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Modern PC News for the Week Ending May 20, 2003
CNet.com | Microsoft Shows Off 'Athens' PC Prototype at WinHEC 2003By Michael Kanellos
...Gates said the combination of computing and communications devices will make it easier for people to screen calls. In an application demonstrated on the Athens PC prototype during his speech, Gates showed how a picture of a caller, e-mails on the PC from that caller, and a history of interaction with that caller could all be displayed on a PC. The PC owner could then decide to take the call or, after looking at who is calling, send it to voice mail. Gates said that Windows devices in the future will likely come with a new navigational tool he called Xeel. Xeel is a series of navigation buttons, stacked vertically, that will execute commands when pushed in or when shifted toward one of four compass points. ...The application is only a prototype and is not part of Longhorn, the next version of Windows for desktop PCs, a Microsoft representative said. Longhorn is expected to make a debut late next year or early 2005 TomsHardware.com | Billy Gras: Microsoft's WinHEC Makes Love to AMD64
...This year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) is packed with pre-release versions of Microsoft XP Pro and Server for AMD64 processors. Is Microsoft mad at Intel for throwing its hat into the Linux ring, or is AMD shooting Kamikazes with the Redmond crowd on Beale Street?... PCMag.com |
Average In-Box Now Receives 42 Spam Messages Per Day In a battle that IBM spam fighter Scott Fahlman calls "a constant arms race," antispammers are fanning out. Unsolicited e-mail, the bane of the computing world, has proliferated so that the average e-mail in-box receives 42 spam messages per day—a figure Jupiter Research analysts estimate will nearly double to 70 by 2007... BetaNews.com | Windows Longhorn Milestone 5 Leaked By Nate Mook
...Longhorn M5 features incremental enhancements over Milestone 4, which leaked out in early March. Microsoft has finally given Longhorn its own boot logo, and has added a new notification screen while logging in. As
introduced in M4, build 4015 utilizes the Windows Preinstallation
Environment to install, reducing setup time dramatically. M5 takes longer
install than M4, however, due to changes in the way Longhorn detects devices.
NewsFactor.com | The HP-Compaq Merger One-Year Checkup Tradition holds that one-year anniversary presents should be made of paper, but executives at Hewlett-Packard no doubt could have done without the papers presented just a couple of weeks before the anniversary of HP's huge US$19 billion merger with Compaq. In those papers, two separate research firms reported that the combined HP-Compaq had lost the top spot in the personal computer marketplace to Dell. And although HP tried to shrug off the news, the symbolism, coming as it did just before the May 3rd anniversary of the merger, was not lost on many observers. "Dell has clearly been the biggest beneficiary of this merger," Forrester analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times. Still, he added, the merged HP appears to be doing better than expected, with recent service contract wins a clear outgrowth of the two companies' union. On the Upside - ...But so far in 2003, the news has been better. HP managed to post a 50 percent increase in profits in the fourth quarter of 2002, though sales did not meet expectations. Even more important, the company recently landed some high-profile contracts for its consulting and outsourcing services. In March, it snagged a $243 million, five-year deal to provide help-desk and related services to Telecom Italia. Then, in early April, it announced a tentative agreement to provide some $3 billion worth of outsourcing services to consumer goods maker Procter & Gamble over the next decade. All told, HP says it has scored some 200 outsourcing deals since the merger closed, helping to make it a potential force in a field dominated by IBM and EDS. ...Enderle said.... "Some of those bigger contracts, they would not have been able to get without having the Compaq consultants on board." ...HP vice president of e-business Marius Haas, a former Compaq executive, told the E-Commerce Times that integration in the online space is "well ahead" of plan. ...He added that about 90 percent of HP's biggest customers now are doing business electronically with the company -- a key achievement since HP had been aiming to streamline its business processes. Moreover, HP.com now attracts 1.2 million unique visitors daily and delivers 10.5 million page views, and the company's e-business marketing unit produces 3 million personalized newsletters that provide millions of dollars worth of sales leads each month. ...Behind the scenes, other integration efforts have vastly reduced the number of different Web applications in use and have resulted in use of a single analytics method worldwide. Haas said top-down management directives emphasizing that the integration plan was "sacred" helped accelerate the pace of change. However, in other parts of the massive company, the merger's results appear less clear at the one-year mark, according to Forrester's Enderle. He said a lack of true integration has hampered attempts to create a unified HP. In places, Enderle noted, the company still divides evenly among Compaq and HP, even down to being able to find distinct groups of employees where integration was supposed to have occurred. And the Compaq brand, though absent from the corporate moniker, survives, emblazoned on a recent line of upgraded Presario computers, for instance. "I don't think people can tell you what the brand image of the new HP is supposed to be right now," he said. Overall, he added, "[The merger is] probably going a little better than expected, but there's clearly a lot of integration work still to be done." AssociatedPress.com |
Mosaic Browser Marks 10th Anniversary Ten years ago this month, software developers at the University of Illinois released Mosaic, which used graphical images and simplicity to open the World Wide Web to the masses. What had been a domain of scientists and computer geeks dominated by cumbersome language and technical complexity became simple enough for nearly anyone to use. Mosaic was released in April 1993 by the school's National Center for Supercomputing Applications as free software. It became the foundation for today's Web browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Communications' Communicator. Mosaic's lead developer, Marc Andreessen, became one of Netscape's founders and took some of his UI colleagues with him. "It was an accelerator for the whole Internet," said Larry Smarr, the former director of the computing center. "It sort of took the Internet to the next level of capability." Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the World Wide Web was limited to text. The new software brought a way to integrate images and sound with words. Andreessen and his colleague Eric Bina had a clear goal when they started — a browser that was easy to install, simple to use and would work with different computer operating systems. ...The first version of Mosaic worked only with UNIX systems. Windows and Macintosh versions followed later in 1993. Once word about Mosaic's simplicity circulated, users couldn't get the software fast enough, turning it from a creation of computer geeks to the beginning of an information revolution. The NCSA Web site recorded more than 1 million downloads within a year of Mosaic's release. New users eager to surf the Web downloaded 70,000 copies of the software monthly. BetaNews.com |
Apple: 1 Million Tunes Sold in First Week
Commodore.ca | Adobe Release Acrobat v6 in 3 Different Flavours
Note that Acrobat Elements is only available in quantities of 1000 units.
Commodore.ca | Ever Wonder Why You Can't See Some File Extensions in Windows? Well, it turns out that there is a registry key called "NeverShowExt"
which causes this behaviour. It has p Commodore.ca |
Print Directly onto the Surface of Your CD's with The New Epson 960 I have been selling hacked versions of the Epson C62 (called the EZCD Printer for CDN$600) which allow inkjet CD's to be run through this otherwise inexpensive printer. Now Epson has a factory version with a real warrenty. List price is CDN$550 and there is precious little margin in that amount so don't expect it to sell for much less. Also keep in mind that you will need inkjet printable media which is now available at Memory Express and other outlets for $.50 per disk. Reuters.com | RIM, Palm in Pact to Market Wireless E-mail Research In Motion Ltd. (Toronto) said on Tuesday it had struck a deal with rival Palm Inc. to make its BlackBerry e-mail service available on handhelds and smartphones that use Palm's operating system. RIM has traditionally offered its e-mail service through its own BlackBerry devices, known for their distinctive thumb-operated keyboards. But the agreement with Palm will allow rival devices that license Palm's Palm OS operating system software to connect to BlackBerry's server. However, analysts said the deal was primarily a marketing effort -- no actual technology was swapped and no licensing agreements were signed. They said it failed to go far enough to link Palm, the dominant handheld computer maker and RIM, the leader in the corporate e-mail pager market... BetaNews.com |
Microsoft Offers Virtual Server Preview A pre-beta version of Microsoft's Virtual Server product, which the company purchased from Connectix in February, is now available for public download from BetaPlace. The preview release, build 1.0.218, is the same that leaked out of Redmond late last month. Microsoft stresses the pre-beta release is not suitable for production, as some features are disabled and Virtual Server has not been optimized for performance. A final release of Microsoft Virtual Server is slated for the end of 2003. Interactivetools.com | Free HTML Text Editor for Embedding into Your Own Web Pages
htmlArea is a WYSIWYG editor replacement for any <textarea> field. Instead of teaching your software users how to code basic HTML to format their content, they can use htmlArea to:
You can also create your own buttons to insert custom blocks of HTML code and images. htmlArea is provided by interactivetools.com completely free. Please note: because htmlArea is available for free, we can't provide any support. Post a question to our Forum if you're having a problem and someone may be able to help you there.
Glennifer Ferguson | Supercool Iceberg Picture This item is totally non-technical, but it was sooo damn cool I put it in anyway!This is awesome! This came from a Rig Manager for Global
Marine Drilling in St.Johns, Newfoundland. They actually have to divert the path
of these things away from the rig by towing them with ships! Anyway, in this
particular case the water was calm & the sun was almost directly overhead so
that the diver was able to get into the water and click this pic.
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uzzled
me for years that files like shortcuts (.LNK files) usually do not have visible
extensions. If you want to see this for yourself, right click on your
desktop, select NEW, TEXT FILE, and call the file TEST.SHS; immediately the
extension will disappear. The complete explaination of how this was
discovered and how programs like virus' use this feature to their advantage is
available 
