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Tech News for Sunday December 31st 2000

Site Update.
Posted: 12/31/2000 Source: N/A Added by: HiTechBits Lacky

Happy New Year!! Our fearless leader Kim Heise is still on vacation in South Africa but will return very soon. Expect to see HiTechBits.com blazin' with new stories as soon as Kim hits American soil in early January (maybe even before then, knowing Kim he's got all kinds of new stories lined up in his palm pilot just itchin' to upload!) Maybe we'll learn about the state of Technology in South Africa (like how you can snag that 486-25sx for only 5k! :-))

Nintendo GameCube Preview.
Posted: 12/08/2000 Source: SharkyExtreme Added by: Kim Heise

Get ready to hear plenty of news on Nintendo's upcoming GameCube. Sony's problems with shipping enough Playstation 2's might just give Nintendo enough space to release the GameCube on time and make a dent in the market.

With a projected shipping date of July '01 in Japan and October '01 in the United States, there is no doubt that Nintendo's project will compete against both the Playstation 2 and the XBox. Will the GameCube, as Nintendo calls it, pack a punch powerful enough to pound its competitors in overall sales and immersing game play? We won't know for another six months, but we were able to sit down with one of Nintendo's partners, ATI Technologies, to discuss some of the specifications of the GameCube and how its architecture is designed to compete.

Bill Gates talks big on small IE6 cookie move.
Posted: 12/08/2000 Source: The Register Added by: Kim Heise

Internet Explorer 6.0 beta should be out sometime soon as we are already starting to hear rumors about upcoming features. I must say the cookie control feature is a smart move.

Security is the big question, and the answer is... er, privacy policies and smart cards. These, at least, were the only obvious concrete suggestions Bill Gates had to put forward when he opened Microsoft's prestige Safenet 2000 conference in Redmond yesterday. And as he doesn't seem to have mentioned the cookie defender patch for IE 5.5 Microsoft hurriedly invented earlier this year, it's not entirely clear whether we're going forward or backwards on the privacy front.

The first leg of the Big News was that Microsoft is to incorporate "a new protocol... into beta versions of Internet Explorer 6.0 that allows users to define the information they don’t mind sharing over the Internet and informs them when Web sites want additional information." This new protocol is none other than the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), and effectively Bill was just announcing that Microsoft was going to support it.

Bluetooth range boosted to 50m.
Posted: 12/08/2000 Source: The Register Added by: Kim Heise

Folks, this is very exiting news! We are making some progress in wireless technologies. TDK has announced a new Bluetooth (wireless protocol) that has a range of up to 50 meters. This means your printers/scanners and network connected computers can be placed all over your house without those finagled wires.

TDK reckons it has found a way to boost the range of a Bluetooth signal to 50 meters, giving it a radius closer to that of the 802.11 wireless LAN standard*, but requiring much less power.

The company says that it has been able to send signals further because of its ceramic antenna technology. TDK has begun demonstrating its new technology, which has been designed as a USB device and will be initially targeted at PCs.

Dual Processor AMD Motherboard From Tyan.
Posted: 12/08/2000 Source: AthlonMB Added by: Kim Heise

The first dual AMD Athlon motherboards will be on the market shortly. Tyan is working hard to be the first on the market with their dual Athlon board which should be available already in Q1 2001. No mention of a price at this time.

Dual 462-pin Socket A Processor Support
Dual 10/100 On-board NICs
Dual Channel Ultra160 SCSI
Server Management
64-bit PCI Slots
Integrated Graphics
..And more!

Pentium 4 price cuts this weekend?
Posted: 12/08/2000 Source: ZDNET Added by: Kim Heise

With all the stiff competition from AMD and Transmeta you can be rest assured that Intel is going to be slashing prices on their chips rather frequently. I suspect that next year will be a bad year for Intel as AMD and Transmeta consume more and more of the processor market.

Intel Corp. plans a desktop processor price cut this weekend that will include its newly minted Pentium 4 chip.
The chip maker, which issued an earnings warning on Thursday, plans to reduce prices by up to 11 percent on desktop chips, sources said.

The largest reduction is planned for its 1.4GHz Pentium 4. The entry-level Pentium 4 chip will be reduced from its introductory price of $644 to $575, sources said.
The 11 percent price cut will likely be reflected in slightly lower prices on PC makers' entry-level Pentium 4 systems.

Tech News for Thursday December 7th 2000

Mobile AMD Duron due this month?
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: The Register Added by: Kim Heise

AMD may be another contender shortly for the high-performance portable market. Intel will have it's work cut out for 2001 with AMD and Transmeta snapping at their heels.

Reports from Taiwan suggest that 600 and 700MHz mobile Durons could launch before the end of the year. And about time too - Intel's had things pretty much its own way recently with the mobile Celeron out-punching the venerable K6-2.

Forever Amigos with Amiga.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: Wired Added by: Kim Heise

On occasion I miss having my old Amiga around and there others out there who work on developing emulators to run Amiga operating systems on your PC or Mac.

Amiga Forever 4.0, released last week, is the latest update to an emulation technology for PC and Macintosh hardware that fully simulates the beloved Amiga environment.

For PC owners clamoring to keep the platform alive, Amiga Forever is a chance to stick with their favorite environment, said Michael Battilana, CEO of Cloanto, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Amiga Forever 4.0 is primarily a cosmetic upgrade that mirrors some of the design changes that were put into Amiga's latest OS upgrade, version 3.9, which was released earlier this year. The emulator has adopted the GlowIcons and some other "look and feel" elements of version 3.9. The software also includes Amiga Explorer 4.0, a combined Amiga-to-PC connectivity and disk utility, plus more than 20 new tools, and a 20-percent speed improvement, according to Battilana.
Users who like to relive history can change Amiga Forever to operate like all of the previous Amiga OS versions, from the original 1.x OS releases right up to the latest version.
Although Amiga Forever won't work with software that requires Amiga-specific hardware, such as the Video Toaster, developer Cloanto said it can run most other Amiga programs.

Qwest Poised To Roll Out Win 2K VPN And Network VPN.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: CRN Added by: Kim Heise

The concept of offer private and relatively secure networks is going to be a major sales pitch for 2001. With various organizations planning to snoop in on your email and traffic it's not surprising to see why.

In addition, the telecommunications services provider is also in the midst of hammering out hosting and services partnerships with major computer makers.
Qwest talked about the VPNs and upcoming deals in an interview at CRN's offices here.
Qwest said the new Windows 2000 VPN is a Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) based offering priced starting at $1,200 a month.
The Windows 2000 VPN includes support for Microsoft's Active Directory, which allows for network management and implementation of complex security policies. Qwest developed the Windows 2000 VPN offering in conjunction with Microsoft.

Tech Stocks Seen Opening Lower.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: TechWeb Added by: Kim Heise

This is going to be rough week for the stock market and I suspect it's not going to get much better. Especially when the debacle in Florida keeps dragging on and on....

U.S. tech stocks are seen opening lower Thursday following more corporate warnings about quarterly results, including one from mobile-phone giant Motorola.
Index futures sank deeper in the red following the profit warning from Motorola Inc. (stock: MOT).
More than an hour from the open, Nasdaq 100 index futures for December were trading 35 points lower, at 2,690, pointing to decline of more than 1 percent. December S&P 500 index futures were off 7.5 points, at 1,346.5.
Motorola shares fell in pre-opening trade on Thursday, to 15 on the Instinet electronic broker system, down from a Wednesday close of 17 13/16.
Motorola said its fourth-quarter sales and earnings would miss Wall Street forecasts because of shortfalls in its semiconductor and personal communications segments. The company said sales for the fourth quarter are now expected to be $10 billion, with earnings per share of 15 cents.
Guidance given in October called for sales of $10.5 billion and earnings per share of 27 cents, the company said. Wall Street analysts on average had been expecting the company to report 27 cents per share in the fourth quarter, according to researcher First Call/Thomson Financial.

Hitachi launches Transmeta-based Internet appliance.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: CNET Added by: Kim Heise

I'm still not convinced the market is big enough for portable internet applications and most companies who are developing these products are moving too fast to try to be the first on the market. Now for later next year it will be a very different story.

Hitachi has begun shipping an Internet appliance in Japan that contains a Crusoe processor from Transmeta and that will eventually come to the United States.
Hitachi's Flora-ie 55mi is effectively a cross between a notebook, a handheld and a cell phone. The device--which looks like a notebook screen with a frame--hooks up directly to the Internet and is used to search Web content or run applications, similar to a standard PC. However, people can use a pen to input data like a Palm. Additionally, it contains a mobile phone interface for calls.

Opera 5.0 Released.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: eFront Added by: Kim Heise

There is a new free browser on the market to compete with Internet Explorer. Take a look at this:

A number of readers sent in that Opera Software today released Opera 5.0 for Windows, as well as making its Web browser available for free. Though it is now free if you choose the "sponsor supported version," its hope is to re-ignite Browser War in "full force as a third player" besides AOL’s Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Download it from opera’s website and give it a try, It’s available for BeOS, EPOC, Linux, Mac and Windows.

Star Trek: A little closer to home.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: Wired Added by: Kim Heise

Here's something exiting for Trek fans as a company has developed a "phaser" that allows you to stun the target.

HSV Technologies of San Diego, a developer of weapons for police officers and military personnel, just introduced a prototype of a weapon that shoots laser beams to stop criminals in their tracks.

Known either as the "Anti-Personnel Beam Weapon" or "Non-Lethal Tetanizing Beam Weapon," it releases two ultraviolet laser beams with a wavelength of 193 to 248 nanometers that paralyzes the skeletal muscles of people and animals up to 2 kilometers away.

Apple plots Mac OS X ship date.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: ZDNET Added by: Kim Heise

Everybody has so much fun poking at Microsoft and making jokes about missed software release dates. Apple's OS X is one of the most delayed products that we have witnessed in some time.

Reports indicate that Apple's next-generation OS will arrive in late February, backed by a "massive" marketing campaign.

Mac fans won't walk out of January's Macworld Expo/San Francisco with copies of Mac OS X 1.0 in hand, sources told ZDNet News, but they will leave Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs' keynote address with a firm ship date for the next-generation OS.

Apple's top brass expects to launch Mac OS X at a special event on Feb. 24, more than five weeks after Macworld Expo/San Francisco. That date is the last day of Macworld Expo/Tokyo, which kicks off Feb. 22, although sources said the Mac OS X rollout would not be tied directly to events at the Mac gathering in Chiba, Japan.

IBM scores memory breakthrough.
Posted: 12/07/2000 Source: ZDNET Added by: Kim Heise

What we have here is more confusion on what is to be the new memory standard for 2001. My money is still riding with DDRAM as it appears as if this break-through is a little late - at least for next year anyhow.

MRAM uses magnetic rather than electrical power to store data bits. Imagine not having to wait for your computer to boot up.
IBM Corp. is taking its latest research product out of the lab and into the market with a new memory technology that, if successful, could change the industry.
Called magnetic random-access memory, or MRAM, it uses magnetic rather than electrical charges to store data bits. Because the chips use magnetism to store data, electrical power isn't required for them to retain that data, unlike current dynamic random-access memory and synchronous random-access memory chips that are the standard.

Tech News for Tuesday December 5th 2000

Florida Ruling Lifts Wall Street Clouds.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: TechWeb Added by: Kim Heise

The stock market appears to be bouncing back after we see some light at the end of the tunnel in Florida.

Stocks are poised for a bright opening on Tuesday as the cloud of uncertainty that had hung over Wall Street lifted a bit after Republican George W. Bush appeared one step closer to winning the battle for the White House.
"People are glad that the end is in sight," said James Volk, co-director of institutional trading at D.A. Davidson and Co. "It's positive for the markets when you get everything settled."
A Florida judge's ruling, following the close of regular trading on Monday, rejected Democrat Al Gore's legal challenge to Florida's presidential election results, giving Bush a wafer-thin lead. If that ruling is not overturned, it will remove the uncertainty that's been weighing on Wall Street for a month now.
With more than an hour to go before the opening bell, the Nasdaq 100 index futures rose 77.5 points, to 2,635, indicating a gain of 3 percent in the tech-dominated market's 100 biggest stocks. Standard & Poor's 500 index futures climbed 10.9 points, to 1,341.4.

Sh*ttyGift.com Exposes Lousy Gifts, Givers.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: NewsBytes Added by: Kim Heise

Now here's something original. If you hate getting useless gifts for XMAS then take a a look at this:

Just in time for the holidays, there's a Web site where people who receive lousy gifts can say, "Oh, you shouldn't have!" and mean it.
Sh*ttyGift.com, launched last Friday, is a whistleblower of sorts, a place to report ridiculous, absurd, tasteless or just plain lame gifts that give the shameful phenomenon of Christmas-gone-commercial a bad name.

Lucent chip spin-off to be called Agere Systems.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: EBNEWS Added by: Kim Heise

Lucent has branded their new chip company spin-off "Agere Systems. Read below for more details.

Lucent Technologies has named its Microelectronics Group Agere Systems, which will be spun off next year.
The name Agere (pronounced a-GEAR), which has its roots in the Latin verb 'ago' that means "to lead, to drive, to act," was the name of the Austin, Texas-based supplier of programmable network processors the company acquired earlier this year.

New Sun software aims to unite servers.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: CNET Added by: Kim Heise

Sun is developing a system for allowing multiple (not really new) severs to work in tandem. If one server moves offline then the other systems in the chain will automatically pick up the slack.

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday will introduce new software that will allow servers to be joined into groups that mean overall higher reliability and performance, but already its competitors are declaring their own victory in the "clustering" market.
As reported, chief operating officer Ed Zander and other Sun executives will unveil SunCluster 3.0 and Sun Management Center 3.0 at an event at Sun's Santa Clara, Calif., site--the company's future headquarters. The software is useful for complicated, high-end server centers when an administrator wants to manage computing tasks without worrying about the servers they run on, Sun said.

Red Hat closes trio of offices, lays off 20.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: CNET Added by: Kim Heise

This is sad news as Red Hat scales back on some offices. Hopefully this is simply a re-focusing strategy and not a sign of what is to come.

Red Hat, the leading seller of Linux software and services, closed three offices and laid off 20 employees Monday, the company said.
Red Hat laid off personnel doing duplicate work, said spokeswoman Melissa London. "Nine acquisitions in the past year created a lot of redundancies," she said. The company now has 550 employees, she said.

Seven of the layoffs were from the San Francisco office, a site Red Hat picked up when it acquired Atomic Vision, then a key part of the company's plans to make its Web site a source of revenue. Red Hat originally hoped to make its site "the definitive online destination for the open-source community," but much of the Web traffic goes to VA Linux Systems sites such as Slashdot, Linux.com and SourceForge.
The San Francisco operation also was the site of an effort called Wide Open News that Red Hat largely scaled back in May.
The remaining nine to 13 personnel from the San Francisco operation will be transferred to other nearby offices in Sunnyvale and Oakland, London said.

Ericsson Unveils First Embedded WAP Bluetooth Technology.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: BetaNews Added by: Kim Heise

Next year you will see a whole slew of innovative new cellular products and it's going to take some time for the dust to settle. Hopefully we will eventually see some sort of standards.

Ericsson has taken the wraps off an embedded Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) server that has Bluetooth personal area network (PAN) technology featured as standard.
The development is a key one for both WAP and Bluetooth users, as it means that the raft of WAP-equipped mobiles with Bluetooth facilities expected early next year will soon have a real server to access.
Using Bluetooth technology in parallel with WAP is an important development, Newsbytes notes, since it means that a mobile handset or advanced smartphone can automatically access a server resource - using Bluetooth channels - whenever it is within range.
Then, when the user wishes to view the relevant WAP data, they can view the pages on a WAP-enabled device, downloading more data at high speed - around 1 megabit per second - across Bluetooth channels, rather than waiting for the relatively pedestrian speeds that wireless networks normally support.
Ericsson says that the embedded WAP Server will soon allow original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to add both WAP and Bluetooth connectivity to products such as TVs, VCRs, DVDs and set-top boxes.

Cornell researchers harness bio-motor with nanotech.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: EETimes Added by: Kim Heise

This news post was originally posted by the smart folks over at Ars-Technica and it is a very interesting read if you are interested in nano-technology.

Cornell University researchers have demonstrated how nanotechnology can directly interface with biological "wetware" by attaching a metal propeller to a motor running on a living cell's own fuel.
A genetically engineered bacteria was the donor of a virus-sized enzyme acting as a biological "motor." The researchers mounted the motors on a substrate bathed in adenosine triphosphate (ATP) — the fuel used by living cells — and attached submicron metal propellers, some of which spun for several hours during the demonstration.
"We believe we are defining a whole new technology — hybrid nanodevices can now be assembled, maintained and repaired using the physiology of life," said professor Carlo Montemagno.

Weekly CPU Price Chart - December 5, 2000.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: Tech-Review Added by: Kim Heise

CPU prices are falling so fast that any vendor who keeps more than a handful in stock is going to loose so much money. Read the warning clip below before running out and ordering a new CPU online.

Unfortunately for everyone, some vendors like to hide the cost of their CPUs in their shipping charges. This allows them to appear as if they have the lowest price CPUs on the net, only to charge you a ridiculous amount of money on shipping. In order to make sure that you get the lowest total price we took a look around and checked out the vendors to see who combined the lowest price and lowest shipping costs. In effect, the list from now on is improved to make sure you get the lowest price that the net has to offer.

What the heck is going on this week. We've been doing this for over a year now and haven't seen this much red and green in the chart. I guess resellers wanted to give us a little more christmas glow.

Gigabyte 7DX DDR Socket A Review.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: OC WorkBench Added by: Kim Heise

The first batch of DDR RAM boards are being reviewed and I'm a little surprised the memory benchmarks were not significantly better. Be aware that these motherboards are all first generation products and none of the hardware has been fully tweaked.

From our test, it can be seen that DDR RAM does have improvement over I/O performance. We did notice a performance gain of 1.5x in the memory benchmarks, not the 2x as we thought it should be :)Just like the ALi MAGiK1 DDR chipset, it supports an external clock speed of 133(266)Mhz, we managed to run our Duron 600 at an amazing speed of 6x133=800Mhz. The benchmarks obtained but not posted surpasses a ThunderBird 800. The memory bandwidth readings were improved by up to almost 80% when at 133Mhz FSB.

3Com Introduces Etherlink Dual Port Network Cards.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: Electic Tech Added by: Kim Heise

Having dual port network cards can be very useful to have in your system - especially if you are running a server of some sort. If a single connection goes offline then the other network port can take over the network communication.

3Com Corporation today announced the 3Com® EtherLink® Server 10/100 PCI dual port network interface card (NIC) to complete its suite of intelligent connectivity solutions for servers.
The new dual port card provides customers with instant scalability from a single NIC upgrade, which delivers the radical simplicity of using one PCI slot to support two network connections. 3Com EtherLink Server dual port connections deliver the reliability required for bandwidth-intensive applications, such as the Internet, e-business, Web hosting and video streaming, with the network availability of two ports.
``This completes our suite of leading business connectivity solutions by adding the dual port capability to our intelligence features,'' said Tom Werner, vice president and general manager, Business Connectivity Group, 3Com. ``Customers who demand continuous server uptime and maximum network availability from slot-constrained servers can rely on this dual port product to deliver the availability, scalability, performance and manageability they need.''

New Microsoft Media Player 7.0 Bonus pack.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: Microsoft Added by: Kim Heise

Microsoft's new audio compression format has not been embraced as strongly as the company would have hoped. To up the ante, Microsoft has released an updated version of Media player that converts all your MP3 files to the new Microsoft audio format.

The end result: Microsoft's new audio format should compress your MP3 audio in half and allow the same sound quality.

Microsoft Corp. today released the free Bonus Pack for the Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 that includes a tool which enables users to double the amount of music stored on their PCs by converting MP3 files into the more efficient Windows Media Audio format, exciting new skins and visualizations, and a tool to convert existing Winamp skins into Windows Media Player skins. To brighten up desktops for the holidays, the Bonus Pack includes a fun visualization of a snowman that dances to music, and fans of Windows Media Player 7 can download a special animated, seasonal skin that offers streamed holiday music courtesy of MSN.

Intel Itanium Guide.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: Sharky Extreme Added by: Kim Heise

Sharky Extreme has posted some information on Intel's new Itanium processor. The Itanium is designed for server systems and should be available for insane prices sometime next year.

The Itanium is a new processor family and architecture, designed by Intel and Hewlett Packard, with the future of high-end server and workstation computing in mind. The Itanium is big, expensive, complex, and will come with massive internal resources. The Itanium is cutting-edge processor design. The Itanium will use an entirely new form of instruction set called EPIC, which has the potential of bringing unseen levels of parallelism inside a processor. Today, we are going to look at the technical side of the EPIC architecture and the Itanium processor.

Micron to supply DDR SDRAMs for Microsoft's X-Box.
Posted: 12/05/2000 Source: Silicon Strategies Added by: Kim Heise

Watch Micron's stock jump significantly today because of the announcement of a deal with Microsoft. (Just my humble predication)

Continuing to line up chip suppliers for its entry into the game-machine market, Microsoft Corp. here today announced a major deal with Micron Technology Inc.
Under the terms of the six-year deal, Micron will supply its current and future DDR SDRAM products to Microsoft's Xbox, a yet-to-be-introduced game machine that will be released by the software giant in the fall of 2001.
Reportedly built around a 733-MHz, x86-based processor from Intel Corp., the Xbox will incorporate a graphics chip, a 3D audio circuit, an 8-Gbyte hard drive, 64-Mbytes of system memory, and other components. The Xbox will also be based on Microsoft's DirectX API for use in game applications.

Last modified: Friday, April 04, 2008