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April 16, 2003
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Corel debuts new WordPerfect
Corel will begin selling the new version of its WordPerfect office software Wednesday, but analysts don't expect the package to make much headway against Microsoft Office.
As previously reported, WordPerfect Office 11 will include a number of new features based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), allowing documents to share data with back-end systems. The package includes the WordPerfect word processing application, Quattro spreadsheet software and Presentations slide-show software.
The new software includes specialized extensions, such as tools for creating legal documents that used to be sold separately, plus integrated support for publishing documents in Adobe Systems' widespread portable document format (PDF). The package also works with Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client to simplify the electronic exchange of documents for review and comment. It also sports a new navigation interface that makes it easier to find a specific spot in a large document.
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Microsoft Windows NT 4 compromised again
There's another problem with Microsoft Windows but this time it's only important for corporate users of the Vole products.
Home users can relax. Corporations and other large concerns should react immediately -- particularly administrators of such networks.
The latest hole could allow crazies to take over your corporate network if, for example, you're using Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
The problem is a buffer overun in Windows kernel message handling which could allow people to arrogate privileges to themselves.
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Agent Orange Use 'Understated'
The United States military used much more Agent Orange and other defoliant spray during the Vietnam war than previously thought, scientists say.
A new study of US military records also found that the amount of cancer-causing dioxin chemicals in the spray has been seriously underestimated.
The report, commissioned by the US Government, is the culmination of a five-year project by environmental health experts at New York's Columbia University.
Between 1961 and 1971, the US military sprayed parts of southern Vietnam with defoliant chemicals - such as Agent Orange - with the aim of allowing the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies to spot Vietcong forces moving in the forests.
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Sony in 'Shock and Awe' Blunder
Electronics giant Sony has admitted "regrettable bad judgement" in attempting to register the phrase "shock and awe" - derived from US military tactics in Iraq - for its computer games division.
The company said it had withdrawn a trademark filing in the US for the phrase, which refers to the deliberately intimidating bombing techniques used in the early phase of the war.
The company said it had had no specific plans for the phrase, but it could have been used for one of the many shoot-'em-up games on its Playstation console.
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Radeon 9500 dies with Radeon 9600 Pro availability
ATI is doing fine in the performance market, the one where cards cannot cost more than $199. And it doesn't have any kind of competition as the TI4200 is hardly a match for this card and FX 5600 Ultra is still only a wish-list item even for reviewers. Not to mention that it's not in retail at least for few more weeks. Still, the Radeon 9500 Pro was great for consumers but not so great for manufactures as it was quite expensive to produce.
Radeon 9500, whether Pro or non Pro, uses the R300 chip, the same one as the 9700 series. That must cost some serious money but this card helped ATI to ship more than million DirectX 9 cards. Of course this was a number before Medion deal so you can easily add 200,000 more cards that it sold in 2 days from release through Aldi and Hofer.
The Radeon 9600 series will definitely mean end of the life for Radeon 9500 series as the 9500 Pro in almost every case outperformed its larger numbered brother.
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Death of Windows will push PC sales
The decision by Microsoft to phase out support for Windows 9X operating systems will mean big businesses will have to upgrade to better hardware, a market research analyst claimed today.
According to senior analyst Matthew Wilkins at iSuppli, many big businesses have stuck with Windows 9X systems and are still hanging fire on upgrading to W2K or to Windows XP.
But when Microsoft drops support for Windows 9X operating systems soon, that will mean that companies will have to upgrade the hardware, because CPUs and OSes from Intel and Microsoft appear to go together like marriage and divorce.
Wilkins claims that will give a boost to PC sales during 2003 which could mean unit growth this year will rise by slightly over 10 per cent.
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Problems with PCI Express
"There's an interesting article over at EETimes going into the pros and cons of PCI Express. In case you missed it, PCI Express is being touted as the replacement for AGP.
"The article is by Vikram Karvat, the marketing director of ServerWorks. And he really lays into PCI Express. According to Karvat, it's expensive and far more difficult to implement than PCI-X, which is obviously his preferred technology. He makes some interesting points.
"It's not certain that the points he makes are good enough though. It sounds like Karvat is making the old "640K should be enough for anyone" mistake. There's another old saying, you can never have too much processor power or hard drive space. You might as well add you can never have too much bandwidth to that.
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Premature Aging Gene Found
Two teams of scientists reported on Wednesday they found a genetic mutation that causes children to die of old age, and said their research offered both a way to find a cure and insights into normal aging.
Children with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria age at a rate five to 10 times faster than normal. They lose their hair, the skin wrinkles and they die of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries by their early teens.
There is no cure and until the two teams finished their work last year, no one knew the cause.
Now, French and U.S. teams have traced the defect to a gene that controls the structure of the nucleus -- the part of the cell that holds most of the genes and chromosomes.
The mutation, found in children with progeria around the world, causes the nucleus to be unstable, affecting virtually every cell in the body apart from the brain.
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AMD First-Quarter Loss Worse than Expected
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD.N , the No. 2 maker of microprocessors, on Wednesday posted a wider first-quarter loss on revenues that rose slightly from the prior quarter as it said it took market share from larger rival Intel Corp. INTC.O .
But analysts were cautious about whether AMD would hit a bump in the coming quarters as distributors run down excess inventories, and cautioned that the company could suffer if Intel decided to start a price war in the market for flash memory used in cell phones.
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Prospects for Multiple Universes
Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.
One of the many implications of recent cosmological observations is that the concept of parallel universes is no mere metaphor. Space appears to be infinite in size. If so, then somewhere out there, everything that is possible becomes real, no matter how improbable it is. Beyond the range of our telescopes are other regions of space that are identical to ours. Those regions are a type of parallel universe. Scientists can even calculate how distant these universes are, on average.
And that is fairly solid physics. When cosmologists consider theories that are less well established, they conclude that other universes can have entirely different properties and laws of physics. The presence of those universes would explain various strange aspects of our own. It could even answer fundamental questions about the nature of time and the comprehensibility of the physical world.
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