From a column at CBS.Marketwatch.com: “Just because Big Blue played white knight and rescued distressed database-software legend
Informix doesn’t mean that other struggling software makers will be so fortunate.”

PCWorld: “Intel hits new speed heights, shipping a Pentium 4 that runs at 1.7 GHz, but despite the increase the chip is still locked in a tight battle with Advanced Micro Devices’ premier CPU, the 1.33-GHz Athlon.

The newest P4 beats the Athlon in a few test areas, notably video encoding. But on most counts the nominally slower Athlon wins out, proving again that lower processor-speed ratings don’t necessarily add up to lower performance. Moreover, top-line P4 systems remain more expensive than comparable Athlon and PIII PCs.”

The Register: “Hynix has begun producing 64Mb DDR SDRAM chips in 4Mb x 16 configuration.

Fabbed at 0.18 micron and designed to operate at 2.5V, the chips can run at 200, 233, 250 or 275MHz.

The new parts are aimed at graphics applications – expect to see them coupled with the likes of Nvidia’s GeForce 3 and ATI’s Radeon – which account for around 20 per cent of Hynix’s DRAM business, the company said.”

Wired: “Using the Web shouldn’t be rocket science. Louise Kirkbride, a rocket-scientist turned Web guru, thinks she has a way to make the Internet accessible.”

Anandtech: “In spite of the majority predicting a single sided race in the 3D graphics market because of the demise of 3dfx, quite the opposite is happening. It is quite clear that NVIDIA’s 6-month product cycles aren’t of much use at this point in time, as they are only competing against themselves at this point. The GeForce2 Ultra and soon the GeForce3 are the fastest overall 3D graphics accelerators on the market today, yet most consumers aren’t complaining about the performance of their hardware, rather they are looking for software to make use of that hardware.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Big bad Microsoft has won a lawsuit against a Chinese company that “violated intellectual property rights,” according to a French Press Agency report published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The company had been installing unlicensed copies of Windows on the computers it sold. Huahai Computer Co., claims to have been capable of producing 100,000 computers annually for the Chinese government sector, according to a description of the company at a trade show Web site. According to the site, Huahai in 1998 was named one of the top 100 Nongovernmental Science and Technology Enterprises and Shanghai High-tech Enterprises, by the Shanghai government.

Microsoft claimed that the company was installing illegal copies of the Windows operating system, a potentially large loss, if Huahai was indeed producing 100k systems each year. As restitution, the company was ordered to pay Microsoft $33,735 and publish an apology in a local newspaper.

Software “piracy’ has long been a problem in China, where the retail cost of a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 is about $480, which represents about five month’s salary for the average white-collar office worker, according to an August 2000 report at The Register.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments
posted on our discussion
page.

BBC: “The text of the lawsuit alleges: ‘Absent the combination of extremely violent video games and these boys’ incredibly deep involvement, use of and addiction to these games and the boys’ basic personalities, these murders and this massacre would not have occurred.'”

LWN.net: “The KDE Project (http://www.kde.org/) today
announced the highly-anticipated release of KOffice 1.1beta1.
KOffice (http://www.koffice.org/) is an integrated office suite for KDE
which utilizes open standards for component communication and component
embedding. The primary goals of the the release are to provide a preview
of KOffice 1.1 and to involve users who wish to request missing features
or report problems. Code development is currently focused on stabilizing
KOffice 1.1, scheduled for final release this summer.”

The Register: “Not so much leet as incredibly brazen, the pair typically exploited several well-known vulnerabilities in Win-NT for which patches were issued ages ago and persistently ignored by sysadmins with far better things to do than read a lot of dry security bulletins.

Interestingly, the FBI engaged in a little social engineering attack of its own, and actually lured the duo to the USA with a come-on from a phony security outfit eager to avail itself of their mad skillz.”

Wired: “Linuxgruven offered tech support jobs to those who passed its $3,900 certification program. But the company vanishes after its founder is arrested on fraud charges. “