NEWS, ETC.
March 2001

3/30 Microsoft to Users: Pay Up

3/30 Microsoft Phasing Out Support For Old Software

3/30 MS Warns of IE Security Hole. A security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser can cause the browser to automatically open e-mail attachments that could be used by an attacker to execute malicious code.

3/30 Home Networks in Early Phases But Firms Gearing Up

3/30 Defective HP Monitors a Jolt to Users. 17-inch HP 71 monitors, model D8903A monitors could electrically shock users, the company said, offering to replace problem monitors.

3/30 Five Questions With... Vint Cerf. Long hailed as the "father of the Internet," ICANN's chairman sits down with Business 2.0 Online

3/30 Gateway Shutting 27 Stores. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

3/29 Top PC Pranks for April Fool's Day

3/29 Gates's Bold New Persona: Your ID Manager

3/29 NASA's New Supercomputer Sits on a Desktop.

3/29 Sign Here, Electronically. Make your electronic signatures count--even in a court of law--with this software.

3/29 Landmark Anti-Spam Bill Closer to Passage. The bill bars some 718 companies from sending junk e-mail unless that e-mail is identified as an unsolicited commercial advertisement and includes a return e-mail address so recipients can opt out of receiving future e-mails.

3/29 PC Makers Appeal to Bargain Hunters. AMD to announce 900 MHz Duron chip on April 2... Intel will release an 850 MHz Celeron the following Monday.

3/29 Microsoft Unveils New Audio, Video Compression Technology

3/28 Slowdown Seen Dampening Home Network Adoption

3/28 Microsoft Releases Windows XP Beta 2.  Home, Professional and 64-bit editions of XP calls for release candidate 1 to be released in early June. Windows XP Beta 2 also has built-in IEEE 802.1x support for wireless LANs.

3/28 Q&A: Windows XP and the Future of Windows Hardware

3/28 Windows XP: Hungry for Power

3/27 Consumer Confidence Rebounds

3/27 Computing, One Atom at a Time. ...scientists will coax a molecule called crotonic acid into executing a simple computer program.  You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

3/27 Shocking Concept: Internet Over Electrical Lines

3/27 Adobe Shows the Web in 3D.  "In the near future, browsing a site will mean walking through 3D room spaces, speaking with other visitors or site representatives, and seeing animated objects in real time..."

3/27 Motorola Invents Tunable LCD Technology

3/27 Wireless LANs Emerge In Enterprises

3/27 The MaxGate UGate-3300: The Gateway That's Got It All

3/26 PC Video Interface Looks to Add Audio Capability

3/26 Transmeta chip to power Microsoft tablet PC

3/26 Gigabyte 7VTX KT266 DDR Athlon Motherboard Review

3/26 CeBit 2001 Report.  Lots of stuff with pictures.

3/26 VIA Launches C3 Processor at CeBIT. 733MHz, 0.15 micron process for small die, 128KB Level 1 and 64KB Level 2 Cache, 133MHz FSB, 3DNow!, MMX.

3/24 CeBIT tidbits from AMD.  PowerNow 2.0 is extremely impressive... The server Palomino demo (900 MHz) used only passive cooling.

3/24 Ethernet Begins Sprint to Bring Broadband Home. A technical study group has taken the first steps toward bringing Ethernet into the home to challenge digital subscriber lines and cable modems...

3/24 Pentium 4 Costs Forces Intel to Keep Spending. "The present Pentium 4 die size is huge at more than 200mm square. Even as Pentium 4 ramps up and yields increase, the big die size means Intel is eating up a lot of silicon."

3/23 Kodak's MC33 is a Digital Camera and MP3 Player

3/23 Iomega Peerless 20Gb Removable Storage Drive

3/23 Micron Electronics Quits PC Business

3/23 Mir Space Station Plunges into the Pacific Ocean

3/22 CeBIT 2001 -- Let the fun commence!  CeBIT coverage, press releases, etc.  Today is the first day of CeBIT.

3/22 AMD Introduces 1.33GHz DDR ATHLON Processor at CeBIT.  Systems with the processor, including those from Compaq (Presario 7000Z family) and MAXDATA, are available now.

3/23 AMD Shows 1533 MHz Palomino at CeBit (in German, Auf Duetch).  Pictures.

3/22 Final Countdown. The Mir space station has entered its last hours before crashing down to Earth.

3/22 Beta 2 of Windows XP Ready to Roll. Microsoft to deliver the second beta of Windows XP Friday.  "It's not just ME version 2.0. It's radically different." The Remote Desktop feature allows users to access their primary desktop remotely, from home or anywhere on the road.

3/22 Robots Can Learn Much From High-Tech Playthings. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

3/22 A New Human Ancestor?

3/22 Western Digital Introduces  80 GB 7,200 RPM Caviar Hard Disk Drive at CeBIT

3/22 Via Readies Second Volley in CPU Battle

3/21 Call Italy for 9.9¢ a Minute.  With the Linksys EtherFast Cable/DSL & Voice Router, you can share a broadband Internet connection with multiple PCs, and work directly with Net2Phone's Voice over IP service.

3/21 WinXP Beta Testers Still in Open Revolt Over Product Activation. Things like this have been done in the past with commodity software and they failed.

3/21 Intel Unveils Last PIII-based Xeon

3/21 HP Rolls-out Seven New Internet-ready Printers.  HP news release.

3/20 Microsoft Announces "HailStorm"... MS press release... intended to advance the Microsoft .NET strategy... I think it is intended to make money.

3/20 Legal storm Brewing over Microsoft's HailStorm

3/20 Getting More from Moore's Law. Marshaling financial clout and technical astuteness, Intel has pushed its choice for the key technology that will extend silicon chips to their limits. Interesting stuff with pics.

3/20 Dean Kent's March 2001 Industry Update. ...signs that things may be picking up just a bit... larger percentage of Socket A motherboard sales... AMD insisted that the Mobile Palomino will be shipping this quarter, followed by the desktop version next quarter. Morgan should follow a similar release schedule... Good read!

3/20 In Intel vs. AMD, Neither Wins. ...consumers aren't rushing to buy a new PC because a 700 MHz-powered machine doesn't perform much differently from a 1000 MHz computer... 

3/20 HomeRF 2.0 Wireless LAN Spec Loses Intel

3/20 VIA To Unveil ITX Motherboard Form Factor at CeBIT 2001.  Socket 370...  The reference motherboard (pic at above link) measures only 215 X 191 mm or 8.5 X 7.5 inches and includes two PCI slots, integrated video and sound, TV out, and USB and 1394 Firewire controllers for high-speed peripherals.

3/20 Power Plant Fire Results in California Blackouts.  Status here.

3/19 VIA: DDR to Take Center Stage at CeBIT 2001. Over 20 motherboard vendors to display VIA Apollo DDR chipset Socket A and Socket 370 motherboards...

3/19 MSI Lunches K7T266-Pro DDR Athlon Motherboard with VIA KT266 Chipset.

3/19 The Next Athlon Versus The Next Pentium

3/19 Alternatives Sought for Broadband.  Way out, ah up... You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

3/19 Is Broadband Net Access Recession-proof? Yes.

3/19 Notebook Industry Backs Intel's 1-GHz Chip. Intel launches 1-GHz Mobile Pentium III.  Press release with pics.

3/19 Intel Steps Up Performance Low-Power Family of Applied Computing Processors. 700 Mhz low-power Pentium III and new communications appliance reference designs.

3/19 ALi Introduces Por-5T DDR/SDR Chipset for Future Pentium III Notebook and Desktop Computers Supporting.

3/19 AMD Emerges as Technology Powerhouse in U. S. Patent Ranking.  Ahead of Intel...

3/19 World's Fastest Ever CD-RW Drives. Yamaha 20 X 10 X 4.

3/19 Farewell, Photo Lab. Four Small Snapshot Printers.

3/19 How is Bug Blood Different.

3/19 Samsung's RDRAM Shipments Surpasses $1 Billion

3/19 Kingston to Build Modules with Nanya DDR Memory.  Naya's output in February was 120,000 units.

3/19 Space Shuttle Crew on Way to Earth

3/19 Let's Hear It. 23 speaker systems.

3/19 MS: The Jury's In: New Office XP and Word 2002 Features Create a Premier Solution for Legal Professionals

3/16 AMD Athlon Dual Processor/760MP Chipset Benchmarks.

3/16 'First Light' for Twin Telescopes

3/16 Intel Says Monday's the Day for 1-GHz Mobile Chip. With launch date set, new Pentium III is likely to land in high-end notebooks before AMD's entry does.

3/16 Digital TV snowed in by 'Napster factor.' 

3/15 Flat Panel Prices Plummet Back to Earth.  A 15-inch LCD monitor will cost less than $350 by summer.

3/15 Tech Sector Layoffs: Not What You Think

3/15 50-inch Projection Display Boasts 'Wow' Factor

3/15 AMD Interview. We have samples of desktop mainboards running the HyperTransport and expect to see them this year. Expect volume quantities of the Mobile Palomino (Athlon) and Morgan (Duron) this quarter... Dual-processor AMD-760 MP chipset will be released first half this year... Each processor will have its own 266 Mhz connection to the Northbridge...' JC has some info on a Tyan dual-Athlon motherboard with the MP chipset..

3/15 Rambus Ruling Limits Scope of Patents. A summary judgment that would end the trial and throw out Rambus’ royalty claims to SDRAM and DDR could be made as soon as Thursday...

3/15 Athlon-Based Notebooks Hit a Snag

3/15 In The Server Wars, The Winner Is...

3/14 UK scientists to unleash Aibo-killer. The RS-01 RoboDog, developed by British scientists, will dwarf Sony's Aibo when it is announced next week.

3/14 Why Stainless Steel Doesn't Rust?

3/14 MSN MoneyCentral Offers Taxpayers Assistance with Tax Returns.

3/14 Gigabyte Interview with Pictures. "We will release GA-7VTX with KT266 chipset, K7 CPU with DDR memory. GA-6RX with Pro 266, PIII CPU with DDR and with IDE RAID function."

3/14 Time Spent Online At Home Jumps 59%.  Dux grew 143%.

3/13 AMD Palomino, Morgan slide back on schedule.  Speculative... I thought yesterday's story from this source was rather speculative.  Now I wish I had not printed it...

3/13 Micron CEO Hints DRAM Growth will Slow Sharply in 2001

3/13 Combo DVD/CD-RW Drives Flourish

3/12 AMD Palomino & Morgan Processors Slide to July. Speculative...

3/12 Flaw Uncovered in TCP. A security hole... leaves the door open for potentially devastating network attacks. Another serious security flaw found in TCP.

3/12 AMD 760 vs. ALi MAGiK1 at 266MHz FSB and PC2100.  The two motherboards tested indicate that the AMD 760 chipset may be faster than an ALi MAGiK1 chipset.

3/12 USB Heading to Gadgets.  The new specification, USB On-the-Go, will essentially eliminate the role of the PC as a go-between.

3/12 AMD's Athlon Lands Slot In IBM's Server Line. Putting another dent in Intel's armor, IBM will shortly introduce a line of front-end network servers using dual Athlon processors...

3/12 'Supercomputer-on-a-chip' to Power Consumer Devices. IBM, Sony and Toshiba are teaming to create a chip to power a digital broadband future. Hello PlayStation4?

3/12 Top 5 Firewall Utilities

3/12 Heady Growth Over, PC Makers Poised to Consolidate

3/10 Semiconductor Alert! Commentary & analysis of week's chip news.  Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research now just months away from developing Japan's first single-electron, tunneling transistor that's capable of operating at room temperature.

3/10 New Crew Enters Orbiting Outpost

3/10 Seven Firms Tune-up DVD+RW Format Products. The DVD+RW group emphasized that its format is compatible with existing DVD-ROM drives and DVD-Video players without any modification. The group estimated that nearly 90 million units of DVD-ROM drives and DVD-Video players were installed worldwide last year, and the total will jump to more than 170 million units this year.

3/10 Philips to Showcase Rewritable DVD Disk Drives at Cebit.  Philips is expected to announce that PC drives based on its rewritable DVD+RW format will go on sale in October.

3/10 New Tool Will Tame - And Record - Internet Radio

3/9 Microsoft's biggest Office XP fear: Pirates. With Office XP and, later, Windows XP, Microsoft will refine the technology, essentially "locking" the software to the user's PC configuration.

3/9 Excuse Me, is that a Mouse in Your Pocket?  The Atek Super Mini Optical Mouse addresses a common irritant for notebook users: lame pointing devices. It is 2.5 inches long and 1 inch wide.

3/9 World Wide Web 2. The internet's governing body is facing a grave challenge - the emergence of a rival Web.

3/9 Despite Difficulties, Linux is Gaining Ground. Linux is now the fastest-growing operating system on the market...

3/9 Abit to Show-off New Motherboards at CeBIT. 

3/9 FCC Decision Opens Door to High-rate Wireless LANs

3/9 Intel to Cut 5,000 Jobs, Warns on Revenue

3/9 Excite@Home Offers New Search Engine

3/9 Intel: One Step Closer to 10GHz. The chipmaker announced Thursday that it has delivered the first standard-format photomasks for use with Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.

3/9 FBI Uncovers 'Largest Ever' Organized Hacker Attack. Exploiting a known Windows NT security flaw, an Eastern European organized crime outfit has stolen credit card and other data from at least 40 domestic e-commerce and e-banking sites.

3/8 Light-emitting Silicon Boosts Chip Speeds. New silicon technology could bring smaller, more powerful computers. By enabling silicon to emit light, the scientists say they may have found a way to use light to efficiently transfer data around microchips.

3/8 First Amendment Challenge--DVD Encryption Code Published. Web site published  seven-line program, which unscrambles the protection around a DVD so quickly that a movie can play at the same time, although the film appears choppy.

3/8 Discovery Lifts Off to Deliver Second Crew

3/8 Tech Firms Offer Plan to Kickstart Digital Cinema. Mobile communications company Qualcomm Inc and film processor Technicolor unveiled plan to equip movie theaters with 1,000 digital projection systems to kickstart the industry's move into a new digital era.

3/8 Researchers Develop the First Plastic Superconductor

3/8 World's First Webcam Brews Its Last

3/8 FIC Announces Products to be Showcased at CeBIT 2001. AN11Socket A DDR with VIA KT266 chipset, etc.

3/8 U.S Postal Service Taps Digital Authentication. New service will issue digital signatures on smart cards through post offices using "in-person proofing" as part of the process.

3/8 Bringing Down the Russian Space Station will be Fraught with Uncertainty

3/8 A Robot That Works in the City Sewer. You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

3/8 AMD, Intel Fight Wars Using Memory Chips

3/8 Anti-virus Company Blasts Industry, Media For Scare Tactics. "People think viruses do widespread destruction of computer hardware. That is extremely rare; only one or two can. NakedWife is different from most viruses because it has the potential to delete several system files essential to the operating system, but it will not destroy hardware."

3/8 Yahoo! Blast Effects May Spread Through Net Sector

3/8 New Compaq Presario is Sure to Please. Says WinMag. With 1.1 Ghz T-Bird.

3/8 On-the-Go Expected to be Approved for USB. The technology, a subset of the USB 2.0 standard, will allow consumers to connect a digital camera to a printer, or a PDA to a smart phone, via a USB port on the device.

3/7 Who Owns Your Body?

3/7 Nintendo Eyes New Game System for Next Game Boy

3/7 The Great Security Debate: Linux vs. Windows

3/7 Vint Cerf Calls New.Net Domain Scheme A 'Cute Trick'. A new online service offering consumers Web addresses in simulated top-level domains like .shop, .game and .xxx, is playing off of a growing consumer desire for new Internet "neighborhoods" and a general lack of understanding about how the Internet works, noted networking engineer Vinton Cerf said today.

3/7 AMD Processor Roadmap

3/7 AMD trims Athlon, Duron Prices

3/7 'NAKEDWIFE' Trojan Worm (Virus) Strikes.

3/6 Judge Slams Door On Napster Downloads—Now

3/6 Circuit City Sales Down, More Declines Seen

3/6 Online Spending Plunges 50% In January

3/6 Space Swap. Space station's new crew is set for blast-off on Thursday.

3/6 Intel Cuts Prices by 19 Percent

3/6 Why Hotmail Users Get so Much Spam

3/5 IT Workers Stay Home as Snow Hits East Coast.  Not much here (Maine) yet, but it's coming.

3/5 Computing Pioneer Challenges the Clock. Clockless computing, according to its small band of proponents, would offer greater computational speed and lower power consumption, as well as making it possible to design new chips more quickly.  You may have to log into the NY Times, but it is free and is well worth the little effort that it takes.

3/5 High-speed xDSL Moves to New Lengths. Unidirectional transmission speeds of 54Mbps over a distance of up to 2.8Km (1.7 Miles), using existing twisted-pair copper telephone cables.

3/5 Hyundai Samples Lower Power 128-Mbit DDR Memory

3/5 Galaxy on the Edge.  Spectacular image of a galaxy on its edge from the Hubble Space Telescope.

3/5 Microsoft Office XP Released to Manufacturing. New version of the world's leading office software, has been released to manufacturing and will be available for retail purchase later this spring.  Press release.  Microsoft Office XP: The User Takes Command.

3/5 ATI Prepares To Give Nvidia A Run For Its Money. ATI's Orton said its new GPU will beat GeForce3's specifications and offer a programming capability as well.

3/5 Intel previews McKinley Processor: Pictures. Intel showed three McKinley systems: a 64bit version with Windows XP and POV-Ray graphics software; another with Linux and Gimp graphics; and an HP-UX system running the Apache Web server.

3/5 USB 2.0 Compliance Testing Moves Forward.  The first products that meet the USB 2.0 spec will start to hit the market in the next couple of months.

3/5 Napster Blocks Songs, But Fans Can Still Find Them. More here.

3/2 Desktops: Kiss Pentium IIIs Goodbye. Pentium III production for desktops will fade out this year.

3/2 Another DRAM Shakeout Coming with Sales Dropping 18% in 2001

3/2 Intel Promises Third-generation I/O Spec. Just as the PCI architecture replaced ISA by addressing the graphics and networking limitations of ISA, so too will a next, third-generation I/O replace PCI, Burns said. "We are pushing to the theoretical limits of copper, and we see a very clear path to a 10-GHz processor..." Response to AMD's HypterTransport System...

3/2 IBM To Partners: Here's $3,000 to Get Linux-Certified. IBM will reimburse business partners for up to $3,000 in tuition and test expenses for each employee who gets certified via the Linux Professional Institute or Red Hat Linux.

3/2 Chip Market Recovery On The Way? Market research firm predicts growth in integrated-circuit sales will resume in the third quarter of 2001.

3/2 NASA Kills $1.3 Billion Space Plane Project

3/2 NVIDIA GeForce3 Chosen by Top PC and Graphics Board OEMs

3/1 FreeDSL Free Ride Over. FreeDSL, the only high-speed free Internet option in the U.S., is about to shut down...

3/1 Broadband Net Access Nearly 8 Million Strong

3/1 Will your computer start answering back?  An Israeli technology firm is claiming a breakthrough with a computer capable of teaching itself to speak...

3/1 Microsoft Tightens the Vise on Desktop OS Market. Shipments of Windows 9x, NT Workstation, 2000 Pro, and Me comprised 92% of all client operating systems shipped last year, up from 89% the year before...

3/1 Quake Rattles Seattle's High-Tech Nerve Center

February 2001

January 2001

2000

1998 & 1999