It's as easy as Dell for Intel employees.

Episode 17BOFH 2003: Episode 17

VIA yesterday began shipping its fastest embedded x86 processor, the Eden ESP7000.

Mobile phone giant Nokia is to acquire the assets of Sega's online and wireless gaming operation to boost its own N-Gage online games device.

Market watcher Gartner yesterday echoed Hynix and others, and announced that the global memory business is "on the verge of recovery".

ATI's RV360 graphics chip - the successor to the Radeon 9600's RV350 chip - will go into volume production next month and will appear in cards clocked at 450MHz or higher soon after.

The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) has launched its appeal against an April US District Court ruling that the Grokster P2P media-sharing network does not infringe copyrights juts because its software may allow users to do so.

The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) this week said it will not target small-scale copyright infringers, only the big boys.

AMD has confirmed the existence of the Applebred processor, and said that the Duron-branded core has already begun shipping.

Elpida has asked the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to investigate Hynix. So have four Taiwanese memory makers, including Nanya, who this week asked their government to probe the troubled South Korean memory maker.

The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours, despite a belief by plant personnel that the network was protected by a firewall, SecurityFocus has learned.

Internet security firm Check Point is targeting medium-sized companies with a firewall/VPN package designed for organisations with up to 500 employees.

Despite large numbers of computer systems being struck down with deadly viruses over the past weeks, almost one-third of small firms do not think anti-virus or firewall protections is important to their business.

Nvidia has confirmed that it will support the PCI Express next-generation expansion bus at some point in the future.

Domain registration giant VeriSign has missed a deadline to ask a federal appeals court to reconsider a landmark decision in the Sex.com case, which established that Internet domain names are subject to state property law.

Cambridge-based speech recognition outfit Vocalis has been sold to Netdecisions Holdings Ltd for just £1 after calling in the administrators.

Microsoft has delayed Service Pack 2 for Windows XP for anything up to a year, sweetly claiming as it does so that there's been no official schedule announced, so it's not delayed at all. News of the notadelay was unearthed by BetaNews, which says Windows client team members have confirmed that SP2 will be delivered in 2004; the company's product lifecycle web site however indicates that it is scheduled for Q3 2004.

The future of broadband in rural areas via electrical cables hinges on the success of a commercial trial that got underway in Winchester today.

Outlook Express has been reprieved, ZDNet Australia announced last week, having two days earlier announced shock news of the product's demise. But if you do the sums, you'll likely conclude that ZDnet was right in the first place - if Outlook Express has any future, it's not likely to be a happy one.

Dell has received a patent for its once highly touted E-support button - a tool which appears to have caused more support problems that in it solved.

Bounced messages from auto-responders in receipt of the prolific Sobig-F worm are feeding a flood of useless and malicious messages that threatens to swamp legitimate emails for many users.

Dell put on a Texas-sized boot on Wednesday and kicked HP where it hurts with a series of consumer and enterprise product price cuts.

A version of OpenOffice that takes full advantage of Mac OS X won't be ready until 2006, according to a note posted on the OO website. A Quartz version of version 2.0 of the suite - which takes advantage of the OS X display model, rather than the Unix standard X11 - is slated for Q1 of 2006. The reason cited is major API changes in OpenOffice itself.

Tampa's Police Department has abandoned a two-year face recognition trial which failed to provide a single identification or arrest, let alone a conviction.

HP's shares were hammered during Wednesday trading as investors reacted to a poor showing in the company's third quarter.