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Modern PC News for the Week Ending Feb 15, 2003
TomsHardware.com | Space Shuttle Columbia 'Parts' On Ebay within Hours Just hours
after the NASA space shuttle Columbia exploded and all seven crew members were
reported lost, the national news indicated the likely path of debris from the
doomed shuttle and asked citizens to report debris that was found and not to
move or touch it. Shortly after the crash, items reported to be from the
Columbia began to appear in great numbers on eBay's auction site. By late
Saturday evening, a search for "Columbia shuttle" items on eBay was reported to
indicate 1,011 items for sale, with more than 900 reportedly having been listed
after the fatal accident occurred. One item for sale was said described as
"Columbia Space Shuttle Debris with a minimum bid of $10,000 US. To eBay's
credit, this listing was pulled and the item was listed as an "invalid item." As
to Columbia items listed on eBay prior to the crash that were still available on
Saturday, bids for these "collectibles" went through the roof. A sheet of
Columbia shuttle stickers sold for $168, a Columbia beer mug sold for $185, and
a $5 commemorative coin sold for $1,951, just to name a few examples.
Commodore.ca | Lindows Competing with Microsoft on the Number of Versions
It seems that Lindows is releasing new versions few hours! Their standard product was released in November 2002, the MP3 version is available now, their Media Center version is due in a few weeks, and finally they have announced a tablet version for later this year.
BetaNews.com |
Microsoft Preps Windows XP Service Pack Updates
In order to comply with a
preliminary injunction forcing the company to include Sun Microsystems' Java in
Windows, Microsoft is preparing two updates to Windows XP Service Pack 1. TomsHardware.com | Intel To Close Xircom Subsidiary Intel in in the process of closing down its Xircom subsidiary in Thousand Oaks, California. Intel will reportedly attempt to redeploy the Xircom employees to other positions within Intel. In the event a job transfer is not available, these employees will likely be laid off... ZDNet.com |
MS SQL Slammer Virus Attack Almost Over After 10 Minutes Last week's Sapphire worm, widely known as SQL Slammer, infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable computers within 10 minutes, opening a new era of fast-spreading viruses on the Internet, according to a think tank. The findings come from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), a U.S. body largely funded by government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and devoted to developing tools and standards for measuring Internet traffic. According to a CAIDA report issued late last week, the worm doubled in size every 8.5 seconds when it first appeared, and reached the full rate at which it was scanning for vulnerable computers--a rate of more than 55 million scans per second--after about three minutes. This rapidity puts Slammer into the realm of what is known as a Warhol worm, or one that could infect the entire Internet in 15 minutes. Researchers have theorized about such worms for some time, and a paper presented at last year's Usenix Security Symposium by security experts Vern Paxson, Stuart Staniford, and Nicholas Weaver also predicted the emergence of a "flash worm", which could scan the entire Internet in a matter of seconds. Until now, however, no examples have been released into the wild... ...Slammer's spread was two orders of magnitude faster than Code Red, which infected 359,000 computers in the summer of 2001, and doubled in size only about every 37 minutes, CAIDA said... ...Traditional virus-blocking methods are now practically useless for stopping the new breed of worm, the report noted. "Since high-speed worms are no longer simply a theoretical threat, worm defenses need to be automatic; there is no conceivable way for system administrators to respond to threats of this speed," it said. On Friday, Stuart Okin, Microsoft UK's chief security officer, warned that morphs of Slammer could cause more problems than the original, which because it had no payload did not do any direct damage aside from the effects of its denial-of-service nature, and systems could be cleaned by being switched off and on again. TomsHardware.com | AOL Reports Whopping Loss for 2002 and Subscriber Decrease AOL Time
Warner's online division of AOL reported that it lost over 170,000 Internet
users in the U.S. during its fourth quarter. While Time Warner has nearly 35
million subscribers worldwide and dominates the market for dial-up connections
at roughly one of every three dial-up households in the U.S., AOL Time Warner
reported an enormous financial loss of $99 billion for 2002. Its founder, Ted
Turner, has also announced that he is leaving the company. Financial analysts
indicate that the drop in subscribers is not a cause for concern yet; but that
these factors combined with the fact that AOL remains stuck in the dial-up slow
speed access lane could be the beginning of big troubles for the company. In the
broadband market, AOL has only one in thirty customer accounts, according to
some recent research reports. Reuters.com | Microsoft Office Pays Bills as Xbox Losses Double
Microsoft nearly doubled its losses from the Xbox video game console in the December quarter, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Meanwhile, the unit that makes Microsoft's Office software closed in on Windows as being the company's most profitable. In a quarterly report with the SEC filed Friday, Microsoft said it posted operating income of $1.97 billion in the December-ended quarter in its Windows-centered business unit on revenue of $2.44 billion. That was down from income of $2.11 billion and revenue of $2.68 billion in the year-earlier period. Microsoft's Home and Entertainment segment, which includes the Xbox, PC games and the company's TV products, posted an operating loss of $348 million in the quarter on revenue of $1.28 billion. A year earlier it had a loss of $180 million on revenue of $833 million. The company loses money on each Xbox it sells, with some analysts pegging the shortfall at more than $100 per $199 console, meaning that strong sales for the platform actually increase its losses. Microsoft's Information Worker segment, which includes the Office suite of programs, posted operating income of $1.88 billion on revenue of $2.41 billion. A year earlier the segment had posted operating income of $1.74 billion on revenue of $2.2 billion. The only other profitable division in the quarter was Server Platforms, which had operating income of $498 million on revenue of $1.67 billion. That was better than operating income of $402 million and revenue of $1.44 billion a year earlier. The MSN Internet access segment had a loss of $157 million on revenue of $569 million, compared with a loss of $211 million on revenue of $462 million a year earlier. Business Solutions, which includes the company's Great Plains software and the recently acquired Navision, lost $93 million on revenue of $139 million, compared with a loss of $41 million on $73 million in revenue a year ago. The smallest segment in the quarter was CE/Mobility, including the Pocket PC operating system. Revenue was $21 million and the unit had an operating loss of $39 million. Both were improved over the year-earlier period when the unit turned in revenue of $17 million and a loss of $61 million....
ITWorldCanada.com |
Nanotechnology Research Centre Announced in Alberta Also referred to as molecular manufacturing, nanotechnology deals with the design of extremely small electronic circuits and mechanical devices built at the molecular level of matter, ranging in size from 0.1nm to 100nm, according to the Institute of Nanotechnology in Stirling, Scotland. However, the goal of the Center for Excellence in Integrated NanoTools is to provide researchers with an environment to better understand and develop nanotechnology, which could enable the development of microchips, microsystems and nanodevices... CNet.com |
AMD Releases Faster Server Chips And Captures 5% of the Market Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday released a faster version of its Athlon chip for servers and workstations, an upgrade to help the company maintain its new foothold in the server processor market. The Athlon MP 2600+ can fit into one and two processor servers and workstations. Approximately 49 system integrators and PC makers, mostly small and regional manufacturers, will release systems in conjunction with the new chip, according to the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based processor maker. ...Now, AMD ships approximately 100,000 server chips a quarter and accounts for around 5 percent of the chips shipped into the so-called X86 server market, according to Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research... PCMag.com |
The
Supreme Court Upholds Copyright Extensions
Although not everyone realizes it, copyrights eventually expire. On Wednesday, though, in a move that constitutes a big win for entertainment companies, the Supreme Court ruled seven to two in favor of longer copyright protection for songs, movies, copyrighted personas and more. The move is a significant blow to many Internet sites that traffic online content, because the extension of copyright protection on many forms of content means that online content purveyors will have to continue to pay royalties. Companies such as AOL Time Warner and Disney, as well as content creators and their heirs, are the beneficiaries of the ruling. At issue in the Supreme Court's deliberation was whether an earlier decision by Congress to uphold a proposal originally made by the late Republican senator Sonny Bono in 1998 to extend copyrights for 20 years should stand. The Supreme Court said that the decision from Congress was "rational" and also said "we are not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order." The result of the ruling is that works copyrighted by creators are extended until 70 years after the death of the creator, which protects heirs of the creators. Corporations who own copyrighted works have most of their copyrights protected for 95 years. The ruling is already being referred to as "the Eldred decision" because Eric Eldred, who owns a public Web library, had challenged the decision by Congress to uphold copyright extension...
Reuters.com |
Nokia Bets That Gaming Phone Will Boost Growth
Mobile phone maker Nokia on Wednesday will set foot in unfamiliar territory, playing the underdog as it unveils a cellphone that doubles as a handheld gaming device, a market dominated by Japan's Nintendo. Unhappy with the slow growing mobile phone market, Nokia will take a stab at the multi-billion dollar handheld video games market. Total game software sales in North America alone grew 27 percent to $4 billion in the 11 months to November, according to market research firm NPD Funworld. Nokia's debut product, N-Gage, will look similar to Nintendo's Gameboy Advance, the dominant mobile gaming device on the market, but the question remains: will it sell like GameBoy Advance? As of September 30, Nintendo, best known for its Super Mario games, shipped 24 million Gameboy Advance units worldwide and shipped 71 million games since its launch in March 2001... |
