Tech News for Friday February 16th 2001

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Anybody who works in the computer industry has a plethora of humorous stories to tell. The author over at Tech Extreme has compiled his list of Friday funnies.

In all that time, I have come across some funny situations that I think you guys will love to read about. Now, I won’t use the real names of the parties involved because I don’t want to burn them in public, but generally speaking, these are all good friends of mine that have called me over the years to see if I can help them with their computer problems.

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All the various motherboards that will be showing up shortly on the market offer some very interesting and much needed solutions that in the past you had to wait for Intel to develop.

For one, Gigabyte's solution of developing a motherboard that can house either DDR or the current SDR memory module and secondly the new wave of dual CPU DDR RAM motherboards from SuperMicro are going to offer some very impressive performance gains.

Approximately one year ago (or even significantly less) there were only two reliable motherboard vendors by Asus or Abit using mainly the Intel chipset. Granted, the early VIA chipsets were plagued with stability issues but the company has come a long way. Now you can choose from a least a dozen motherboard vendors who can afford VIA's motherboard chipset and you can then also pick from at least two dozen features to tailor your needs offered by these various vendors.

Gigabyte Provides DDR + SDR Mainboard.
One more mainboard presented at VIA DDR Summit, which attracted our attention, was Gigabyte GA-6RXB based on VIA Apollo Pro266 chipset. This Socket370/FC-PGA mainboard features 1 AGP Pro, 1 AMR and 5 PCI slots. The board is also equipped with Promise ATA/100 RAID controller. The difference between this board and GA-6RX, which has already been announced, is the presence of 2 DDR and 2 SDR DIMM slots, while the ordinary 6RX mainboard from Gigabyte has 4 DDR DIMM slots. The most interesting thing is that both mainboards (see GA-6RXB photo here and GA-6RX photo here) feature almost the same PCB: it is only the spots around the memory slots that are different. All this means that it isn’t hard at all to provide the DDR mainboards on VIA Apollo Pro266 with a couple of SDR DIMM slots: the modification will be really small. That’s why many mainboard manufacturers can introduce a lot of interesting modifications of their DDR mainboards based on VIA Apollo Pro266.

Dual-Processor DDR Board from SuperMicro
Well, now Iwill is not the only one to manufacture dual-processor mainboards on VIA Apollo Pro266 with DDR SDRAM support. At the DDR Summit in Taipei SuperMicro has also showcased its 370DDI mainboard with 2 FC-PGA/Socket-370. We have to point out that this mainboard looks a bit more attractive than Iwill DVD266-R, since it supports not only DDR memory, but also the ordinary PC133 SDRAM. For this purpose the board is equipped with 2 DDR slots and 3 SDR slots. The other specs of this board look as follows: 1 AGP Pro slot, 5 PCI slots, 1 ACR slot. Besides, the mainboard is also provided with promise ATA/100 RAID controller. See the picture here.

Don't you just smile at the war between Intel and AMD? For one it leads to significant price cuts and performance gains for the consumer. The downside is that these companies are rushing the products to the market with bare minimum testing and low production yields.

The smart rule of thumb is to never purchase the latest generation product whether it is a new CPU or a new motherboard or else you will be stuck being a "beta-tester".

Take a look at the second table which tabulates AMD's roadmap for this year.

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Handspring has taken a serious bite out of Palm Computing's market share due to lower prices and more features. SystemLogic reviews the Visor Platinum which features a speedier new Dragonball processor over Palm's counterpart.

Thanks to my wife I was able to upgrade to the Visor Prism with 65k colors for free because she won a $1,000.00 shopping spree at Staples and I cannot praise the unit enough. My only complaint: No flash memory.

The Visor Platinum is basically the big brother of the Visor Deluxe. The Platinum has a faster processor, sharper display, and updated operating system. It's Handspring's stab at the Palm V and VII markets. Although it's the same size and weight as the Visor Deluxe, the new metallic silver color makes it more for the corporate professional. This review will take a look at my impressions of the Platinum, how it compares to Palm handhelds and the Visor Deluxe, and the weaknesses of this seemingly great product.

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Not very exciting news but Netscape released an update to Communicator 6. Select the "More" link below for the update.

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I had no idea that cell phones had advanced so much due to the rare metal called tantalum. I can't say I've ever heard of tantalum and thought that cell phones had simply become smaller and more sophisticated due to improved manufacturing processes.

Only a few years ago the mobile phone was a brick-like, unreliable and expensive device targeted at the few with deep, reinforced pockets.

Today, it's a small, light, everyday, inexpensive product used by more than 700 million people, or about 12 percent of the world's population.

What led to this dramatic change?

One important factor was the use of certain metals, such as copper, nickel, palladium, gold and tantalum, to help reduce the size of a cellular phone.

Industry experts say that all the technology now packed into a mobile phone, such as batteries, flash memory chips, microprocessors and LCDs (liquid crystal displays), could have filled a whole office floor less than 30 years ago.

Take for example the silver-gray precious metal tantalum, which is largely mined in Australia and Central Africa.

Tantalum, a powder compacted for use in producing passive capacitors, has been a key factor in reducing the size of the mobile phone in recent years.

The expensive and rare powder is used to build these capacitors that regulate voltage at high temperatures.

Demand for this tiny but sophisticated component from the likes of mobile phone giants Nokia and Motorola has pushed the price of the precious metal around 600 percent higher in less than three years, traders say.

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Being in the computer hardware business today is very difficult. The profit margins are so small because there is very little that differentiates one company from another. Instead of improving customer services the companies try and bundle deals that are not worth a dime on the long run. For example: offering 1 year of AOL service.

Dell Computer is gearing up for large-scale layoffs, according to analysts, and has already slashed its temporary staff in an effort to cut costs.

A weaker PC market is forcing the Round Rock, Texas-based PC maker to make the cuts, according to analysts and sources close to the company. Dell has more than doubled in size over the past three years as it increased its share of of the growing computer market.

One analyst said the cuts could eliminate as many as 5,000 jobs. Dell spokesman Mike Maher said the company is looking to cut costs but said no layoffs have been announced.

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Lucent's new wireless chip is music to almost anyone's ears. If you do the math - lower cost and smaller in size it sounds very attractive to consumers and OEM's.

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The new "disk drive" sounds just like a humongous token ring network. Not that it's a bad concept and in fact it offers very simply solutions to the problem of bottlenecking data.

A Canadian group researching advanced networking technology says it is about to test "the world's largest disk drive" - data storage within the light waves of a 5,000-mile fiber- optic loop.

Labeled the Wavelength Disk Drive (WDD), the concept promises to provide lightening-fast access to shared data at the same time that it offers a new use for excess bandwidth in optical networks.

Bill St. Arnaud, senior director for advanced networks at CANARIE, an Internet research outfit funded in part by the federal government, told Newsbytes that an initial test of a WDD would create several gigabytes of storage within the nationwide fiber backbone known as "CA*net 3."

"Today, we use optical networks for point-to-point communication," St. Arnaud said. "You send a (data) packet across and it goes off the end into a computer. What we're doing is putting a packet onto the network and letting it circle continuously around the network. It can got from Vancouver to St. John's (Newfoundland), back to Vancouver ... going around and around the network.

With a WDD, he said, "the wavelengths are like tracks on a disk drive, and the routers are like read/write heads."

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If you've been around in the computer hardware business to know the beginnings of the 3D accelerator race you would appreciate how far NVIDIA has progressed. The concern is that the company has grown far too quickly and management proceeds to make the same mistakes that killed 3DFx. When companies grow too rapidly and consume far much a slice of the consumer market they tend to become overly comfortable. This "over" comfort leads to the idea of whatever we produce the market will accept.

3DFx's big mistake of releasing 16bit only 3D accelerators when every other company was producing 32bit color cards was a fatal flaw. The second mistake was to try and enforce a driver standard (Glide) that locks out the competition including Microsoft's directX API . I will not even begin to discuss the unstable 3DFx drivers

The point I'm getting too is that I hope sincerely that NVIDIA moves forward with a different vision of open standards and the appreciation that someone could show up tomorrow with a far better product.

NVIDIA needs no introduction at FiringSquad or anywhere else in the hardware industry. The company has become the poster child for consumer 3D graphics. Ever since the release of its RIVA 128 graphics card, NVIDIA has never let its momentum slow down.

When NVIDIA made its initial public offering three years ago, it was joining a club of only a handful public fabless graphics semiconductor companies: ATI, S3, Trident, Tseng Labs, Number Nine, Cirrus Logic, 3dfx, and 3Dlabs. We all watched as the company climbed through the ranks with the TNT, TNT2, GeForce, and GeForce2 line of graphics processors.

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It is a concerning thought that so much Internet traffic in China is reliant on a single conduit that could very easily be broken.

Millions of people across China were unable to access much of the Internet on Friday after an undersea cable was severed, and an official at China Telecom said it could take three weeks to make repairs.

The break in the cable linking Shanghai to the west coast of the United States apparently sent reverberations throughout the Asia-Pacific region, with Hong Kong and Singapore reporting reduced online speeds.

Besides, Taiwan said its connections to overseas Web sites had been paralyzed by a snapped submarine cable, but it was not immediately clear whether it was the same cable.

In major Chinese cities, from Beijing and Shanghai to Guangzhou and Chengdu, Web users said they were unable to visit overseas sites, although many domestic addresses were accessible.

``Restoring the cable will take 23 days,'' said Wang Yang, an official at the Network Management division of state phone giant China Telecom.

``We are sparing no effort to redirect traffic through other channels, but access speeds could be fairly slow,'' Wang said.

China has several undersea cables connecting its data networks to the rest of the world, but the Shanghai-U.S. line carried the most traffic, she said.

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Nasdaq glitch casts shadow on Decimal trading.
Posted: 02/09/2001     Source: TechWeb  Added by Kim Heise

Just an FYI for those of you who are watching the stock market on a daily basis.

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Palm confident of successful 2001.
Posted: 02/09/2001     Source: The Register  Added by Kim Heise

I hope that the Handspring Visor Prism would be able to upgrade to the new Palm 4.0 OS. What makes me nervous is that the Visor Prism does not have flash memory and so the upgrade might be a little more complicated. It boggles the mind why Handspring would decide to leave the flash ROM off the device other than it would have raised the cost or the size of the physical unit. 

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Cookie monster: Gnutella may expose users to data theft.
Posted: 02/09/2001     Source: ZDNET  Added by Kim Heise

The privacy advocates are going to be up in arms over this. I don't blame them since there should be no valid reason for recording a user's private network traffic unless that person has shown prior hard evidence of any violation.

Web surfers trading free music and other digital goods over one of the Web's most popular file-swapping networks are sharing much more: sensitive data files that could expose them to identity theft.

One of several file-swapping networks coat-tailing on Napster's success, Gnutella allows people to open the contents of their computers to create a virtual swap meet for MP3s, software, video and text files. A recent casual search of the system revealed scores of files that could compromise the service's users.

Putting these would-be file swappers at risk are electronic markers, known as cookies, left automatically on their computers through Netscape or Internet Explorer Web browsers. Web sites place cookies as a way to identify surfers, using them to create personalized Web sites or accounts at shopping sites such as Amazon.com.

"This not a good thing," said Richard Smith, chief technical officer for the Privacy Foundation, an online privacy watchdog group. "All someone would have to do is take these stolen cookies...and they would be able to masquerade as someone else."

Ordinarily these files are private. But under certain settings in Gnutella, people can open their hard drives indiscriminately to the network, giving anyone who cares to look access to their recent Net history. At best, this can provide a potentially embarrassing look into a person's private Web surfing habits. But unscrupulous individuals could also use these files to log into other people's Web accounts, possibly even gleaning passwords and usernames that could give access to bank accounts or other financial data.

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