NEWS, ETC.
June 2003

Monday, 30 June 2003

Windows Connects New Storage Standard. Microsoft on Monday released an update to its Windows operating system to add support for the emerging iSCSI storage networking standard.

Can Ximian Crash Microsoft's Desktop Party? "The desktop is Microsoft's last stand for near dominance, which will gradually erode with greater awareness of the maturity of Linux desktop offerings," Forrester analyst Stacey Quandt predicts.

Apple Releases an Outstanding Browser. Safari is one of Apple's finest releases, a piece of work that shows an emphasis on simplicity and speed.

Will Microsoft's Browser Engine Backfire? Microsoft may have unwittingly started a revolt against its Internet Explorer (IE) browser by discontinuing it as a standalone product and blurring the future of the current version, IE 6.

NEC Claims Fuel-cell Laptop Battery Will Last 40 hours. NEC is battling domestic rivals such as Toshiba Corp., as well as U.S. and South Korean rivals, all of whom are rushing to bring fuel cell technology to the mass market.

Worldwide Chip Sales Rising. Spurred by growing PC sales, outlook gets brighter every month. Even at current rates, growth is expected to hit 8.6 percent worldwide.

Intel Ships 'Madison' Version of Itanium 2. Intel executives say their comany's Itanium 2 platform has reached the point at which the market has begun spending as much--or more--on Intel 64-bit processors as it does on competing RISC chips.

AMD Rolls-out Expanded Opteron Processor Line.  AMD expanded its Opteron 64-bit server line to include for the first time processors for four-to-eight way servers, as well as a low-end uniprocessor family for workstations and one-way servers.

Blueprint Brews 3D Band-gap Crystals. A cookbook developed by University of Toronto researchers describes how to fabricate efficient, large-scale, three-dimensional photonic band-gap (PBG) crystals. PBG materials enable light from micro-lasers to carry information on-chip the way fiber optics uses light for communication between chips.

Vulnerability Enables Passport Account Hijackings. Attackers to reset the password and hijack older .Net Passport accounts.

Britain to Use 'Splatometers' to Count Its Insects

Friday, 27 June 2003

Spam May Sprout Viruses in Home PCs. Junk e-mailers are spreading viruses that let them send spam anonymously through home computers, according to an e-mail security firm.

Research May Crystallize Future of Optical Microchips. A new class of microscopic crystal structures developed at the University of Toronto may bring high-bandwidth optical microchips one step closer to efficient, large-scale fabrication.

Microsoft Releases Fourth Service Pack for Win 2000. Microsoft has released Service Pack 4 for Windows 2000, which contains a bundle of all updates and patches for the operating system released since Service Pack 3 last August.

Court: Microsoft Not Required to Carry Sun's Java. Appeals court also affirms earlier copyright violation ruling.

Windows NT to Get the Seven-year Ditch. The clock is ticking for those Microsoft customers still using the software maker's Windows NT 4.0 workstation operating system as phone support will end June 30.

Harvesting Hydrogen Fuel from Plants Gets Cheaper

Thursday, 26 June 2003

Labels Aim Big Guns at Small File Swappers. In its most serious crackdown yet on file swapping, the Recording Industry Association of America said it will gather evidence against individuals who trade songs online and slap thousands of them with copyright-infringement lawsuits. Piracy Dragnet. Online Piracy Spurs High-Tech Arms Race.

What Goes Around Comes Around. The Only Clear Winner in This SCO Versus IBM Case is Microsoft. SCO Smear Campaign Can't Defeat GNU Community.

Is Oracle the New Neighborhood Bully? It is not surprising that Oracle's hostile takeover bid for rival PeopleSoft is ruffling a few feathers.

Sobig.E@MM Worm Apreading Around Globe. The worm is being helped along by users who open its payload before their antivirus protection is updated. Sobig Finds New Routes to Relay Spam.
W32.Sobig.E@mm Removal Tool.

Defense Department To Convert To New IPv6 Internet Protocol. Backing from the enormous armed forces will likely accelerate the widespread availability of the next-generation Internet Protocol.

SMC Networks Moves Gigabit To Desktop With New Products. Wired/wireless networking vendor SMC Networks Thursday announced a new product family, including Gigabit switches and network cards that deliver a more affordable high-bandwidth desktop connection.

Sanyo Set to Migrate Production From LCD to OLED. Move reflects Japanese drive to hold high ground in display technology.

IBM Claims World's First 3D Magnetic Crystal. IBM researchers hope to create a "cookbook" of metamaterials with optical properties that can eventually be integrated with its existing silicon chips.

WLAN Market to Reach $1.1B by 2007. With increased adoption of wireless networking and hotspots springing up across the globe, IDC expects the WLAN market to see a 13 percent CAGR through 2007.

Huge Mystery Flashes Seen In Outer Atmosphere

Wednesday, 25 June 2003

Intel Shows Off Personal Server. Intel showed off a personal server that's roughly the size of a deck of playing cards and capable of at least as many tricks.

Lindows.com Upgrades OS with 4.0. The firm, which aims to take Linux to the mass market as a desktop operating system, unveils the latest version of its platform.

How Far Can Zend Take PHP? PHP is being pushed by proponents of the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) platform as part of an ecosystem that could compete with a Java-Microsoft-based implementation.

Microsoft, Google May Go Head-to-head. Microsoft's path to expand the Windows empire is leading directly to search king Google.

HP Led Worldwide Notebook Market in 1Q. With sales of 1.3 million to 1.35 million units in the first quarter of 2003, Hewlett-Packard (HP) again secured the crown in the global notebook market, which it took from Dell Computer in late 2002.

Symantec Download Exposes PCs to Attack. Symantec has issued a warning to users of its online Security Check service, admitting they have probably downloaded a flawed ActiveX control that could be used by an intruder as a path into the victim's PC.

Tuesday, 24 June 2003

Nvidia’s nForce2 K7 Chipset Dominates Market. Statistics for June show that of all AMD Athlon XP motherboards shipped, those based on Nvidia’s nForce2 will account for 35% of all shipments, up from 25% in April.

AMD Drops Q2 Guidance by $100M. Lowering its revenue guidance to $615 million, AMD says the anticipated Q2 improvement in sales did not materialize. Meanwhile, one market researcher warns that the MPU maker may be worse off than it is letting on.

Can the G5 Save Apple?  The company has formed an alliance with tech powerhouse IBM, it has moved into the new world of 64-bit computing, and it can now claim its computers are as fast as -- possibly faster than -- the fastest Windows PCs. Apple PowerPC G5: IBM's PowerPC 970 Unleashed. Apple claims they have the fastest 64 bit desktop on the planet. We claim they have a pretty fast 64 bit workstation, but Opteron workstations available now seem faster.

Novell to Push-out Linux Networking. With one eye on the growing popularity of the open-source operating system, Novell pledges to deliver versions of its networking software for Linux-based systems.

U.S. Buys Oldest Map Marked "America"

Monday, 23 June 2003

The End is Here, National Semi's Halla Insists. The end is nigh! The end of the semiconductor industry downturn...

ATI Technologies Soups-up Integrated Graphics Chipset. Striving to escape the intense pricing environment of the integrated graphics processor (IGP) market, ATI is offering chipsets with some functions typically found only in discrete parts.

Intel Speeds Up P4 with HT. Hyper-Threading (HT) technology running at 3.2GHz.

Microsoft Releases Pocket PC 2003, Touts Simplified Development Environment. Microsoft released its latest Pocket PC operating system, emphasizing the software's ability to run more efficiently and offer a development environment that's much easier to use for corporate developers.

Old Apple Hard Drive Becomes New Atomic Mirror. Using a discarded Apple hard drive from the mid 1990's, Cal Tech researchers have fabricated a mirror that reflects atoms instead of light.

Second Black Hole May Lurk at Milky Way's Heart

Friday, 20 June 2003

Senate Panel Overwhelmingly Passes Anti-Spam Bill. Spammers who use false headers or misleading subject lines could get up to a year in jail and a maximum fine of $1 million, etc... "The bill will get tougher as we go forward."

E-mail Scam Makes Best Buy Scramble. The retailer moves to limit damage from an e-mail scam that links to a look-alike Web site to try to persuade consumers to give up their credit-card information.

IP Business is ‘the Oil of the 21st Century.’ 50 to 80 percent of the market value of modern business is due to Intellectual property (IP) assets.

Security Researchers Uncover Mystery Malware. The culprit, which was first thought to be a new breed of Trojan, is actually a distributed network mapping tool that also acts as a listening agent. Dubbed Stumbler... Malware = malicious software = Viruses, Trojan Horses, and Worms.  I would add Spyware to the definition.

CeBIT's Greatest Gadgets. It's here: a do-it-all remote control, touch screen converter, always-on videocam, multiformat DVD burner, and more. German Tech Show Comes to the U.S.

DRAM Prices Too High for OEMs, May Drop. DRAM distributors are worried that with DRAM prices rising over 30% since the beginning of June, PC OEMs may be holding off on large purchases of the memory.

Apple Poised To Release Speedy G5. Apple is set to unveil its new G5 processor, according to screenshots taken by Macintosh enthusiasts of the company's Apple store.

Is This VoIP's MVP Year? Companies have been waiting for voice over IP to free them from the tyranny of circuit-switched telecom networks, and some say 2003 could be the break-out year.

Open Source Advocate Fires Back at SCO. Just days after SCO escalated its legal battle with IBM over alleged violations of a Unix source code contract, open source advocate Eric Raymond has said he has evidence that could undermine some of SCO's legal arguments.

"Dark Side" of the Universe Is Coming to Light

Shyness Linked to Brain Differences

Thursday, 19 June 2003

Linux Is Not Ready For the Enterprise (Opinion). "Linux and other open source projects require too much customization, and doubts about the legitimacy of open source code could get users tangled up in lawsuits. Besides, many Linux supporters are a bunch of potty-mouthed malcontents. Enterprises are better off staying away from Linux and open source..."

AMD Likely to Move Athlon 64 Shipments Up to August. AMD is said to plan to start small-scale shipments of its long-awaited K8-core Athlon 64 processors in August, earlier than its September schedule, sources revealed.

U.S. Tech Exports Down 26%, Study Says. Meanwhile, China replaces Japan and Mexico as the largest supplier of electronics to the United States.

Calling On the Internet. All kinds of companies are trying to exploit the Internet to more cheaply transmit calls that have long moved as analog signals over copper wires.

Micron Fiscal 3Q Loss Expands on Falling Prices. Micron, the world's No. 2 global DRAM manufacturer, said it lost $215 million, or 36 cents per share, in the three months ended May 29...

Trojan Horse Picks Up Steam, Baffles Experts. Security experts still can't get a good handle on the behavior of a new Trojan, which is infecting machines at an increasing rate.

SoBig Worm Rears Its Head Again. Just weeks after the SoBig.C mass mailing worm turned itself off, a new variant begins to spread in the wild.

Micro-engines to Power Next-gen PDAs, PCs, Phones?

Wednesday, 18 June 2003

CeBIT Comes to America. Show preview: Mobile devices, wireless wares, and array of business gadgets debut.

Microsoft Launches Legal Blitz Vs. Spammers. The software giant files 13 U.S. lawsuits and two in the UK, alleging the defendants flooded MSN and Hotmail users with deceptive spam.

U.S. Slaps 45 Percent Final Duty on Hynix Chips. The United States slapped a final import duty of almost 45 percent on South Korean memory-chip maker Hynix Semiconductor Inc. to offset alleged subsidies by Seoul.

Top 10 DVD Read Write Drives. 10 drives priced between $150 and $480.

Hands-On with WLAN Antennas

Geometry Keeps New Building Blocks Together. New building blocks can interlock without cement, and stay strong when damaged.

Tuesday, 17 June 2003

Nanotube Chip Could Hold 10 Gigabits.  Nanoscale random access memory (NRAM) could hold more data than existing types of RAM and would also be non-volatile.

SCO Suit Now Seeks $3 billion From IBM. SCO Group ups the ante in an amendment to its suit against IBM, seeking more than $3 billion in damages for alleged copying of proprietary Unix intellectual property into Linux and seeking an injunction prohibiting IBM from selling Unix.  SCO Revokes IBM Software License, Dispute Deepens. OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint.

Anti-Spam Proposals Getting Tougher. A bipartisan group of legislators and some citizen groups, concerned that current legislative proposals to combat e-mail spam are inadequate, are engaged in a push for tougher alternatives.

CeBit America--the Anti-Comdex. Unlike sister show CeBit Hannover, which boasts hundreds of thousands of attendees, CeBit America is aiming at a much smaller number of corporate executives this week.

AMD Rolls-out Three More Mobile Processors. Less than a week after Intel releases new mobile processors and chipsets, AMD announced three new mobile processors that feature 512 KBytes of L2 cache'.

Monday, 16 June 2003

CeBIT America Debuts, Defying Show Slump. Organizers have cut their attendance forecast in half.

Microsoft: No new versions of IE for Mac. The software giant says it is halting development of future Macintosh versions of its Internet Explorer browser, citing competition from Apple Computer's Safari browser.

Germanium MOSFETs Again Under Study in U.S. and Europe. Two programs are taking shape to study germanium MOSFETs, putting this crystalline element squarely back on the semiconductor industry's research agenda for postsilicon devices.

DRAM Contract Prices for Late June Expected to Rise 15%

Friday, 13 June 2003

High Noon Looms in SCO Dispute. As soon as Monday, SCO may ask a judge to stop IBM from selling Unix products.  What Does the SCO Unix Code Reveal?

Apple and Acer Order Their First 15.4-inch Wide Screen Notebooks From Compal. Already producing Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) first 15.4-inch wide-screen Centrino notebooks, Compal Electronics recently landed orders to produce the first 15.4-inch wide-screen notebooks from Apple Computer and Acer.

Macs to Get a Big Lift with HyperTransport. Apple Computer plans to show how it will use the high-speed chip-to-chip communications technology to charge up its desktops. It also plans an OS X upgrade and a new IBM chip.

Something Is Going On Between Microsoft and ATI... XBOX2?

IAB: Online Ad Rebound Underway. Paid search and the big players powered the online ad market in 2002, setting the stage for a broader recovery in 2003.

Spammers Use Trojans to Enslave Home PCs. Spammers are increasingly hijacking home PCs to send junk mail...

Schumer Introduces No Spam Registry Bill. The bill, Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing Act (The Spam Act), would also make it a crime to harvest e-mail addresses...

Tidbits From AMD's Tech Tour

Cracks Appear in China's Giant Dam

Thursday, 12 June 2003

Prices for Recordable DVD Drives Plunge Despite Tight Supply. Both retail and contract manufacturing prices for recordable DVD drives have plunged since early this year despite tight supply, and prices of some products have declined by as much as 30% during the past month.

Microsoft to Kill Popular Linux Antivirus Product. The RAV product line comes from Romania's GeCAD Software Srl, which Microsoft said yesterday it is buying.

Tech Recovery On The Way? Rising tech stock prices and falling IT unemployment could indicate that the technology sector is finally ready to resume its growth.

Linux: Catalyst for Server Consolidation.  Linux is looking more and more like the catalyst for leaner, meaner systems.

802.11g Wireless LANs Standard Gets Totally Ratified

Apple in Court Dispute Over Unix. As legal battles heat up over who owns the rights to the operating system, the company that claims ownership of the Unix name says Apple is infringing its trademark.

Trident Revamp Cuts PC Graphics Chips. Chipmaker Trident Microsystems will exit the PC graphics market as part of a sweeping reorganization that will shift its focus to digital media products such as high-definition television.

Super-strong Nanotube Threads Created. They are stronger than any natural or synthetic organic fibre known.

Two Is The Loneliest Number

Wednesday, 11 June 2003

Did SCO Violate the GPL?  Some members of the open-source community are claiming that the SCO Group may have violated the terms of the GNU GPL (General Public License) by incorporating source code from the Linux kernel into the Linux Kernel Personality feature found in SCO Unix...

U.S. High-speed Access Nears 20 million Subscribers. High-speed Internet access connecting U.S. homes and businesses increased 23 percent during the second half of 2002.

Sprint Quits Hosting Business. The network operator is shuttering its money-losing hosting and co-location businesses and cutting 500 employees by year's end.

Micron Ships Next-generation Graphics Memory. Micron has shipped the first samples of GDDR3 memory to ATI and nVidia. GDDR3 is a graphics memory technology specifically designed to meet the needs of modern graphics cards.

Profits Up, Supply Up Wednesday. Finally, the electronics industry seems to have gotten the timing right for supply and demand. That could greatly extend the life of the next upturn.

Western Digital to Ship Industry’s First 250 GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with SecureConnect and Flexpower Technologies. 8 MB buffer and three-year warranty.  Drive-cable connection has been strengthened and drives can be powered by existing as well as SATA power supplies.

FTC Says Needs More Authority to Fight Spam. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission told Congress today it needs additional authority to fight unwanted Internet "spam" that has flooded the Internet, accounting for up to half of all e-mail traffic.

New Bugbear Targets Bank Passwords. Security company Symantec uncovers a sinister new function in the fast-spreading e-mail virus--the intruder harvests passwords used by bank employees.

HP’s Fiorina Upsets Taiwan Suppliers. HP's plan to cut another US$1 billion out of the supply chain may have caused smiles among investors but the company’s suppliers in Taiwan are not at all happy. Taiwanese suppliers are estimated to account for about 90% of HP’s global hardware procurement.

Intel Puts Tri-Gate Transistor on Fast Track. Intel says that its Tri-Gate transistor, a futuristic transistor that will let electricity flow more freely inside chips, is moving closer to reality.

Gecko Glue May Aid Computer Chipmaking. Gloves -- covered with a new type of adhesive that mimics the mechanism geckos use to climb slick surfaces -- may simplify handling everything from ultra-clean computer chips to slippery optical lenses.

Scientists Find Oldest Fossils of Modern Humans

Tuesday, 10 June 2003

Intel Ships 1 Billionth Processor. The 25th Anniversary Of Intel Architecture.

SCO Shows Linux Code to Analysts. "It's clearly a fact that [Unix] contains a lot of BSD code, and Linux has some too, so there are bound to be ... lines of code in common," wrote Linux creator Linus Torvalds in an e-mail interview.

The .zip Standard Splinters. PKWare, WinZip format changes jeopardize compatibility.

IBM, Infineon Take Step Toward New Computer Memory. IBM said that the magnetic random access memory technology, or MRAM, could replace DRAM as early as 2005.  With MRAM, a personal computer could turn on almost immediately, like a light switch.

Tetrapod Nanocrystals Could Improve solar Cells. A new type of semiconductor nanocrystal called a tetrapod promises to double the efficiency of "plastic" solar cells.

Monday, 9 June 2003

SuSE Cleans-up Linux Desktop. Germany's SuSE Linux will launch new software and a marketing initiative that aim to make it easy for large organizations to migrate their desktops to the Linux operating system.

Linux-Unix Ties Spelled-out by SCO Group. SCO Group has revealed the basis of its legal battle with the Linux community, including evidence of large blocks of Linux code that it contends were stolen from Unix.

Maine Town is center of Solar System

Friday, 6 June 2003

Packet Tracking Promises Ultrafast Internet. Fast TCP can run on existing infrastructure, but would allow a whole movie to be downloaded in just five seconds.

Jobless Rate Hits 9-Year High. The nation's unemployment rate climbed to 6.1 percent in May.

SCO Says Clause Bolsters Linux Claim. SCO Group discovers a clause in a contract that it says could bolster its potential legal claims against Linux users.

Bugbear Worm Variant Infecting Computers on Web. A variant of the "Bugbear" worm, which spread around the Internet last October, opening back doors on computers and logging keystrokes, has started to infect users around the world, security experts said on Thursday.

Verizon to Hand-over Names of Downloaders. Verizon internet services is to reveal the names of four large-scale music downloaders after an appeals court denied the company's request to overturn the subpoena.

HP Props-up Presario Retail Lines. The Compaq Presario PCs in the new S4000NX line use processors and chipsets from Intel Corp., including some of Intel's new Pentium 4 processors with hyperthreading and 800MHz front-side buses.

Earth Becomes Greener as Climate Changes

Local-Aquatic-Network Packet Caught, Gutted, Eaten

Wednesday, 4 June 2003

Microsoft's Browser Play. Software giant's standalone browser may vanish, raising new questions about its monopoly endgame.

Drop in 'Planned' Layoffs May Signal Recovery. Corporate layoffs dropped 53 percent in May to a 30-month low of 68,623 from 146,399 in April 2003.

A Fast Bus, but Catch It Later. 875P chip set offers an 800-MHz bus but little performance boost, for now.

Graphics Card Makers Slashing Prices to Accommodate New-generation Cards. Widening price ranges for graphic cards have been reported in the retail sector, as graphics card manufacturers continue to cut prices on older products to make room for new-generation DirectX 9-supporting cards.

Legal Action Hits SCO Web Site. SCO Group, which has warned companies that using Linux could get them in legal trouble, shuts down its German Web site after a Linux advocacy group obtained a restraining order.

Does Linux Have a Dark Secret? All it would take, however, is one rogue uploader flying under the radar to open a whole project with millions of users to significant legal repercussions. So in that respect, SCO has done the Linux community a favor by pointing out a chink in the armor.

Insects Stay Cool With Thermoelectricity

Tuesday, 3 June 2003

Gartner Warns--Limit Linux Use. "Although Gartner has reservations on the merits of (SCO's claims), don't take them lightly," Gartner analyst George Weiss advised in a May note. "Minimize Linux in complex, mission-critical systems until the merits of SCO's claims or any resulting judgments become clear."

Spam Saturation tops 50 Percent. Spam has officially overtaken legitimate e-mail in the workplace, and there’s little relief in sight.

New Processor Drives DVD Recorder Price Tag Below $400. DVD recorders, featuring LSI Logic's single-chip DVD encode/decode processor, will go on sale this month at a suggested retail price of $399.

Start-up Brings Hard Drive to the Masses. Cornice wants to take the hard drive out of PCs and put it into your camera.

Defense Department Issues Open Source Policy. The memo eases fears that the military might ban use of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Mars Express Takes Off. The European Space Agency’s mission has been successfully launched.

Monday, 2 June 2003

Microsoft to Drop Standalone IE. The software giant is phasing out standalone versions of its Internet Explorer Web browser, according to statements attributed to IE's program manager on its Web site.

Linux Server Sales Soar As Overall Market Drops. The total number of servers shipped with the Linux operating system preinstalled hit almost 171,700 in the first quarter of 2003, up 29.5 percent from the first quarter of 2002.

Intel Gives Centrino a Boost.  As expected, the chipmaker launches three new Pentium M processors that run at higher clock speeds. It also cuts prices on existing versions of the chip.

Tech Sector's Spring Thaw. It may still be winter out there in the technology sector, but a handful of successful tech companies hint that spring may be just around the corner.

Better bunch of Disks. Three Serial ATA RAID controllers prove their enterprise mettle.

Gecko tape Will Stick You to Ceiling

Index