Latest Technology News

Microsoft announced today in a statement that it will be officially calling its upcoming version of Windows and Office Windows XP and Office XP respectively. Rumors circulated last week as one BetaNews reader said he had heard a Microsoft representative slip the names in a seminar, and ZDNet reported on it last Friday. The "XP" stands for Experience, according to the release and the Reuters report. Bill Gates told reporters "These breakthrough versions of Windows and Office will give people the most powerful end-to-end computing experiences ever available." Stay tuned as both products are set to launch by the end of this year.

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If and when rogue music-sharing Napster is
reincarnated by its new corporate benefactor Bertelsmann AG as a
tamed service that is fee-based and limited in its musical
selection, will a successor be ready to leap into the void? Up to
now, the prevailing wisdom has said no - nothing on the market is as
simple and reliable to use as Napster.

However, a new product called BearShare, introduced in early
December and now undergoing improvements, just might change the
prevailing wisdom.

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Anti-virus company McAfee.com Corp. is warning America Online (AOL) users to be on the
lookout for various incarnations of a password-swiping program that
is making the rounds attached to e-mail messages.

McAfee.com, largely owned by security company Network Associates,
said it has logged an increasing number if such "Trojan" programs -
part of a family labeled "APStrojan" - among AOL users over the
last 30 days. However, AOL says any evidence of an increase may be
a matter of perspective.

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Struggling net provider Juno said today that it has plans in the works to turn its network of home computers into a supercomputer for research institutions to borrow. Much like the way Seti@Home works, users will leave computers on 24-hours a day and institutions will be able to use your excess processor power and hard drive space to analyze data sent over the net. Juno reports that the new setup only activates when users are not at their computers, and that it should not slow anything while they are using it. For more information read the Associated Press report.

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IBM announced today the availability of a new hard drive for servers that is said to run faster than current drives. Keeping up with Seagates current fastest drive, Reuters reports that the IBM Ultrastar 36Z15 runs at 15000 revolutions per minute, matching its Seagate competitor. According to the article, the IBM drive has a better seek time than that of the Seagate, making it the fastest on the market at the moment. A Seagate spokesperson told Reuters that by the time IBM ships the product his company will be back on top with its next-generation products.

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Web protection software maker eEye
Digital Security said today it has released Retina 3.0, a
network guard for the Microsoft Windows NT platform.

The company said in a statement that the Retina network security
scanner is the first such software application with
state-of-the-art artificial intelligence features that allow it
to think like a hacker, a trait the company described as CHAM
(Common Hacking Attack Methods). The feature lets the scanner
look for both known and unknown vulnerabilities.

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Redhat has released the first beta of its next Linux operating system upgrade, codenamed "Fisher", for the public to download. Version 7.1 features the new 2.4.0 kernel and a wizard to help you set up a basic firewall on your system. Redhat follows SuSE as the second major Linux distributor to incorporate the new Linux kernel in release editions of its software. As you may recall, Linux kernel 2.4 was released less than two weeks ago by guru Linus Torvalds.

Redhat Fisher also includes support for the Intel Itanium processor and improved XFree86 installation and setup guidance. A new setup for laptops has been added which features automatic PCMCIA card support.

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Sega made it official today, after rumors had been circulating for weeks about the eventual end of Dreamcast production. As of March 31st, the company will no longer be producing the console, instead focusing on making games for current and upcoming consoles. The list includes Playstation2, Dreamcast, Gameboy Advanced, Nintendo Game Cube, and Microsoft's X-Box. Sega had been losing money in the console market, and was rumored to be producing the final units using existing parts in plants. AP reports starting Sunday the Dreamcast console will retail for $99.95 in hopes to liquidate stock.

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Monday chip-giant Intel launched a new line of mobile processors taking aim at Transmeta's Crusoe processor line. The new chips, both the PIII and the Celeron model, are said to only consume as little as half a watt of power at the 300MHz level under one volt, according to the AP report. The new line is also said to outperform rival Crusoe processors, introduced by Transmeta last year. Operating at 500MHz while plugged in, the PIII model automatically steps down to 300MHz when running on battery power to achieve said engergy consumption levels. IBM will be the first to use the new chips, introducing them to Japan today and the US shortly thereafter.

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AMD today announced the availability of its Hammer emulation software VirtuHammer at LinuxWorld in Paris and New York. The software allows developers to emulate the upcoming Hammer family of processors AMD is currently developing so that application deployment will be rapid and successful. The Hammer family will be AMD's first line of 64-bit processors, extending on current X-86 technologies to provide enhanced performance for all software. For more information read the press release over at Yahoo.

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Corel Corp.'s new WordPerfect Office 2002
suite will improve Web integration and compatibility with Microsoft
Office formats.

Corel officials said they want to maintain their suite's dominance
among federal users at the Labor and Justice departments and the
Library of Congress.

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The Walt Disney Co. said today
it is giving up on running its Internet affairs as a separate business
and will bring its Walt Disney Internet Group back into the
fold. Holders of the Internet business's tracking stock - worth now about
20 percent what it was a year ago - will receive Disney common
stock instead.

Disney said the move also spells the end of its GO.com portal site,
the closing of which will result in the loss of some 400 jobs.

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In a bid to prevent a repeat of last week's crippling Web
site outages, Microsoft Corp. has retained Akamai
Technologies Inc. to host backup severs to which Microsoft can
default in the event of a hacker attack or technical failure.

"Our primary (Domain Name Server) network is still hosted at
Microsoft, but Akamai is now hosting some of our secondary servers,"
Microsoft spokesperson Rick Miller said. "What this means is that if
for any reason a customer does not get an answer from Microsoft's
primary network, there will be another network to point them to our"
Internet sites.

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ZDNet is talking about Gnutella, and how its popularity seems to be on the decline as of late, after a huge surge in interest when all of Napsters problems began to happen. In the report, reporter Ben Charny sat down with J.C. Nicholas of GnutellaWorld to talk about the upcoming release of Gnotella, Gnotella2, and the impact it will have on the filesharing community.

Nicholas was so bold as to tell Charny he thinks Gnotella2 "is going to be one of the greatest revolutions since Linux. It will revolutionize the way we exchange information on the Internet." He also wrote that they are looking for an "earthquake" on the Internet to reshape the way the world views and uses the Internet.

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German-based record company Bertelsman AG announced today that it could launch its Napster-based subscription download service as early as July. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Bertelsman CEO Thomas Midelhoff touted "I’n convinced we can introduce in June or July of this year a subscription model, with a real working digital rights management system."

While no one with the record company or with Napster could say how much the service might cost, it is rumored to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $5, not too shabby if you take into account how many files you could download in a month. But that is contigent on Napster not losing its user-base due to the fee.

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