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March 25, 2003
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No megahertz war for Intel Centrino
BY SOME STRANGE QUIRK of design Intel's new Pentium M processor is causing the marketing droids problems. The processor is a bit too good. The Pentium M is the processor used in Intel's Centrino technology. But there are no clock frequencies appearing on adverts for Gateway or Toshiba machines.
The problem isn't with the processor exactly, it's a real firecracker from all accounts. But the Intel marketing droids have spent years trying to convince everyone that megahurts matters. Now an Intel processor has come along that proves the marketing droids were wrong. The 1.6GHz Pentium M is performing more like a 2.4GHz Pentium 4.
Now adverts are starting to appear for machines using the new processor but the clockspeed is conspicuous by its absence, as you can see over here.
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Mobile phones users can be tracked from web site
That dinky little Nokia in your pocket could be your undoing if you're up to no good. A new UK web service from Overview Mapping called VeriLocation is likely to have privacy activists up in arms, paranoid employers signing up and jealous spouses addicted. The service lets you pinpoint the location of a mobile phone to within 100m and even gives you a map of the area.
The service has only just gone online and there has already been one blunder. The system is supposed to randomise the location given out at the moment. Up until half an hour ago it was quite happily displaying the location of Vodafone users, though it has now stopped doing that. The system is only supposed to show the location of mobile phone users who have agreed to let themselves be found.
The idea that the service is opt-in won't give any succour to travelling salesmen and such like. You can bet that they use company phones and that there are plenty of companies paranoid enough to sign up for the service. There probably won't be a shortage of jealous spouses signing up their other half's phone either.
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IBM to produce Nvidia chips
Nvidia has signed a pact with IBM Microelectronics to help it avoid putting all of its graphics chips in one basket.
The chipmaker on Wednesday will announce an agreement in which IBM will serve as an additional manufacturer for the GeForce family of graphics chips. Nvidia's current manufacturer is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).
Nvidia wanted more manufacturing capacity and was looking to avoid the pitfalls of working with just one producer, said Nvidia spokesman Derek Perez.
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Sun uncovers 'rare' server glitch
Sun Microsystems has warned customers of a problem with high-speed memory that could cause most of the company's higher-end servers to crash under some rare circumstances.
The problem, now patched, afflicts several servers using the 900MHz UltraSparc III processors, Sun said in an advisory posted in January and updated Thursday. The problem crops up through the cache, high-speed memory that stores data that a processor can fetch more quickly than information stored in main memory.
In most instances, error-correction mechanisms fix the problem, but in some "very rare instances" multiple simultaneous errors could cause a crash, Sun said in a statement Tuesday.
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Red Hat slips into the red
Red Hat said Tuesday that it slipped into the red and below analyst expectations for its most recent quarter, but the Linux seller reported revenue growth and progress in selling its premium products for business customers.
The company had a net loss of $56,000, breaking even on a per-share basis, on revenue of $25.9 million for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2003, which ended Feb. 28. Analysts surveyed by First Call expected net income of 1 cent per share on $26.8 million in revenue. The revenue was a 39 percent increase from the year-ago quarter's $18.6 million.
However, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company said more customers are adopting the premium Red Hat Enterprise Linux product line, which brings the company revenue for an entire year after purchase and not just in the initial quarter. Red Hat has been aggressively steering customers toward the premium line, which comes with support from hardware and software business partners and includes a subscription to basic Red Hat Network services.
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Red Hat liberates low-end Linux
Linux seller Red Hat has moved to a strategy that lets it adopt the latest technology more aggressively for its lower-end products, a strategy that will become visible March 31 with the release of Red Hat Linux 9, code-named Shrike.
The Raleigh, N.C.-based company has just completed splitting its product line in two: the slow-changing premium Red Hat Enterprise Linux version for businesses and the free Red Hat Linux version for enthusiasts. Establishing the RHEL option for conservative customers freed up Red Hat to accept more flexibility with the RHL line, said Matt Wilson, manager of Red Hat's base operating system, in an interview Tuesday.
"We wanted to be able to have a little more fluidity in Red Hat Linux...so we get the best open-source technologies that are available and stable," Wilson said. "It's a new way of thinking that we're able to do now that we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the longer support lifecycles."
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Scanning the future of privacy
Engineers who design biometric technologies and Internet authentication mechanisms should take more aggressive steps to preserve privacy, a new government report says.
The 177-page report released Tuesday afternoon by the National Research Council suggests specific guidelines for authentication technologies, such as passwords, identification cards and key cards, and the use of biometrics to verify physical characteristics like the shape of a retina or fingerprint.
"The ability to remain anonymous and have a choice about when and to whom one's identity is disclosed is an essential aspect of a democracy," said Stephen Kent, chair of the committee that wrote the report and chief scientist for information security at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., which is owned by Verizon Communications.
This report represents the most detailed analysis to date of the tension between authentication--which requires the disclosure of information to confirm a person's identity or access--and the perils such systems may pose to the privacy and anonymity of people who use them. Microsoft's Passport and Sun Microsystems' Liberty authentication systems received only a passing mention in the report, which concluded that their privacy implications "ultimately depend on choices made at the design, implementation and use stages."
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Co-founder downplays Google IPO
Search-tool company Google has no plans to sell its shares to the public any time soon, co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday.
Brin discussed the reasons for not rushing an IPO during an on-stage interview with technology guru Esther Dyson at the PC Forum technology conference.
That Google is not eager to go public is understandable given that many technology stocks are trading near all-time lows and investors are distracted by the war in Iraq. Still, Google's popularity has fed persistent speculation that the company, founded in 1998, is ripe for an IPO. But Brin said there are many good reasons for going slow.
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Face recognition gets lift, U.S. says
Spurred by two federal antiterrorism statutes, the Commerce Department has released a study showing that face-recognition technology is hitting its stride.
The Face Recognition Vendor Test 2002 (FRVT 2002) looked at 10 companies' work on face recognition and said they had made "significant advances" on the state of the art.
"The performance results...show an improvement in the capabilities of the face-recognition systems over the last two years," concludes the report released this month. "On comparable experiments in...2000, there has been a 50 percent reduction in error rates."
The team that produced the report included a slew of government agencies. Evaluators included scientists from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which issued the report; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Department's Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office. Other sponsors of the report include the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice, the State Department, the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI.
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Intel invents overclock deterrent method
Chip giant Intel appears to have invented a cunning method which after detecting overclocking on a microprocessor can then prevent such overclocking by reducing the clock rate on a microprocessor.
The patent, 6,535,988 – was granted to Intel on March 18th last, and was invented by David L. Poisner at the Folsom, California site.
It claims to detect and deter overclocking of a signal for microprocessors which includes a detection circuit and a prevention circuit, which limits or reduces the performance of the processor when the circuit detects an overclocked signal.
There's a list of 30 different features implemented in the patent.
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Adobe site dings Apples
An Adobe Systems executive denied that the company is advocating Windows PCs over Apple's Macintosh, despite a new page on Adobe's Web site that claims PCs run Adobe software faster.
Posted earlier this week, the page on Adobe's site points out test results published last year in Digital Producer, a magazine for video editors. The tests compare the performance of comparable high-end PC and Mac products--a Dell PC with a 3.06GHz Pentium processor versus a Mac G4 with dual 1.25GHz processors--on three Adobe applications.
The magazine found that the Dell PC rendered images significantly faster in each of the applications--Adobe's After Effects video-editing software, its Illustrator publishing program and its Photoshop image-editing software.
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Mandrake Linux 9.1 (Bamboo) is available
MandrakeSoft, a leading provider of Linux solutions for the enterprise and for individuals, today announced the immediate availability of Mandrake Linux 9.1 "Bamboo" for x86 processors. This new release is one of the most advanced and powerful Linux systems currently available, with cutting-edge features such as Apache 2, NTFS partition resizing, ACPI power-management, "Zeroconf" network support, WiFi support, and much more. Mandrake Linux 9.1 provides an unequaled level of comfort for users with a simplified graphical installer, a brand-new "MandrakeGalaxy" theme, stunning anti-aliased fonts, and of course the new KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.2 desktop environments.
The "core" version of Mandrake Linux 9.1 is now available for download. Complete retail packs may be pre-ordered at MandrakeStore (http://www.mandrakestore.com). Choose from:
Mandrake 9.1 Standard (US recommended price: $39.90 USD), a customized Linux system for desktop workstations
Mandrake 9.1 PowerPack (US recommended price: $69.00 USD), a full-featured Linux package for power-users
Mandrake 9.1 Prosuite (US recommended price: $199.90 USD), a comprehensive solution for small & medium-sized businesses
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Futuremark flames Nvidia over benchmarks
The folks at FutureMark have decided to take some radical steps against Nvidia and what it describes as "questionable drivers", the versions of Detonator 42.67, 42.68 and 42.69.
These drivers arrived after the first 3dmark03 benchmarks when the ATI card dramatically outscored FX 5800 Ultra.
In future, Futuremark said it wants to have only WHQL drivers in its database to avoid erring on the side of err, erring.
It added that this doesn't mean Futuremark is "banning all beta/leaked drivers" -- they are "simply disabled from being published".
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