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May 4, 2003
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RIAA plans attacks on computers
The RIAA's president Cary Sherman is lamenting that there's a lack of civility in the debate over sharing the music we love. He's complaining that people object to his effort to plant bombs in your computer. He says such people are irrational.
The New York Times reveals the record companies are preparing a program called "silent", which "Locks up a computer system for a certain duration - minutes or possibly even hours - risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted," the Times tells us. "It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music."
This latest bombing campaign follows the RIAA's attempt in October to get bombing prohibited from limited damages: a daring and unusual move for a bomber. Bombers usually light a fuse and then run away, or fly away at a very high altitude, but this bomber wants to return to the scene of the crime and deny the victims their right to get recompense for the destruction. That was the Berman Bill.
One other program can only be described as a kind of psychological "All Your Base" campaign, only for real. It deletes all the MP3s it can find on your computer so you have to buy the music again in DRM'd form. And then your music will truly belong to them, because once the DRM noose is around your neck, they only need to tighten it.
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Budget e-book lasts on AA batteries
Japanese firm Matsushita Electric Industrial will reportedly sell a low-cost electronic book for buyers that can last up to six months on two AA-sized batteries.
Normal liquid-crystal displays flicker or refresh the screen about 60 times a second, with each refresh requiring power.
Matsushita's LCD screen needs only one refresh, when the page is "turned." Thereafter, the image is locked and no more power is required, according to a report in the Japanese daily Nikkei Electronics Asia Online.
The LCD panel is something of a mystery, according to Nikkei. Apparently, it comes from neither electronics maker Matsushita nor its affiliate, Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology.
It does have limitations, however. It can't really do grayscale, and instead displays blue text and images against a white background, according to the report.
When the magazine-sized device--called Sigma e-book--is opened, two 1024-by-768-pixel displays, measuring 7.2 inches each, are seen side-by-side. It weighs about one pound.
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Intel's mobile future: It's in the chips
Intel is quietly manufacturing a new Celeron processor that could determine the direction of its notebook processor line.
The chipmaker is providing Sony with a new custom mobile Celeron chip, dubbed the Ultra Low Voltage 600MHz Celeron processor A, an Intel representative said. Sony is using the chip in a Vaio mini-notebook sold only in Japan.
Intel is treating the new Celeron as a one-off. The chipmaker manufactures special-edition processors for individual manufacturers frequently. It created another special-edition chip, a 1.6GHz Celeron, for Sony's Vaio W desktop PC. And the company recently launched a new 1.26GHz mobile Celeron chip, based on customer requests.
But special-order chips sometimes foretell the company's upcoming products. Some of Intel's first low-power mobile Pentium chips were specially built for early versions of Toshiba's Libretto mini-notebook, for instance.
Furthermore, Intel built a special-edition mobile Pentium 4, dubbed the Pentium 4C, for Hewlett-Packard that presaged the chipmaker's trend of delivering more desktop-like mobile Pentium 4 chips.
Intel hasn't yet made public whether it plans to offer a full line of Celerons like the Ultra Low Voltage Celeron 600MHz A, but the processor could again predict the future of Intel's mobile chips.
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Spam celebrates silver jubilee
Net historians have trawled records and found that the first junk e-mail message hawking a company or its wares was sent back in 1978.
Now spam is thought to account for up to 40% of all e-mail messages sent across the net and many industry groups, companies and technologists are uniting to fight the flood.
Research by net alumni Brad Templeton has found that the first spam message was sent back in the days when the internet was known as Arpanet.
By 1978 Arpanet had been operating for about nine years and was letting lots of people at universities and government bodies swap e-mail.
On 3 May a marketing executive at Digital Equipment Corporation, a leading maker of minicomputers, decided to send all West Coast Arpanet users a message about an open day that would show off its new range of machines.
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Terminal PC Software May Curb Need to Upgrade PCs
Neoware, a maker of software used to run network-connected terminals that work as an alternative to personal computers, will unveil on Monday low-cost software to turn obsolete PCs into modern terminals.
Upgrading existing office PCs rather than replacing them with more expensive machines undercuts the long-anticipated PC replacement cycle that some investors have hoped would re-energize sales of business PCs later this year.
Neoware and rival terminal makers make up a tiny but fast-growing niche in the commercial computer world. Players include Wyse of Taiwan, Neoware and Citrix Systems, who boast they can upgrade PCs for under $200 per machine.
"Today, it's all about saving money," Neoware Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Kantrowitz said in an interview, referring to solid growth of terminal computer purchases by buyers looking to replace obsolete PCs while cutting overall technology costs.
Terminals, or so-called "thin client" machines are diskless computers that store and access data from central computers.
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Digital Projectors a Big Hit for Home Movies
What began as an exotic work-place tool is becoming a fixture in many homes, as prices of digital projectors close in on $1,000 and DVD technology outpaces video.
Sales of consumer projectors are expected to nearly double this year and next from 28,000 in 2002 in the United States and 148,000 worldwide, according to Pacific Media Associates, a Menlo Park, California-based research company specializing in large-format televisions and monitors.
The technology is hottest among Europeans and Asians who want big pictures but often cannot fit huge TVs in their small apartments, said Pacific Media analyst Bill Coggshall.
The projectors feature two different technologies. One shoots light onto the screen through tiny liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, the same technology used on watch faces and flat-panel computer monitors, which turn off and on.
A second, called DLP, uses a microchip with more than a million tiny mirrors developed by Texas Instruments Inc. The mirrors reflect light from the projector bulb through a color wheel and into the lens, creating a picture.
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Mobile Intel Pentium 4s revealed
As we've pointed out in a few stories over the last few weeks, one of the more interesting family of processors Intel will launch during this year is its "Portability Processor".
These are Pentium 4s and Celerons which are based on Intel's desktop CPUs but with some differences - they're intended for so-called "transportable" notebooks.
The chips also have some interesting characteristics - at first they'll be built using the .13µ (micron) process, will have a 512K cache, and will use a 533MHz front side bus, although Intel calls this the PSB.
By the fourth quarter of this year, these processors will also support hyperthreading, and next year will start to appear as "mobile Prescotts", with 1MB of cache, hyperthreading and also at 533MHz for the bus, although produced using a 90 nanometer factory process.
It's important to note these are not Pentium 4Ms, but they do have some heat characteristics which make them suitable for notebooks, Intel will claim. As far as we can see, there won't be any Speedstep in there either.
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African expats offer tech savvy to homelands
Visitors to Application Technologies' office are greeted by 20 African masks on the wall. Each has a color pattern unique to a particular village in Cameroon, the home country of the high-tech company's founder and chief executive officer.
Rebecca Enonchong has lived in the United States for 20 of her 35 years but has not forgotten her roots. She has done more for her homeland than just hang its artifacts on her walls, opening an office in her native country.
Enonchong is one of 20 native Africans -- many are female executives of technology companies -- who planned to spend three days in Kampala, Uganda, beginning Monday to discuss how to develop high-tech industries in the countries they left behind. They intend to meet with government and business leaders, as well as aspiring entrepreneurs.
"There's a link and an attachment to the continent that you can't get rid of," Enonchong said in her office on the eighth floor of a suburban Washington office building. "You just fall in love with this beautiful continent and say, 'I can't let it suffer. What can I do?"'
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