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May 19, 2003
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Countdown to Mars begins
Europe has formally started the countdown clock for the launch of its Mars Express space probe, which will lift off for the Red Planet on Monday, 2 June.
The UK science minister Lord Sainsbury set a digital timepiece going at the Royal Society in London, in the presence of senior European and British space officials.
Mars Express, which is carrying the Beagle 2 lander, is set for a 1845 BST (2345 local time) launch from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
The 400-million-kilometre- (250 million miles) trip should see Beagle transmit its first signal from the surface of the Red Planet on Christmas Day.
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Websites don't like Mondays
Developers implementing 'weekend inspiration' are more dangerous than hackers.
UK websites are more likely to crash on a Monday morning, not because this is when hackers or viruses are most active, but because this is when developers come in and implement ideas they had over the weekend.
Development staff are now a bigger threat to website uptime than hackers and viruses combined, according to data taken from 70 leading sites over a nine-week period.
'Manic Monday' syndrome often arises when web developers tinker with the site after 'weekend inspiration'.
This results in more faults on a Monday morning than at any other time, said enterprise applications specialist Attenda, which conducted the research.
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Virus mimics Microsoft e-mail
People are being warned about a new e-mail virus that disguises itself as a message from Microsoft.
Anti-virus firms have told people to be on the look out for the e-mail worm which pretends to come from support@microsoft.com.
The message comes with a variety of subject lines but the attachment should not be opened because it will infect users with a worm known as Palyh.
Palyh will then copy itself to the Windows folder, and begin sending itself to all e-mail addresses it finds on a computer.
Experts say the virus is now active in at least 69 countries.
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Detonator FX "bug" says exit, to the dragon
The hardware world is talking about the so-called 3D Mark03 "bug" that tipped up as soon as Nvidia showed a new driver to the world.
Writing software is not simple.
This is not Nvidia's first time, nor like any software firm will it be the last, and we remember that we and our Croatian friends discovered blurred images in Nature scene on Geforce 4 TI500, and my favourite bug when Nvidia scored slower on 3Dmark01SE if you just turned off the title screens.
Now a set of French guys is claiming that Futuremark's dragon from 3Dmark01SE has been killed by some virtual Saint George, as Geforce FX 5600 Ultra simply does not render it.
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Med Schools Cut Out Cadavers
Top medical schools are cutting out cadavers from their curriculums, dismaying traditionalists who insist every future doctor needs to poke around a dead person before touching a live one.
But administrators say their students are just too overloaded to take on the tedious chore of dissecting a human body.
"Digging through fat, getting around bone, getting under skin -- these days that's considered too much work," said Robert Trelease, director of integrative anatomy at the University of California at Los Angeles.
This fall, first-year medical students at UCLA will spend about 40 percent less time cutting open bodies in gross anatomy classes. Just up the coast, dissection has been eliminated entirely since 2001 for first-year students at the University of California at San Francisco. Instead, students examine pre-dissected bodies and body parts without picking through skin, fat and connective tissue.
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Anti-fraud credit cards tested
A new system designed to beat credit card fraud has gone on trial in a British town.
Shoppers in Northampton will be using credit, debit or charge cards that contain a special chip.
Instead of signing for goods, the users will have to enter a four-digit pin number.
If successful, it will be rolled out across the whole country in the summer.
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Citizen Reporters Make the News
In the West, people with a journalistic bent turn to weblogs to exercise the urge to publish news or comment on events of the day.
But in South Korea, the publishing instinct is directed toward a big, collaborative online newspaper that has emerged as one of the country's most influential media outlets.
OhmyNews is a unique experiment in "citizen journalism": Anyone who registers with the site can become a paid reporter.
"With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media," said editor and founder, Oh Yeon-ho. "Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."
Launched three years ago, OhmyNews has grown from a staff of four to more than 40 editors and reporters who publish about 200 stories a day. The vast majority of the news, however, is written by more than 26,000 registered citizen journalists, who come from all walks of life, from chambermaids to professional writers.
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US sweep finds $176 million of scams
A US crackdown on investment scams, identity theft and internet fraud has uncovered 89,000 victims conned out of $176m (£108m) since the start of the year, US Attorney General John Ashcroft has said.
The cases included allegations of advertising goods or services that did not exist, setting up fake banking websites to collect customer bank account details and non-delivery of items "sold" in online auctions.
There were also cases relating to alleged manufacture and sale of pirate films and other counterfeit goods, Mr Ashcroft said.
One person from California was charged with running an investment scam that collected $60m from 15,000 victims worldwide while a San Diego couple was charged with taking $600,000 in connection with a matchmaking service that promised to find Russian or Ukrainian brides.
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The Doom 3 myth exposed
The up and coming release of Doom 3 is easily one of the most anticipated events in the entire history of the personal computer, potentially equaled in recent years only by AMD's upcoming Athlon 64 launch and, when compared to the sum total of human history, by the Second Coming. For almost two years every video card that's been launched has been evaluated by its future standard, first all-but invisibly, and then, as the appointed day drew nearer, with increasing fervor. John Carmack may have done more damage to NVIDIA's low-end budget video lineup then the entire tech recession of the past three years combined when he uttered the (paraphrased) sentence: "Do not buy a GeForce4 MX to play Doom 3." He might as well have said: "Do not buy, consider, or look sidewise at a GeForce4 MX, period, for any reason."
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Einstein online: Genius hits Web
Genius goes online today with the establishment of a new Web site of Albert Einstein's scientific and other writings, the California Institute of Technology said.
A collaborative effort of the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Web site will allow users access to 3,000 digitized images of the Nobel prize winner's writings, Einstein Papers editor Diana Buchwald said.
Among them are papers on the special theory of relativity, his never-published travel diaries, various humanitarian statements, and his frequent pleas for peace.
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Two British journalists arrested at E3
Details, like the party, remain scanty and hardly remembered, but it appears that two British hacks got themselves in trouble at the big party in Los Angeles last week known as E3.
They were boys, and we understand they've been released now, but we'd like to warn them about something called Patriot Act II.
Amongst other things, this up-and-coming piece of legislation means that you might find yourself lost in space with not even a buoy to hang onto.
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Opera Releases Opera 7 For Linux
Opera Software on Monday released its latest Opera 7 OS for the Linux operating system, complete with an email client.
Opera jumped to version 7.11 for the new Linux client, bringing it up to date with version 7.11 for Windows.
"With Opera 7.11 Linux is brought up to par with Windows," said Jon S. von Tetzchner, chief executive of Opera Software ASA, in a statement. "Now Linux users can enjoy the most advanced Web browser available with the most innovative e-mail client in recent years."
Opera 7.11 for Linux offers a slew of user-friendly features including the email client, previously reserved for Windows users. The M2 email client can handle POP3 email, and it contains an integrated spam filter.
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Microsoft Mum on Unix Licensing Move
Microsoft Corp., which on Monday announced it was licensing the Unix source code and patent from the SCO Group, is remaining tight-lipped about its reasons for the move.
A company spokesman told eWEEK that there was no one available to discuss the matter further at this time, and referred eWEEK to a statement from Brad Smith, the general counsel for Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash. In that statement Smith said, "The announcement of this license is representative of Microsoft's ongoing commitment to respecting intellectual property (IP) and the IT community's healthy exchange of IP through licensing.
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".org registry vanishes into thin air" The Register
The registry for all .org domains appears to have collapsed - meaning that all the details of who owns any .org domain are unobtainable.
We can't be sure when it vanished but it would have taken a few days to filter through the system so presumably whatever servers are hosting the registry went down at the weekend and no one has yet noticed.
Which it is all very sloppy and doesn't exactly encourage confidence in the company that now runs the .org domain - Public Interest Registry.
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Will Enter the Matrix Save Infogrames?
Corporate dramas don't interest Nathaniel Dennett, a 10-year-old student at Paris' Ecole de la Motte Picquet. He couldn't care less that shares in Europe's largest video-game maker, Infogrames Entertainment, have tripled since early March. As for the revelation on May 8 that Infogrames is changing its name to that of video-game pioneer Atari Inc.? Yawn. The game-loving garçon has never heard of Atari, which had its heyday in the 1980s. But ask him about Infogrames' highly anticipated new title, Enter the Matrix, which shipped a record 4 million copies before its May 15 release, and his eyes light up. "I love the Matrix movie," he says. "The game sounds really cool."
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Researchers say chimps should be classified in same genus as humans
A researcher in Detroit sees humans as only slightly remodeled versions of chimpanzees -- saying chimps are more closely related to people than to gorillas or other monkeys.
That's how Morris Goodman and his team of researchers at Wayne State University School of Medicine see things.
They also say chimps should be included in the human branch of the family tree.
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Amazon Makes Web Services Inroads
Amazon.com Inc. Monday announced three milestones in its Web services initiative: a new tool kit, an enhanced Web site for developers and the registration of 25,000 developers in its developer program.
The Seattle-based company released its Amazon Web Services Software Development Kit 3.0 as a free downloadable kit to enable developers to build applications on top of the Amazon.com e-commerce platform. With SDK 3.0, Amazon is enabling developers at other e-commerce sites to tap into the company's Web services expertise and tools and build applications that reside on their sites but that sell Amazon.com products. The sale would go through the third-party site.
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KT600 will be the next big Athlon chipset
We checked the Hard Boys review of the latest Via KT600 chipset and it made us reel in shock'n'awe.
We're surprised and shocked to see the first benchmarks of a reference board based on the KT600 chipset.
In most tests, apart from purely graphics, the KT600 outscored the new Nforce 2 400 Ultra a sea-change from the performance of the KT400A, we must say.
Boards based on this chipset should arrive in retail as soon as June, so in the next 10 days or so and are much cheaper than Nforce 2 Ultra.
The Via chipset not only costs less than Nvidia's, but also use less components, which helps bring the BOM (bill of materials) price right down.
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Chinese Internet Operator Jailed
A Chinese internet operator, Huang Qi, has been sentenced to five years in prison for subversion after he allowed articles about China's 1989 pro-democracy protests to appear on his website.
Huang was convicted and sentenced 10 days ago at the end of a trial that began two years ago in Chengdu in south-western Sichuan province, Chinese legal officials said.
Huang was the first person China put on trial for internet crimes. Since his arrest, several others have been detained for posting political material online, according to human rights groups.
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