambus. Most motherboard manufacturers are expecting boards based on Intel's upcoming 845 chipset, code-named "Brookdale", to quickly account for most of their Pentium 4 motherboard output, relegating the Rambus-based 850 chipset to a niche. Meanwhile, the  the rest of the world will be shifting to DDR memory.

7/27 Intel Aims Pentium 4 at the Masses.  The forthcoming 845 chipset--which will allow the Pentium 4 to work with standard SDRAM memory rather than with expensive Rambus--combined with further processor price cuts should drive down Pentium 4 PCs to prices that will appeal to average consumers.

7/27 Intel Fights Back against AMD and VIA With in the Low-end Processor Market.  512 L2 Cache'... 0.13-micron in 2002... Celeron, with the Coppermine-T core and clock speed of 1.2GHz, will be priced at US$103.

7/27 Intel to Launch Enhanced Mobile Pentium III CPUs on Monday. 1.13 GHz, 0.13 micron Tualatin. Report includes prices.

7/27 Compaq to Make Windows XP Desktop AOL's Turf. AOL will be the first Internet service consumers see when they start a new Compaq PC running Windows XP. MSN won't be part of the computer's startup sequence.

7/27 Windows XP Nears the Finish Line. Windows XP Release Candidate 2 will be released to PC manufacturers  tomorrow.

7/27 Justice Department Asks Court to Deny Microsoft Rehearing

7/27 Gates: Full Steam Ahead for Microsoft. Gates said the company will release Hailstorm on schedule despite the recent resistance from privacy concerns.

7/27 Sneak Preview of the MSI MS-6373 nForce 420 Athlon Motherboard:
ATX, 266 FSB (Socket A)
5 PCI, 1 AGP, 1 CNR, 3 DDR, TV-Out, SPDIF out
PC2PC, D-LED, Fuzzy Logic 3, Live BIOS

7/27/01 Platform Conference Reports... Platform Conference "Beta report": HyperTransport error correction... Everyone and their brother was displaying nForce... VIA Hardware's Report...  AMD Hammer (K8) processors will integrate their own memory controller, and use HyperTransport to communicate with an AGP8X and/or PCI-X tunnel, as well as a Southbridge. This allows each processor in a SMP system to have its own, dedicated bus to memory, as well as a high-speed bus to AGP and PCI peripherals. First time NVidia demonstrated nForce's 6 channel sound, since they just recently got the audio processor to work in anything but AC97 software mode--truly impressive... Bunches of photos of motherboards, etc.

7/26 7/26 AMD's HyperTransport: No Actual Competition.  '...among potential standards for connecting chips within a computer...  HyperTransport is here today and products are shipping now.  Its performance beats that of any alternative. It is scalable--simply adding more bits can make it faster--and simple...'

7/26 nVIDIA Expects nFORCE Motherboard Chipset to be 10% of Its Sales. He expected full production of the new nForce chipset to hit early in 2002.  A disappointing delay.  Vaporware?  Or, is it a problem with Microsoft and the Xbox introduction?

7/26 Copper Proposals Tout Ethernet Versus ADSL. 802.3ah task force is looking at technology to combat the vagaries of DSL connections... 100BaseCu can shift a call to different frequencies to avoid crosstalk and operates in burst mode, transmitting only when there's data to be sent, to get more bandwidth out of an Ethernet connection across old twisted-pair cables.

7/26 VIA Teams-up With Motherboard and Memory Makers to Clear-out DDR Inventories. Memory and chipset vendors have considerable inventories. VIA has recently teamed up with Micron  and Samsung and some motherboard makers to decrease the inventory of DDR chipsets, memory, and motherboards.

7/26 World's Fastest Disc Drive From Seagate Runs Compaq Servers.
" Revolutionary 15K RPM Cheetah X15 36LP adopted first by Compaq; delivers unrivaled performance and reliability for business-critical servers."

7/26 HP Warns of Revenue Decline, Will Cut 6,000 Jobs. Consumer business, the main culprit, was down 24% the last quarter.

7/26 Zing In The Flavor Helps Chili Pepper Plants Survive

7/26 Dell Turns to Networking as PC Sales Slump. Dell Computer hopes to use its clout in the computer hardware market to battle the likes of 3Com and Cisco Systems in the networking business, but it follows other PC makers that have had only moderate success with similar strategies.

7/26 And the Webby Award Goes to ... Microsoft's Windows Update Web Site. The Windows Update site was voted best among five Web sites nominated for the year's most distinguished technical achievement on the World Wide Web. Webby Awards.

7/26 AOL Targets PC Desktops. AOL would pay PC manufacturers about $35 for each customer they nab.

7/26 Hitachi To Withdraw from CRT Monitor Making and Might Sell Business

7/26 Compaq Sees Q3 Sales Down

7/25 Microsoft Refutes Privacy Concerns Surrounding XP.

7/25 Sircam Virus Removal Tool. Deletes the files infected with the Sircam worm and removes the changes that were made to a computer by the virus.

7/25 Intel to Phase-Out Rambus Discounts. Direct Rambus DRAM is now cheap enough that Intel no longer has to subsidize sales, but rival DDR is still gaining ground.

7/25 Windows XP Feels the Heat. A privacy group joins those putting pressure on, and possibly delaying, new OS. EPIC to Protest Passport Bundling with Windows XP.

7/25 Cutting Through the Linux Hype.  If analysts' numbers are correct, Linux is steadily gaining a foothold in the server market, bolstered by recent "Linux-friendly" moves from IBM, Sun, Oracle and SAP.

7/25 Downturn Shakes Up Top 10 Chip Suppliers

7/25 Plug.In: Peer-To-Peer Shows Mainstream Potential

7/25 'Farsite' To Offer Fail-Safe File Storage. "Farsite," a fail-safe storage technology being developed at Microsoft, is a distributed system designed to run on multiple machines. Running entirely on client computers, it requires neither a central server nor a cluster of servers.

7/25 Amazon 'Leaves Door Open' for Buyout by AOL

7/24 Future's Big Sellers Rely on Tiny Science. A computer chip many times as powerful as the ones today, but less expensive and 1,000 times smaller. The transistors that power the chip would be the size of a molecule...

7/24 Online Music Spending to Grow to $6.2 Billion in 2006.

7/24 AMD, API Networks, Apple, Cisco, NVIDIA, PMC-Sierra, SUN Microsystems, Transmeta Form HyperTransport™ Technology Consortium. More than 180 companies throughout the computer and communications industries have been engaged with AMD in working with the HyperTransport technology.

7/24 Intel and AMD Lock Horns in 0.13-micron Battle. Intel expected to launch the 0.13-micron version of the Pentium III Tualatin as early as next week and is counting heavily on moving the Pentium 4 to a 0.13-micron design rule as fast as possible to cut high production costs. AMD is planning a fourth-quarter migration to 0.13-micron processing and moving the Athlon 4 directly to 0.13-micron geometry.  I keep hearing about the cost advantages of the Athlon's smaller die size, but absolutely nothing about the disadvantage, I would fathom, in the speed race that the decreased thermal transfer area must impose--perhaps the reason for AMD's scramble to implement SOI and pure silicon.

7/24 Microsoft Faces Congressional Hearing. To include examination of Microsoft’s Windows XP. Senator Demands Changes in Microsoft's Windows XP.  'Government should block the October release of Windows XP unless...' ``It appears to me that Microsoft intends to maximize its monopolistic power, using XP as a platform to enter new lines of business while encumbering competitors,'' Schumer said.

7/24 Microsoft Wrestles With New OS. Plans to have the operating system code-named Blackcomb succeed Windows XP, instead adding a new release to its product rollout strategy currently code-named Longhorn. First true ".Net version" of Windows?

7/24 Orbital Robot Runs Linux. The robot is a six-inch sphere inspired by the sparring droid that Luke Skywalker fights in the movie "Star Wars", but NASA engineers say its functionality is closer to the "tricorder" tool used in Star Trek...

7/24 Lite-On IT to Start Shipping 24x CD-RW Drives in August.  Writes CD-R's at 24X.

7/23 SirCam Clogs Mailboxes, Spreads Secrets. The SirCam worm continued to gain momentum, carrying with it the potential to slow servers and send company secrets.  SirCam sends a random file from the infected computer, potentially sending confidential business data or embarrassing personal information along with the virus... memos, resumes, job listings, credit card numbers...The subject line matches the name of the file being sent...

7/23 (updated) The Sircam Virus/Worm is for Real!  So far, I have received over 20 messages with the virus and have lost count.  The text of the message propagating the worm as an attachment contains:

Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks

The text may be in Spanish (see below).  This is a nasty virus that can destroy your data.  Do not open the attachment.  Symantec has more info and instructions for getting rid of it.

For Apple users... E-Mail from tidbits.com

"Larry's right - this one is a nasty one for PC users (it doesn't
affect Macs, other than to be annoying with all the downloads). We've tried to block some of the attachments at the mail server, but it's  fairly likely that you'll get a few of these. The text of the message
may also be in Spanish.  From what we've seen, they tend to have two filename extensions, like .doc.pif or .xls.com. The second one is designed to make the file executable. The best thing to do is just delete the messages and their attachments, but see the page Larry references for full details.

cheers... -Adam"

7/23 Plans to Harness Fusion May Be Coming Together. Scientists at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego may have taken a significant step forward by nearly doubling the usual attainable pressure of hot gaseous fuel inside a doughnut-shaped "Tokamak" reactor, a critical step in being able to reach conditions necessary to trigger and sustain a fusion reaction. And there are no emissions, no pollution, no spent radioactive fuel rods left over, and the power potential is immense: "For every megawatt you put in" to drive the reactor, Navratil said, "the system could generate 100 megawatts."

7/23 IT Bugs Out Over IIS Security. Microsoft has issued 21 security bulletins for the Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0 alone, a number that is increasing at the rate of about one every three weeks. Is it time to switch?

7/23 Metromedia Rebuilds Fire Damaged Network in 36 Hours. Around cables affected by fire in Baltimore tunnel.

7/23 Analysts: Microsoft Stalling To Protect Windows XP  Mixed Signals From Microsoft

7/23 AOL Mistakenly Tells Users They Won $10,000

7/23 AMD Wins Microprocessor Category in CRN Channel Champion Competition

7/22 Semiconductor Alert! (July 16-20). Commentary & analysis of week's chip news. Rarely if ever has any industry gone from an 80% growth year [in 2000] to what increasingly looks like a 40% down year! Don't take market forecasts too seriously... According to an industry analyst at Deutsche Bank, growth in the global semiconductor industry will remain weak until at least 2010.

7/22 Selling a House Without Broadband? Good Luck. Suddenly I felt as if I was trying to sell him a one-room wooden shack without running water and electricity.

7/22 Compaq Rides Trend Toward Services. Small computer businesses did this years ago when they couldn't make money with hardware.

7/22 Justice Department Hires a New Anti-Microsoft Gun

7/20 Microsoft Opposes Efforts to Speed Antitrust Case

7/20 IT Spending Still Going Up. IT spending increased by 10% this year. Slightly more than half of the respondents said their budgets are growing, and more than 40% said their spending will be flat or down.

7/20 Hotmail's Redesign Spurs Complaints

7/20 PC Shipments Worst Since 1986, As Only Dell Grows. U.S. sales declined 6 to 8%, to about 10 million units. International PC shipments declined 2% from the same period a year ago, to about 30 million units. First time since 1986 that worldwide sales have fallen.

7/20 Analyst: HP Could Signal Tech Rebound. "As HP was first to signal a downturn, they could be the first to lead us out... HP's unique customer base (consumer, small and medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises) has been an early, reliable indicator..."

7/20 Microsoft Says PC Business Will Worsen. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

7/20 Tech Salaries Follow Economy Downward

7/20 NVIDIA Crush (nFORCE) Chipsets Pricing Analysis

7/20 Benchmark Shows DDR SDRAM More Bandwidth Efficient Than RDRAM

7/19 Gateway's Results Worse-Than-Expected. Loss of $20.8 million, or 6 cents per share, compared with a profit of $118 million, or 36 cents, in the year-ago quarter.

7/19 Government Must Reply to Microsoft Request. The Justice Department and 18 states have until Aug. 3 to respond to Microsoft's request for rehearing.

7/19 Fire's Effects Ripple Onto the Internet.  A fire sparked by a train derailment in a tunnel in downtown Baltimore rages for a second day, causing power outages, bringing segments of WorldCom’s UUNet Internet network to a grinding halt, and affecting customers along the Eastern corridor.

7/19 Microsoft To Ease New Windows Anti-piracy Measures. Microsoft will alter product activation to allow a certain number of changes to a PC within a certain period of time, Shawn Sanford, group product manager for Windows, said in an interview.  "...the company should have gone further and tied Windows to an individual user rather than a computer."

7/19 Jobs Puts Emphasis on Software at Macworld.  OS X... Watch out Microsoft.  This OS can be moved to a PC platform and some of it already has as Darwin--perhaps an appropriate name.  And it uses no XP activation code.

7/19 Microsoft Coasting Through Rough Seas. Software developer experiencing strong business cycle while other tech companies swim for their lives.

7/19 Via's One Chip System. Matthew will integrate both the C3 processor and the S3 Savage 4, along with a complete North Bridge.

7/19 Appeals Court Lets Napster Power Back Up. A California federal appeals court has granted Napster at least temporary permission to go back online and once again allow its users to tap into its free MP3-swapping service.

7/19 Google Search Engine Wins Big at Webby Awards.  Best Practices award... Google was not among the search engines recently accused by a consumer group of giving better treatment to sites that pay fees.

7/19 Snaps, Crackles May Stop CD Piracy. For the last several months, consumers have unwittingly been buying CDs that include technology designed to discourage them from making copies on their PCs.

7/19 VeriSign Is Coming to Your Phone. A system called Global Voice Registry that would enable users to speak a business name into their conventional or mobile telephone and be connected automatically.

7/19 Microsoft Petitions Court for Rehearing on Browser Issue. "...critical evidence was overlooked -- or misinterpreted -- on the technical question of whether Microsoft 'commingled' software code specific to Web browsing with software code used for other purposes in certain files in Windows 98."

7/18 DRAM Makers Do Not Expect Price Rebound Until September. Supplies in distribution channels are still abundant. When supply and demand finally strikes a single-month balance, it will take 4-6 months to clear-out inventory.

7/18 Isonics Announces Joint Development Program With AMD. Isonics  produces isotopically pure silicon-28 chemicals and wafers.  Isonics: Isotopically pure silicon... Silicon exists in nature as three isotopes: Si-28 (92%), Si-29 (5%) and Si-30 (3%).  Purification removes essentially all of the Si-29 and Si-30 leaving isotopically pure Si-28, which has a more perfect crystal structure and better thermal conductivity... A major microprocessor manufacturer [wonder who could that be?] has modeled isotopically pure silicon wafers and has told Isonics that the peak temperature of their "advanced 1 GHz microprocessor" was reduced by 35°C.

7/18 IRS Sends Wrong Message. Programming error blamed for sending out 500,000 letters this week that misinform taxpayers about the size of the tax rebate they’ll be receiving.  Error affects only the letters, not the rebate.  Get the correct info here.

7/18 Intel Revenues Down 24%.  Press release.  Earnings per share were $0.03, down 93% from $0.45 in the second quarter of 2000 and down 57% sequentially.  Intel - Business Will Improve In Second Half.  Win XP will motivate people to upgrade. To what?  SDRAM?

7/18 Intel Vows Deeper Price Cuts. Intel's low-price initiatives are seen as offensive against AMD, which has increased market share from the upper teens to about 22%. Intel will soon release the 845 chipset, which will enable Pentium 4 users to utilize less costly SDRAM memory, rather than Rambus memory.

7/18 Intel Roadmaps Show P4 Change. Next price drip August 26th. 2 gig P4 this quarter (Ha), 2.2 gig follows soon and 2.4 Q1 2002.

7/18 Jobs Optimistic at Macworld Despite Apple's Thin Profit.  Jobs Unveils New iMacs at Macworld.

7/18 Microsoft: No Java Support in Windows XP.  Resulting form an out-of-court settlement with Sun...  And findings of the DOJ case... court said Microsoft's agreements with software vendors to use only the MS-compatible Java version was illegal... MS denied move was aimed at phasing out support for Java in Microsoft applications... Windows XP users will be able download Java off a MS update site... Is Microsoft Attacking Sun or Protecting Consumers?  Microsoft kicks Java out of Windows XP.

7/18 Reasons Apple Should Port Mac OS X to PC Hardware.  There has been plenty of discussion on this subject lately... I really feel that Apple will port the OS to other hardware. Here are my reasons why...

7/18 Space Station Computer Crashes Again. "We have plans to move to a solid state hard drive towards the end of this year."  Cosmic rays?

7/18 Hynix to Close Memory Fab for Six Months. Due to falling memory prices and to upgrade from 0.22-micron processing making only 64 Mbit SDRAMs to 0.13-micron and 256 Mbit chips.

7/18 Philips May Cut 4,000 Chip Jobs. Jobs touted the latest models of the company's trademark product line, the latest improvements to its UNIX-based Mac OS X, and the success and expansion of its new signature stores.

7/18 Novell Moves NetWare 6 Into Beta Testing

7/18 Magnetic Spin Locks Data Into MRAMs. The refinement of techniques for "locking in" memory values with magnetic spin could help non-volatile magnetic random-access memories (MRAM) mount a challenge to volatile DRAMs.  Interesting.

7/17 Clever Wiring Harnesses Tiny Switches. ...shrink the computer to the size of a bacterium or even smaller. Hewlett-Packard patent describes how to hook up molecular-scale devices by essentially assigning each switch a random marker — like a phone number — that allows signals to be routed to it.

7/17 Sharing Microsoft's .NET Vision - With Linux. The .NET initiative is an unabashed effort to dominate the future of the Internet, but if the federal courts can't slow down the giant software company, maybe Ximian Inc., a small outfit in Boston, can do the trick.

7/17 AT&T Wireless Throws Down the Gauntlet in Race to 3G. 2.5G services for Seattle businesses.

7/17 Search Engines Accused of Hiding Ads. Eight major Internet search engines have been accused of deception after a consumer group demanded that the Federal Trade Commission investigate whether they are coughing up "ads in disguise" in response to user queries...

7/17 Spin-off Develops 'Digital Paper' Display for Handsets. 3-inch diagonal display that can serve as a drop-in replacement for liquid crystal displays in personal digital appliances and mobile-phone handsets. It nonvolatile display retains its image after power is removed and only needs power when the image changes.

7/17 Gates Q&A: HailStorm Reliability, The Economy, Sun, The Antitrust Case

7/17 Micron Takes Lead on Gorcing DDR Prices to Plummet. Less than eight weeks after launching an aggressive double-data-rate SDRAM pricing campaign, Micron Technology Inc. appears to have forced its competitors to follow suit.

7/17 SiS Set to Mass-Produce AMD Chipsets, Compete With VIA. At the beginning of the year, over 90 percent of AMD-supported chipsets were produced by VIA. SiS has decided to mass-produce AMD-supported chipsets, the 733 and 735 chipsets, in August as the first step to realize its target to win a 25-percent market share.

7/17 Intel Cuts Prices on Mobile Pentium III. Cuts prices on 1 gig and 900 Mhz Pentium III Celeron mobile processors by 37 percent.

7/16 IRS Publishes Schedule for Mailing Tax Refunds. The IRS has just published a schedule for mailing checks as part of the new U.S. tax-cut law.  Criteria is also provided for who will get a refund and how much it will be. Click here to go there.

7/16 Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer. Our solution was to construct a computing cluster using obsolete PCs that would have otherwise discarded.

7/16 PC Makers Caught in Microsoft Antitrust Squeeze.  Some analysts are hinting that any complications to the XP release could jeopardize the future of some PC firms.

7/16 Cable's Long Reach Getting Longer. As big cable gets really big, some worry that consumer choice will suffer. And then there's that ever-rising bill.

7/16 U.S. Cable Broadband Use To Outstrip DSL. While digital subscriber line (DSL) access will lead globally, cutbacks in last-mile build-outs by U.S. telecommunications companies will allow cable domination in North America.

7/16 Microsoft to Charge for MP3 Ripping. Consumers looking to rip MP3s using Windows XP's media player will have to pay as much as $30 extra for the capability.

7/14 Economy May Experience Boost. Falling energy prices, lower interest rates and tax rebate checks are expected to lift the economy in the second half of the year.

7/14 Astronauts to Attach Passageway. ...Astronauts geared-up Saturday for the big event: the attachment of a $164 million passageway for spacewalkers.

7/14 Semiconductor Alert! Commentary & analysis of week's chip news, July 9-13.

7/14 Justice Department Says Rein in Microsoft Soon. "The DOJ and the states are on the same page, and they're intent on getting relief as soon as possible, undoubtedly in light of the planned Windows XP introduction..." DOJ Asks Appeals Court to Hurry Microsoft Case. 'Some legal experts, who have followed the case, have said the government is likely to seek an injunction to stop Microsoft from releasing Windows XP on Oct. 25.'

7/14 Intel, AMD Likely to Hold the Line on Prices. Maybe, maybe not.  Both may have a lot of inventory.

7/13 Radical 'X-Architecture' Chips Push Speed, Power. 'The X-Architecture is deceptively simple... diagonal wiring results in chips with 10% greater performance and 20% less power.'

7/13 Severe Security Hole Discovered in Office XP.  'Report warns that unauthorized access is possible to email in the user's inbox, including reading, modifying, or deleting such mails, to the unauthorized execution of unlimited commands and programs on the afflicted computer.'
Microsoft Warns of E-mail Vulnerability. While the fix is being prepared, Microsoft recommends that Outlook users disable ActiveX controls in the Internet Zone of Internet Explorer to protect their machines from a Web-based attack.

7/13 Microsoft Enters Internet Music Fray.  Microsoft will form a partnership with pressplay, a joint venture by music giants Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, and distribute music through MSN for an undisclosed price. "We're at a tipping point for the down slide of the CD sale and the uptake of digital distribution of music..."

7/13 AMD Prepares SOI Shift in PC Processors With Initial 0.13-Micron Process.  'In a bold move to convert 100% of its PC processors to silicon-on-insulator technology, AMD has begun pilot production of 0.13-micron SOI processes in Dresden, Germany, with a target to start up volume fabrication by the end of this year.... Athlon 4 processors using 0.13-micron SOI processes by the end of 2001.'

7/13 AMD Cuts 2001 Capital Spending Budget. Average selling price for processors is now about $75, down $15 from the first quarter.

7/13 AMD Reports Second Quarter Results.  Net income $0.05 per diluted share, down from $0.37  the first quarter... Sales declined by approximately 17%... record unit sales of more than 7.7 million PC processors during the quarter, up 16%... Demand for flash memory products continued to reflect severe weakness in the communications and networking sectors. Q2 Bad, Q3 Worse For AMD. AMD warns revenues could fall by as much as 15% in the third quarter, resulting in an operating loss... AMD Conference Call Transcriptishes.

7/13 AMD Palomino Performance Preview. Based on our results, Palomino should offer anywhere from a 4-10% performance improvement over today's Athlon processors based on AMD's Thunderbird core.

7/13 Researchers Study The Brain As Subjects Feel The Pain. This may help explain why some people are more sensitive than others when it comes to painful sensations...

7/13 Intel Notebook CPU to be Totally Differentiated From Desktop CPU in 2003.

7/13 Wireless Works for Portland, OR Police.  'Officers can access t a massive database containing information on 975,000 people, mug shots, and nearly 2 million cases from the field.'

7/12 Microsoft Tests Web Service For solution providers. Microsoft plans to demonstrate a beta version of bCentral designed specifically for solution providers at its Fusion partner conference here this weekend.

7/12 Judge Puts Clamp on Napster's Return. A San Francisco judge ruled Wednesday that Napster Inc. cannot resume its music file trading service until the company shows that it can fully comply with court orders governing Napster's use of certain copyright songs.

7/12 Intel: VIRTUAL PRESS KIT -- Connected Home

7/12 Online Advertising: It's Just the Beginning. Good read if you have a commercial web site.

7/12 Through the Looking Glass, to Holographic Data Storage. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

7/12 RDRAM and DDR Memory Face Off in Second Half

7/12 New Ethiopian Fossils May Represent Oldest Human Ancestor Yet. From sediments dated to between 5.2 and 5.8 million years ago.

7/12 Win XP Copy Protection.  Readers to Microsoft: Copy Controls?  No Way!  Antipiracy technology in Windows XP could prove a major deal breaker for would-be upgraders.

7/12 Windows XP: Where The Remedy Will Be. Members of the legal community say it's becoming increasingly likely that a remedy for Microsoft's unlawful behavior to protect its operating system monopoly will center on a product still under development.

7/12 U.S. Scientists Create World's Most Precise Clock. Has the potential to be 100 to 1,000 times more accurate than the current cesium-based microwave clocks.

7/12 Library "Radicals" Targeted in Latest Copyright Battles. Publishing houses that had ringside seats to the Napsterization of the music industry are increasingly concerned that their material, too, may be freely swapped in digital form.

7/12 Dell Gives Motherboard Order to Asus. First OEM motherboard order to Taiwan.  200,000 P4 boards/month.

7/11 Microsoft to Allow PC Makers to Alter Windows. "We recognize that some provisions in our existing Windows licenses have been ruled improper by the court, so we are providing computer manufacturers with greater flexibility and we are doing this immediately so that computer manufacturers can take advantage of them in planning for the upcoming release of Windows XP," said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

7/11 Can Privacy Rights Survive?

7/11 Users Still Having Problems Downloading WinXP Beta (RC1)

7/11 Western Digital Ships 100 GByte, 7,200 Hard Disk Drive. Three platters.  Ship this month.

7/11 Valley View: Still the same old AMD? The downbeat news last week obscured the fact that this is not the same company that spent most of the '90s stumbling from one debacle to another.

7/11 Compaq to Expand Job Cuts to Total 8,500

7/11 Intel Confirms Halt to Pentium III Xeon Chip for Servers.  Happened in April.

7/10 RIP IBM PC. "In a nutshell it looks like the global PC marketplace is to lose another player. There will still be PC products coming out of IBM, but no PC division and no dedicated teams... The mother of personal computing as we know it looks like it could be almost ready to cut the umbilical cord and finally leave the PC business."

7/10 Amazon Pulls Preorder Plug on Windows XP

7/10 Napster: End of the Peer-to-Peer Road?  Newer technology from the Netherlands called FastTrack could become the "New Napster" and provide even greater headaches for copyright holders.

7/10 Hosting Glut Should Mean Bargains for Companies. Empty server racks line the walls of data centers throughout the U.S., casualties of a gold rush that never quite materialized...

7/10 Scientists "Microstamp" a Neuronal Network in a Dish. Nerve cells grow and wire themselves to electrodes...

7/10 MSN Messenger Service Restored, eh, restored to 99%...

7/10 WinXP Product Activation Decoded and Analysed

7/10 Microsoft Stumbles with XP Preview.  But eight days later, many of the people who plunked down $10 for the right to download the approximately 500MB file said they have not received the e-mail containing a user ID and password that would allow them to do so.  11:43 Just downloaded it.  512 MByte ISO file.  Took 1 hour, 10 minutes with a cable MODEM.

7/9 AT&T: No Plans to Sell Broadband Unit. Talks with Comcast did not lead to a valuation agreement, but it will review the cable company's $58 billion unsolicited offer.

7/9 Messaging Woes Cloud Microsoft's .Net Strategy. Problems with MSN Messenger continue into the second week.

7/9 Vendors Move to Bridge Web and Phone Network. AT&T, Cisco, IBM, WorldCom and AOL Time Warner are urging the U.S. government to support a top-level domain for Enum, an emerging technology that builds a bridge between the public switched telephone network and the Internet.  Enum lets users type a telephone number into a Web browser and find a corresponding URL, e-mail address or IP address.

7/9 Microsoft Issues Spam Patch for Windows 2000. Fixes hole that allows intruders to relay E-mail from a remote PC.

7/9 Microsoft Sees Clear Victory on 'Bundling.' Opponents read the appeals court ruling differently. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

7/9 Pursuing a New Line in Optical Research

7/9 Towns Bogged-Down in Slow Internet Access

7/7 Semiconductor Alert! (July 2-6). Commentary & analysis of week's chip news.

7/7 New Insight into Reason Matter Exists

7/7 Taiwan Struggles to Cope With Downturn

7/7 Apple Recalls Power Adapters Due To Fire Hazard.  Sold with PowerBook G3 notebooks shipped from May 1998 until March 2000.

7/6 IT Banks on Windows XP.  A combination of refresh cycles as IT buyers update their systems, and a Microsoft hard-sell may restore spending, though not everybody is convinced.  I think Win XP will be a BIG deal.  Reason: the shift in my web statistics to Win 2K indicate Win 9X is starting to be abandoned.  XP should accelerate that transition.  Many potential Win 2K buyers are probably waiting for XP.  Also, all of those computers purchased because of the Y2K fiasco will start to show their age.  The nVIDIA nFORCE motherboard chipset could be a BIG sleeper.  Boards with the chipset should start to appear towards the end of next month.

7/6 Scientists Create First Room-Temperature Single-Electron Transistor. From a carbon nanotube, Dutch researchers have crafted a transistor that toggles on and off with the flow of a single electron.

7/6 DRAM Makers(?) Skimping on Tests?

7/6 Slump Worsens as Singapore Slips Into Recession

7/6 Silicon Valley Slips Into Sleep Mode

7/6 MSN Messenger Suffers Fourth Day of Outages

7/6 MSN Messenger Falters for More Than 10 Million Users

7/5 AMD Issues Warning, Cites Chip Pricing.  Net income would be in the range of 3 to 5 cents per diluted share, rather than the 27 cents analysts expected.

7/5 AMD Updates Roadmap, Delays Desktop Palomino

7/5 Microsoft Could Hold Passport to Net. Rivals fear Redmond's authentication service could make the software giant the one and only centralized power on the Web.

7/4 Patient Receives First Completely Self-Contained Artificial Heart

7/4 Researchers Pursue Quantum Chip-Making Process. Quantum dots store information in domains that are at least 10 times smaller than those typically proposed for future silicon chip technologies — only a few square nanometers, containing 50 to 10,000 atoms per stored quantum bit (qubit). The devices work by instantaneously passing individual electrons across an insulator without taking any time to physically pass through it — a phenomena called "tunneling."

7/4 Web Sales of Airline Tickets Are Making Hefty Advances. Delta started a fare sale, matched by other airlines including American and America West, that offered an extra 20% discount for using its Web site. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

7/4 Taiwanese Motherboard Makers Landing OEM Orders for Server Boards From International Heavyweights. In the past, high-end servers have been manufactured in-house by international heavyweights like HP, IBM, Sun and Dell, but lately they have begun to adopt the open Wintel structure and they have been outsourcing to 1st tier Taiwan manufactureers.

7/4 Apple's Ultramodern Cube PC Now An Antique.  Or, "Apple Puts... Cube on Ice."

7/3 Alpha Chip Demise Impacts Cray

7/3 Kodak tangles with Microsoft Over Win XP. "Consumers were effectively being denied a choice of which photo software they could use. More important, they should be able to send photos to any Internet printing service they choose--without paying a tax to Microsoft."

7/3 Red Hat Guns for MS Database Space. Red Hat European VP Colin Tenwick called in to the IT-Analysis HQ on the impending launch of Red Hat Database. It seems that the firm is gunning for Microsoft.

7/3 Panel OKs 79 MPH for Amtrak Run. Removes the major barriers to completion passenger rail connection between Portland, Maine and Boston. Service could start early this fall.

7/3 Police Cameras Scan for Criminals. Tampa is scanning public places for the faces of criminals through surveillance cameras.

7/3 Smile, You're on Not-So-Candid Camera. Protecting the Public or Burgeoning Big Brother?

7/3 Taiwan Chipset Companies Continue Swoon.  VIA and SiS sales fall 25% in June

7/3 High-Tech Malaise Will Continue Through Summer

7/3 IBM Slashes 1,000 Positions

7/3 Napster Halts File Sharing During Upgrade

7/3 Hitachi Spins Chips Into Paper Money. Paper thin, .4 mm square, and can transmit info 30 cm.

7/3 'Day One' at Novell Promises Big Shakeup. While details remain guarded, sources say the latest in a series of organizational shakeups by the reeling network giant is likely to raise anxieties among enterprise customers and mean unemployment for top Novell executives.

7/2 Microsoft Announces "Availability" of First Release Candidate (RC1) of Windows XP.  E-Mail has arrived here from Microsoft stating that another E-Mail with download instructions and a product key would be sent in the next few days to people who have signed-up (and paid) for the preview program.

7/2 Planting the Seeds: Microsoft Windows XP. Microsoft's .NET aims to takeover the web.

7/2 IBM Completes Acquisition of Informix Database Assets. IBM intends to incorporate select Informix technologies into future versions of DB2 Universal Database, which will remain IBM's flagship database product.

7/2 Intel Introduces Introduces 1.8 and 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 Processors

7/2 Intel Releases 900 MHz Desktop and 850 MHz Mobile Celeron Processors

7/2 May Semiconductor Sales Drop 7 Percent From April

7/2 Tech Future Is Said to Brighten.  Executives plan to increase information- technology spending by 6.3% on average over the next 12 months, up from the 3.8% in May. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

7/2 AMD and Dell a Go-Go Analyst Says

7/2 Compaq to Pull PC Production from Mitac. Will instead Contract FIC and Foxconn to build its desktops.

7/2 P2P Movement Picking Up Steam. Peer-to-peer technology is gaining popularity, and a Meta Group report predicts it will be a standard part of the e-business infrastructure by 2005, once security flaws are resolved.

Index