The Register: “Intel will officially launch its 0.13 micron Pentium III die-shrink, codenamed Tualatin,
tomorrow, 19 June, if company sources cited by Web site X-bit Labs are to be
believed.

With a clock speed of 1.13GHz (as predicted) and an L2 cache of 256KB or 512KB
(ditto), tomorrow’s Tualatin will apparently be aimed at the server market.”

“IMEC (Leuven, Belgium) has developed an FPGA-based camera system
in which both hardware and software modules can be reconfigured over the Internet
while the camera is operating. IMEC, an independent research institute with academic
affiliations, plans to demonstrate the camera this week at the Design Automation
Conference.” At the heart of the system is a processor running Linux. Full story at EE Times.

The Register: “Creative Labs’ SoundBlaster Audigy sound system – details of it, at least – have
leaked out onto the Web. Part of what looks suspiciously like the company’s launch
presentation has been smuggled out onto a Russian Web site.”

Domain name registrars report brisk business for the new .biz domain suffix. The registration isn’t open to the public yet; companies looking to protect their trademarks get first crack at the new TLD, and thousands of companies are flooding registrars with their requests. Also, the deadline for staking claim to one’s trademarked domain name was July 9, but the company handling the .biz rollout has extended that deadline to August 6. Wired News has the story.

PC World: “As the latest salvo in the spring storage wars, Maxtor is announcing two extra-large hard drives for the storage deprived:
the 80GB DiamondMax D540X and the 100GB DiamondMax 536DX.

The 80GB DiamondMax D540X uses Maxtor’s latest technology tweaks to double the data storage of a two-sided drive
platter from 20GB to 40GB. The new DiamondMax 536DX drive has more traditional platter capacities, but it uses three
platters for a whopping 100GB of storage capacity–making it the largest desktop drive on the market.”

PC World: “Move over, Palm. Compaq Computer is set to become the number one earner in the PDA market, according to a new
report from research and consulting company Dataquest.

Compaq is expected to report revenue of more than $200 million from its iPaq handheld PC line in the second quarter,
which ends June 30. Palm’s hardware revenue is projected at $130 million to $135 million for its fiscal fourth quarter,
which ended June 1, according to a Dataquest statement Monday.”

“The linux-vax porting team is happy to announce that the
Linux kernel now boots to a shell prompt, on the DEC VAX
architecture (Digital Equipment Corporation, now owned by
Compaq). The kernel boots successfully on a MicroVAX 3100
model 38, with more models close to booting.” Read the post at Linux Weekly News.

Interactive Week has an item on “an enhancement to the basic language of the Internet” called Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)> Essentially, ECN adds a tiny bit of information to a packet header for e-mail and Web requests to reduce the number of packets lost during transmission. The Internet Engineering Task Force is close to making ECN a proposed official standard, and Cisco expects to make the new technology available in its routers by early 2002.

From an Interactive Week story on the U.S. patent issuing process: “As the technological ferment in the U.S. grew wildly effervescent at
the end of the 1990s, the number of patent applications relating to the
networked world exploded. But the USPTO didn’t have the staff or
budget to meet the challenge. As a result, experts say, patents that
shouldn’t have been granted were given USPTO approval, and patents
that should have sailed through spent too much time lingering on the
desks of overworked examiners.”

Interactive Week follows up on the controversy surrounding last week’s release of a Gartner study showing that Linux server sales were just 8.6 percent of the market, comapred with the 27 percent figure reported by IDC: “The dispute over the Gartner and IDC figures mirrors a debate within
IDC itself, between its hardware and software analysts. Operating
system analyst Dan Kusnetzky saw 27 percent market share for Linux
at a time when IDC was reporting growth was stagnant for Windows
NT.”