Although the proposed merger of CPU manufacturer AMD and graphics chip producer ATI has cleared regulatory hurdles in the US and ATI's native Canada, an ominous warning issued by ATI after the close of business yesterday is starting to cast doubt upon whether the merger partners can achieve their stated principal objective: to seize the integrated graphics platform market.

Yesterday, ATI said it now projects revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter 2006 to be below the low end of previous estimates, specifically down to $520 million. This despite a stellar third quarter for the company, in which it posted $652.3 million in revenue, with declining cost of revenues that increased margins and bucked the industry trend.

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The chief technology officer of security firm Secunia, which issued an "extremely critical" rating for a worm exploiting a previously undiscovered Word 2000 vulnerability, is defending his company's policies in the face of competitors who have rated the severity of the worm as "very low." He told BetaNews the warning was indicative of how severe the worm could be if it infected a user's system.

Secunia's Thomas Kristensen said the risk rating of a worm should not be confused with the critical rating of its vulnerability. Since a worm is not a virus, by design, it cannot propagate itself widely. As a result, he said, when one examines the world's networking environments as a whole, damage assessments from any worm become more limited, "in turn causing anti-virus companies to give it a fairly low rating."

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Programming language developers are quite accustomed to using beta builds of their own work even in production environments; so for them, today's announcement from Microsoft that IronPython 1.0 is finally complete, may not be big news.

But to the broader world of system administrators and IT department staffers for whom rapid deployment and C# continue to be opposite concepts, the creation -- under Microsoft's stewardship -- of a dynamic language closely linked to the .NET Framework, and using Python constructs, is the opening of a new door for Windows.

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Last weekend's disclosure of an alleged security vulnerability in Microsoft Word 2000, exploited by a new version of an old worm, is raising questions over what constitutes the severity of an exploit. Is it the degree to which we know about it, or the number of systems out there it could possibly hurt?

A blog post last Sunday on Symantec's Web site characterizing the latest permutation of a months-old exploit as "zero-day" contributed to security firm Secunia raising its advisory rating to "extremely critical."

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Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi said Wednesday his company's PlayStation 3 game console rollout for the European market would be delayed. The PS3 had been scheduled for worldwide release in mid-November; now, the date will likely be March. Lack of blue laser diodes used by the console's built-in Blu-ray Disc player were directly blamed for the delay.

"I feel sorry. I think there are so many people out there who hold such high expectations for PS3," Reuters quotes Kutaragi as saying, just after the close of the Nikkei market, where Sony's stock had already fallen nearly one percent.

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As expected, Intel announced late Tuesday a new wave of job cuts as part of the company's reorganization plan, first detailed last April.

Although voluntary reorganization plans have already been in place, Intel's statement projects the company's goals for "employee population" to be reduced to 95,000 by the end of this year, and 92,000 by the middle of the next calendar year. This results in a reduction of 10,500 employees since the end of last July, when the company released disappointing revenue figures - down 5% year-over-year.

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"You might wonder," reads a Google corporate blog post this morning, "why Google is interested in [optical character recognition]." Indeed, you might wonder that if you didn't already know that Google has been deeply involved with an on-again/off-again project to produce a digital library of the world's literary material.

Although the future of the project remains up in the air, work continues on one of the technical prerequisites to making such a library possible: a project called Tesseract, begun in 1985 at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The school worked with HP to construct a reliable OCR system that works with all manners of printed text.

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Since last January, Microsoft has used the term "on track" to describe how it delays its release dates for Windows Vista, most notably last March. But today's news from Microsoft that Vista RC1, announced last Friday, will be opened up to as many as five million participants for testing, included no mention of the now-infamous euphemism, thus giving hope to both users and developers that January may be the final kickoff date.

The new build - most likely numbered 5600 - will be released not only to TechNet subscribers but also members of the next Customer Preview Program (CPP), enrollments for which are expected to begin soon. With RC1 certain to become widely deployed in a short period of time, independent developers could soon find themselves with fertile proving grounds for Vista-oriented support products. For them, Microsoft released over the weekend another RC1: .NET Framework 3.0.

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In the next step of its sweeping reorganization plan, Intel may be preparing to let go of as many as 22,000 workers worldwide, according to media sources close to the affected operations. The announcement may come from the company as soon as today, according to the Financial Times, which cites analysts as saying the final job cut number may come in at around 10,000, once those affected have been notified after returning from their Labor Day holiday.

Intel's operations in Israel could be severely affected by these cuts, if the fears of the Tel Aviv-based newspaper Ma'ariv are realized. Last December, Intel announced it would be expanding its 300 nm fabrication facility in Kiryat Gat to handle production of 45 nm components, supplementing that plant's current 90 nm line.

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