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August 2003 News Archive
A jury in a Chicago federal court handed Microsoft a whopping $521 million legal defeat yesterday after deciding that the company infringed on a Web browser-related patent that the University of California owns in part. The little-reported case centers on technologies that support browser add-ons such as plugins, applets, and ActiveX controls. The Regents of the University of California and inventors Cheong Ang, Michael Doyle, and David Martin were awarded the patent that protects this technology in 1998; Doyle left the university and started a company called Eolas Technologies, which became the exclusive licensee of the patented Web browser technology. Eolas originally sued Microsoft in 1999, and the Regents of the University of California joined the lawsuit a year later.Click here to read more.
MICROSOFT'S leak last year that it would develop a 64-bit operating system for AMD's x86-64 initiative was an essential step towards Sunnyvale's goal of winning acceptance for its new 64-bit processor. Without MS support, only people running Linux would've been able to take advantage of the CPU's 64-bit mode, which would've effectively ended AMD's push for 64-bits in the desktop and potentially even crippled server/workstation deployment.Click here to read more.
Click here to read more.Recording industry lawyers have claimed that detailed analysis of the data in MP3 music files can prove the files were downloaded illegally from an online file-sharing network.
The revelation came with the release of court documents relating to a case against a New York woman. She is accused of sharing 1000 songs through a peer-to-peer file network, using the online pseudonym "nycfashiongirl". She claims to have made the MP3 files found on her computer from CDs that she owned.
The RIAA says the username of another computer user was found in the header of one of the MP3s. Headers are routinely used to store a song's title and length, but some MP3 compression software may also add information such as the username of the person who created the file.
The RIAA said that it also examined the digital fingerprints, or "hashes'', of the MP3s and found that some matched those of files previously see on file-sharing networks.
Click here to read more.Very surprising is that Intel's roadmap indicates only a 3.8 GHz Prescott in Q3 2004. Now these Intel Roadmaps tend to be conservative, and Intel has proven more than once that they can speed up the clockspeed a bit faster than they announced. Tejas will probably be introduced at 4 GHz (Q4 2004), and could reach 4.4 GHz at the end of Q1 2005.
However, this means that since the introduction of the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 in November 2002, clockspeed will have increased by only 1 GHz at most or only 33% in two years time! Compare this to the speed at which clockspeed has increased the past years. The 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 has been introduced in November 2000, and in November 2002, the clockspeed doubled (3.06 GHz). And we are not even talking about the two years before that period (Nov '98: PII-450 - Nov' 2000: P4 1.5 GHz). It seems that even the process wizards of Intel can not change the fact that Silicon/CMOS technology seems to be getting close to it's limits...
Click here to read more.In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Mars was only 34.6 million miles away from Earth, the closest approach in the past 60,000 years. Taking advantage of this opportunity, NASA trained the Hubble telescope on the red planet and snapped a few pictures. Of course, Hubble wasn't the only telescope trained on Mars, The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope obtained what may be the sharpest image taken of Mars from the ground.
If you haven't had an opportunity to see Mars during this opposition, I suggest wandering out in the morning hours to gaze at our planetary neighbor...
China was the fastest to make the conversion from Pentium III to Pentium IV in any place we do business, including the United States,'' Intel Chief Executive Craig Barrett said Wednesday.Click here to read more.
"I think we have a competitive product offering almost independent of what price point you are looking at,'' he told reporters after visiting the southwestern city of Chengdu, where Intel plans to open an assembly and test plant.
AMD aims to increase its market share in China at least twice as fast as the overall market there, which analysts said may be possible given AMD's competitive pricing and its low market share in the country, which just crossed into double digits.
Some of you may already be aware of this, but after doing some testing the results are striking enough to warrant posting on the front page for those who haven't. Its been common knowledge for a while that running FAH with the "-advmethods" flag would enable the Gromacs core (with its subsequent performance boost) but after watching this on both P4 and AMD systems in the lab I noted that the P4 systems always use SSE, while the AthlonXP systems still default to 3DNow!.Click here to read more.
Curious, I decided to test whether or not using SSE over 3DNow! with the AthlonXP would improve performance. The "-forceasm" flag can be used to force SSE on AMD's AthlonXP or Athlon 64 processors, and was hence enabled.
The results are startling. Units that were taking no less then 30 minutes per percent to complete under 3DNow! now crunched in 10 minutes under SSE. Similar performance jumps have been seen across multiple work units and systems, including some of AMD's "latest-and-greatest."
The fatal break-up of the Columbia space shuttle was caused by long-standing flaws in Nasa's staff culture as much as technical problems, an independent investigation has found.Click here to read more.In its final report, published on Tuesday, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) said that while mechanically the orbiter was lost because of a breach in the heat shield, management blunders and organisational errors at the space agency were as much to blame.
But the report said that the growing culture within the space agency, whereby "little by little, Nasa was accepting more and more risk in order to stay on schedule," meant that the problem was overlooked.
The report said that mission managers had fallen into the habit of accepting defects in the shuttle system as normal and ignoring them. Nasa has since admitted that if the problem had been known by the seventh day of the mission, the shuttle Atlantis could have been rushed into space in enough time to evacuate Columbia.
Paris and Victoria emerged earlier this year, when they were revealed to be cut-down versions of the Athlon 64. At the time, it was assumed that was simply a matter of their smaller, 256KB L2 cache. Paris will be fabbed at 130nm, and is due to ship sometime during Q4 2003. Victoria will debut late Q2 or early Q3 2004.Click here to read more.
However, it now appears that the chips will not operate in 64-bit mode. The Athlon 64 supports three modes of operation: 32-bit 'legacy' mode, dual 32/64-bit 'compatibility' mode and pure 64-bit mode. The last two require a 64-bit OS, and are essentially sub-modes of the chip's 64-bit 'long' mode.
If Xbit Labs' report is correct, Paris and Victoria will be limited to 'legacy' mode.
AMD has always touted Athlon 64's full 32-bit compatibility, partly to make it easy for users to migrate from the 32-bit domain to the 64-bit world, but mostly because it allows it to use one chip to target both domains, rather develop, market and manufacture two products, which is Intel's approach.
A little over a week ago we reported on one of the first legal moves against the RIAA brought about by an RIAA target. Now another targeted user has come forward with another, albeit different legal challenge. "Jane Doe," an anonymous Kazaa user (for the moment), and her lawyers are arguing that the RIAA's subpoena power is both a violation of due process, and a violation of her privacy.Click here to read more."This is more invasive than someone having secret access to the library books you check out or the videos you rent," Glenn Peterson, one of the attorneys, said in a statement. "The recent efforts of the music industry to root out piracy have addressed a uniquely contemporary problem with Draconian methods--good old-fashioned intimidation combined with access to personal information that would make George Orwell blush."
WE NOW HAVE CONFIRMATION of an earlier story at Xbit Labs saying that AMD will use a 754 pin layout in the future.Click here to read more.The chip will use single channel DDR but won't be available until Q3 of next year and currently masquerades under the codename Paris. When it moves to 90 nanometers it will be codenamed Victoria.
The CPU, despite the pin count, will only run in 32-bits but our sources tell us that it will ran faster than the current 462 pinout. µ
Much of the Unix code in the slides was obscured, because the company wants to keep its intellectual property under wraps, but SCO is allowing people who want to see a more extensive side-by-side comparison during the conference to do so if they sign a nondisclosure agreement.Click here to read more.
Sontag also said thousands of lines of Unix have made their way into Linux in the form of derivative works that should have been bound by SCO licensing agreements that require licensees to keep the code secret. The company said several enterprise features of Linux--the NUMA (nonuniform memory access), RCU (read-copy update), SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing), schedulers, JFS (journal file system) and XFS (extended file system) portions--all include copied code. The company broke out the number of lines of code that had been directly copied from each. It said, for example, that more than 829,000 lines of SMP code had been duplicated in Linux.
"A number of entities have violated contracts and contributed inappropriate content into Linux," Sontag said.
A PRESS BRIEFING held for British hardware hacks by memory company Corsair has cast some doubts on the performance of the future Athlon 64 microprocessor.Click here to read more.
Company officials told the journalists that registered memory modules don't overclock that well on the AMD64 platform, and as the Athlon 64 is aimed at enthusiasts, that's a bit of the paradox.
And the same officials claimed that increased performance of the Athlon 64, estimated by some to be 30% greater for 32-bits than competing X86 chips, is probably rather optimistic.
Somewhere in Redmond a highly-skilled network technician flips the Big Red Switch (BRS) marked 'Do not touch this switch,' the Blaster attack is foiled, and the 'Linux to the rescue' urban legend is born. As all you paranoid conspiracy-theorists can see here, on the eve of the onslaught windowsupdate.microsoft.com ceased to be a Windows Server 2003 site minding its own business and running Microsoft IIS, and instead became a Linux site running (hint) Microsoft IIS.Click here to read more.
What actually happened, as we mentioned earlier, was that Microsoft removed the redirect from windowsupdate.com to windowsupdate.microsoft.com, thus cunningly frustrating the worm, which was written with a view to performing a denial of service operation on the former, but not the latter. The BRS approach to security, which owes much to the theory that viruses don't come out at night, is one we particularly like, as it's cheap and approximately 50 per cent effective, but the move did not make Windows Update unavailable as such.
The rumour is that Microsoft has got into such a flap about the Blaster worm that it's readying a small service pack called SP1a for Windows XP, which might emerge within the next two weeks.Click here to read more.Except it can't be called SP1a as there is one of those already for the Java VM, so maybe it will be SP1X or something. "Tiny", as one of our readers points out, is relative in the case of "modern" operating systems from Microsoft.
According to those rumours, Microsoft wishes to downplay the massive MB accumulation of fixes and the like released during the last 10 months or so.
This deal leaves me with two interrogants: What will happen with ATI's deal with Nintendo, or what will power Nintendo's next generation console. And the second, how backwards compatible will X-Box 2 be? Would sound simple since any chip ATI or NVIDIA develop are PC based however many X-Box games have used NVIDIA-only optimizations... but I guess they still have a lot of time to work on it anyway.Click here to read more.
"Third quarter next year would put anywhere from 18 to 24 months between the first two service packs," Joe Wilcox, senior analyst for Jupiter Research, told BetaNews. "This is a much longer cycle than between Windows 2000 service pack releases."Click here to read more.The possible implications of the move are far reaching. A yearlong delay gives Microsoft significant time to further its integration strategy with Windows XP – building more components directly into the operating system.
"It's possible that Microsoft is preparing a more substantive-than-usual service pack that would add new features to Windows XP or hybrids Media Center and Tablet PC," said Wilcox.
One such potential feature is Microsoft's PC Satisfaction package, currently in beta testing. PC Satisfaction extends the native functionality of Windows XP with services such as an enhanced firewall and virus scanner that give customers a better Windows experience out of the box.
When heading to the registration area here at Quakecon I noticed that Macs were being used again this year to sign people in. I thought it was curious and commented that I didn't think Apple was a sponsor. Well the reason they weren't sponsors, I was told, was that they could not get their AGP cards working with the G5 Power Mac, and that was hampering a display of them at Quakecon of course. So I'm wondering does anyone in the world have a G5 Power Mac, and can they run 3D applications on it?Click here to read more.
Click here to read more.In order to compete with the Thai government's plan to sell a million cheapo Linux PCs, which we covered earlier, Microsoft did some fancy footwork on pricing. And on activation.
According to the Journal, Microsoft said it would sell WIndows XP and Office at a piffling $36 a PC
If it can do all these marvellous things in Thailand, why not anywhere else on our planet? As Windows XP forms a particularly large item in a PC's bill of materials, resellers everywhere would certainly welcome this one. �
Click here to read more.According to the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required), SCO intends to battle IBM by showing the GPL (General Public License) to be invalid. The GPL is the primary license by which most open source software is protected from Intellectual Property attacks and/or theft. The GPL has never been tested in court, so this may turn out to be the first time that high-powered legal scrutiny considers the effectiveness and legality of the license.
IBM has charged that SCO's own past distribution of Linux essentially implied SCO's total acceptance of the GPL and its terms, effectively negating its current claims. Now SCO's lead attorney, Mark Heise of Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP, is going to argue that US copyright law invalidates the GPL, because the GPL allows unlimited copying and distribution of software. The catch? US copyright law stipulates that users can make one, and only one copy of software that's purchased. In effect, SCO is arguing that Intellectual Property can't actually be given away for free if the purpose is unlimited duplication. This is patently ridiculous; first because you don't actually have to buy most GPL's code, it's available for free (and when you "buy" it, you're not buying the code, you're buying the media, the manuals, and possibily support), and second, the purpose of the duplication clause is to guarantee at least one backup to users, not to limit users to one backup in a case where a license permits more than one backup.
AMD is in the somewhat unusual position of running toward an all-time loss. From April 1970 to the end of the second quarter of 2003, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker's cumulative net income--including the effect of acquisitions, sell-offs and charges--comes to $186.6 million, according to a tally of the net income figures culled from AMD's published financial statements and a review of documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission.Click here to read more.
This decision wasnt easy, Neowin has been my life for the better part of 3 years, We have dedicated that time to help people and to help people stay informed about the latest news and releases for the IT sector. We dont get paid, we dont force anything on our members yet we are treated like this by a kid who doesnt even know us personally.Go to NeoWin and Neowin's MSN GroupI am sad that one child can have so much influence on the web that he can destroy a service we offered for free to over 30,000 registrations. I have posted his details on our Neowin MSN community, you can view that here. I just want to close this message by saying thanks for your continued support over the last 3 years.
Click here for more.Microsoft officials declined to comment on the Office release to manufacturing (RTM) date or on the official launch of Office and Exchange 2003, which is expected around mid-October, the sources said.
The newest version of Outlook has much appeal. It adds e-mail filtering, an improved user interface, mobility features with a Cached Exchange Mode, better connectivity capabilities and secure connections on HTTP, among other things. Outlook with Business Contact Manager is a feature to help small businesses more closely track customer accounts.
"It seems as if they've heard our complaints," said Ibrahim Abdul-Karim, an Exchange administrator at Delaware Investments, a Philadelphia-based financial services company. "They've improved on the usability and functionality of the client."
Getting an MS x86-64 OS for the desktop is like getting a kitchen table and chairs for the house. You certainly want that; it's a lot better than eating from the floor, but you'd hardly call the house fully furnished once you got that.Click here to learn more.
What prospective Hammer buyers should be watching very closely in the months ahead is the other software that gets ported over to x86-64.
I only included those images that showed elevated temperatures.� No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get any heat out of the CPU and Heat sink.� The Northbridge did however show a little heat leaking out from under the heat sink, confirming that the sink is probably concave and the compound was not very well applied.� I only saw this with the camera settings really screwed up, it didn't show up after I figured out how to work the thing!!!� I will try and keep this page updated with more pictures as I modify and add goodies.Read here to see more.
After a bit of research, it looks like the little �smoking� chip by the south bridge is the Chipset Voltage Regulator CM3708 (Thanks to the MJ Vdd mod at www.NforcersHQ.com) I wonder if its �just under boiling� temperature is part of many of the problems associated with this board. Could this be the Bios Death trigger?� Maybe the Soundstorm noise maker? Who knows? I�m thinking one of the spikes from a Northbridge style sink glued on there might help.
Officials at AMD, in Sunnyvale, Calif., said the deal for National Semiconductor's Information Appliance unit which primarily manufactures the Geode chip family�will enable the company to offer x86 architecture chips in thin clients, smart displays and set-top boxes.Go here to read more about it.
Financial terms of the deal, announced Wednesday, were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close at the end of the month, according to AMD.
"With this acquisition, AMD would be the only company with the assets, dedicated resources and strategic vision to deliver a common, industry-standard architecture from embedded applications to mobile, desktop and servers," AMD President and CEO Hector Ruiz said in a prepared statement.
Also, said she, that crazy Bosnian guy who writes for the INQUIRER � what's his name � was spot on about the heat emitting properties of the Prescott. But they'll fix that, she reckons.Read the entire report here
And he's right too about air cooling for future Intel chips. Water cooling is absolutely in the pipe for Intel chips and air cooling will be a thing of the past, what with global warming, and that proceeding nicely.
Why, even 1U rack mount servers are already underpowered on heat dissipation and Intel knows that all too well , said Sheena.
The bootleg and knock-off trade is booming, and practically no one seems to care. Here in Boston I can walk down to Copley Square and buy a current, popular CD from a pirate for $5 in about 5 minutes. And I can do it right in front of a cop. While the RIAA wants to break down the doors of every house in town with a cable modem, these guys can conduct their trade right out in the open.Read the entire report here
The pirate CD market is now so big, $4.6bn (�2.86bn), it is "of greater value than the legitimate music market of every country in the world, except the USA and Japan".When I was last in Athens, I was amazed at how these guys would just work a restaurant, right there out and the open selling illegal copies of music. And hey, many of these CD's aren't derived from 112kbps songs ripped off the 'net. They're oftentimes perfect copies of the original, and the pirates have even used color laser printers and the like to replicate the cover art. Sure, you're not likely to find Steely Dan's Greatest Hits in the repertoire of your street pirate, but then, that's not what people are buying.
According to David Brown, "if the Chinese government ever launches nuclear missiles against the West with an Opteron enhanced guidance system, the survivors can tell themselves that the American assistance that helped make it possible was provided in full compliance with US regulations".Read the report here. Plus read the full thesis on this theory here
Still, as we've broadly hinted many times here before, the Chinese government has had Alpha chip technology for years. There have been many suggestions that a former president of the United States made transfer of technology possible because he needed money for what's called an "erection", where everyone gets to vote for politicians.
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 4, 2003--Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - News) today made two significant announcements to protect Red Hat Linux customers and the worldwide Linux industry. First, Red Hat announced that it filed a formal complaint against The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX, "SCO"). The purpose of this complaint is to demonstrate that Red Hat's technologies do not infringe any intellectual property of SCO and to hold SCO accountable for its unfair and deceptive actions.Read the report at Yahoo! Finance
"We filed this complaint to stop SCO from making unsubstantiated and untrue public statements attacking Red Hat Linux and the integrity of the Open Source software development process," said Mark Webbink, General Counsel at Red Hat. "Red Hat is confident that its current and future customers will continue to realize the significant value that our Red Hat Linux platform provides without interruption."
A REPUBLICAN SENATOR has demanded that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), turn over copies of the 900 subpoenas it has issued to people allegedly copying music.Read the entire report here
MTV said that Minnesota politician Norm "Napster" Coleman, who also chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations, wants copies of the subpoenas by the 14th of August.
He is worried that the music industry has adopted a shotgun approach to the problem of music piracy and may end up taking innocent people to court who may have been victims of circumstance.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is firmly planted in the top 5 technological advances in my lifetime. But, with the Feb. 1 Columbia accident the future of the HST is currently up in the air. The fourth servicing mission (SM4) of Hubble had been tentatively scheduled for mid 2005 (hopefully to extend the HST lifetime 'till 2010), but that date is put on hold since the shuttle fleet's grounding. Even with a resumption in shuttle flights, the majority of missions will be used for completion of the International Space Station. Tight scheduling combined with growing NASA budget constraints may mean the fourth servicing mission for HST will be scrapped altogetherRead about the report here
If approved, the settlement states that Florida residents who purchased, either directly or indirectly, a Microsoft operating system between November 16, 1995 and December 31, 2002 could receive vouchers from the company to be used towards PC and/or Mac hardware and software. Vouchers could also be available to people who purchased, directly or indirectly, other Microsoft products, such as Word or Excel.Read more about this suit here.
Microsoft Corporation (UK) has just made available the MS Office 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 Product Briefing event to Business and IT Decision Makers in East Anglia for the 24th September. According to the description of the conference, "This event has been timed to coincide with these product launches to ensure that you receive the most up to date information as it becomes available".Click here for info.
