19th December 2003 Archive

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775-pin Prescott insides exposed on web

Not a pretty sight

Top marks to Virtual Zone for getting their mitts of one of Intel's 775-pin 'Prescott' Pentium 4 processors. The site claims to have had it for a while but now the time has come to lift the lid on the new chip - literally. It's a bit Russian dolls, really. Lift one blank, featureless square to reveal... another, smaller blank, …

Channel 19 Dec 2003, 09:24
Warranty inquiry lets retailers off the hook

More competition = fewer customers?

The UK's extended warranties market is to be opened to competition, with retailers forced to promote offerings from third parties as well as their own. This conclusion of a Competition Commission investigation into extended warranties was accepted yesterday by the government, so the likes of Dixons and Comet may breathe a small …

Channel 19 Dec 2003, 09:28
Transmeta's 90nm Efficeon to sample next month

Won't ship until July at the earliest

Transmeta has already said it will ship the 90nm version of its Efficeon processor during the second half of 2004, but this week it confirmed that it will be getting its hands on the first samples of the chip next month. The information comes from one the company's recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, an 8-K form …

Channel 19 Dec 2003, 09:48
O2 claims 1m Active users

Onto the handset

More than five per cent of O2 customers use their handsets to access the mobile operator's O2 Active portal, generating around 559 million page impressions in October. The company announced that around one million of its more than 20 million customers in Ireland, the UK and Germany accessed the portal in a 90-day period to the …

Mobile 19 Dec 2003, 10:06
STMicro buys UK dual-mode Wi-Fi chip pioneer

Wants to sell WLAN tech into broadband kit, phones

STMicroelectronics yesterday said it has bought privately held UK fabless Wi-Fi chip developer Synad. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Last April, Synad launched its debut product: Mercury5G, a dual-band 802.11a/b/g chipset. Synad's radio technology, dubbed AgileRF, can directly hop from the 2.4GHz band to the 5GHz …

Wireless 19 Dec 2003, 10:12
Oracle 10g – grids at tenth of the price

KISS and tell

A twin processor Lintel server for $5000 is the only rational building block for enterprise computing, Oracle's Larry Ellison said at a recent conference, writes Peter Abrahams of Bloor Research. It is faster and nearly ten times cheaper than the equivalent power on a mainframe or UNIX server. This statement is at the heart of …

Hardware 19 Dec 2003, 10:18
ATI R420 to ship late Q1 2004

Taiwanese sources claim

What could well be ATI's final AGP 8x graphics chip, codenamed 'R420', is due to go into volume production next March. So claim Taiwanese industry sources, cited by local news site DigiTimes. The R420 will be manufactured by TSMC at 130nm using low-k dielectric insulation. The chip itself will contain 160 million transistors …

Channel 19 Dec 2003, 10:26
BT scoops up NSB Retail's UK ops

£17m cash

BT is buying the UK operations of NSB Retail for £17m cash. The acquisition extends BT's move into the IT services sector, and takes NSB closer to becoming a pure-play software company. NSB will continue to develop and own its software, while BT will become its exclusive distributor in the UK and Ireland. BT will also have non- …

Channel 19 Dec 2003, 10:37
Open source outfit releases vulnerability for IE vulnerability

Oh dear...

An open source and freeware development outfit, Openwares.org, has released a patch for an IE spoofing vulnerability. Unfortunately, it came with its own added buffer overflow vulnerability, together with a mechanism which appears to pass information over to the Openwares' web site. Microsoft itself has however only warned of …

Software 19 Dec 2003, 11:47
MP ejected for picture-phone abuse

Picture messaging reaches the mother of all parliaments

Marketing droids concerned to see mobile picture messaging coming into more serious business use would have been delighted to see it employed in the House of Commons yesterday. At least they would have been if the Member of Parliament concerned hadn't been ejected from the chamber. Normal business was interrupted when Henry …

Mobile 19 Dec 2003, 12:12
ATI Q1 sales up 40%

Selling more desktop graphics cards

ATI saw sales leap 40 per cent year-on-year and 23 per cent sequentially to $469.7 million during the three months to 30 November, the first quarter of its 2004 fiscal year. Income for the quarter totalled $47.4 million (19 cents a share), significantly better than the $7.3 million (three cents a share) is recorded this time …

Channel 19 Dec 2003, 12:23
Dutch Supreme Court rules Kazaa legal

But using it might not be

A Dutch supreme court today reaffirmed that it is lawful to make the file sharing software Kazaa openly available. It is the first time that a Supreme Court or other national high court is ruling on the legitimacy of P2P technologies such as Kazaa. The outcome of the case, brought in a counter-suit by Dutch music rights society …

Music and Media 19 Dec 2003, 13:39
Red Hat Fedora plans Linux kernel 2.6 for April

First big test for the bleeding edge?

Red Hat's Fedora project is likely to produce one of the first major Linux distributions sporting the new 2.6 kernel, with release of the next version, Fedora Core 2, scheduled for early April. This will put it well ahead of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, which isn't likely to go to 2.6 until next autumn, and will provide an acid …

Software 19 Dec 2003, 15:56
UK's Equiinet offers to rescue Sun Cobalt clan

Deep discount

UK-based Equiinet has rushed to profit from Cobalt's demise, touting a server appliance refund program for customers willing to give up their Sun Microsystems kit. We'll hand it to the marketeers at Equiinet for seizing on our declaration that the server appliance is dead, following Sun's decision to end-of-life the once …

Servers 19 Dec 2003, 16:34
EMC brings Documentum into the fold

Done, dusted and ready to sell

EMC has put the finishing touches on its Documentum acquisition, paying $1.48 billion for the software maker. With the deal now completed, Documentum will become a division of EMC and keep its headquarters in Pleasanton, California. The division will be led Dave DeWalt, the former President and CEO of Documentum, who will …

Storage 19 Dec 2003, 17:58
‘Open source’ IE patch withdrawn for further patching

Thanks, but no thanks

The third-party 'open source' patch for Internet Explorer that we told you about earlier today, contains more than a few potentially nasty surprises. As we noted, German tech site Heise had already warned of dangerous buffer overflows. Openwares.org, a month-old site which boasts "Software is free" today published source code …

Security 19 Dec 2003, 22:11