| 2003-December-28 Sharp Corp will invest 90 billion yen ($839.1 million) to boost production of large LCD panels at a new factory in western Japan. While this will eventually help to lower LCD prices across the board, LCD prices in Malaysia are slightly higher in December, due to worldwide spike in demand during the holiday. Consumers in the United States and Europe traditionally purchase large quantity of electronic products in the two weeks leading up to Christmas.
2003-December-19 TM Net Sdn Bhd will be conducting a scheduled maintenance and upgrading exercise to improve its service performance. As a result, tmnet streamyx customers in Selangor, Kedah, Perlis, Melaka, Negeri Sembilan, Perak, Kelantan, Sarawak and Johor Bahru may experience some short disruption of service between 3 – 25 December, 2003. Details of the areas affected by the upgrading exercise is as follows:
2003-December-19 The war on spam escalates. The attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer, filed a civil lawsuit yesterday against three marketing companies that allegedly send up to 250 million unsolicited commercial e-mail messages a day. The messages contained more than 40 000 fraudulent statements such as faked sender identifications and deceptive subject lines. The state will seek penalties for each fraudulent act that could result in a fine of $20 million. One of the spammers being sued was Scott Richter, president of OptinRealBig.com which is alleged to be the third-most-prolific spammer in the world. Microsoft said it would file a similar suit in Washington State because much of the spam was aimed at its Hotmail e-mail service. It is seeking $18.8 million.
2003-December-17 Microsoft has released some details of its Windows XP Service Pack 2 targeted to be released in mid-2004. Service Pack 2 security enhancements focus on four areas: port-based attacks in which a person runs malicious code on systems, malicious attacks via e-mail attachment, malicious web content, and buffer overrun attacks, said Nash. A major enhancement to the Service Pack, called the Windows Firewall, will block data or malicious code in e-mail and instant messenger (IM) attachments.
2003-December-12 Two North Carolina men were indicted for violating the state's junk e-mail law by sending thousands of e-mail pitches for investments, software and other products. Jeremy Jaynes, 29, who uses the aliases of Jeremy James and Gaven Stubberfield, and Richard Rutowski each face four felony counts of transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail, each count carries up to five years in prison and fines of up to $2,500. The Virginia case will be the first felony prosecution for violation of antispam statutes in the nation. Howard Carmack, 36, of Buffalo, New York, was indicted in May for allegedly using stolen identities to create Internet accounts from which he sent more than 825 million junk e-mail messages, but he was charged with identity theft. Atlanta-based ISP EarthLink was awarded $16.4 million after successfully suing Carmack for using 343 false identities to establish e-mail accounts.
2003-December-3 Sun, one of the top four server sellers, has begun offering AMD processors on its blade servers. The shift will let Sun blades run Linux as well as Sun's Solaris operating system. The AMD-based blade, called the B100x, costs US$1,799 for a model with 2GB of memory and a 1.53GHz Mobile Athlon XP 1800 processor and is available immediately. Sun plans to sell systems in early 2004 using AMD's high-end Opteron processor.
2003-November-6 Microsoft has allocated five million US dollar to a reward program designed to help catch virus writers. It will offer another half a million dollars: US$250,000 rewards to anyone offering information on the creators of the "SoBig" virus, another US$250,000 for information leading to the arrest of the "MSBlast" virus writer(s). The bounties are being offered worldwide, in an acknowledgement of the global nature of cybercrimes, the company said.
2003-October-28 Details of Microsoft's new Windows operating system, code named "Longhorn", have been offered to the public by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Scheduled to be released in 2006, "Longhorn" permits one-click installation of applications without rebooting. In addition, it has an XML-based visual presentation system, code-named Avalon; a new file system, dubbed WinFS; and new technology for communications between applications and devices, code-named Indigo. According to Microsoft representatives,Avalon will take much more advantage of underused graphics processing power on modern PCs; Avalon allows Longhorn to seamlessly render video, and include some elements reminiscent of Mac OS X, including transparent windows. The WinFS file system will use XML and database technology to define files of all kinds by multiple attributes or metadata. This will support fast and sophisticated searches across multiple data types in scattered locations. Information that previously was available only at the application level will now be available on the OS level, giving users greater access to information that previously was segregated by file type. Indigo technology is intended to make it easier for applications to communicate across the Internet
2003-October-27 MandrakeSoft, the makers of the Mandrake Linux distribution, has warned users that the latest release, 9.2, could damage some LG-based CD-ROMs. In an advisory posted on its site, the company said the error scenario being encountered by some users was that of installing 9.2 and getting an error message that said "unable to install the base system" with a subsequent reboot revealing that the CD-ROM drive was physically dead. "According to LG Electronics, their ODD (Optical Disc Drive) products do not support Linux nor do they test with Linux. Unfortunately, many Dell computers (possibly others) come with these CD-ROM drives," the advisory said. "Currently there is no solution or workaround for this issue; it is still under investigation. Damage occurs even when doing a network install. At this point, please do not install Mandrake Linux 9.2 on any computer containing a LG-based CD-ROM drive or it will damage your CD-ROM drive! We are actively looking for a solution to this problem," it said. List of the compatible and incompatible LG CD-ROM drives:
2003-October-24 TMNet backbone is down since around 11:23am. This affects all of TMNet services, which means our services are disrupted as well. It seems as if a primary conncting node is disconnected and they have no idea where it is. TMNet technician is going through all the key routers one-by-one, either rebooting, trying out the cable or rerouting the traffic. Failure of this magnitude is seldom seem and is usually easily solved, once they found where the fault is. We expect the outage to last at least four hours.
2003-October-23
In contrast, the current fastest super computer, the Japanese Earth Silmulator,
costs more than USD 200 million and can perform 35.8 trillion operations per second
with its 5,120 custom processors. The fastest cluster machine, the Lawrence Livermore
system for weapon design, performs 7.63 trillion operations a second with 2304
Intel Xeon processors, at a price of USD 10 million or more.
2003-October-22
The products include professional and small-business editions of Office 2003, which comes with updated versions of Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word, and the new InfoPath application for generating business documents using XML-formatted data. In addition, Microsoft introduced upgrades to its FrontPage, Project, and Visio applications, which are sold separately, and a new standalone application called OneNote, for electronic note taking. It also rolled out two improved server products--SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003--a new instant-messaging server, dubbed Live Communications Server, and a Web conferencing service, Live Meeting. 2003-October-20 In the United States, the state of Massachusetts has instructed its chief technology officer to adopt a policy of "open standards, open source" for all future spending on information technology. Governments are a huge market, accounting for about 10 per cent of global information technology spending. Federal agencies in France, China and Germany, as well as the city government of Munich, have opted for Linux. Britain, Brazil and Russia are also exploring it. Here at infoarch, our experience was that our client typically saved an initial cost between 20% to 30% on open source system, but paid an additional 10% to 50% more in lost productivity and training in the long run. We would recommend open source system only if our client's employee were reasonably IT-savvy, or has an internal IT department that was staffed by professional IT support persons.
2003-October-8
Maximum talk time is 180 minutes, stand by time 350 hours, it weights 141g, and its size is 132mm x 52mm x 25mm. Nokia N-Gage Specification :
2003-October-8 TMNet has revised its Streamyx ADSL packages, reducing prices across the board. Their unlimited usage plans are as follow:
2003-October-6 The recent degradation in Internet traffic performance was due in part to several new strains of computer viruses and worms. The latest generation of these worms came with SMTP (for email transfer) built-in, and were capable of sending out emails on their own once they had successfully infiltrated the victims' computer. The resulting flood of emails brought some of the local ISPs' server to its knee (Jaring, TMNet, etc.), and significantly reduced the email server performance (TMNet, PacNet. etc.) to the point were some emails were lost. One party that has benefited from these viruses are the Spammers (senders of junk e-mail known as spam), who are able to harvest previously valid but unknown email addresses. As a result, if you find yourself receiving an email infected with virus, don't be happy even if your anti-virus software successfully blocked the virus, chances are that same email have also been sent to other parties, and eventually, a harvester. You might, therefore, be flooded by spams soon.
2003-October-6 The problem of TMNet and Jaring Internet traffic congestion has been resolved, apparently it is due to an International undersea cable being cut off around Taiwan. In a related news, Jaring and TMNet is in the final round of talk about the upcoming merger into one single entity.
2003-September-30 While not exactly news, this question has come up repeatedly that we feel the need to address it here. In the future we will start a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section which is the more appropriate forum to answer question such as this: Question : I bought a computer that was pre-loaded with Windows XP Home Edition and Office XP Standard. Because of my need I am going to purchase Windows XP Professional and Office XP Professional to load them onto this computer; can I install the original copy of XP Home and Office Standard on another PC for my staff? Answer : The short answer is no. Windows XP and Office XP need to be activated to permanently unlock themselves. They take a snapshot of your computer system after installation, and generate a number. Microsoft will issue a corresponding number to "activate" your copy of Windows XP and Office XP. When you installed the software to a different computer, the generated number won't match, and Microsoft won't give you a new set of activation number. The long answer is maybe. You can call Microsoft's activation hotline to explain the situation. Microsoft will require your purchase invoice and sometimes photocopy of the licenses. Most of the time they will issue a new activation code for the second PC if they are reasonably happy that you are a legitimate user.
2003-September-17 Intel will be launching a new Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading Technology, Extreme Edition, starting at 3.2GHz. The CPU will include a 2MB Level 3 cache, which should help boost its performance in demanding applications such as graphics-heavy games. Today's Pentium 4 processors include a 512KB L2 cache, but no L3 cache (in fact, none of Intel's desktop processors include an L3 cache). Expected to be up to 15 or 20 percent faster than 3.2-GHz P4 systems, this new processor is basically a Xeon MP so its price is expected to be somewhere between USD637 and USD3692 (prices of current 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 and 2.8-GHz Xeon MP processor).
2003-September-8 Now it's TMNet's turn. We believe TMNet's email server is experiencing the same problem as Jaring's, TMNet's server is becoming unstable and users may experience intermittent difficulty in sending or receiving of emails.
2003-September-4 Jaring's email server is overloaded by the massive amount of emails generated by the W32.Sobig.F@mm virus. Jaring users may experience difficulty in sending or receiving of emails. UPDATE 2003-09-04 : Jaring has acknowledged this problem and is working to resolve it.
2003-August-20 Jaring's email problem is getting worse, we suspect it is due to Jaring use of SMTP authentication. In a related news, if you are Jaring dial-up subscriber, you would probably experience difficulty in connecting to Jaring's server, or slow connection speed.
2003-August-14 In response to the massive damage done by the recent computer worm virus, Microsoft said future shipment of Windows XP will completely turn on the protective network firewall by default, to make PCs less vulnerable to attacks. In the future, customers who choose to partly disable the firewall will be able to do so. The other main version of Windows now sold by Microsoft, Windows Server 2003, already has been sold with the firewall fully enabled; users can disable it if they choose. The current Windows XP default was to partially enable its firewall to make it easier for users to play games or perform on on-line transactions. Critics have long said that these capabilities should be chosen by the users, not installed by default, as they can make PCs more vulnerable to network attacks. As at 14 August, the latest attack by the "MSBlast" or "LoveSan" worm virus infected an estimated 250,000 to 1,5000,000 computers worldwide, costing between USD 50 million to 329 million in damages and lost productivity.
2003-August-11 Jaring reported that there are some problems with its email service, causing intermittent connection problem for some users.
2003-July-25 Effective from 4th August, if you are Jaring subscriber, you will need to enable SMTP authentication if you wish to send emails via Jaring's SMTP server while connecting through a connection OTHER THAN Jaring's. What it means is: if you have multiple dial-up accounts (TMNet, Maxis, Digi, AT&T, etc.) or frequently travel overseas, you are affected. This is Jaring's way of controlling SPAM. We believe this is a smart move on Jaring's part and will actually affect our users in a positive way, as our servers have always required SMTP authentication since the very beginning.
2003-July-18
Processor : Sony's ARM926-based Custom-Built
Processor : Intel XScale
Processor : Intel XScale
2003-July-15 While not exactly news, the recent SCO law suit against the Linux open source community has prompted many of our clients to ask us this question: exactly how is "Linux" pronounced? Linux was a word play that came from both the word "Unix", its big brother, and "Linus", the name of Linus Torvalds, its creator. The original pronunciation was Lee-nicks, as in Little Unix. Nowadays it is also commonly pronounced with a short " i " and with the first syllable stressed, as in LIH-nucks. This was how the creator Linus Torvalds pronounced it in Swedish and in English. Many other variations of the word exist.
2003-July-1 Intel Corporation introduced new Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and Intel Xeon™ processors MP. The new Itanium 2 (Madison) processor delivers up to 30 to 50 percent greater performance than the previous Itanium 2 processor (code-named McKinley), while maintaining system compatibility with the previous Itanium 2 processor and two future Itanium processors (code-named Madison 9M and Montecito). The 64-bit Itanium 2 processor also maintains software compatibility with previous and future Itanium processor family products, as well as 32-bit applications. The 32-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 2.80 GHz is compatible with existing Intel Xeon processor MP-based platforms and delivers up to 10 percent or greater performance over its predecessor
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A group
of faculty, technicians and students at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University have assembled a low-cost supercomputer by linking 1,100 Apple
Macintosh computers at a cost of approximately USD 5 million. At its current un
optimized state, this cluster of 2,200 IBM PowerPC processors is the forth fastest
in the world, capable of 7.41 trillion operations per seconds.
Microsoft
on Tuesday formally launched its new Office System family of products, involving
personal productivity applications, server software, and related services centered
around the company's refreshed desktop suite, Office 2003.
Nokia
has finally launched its N-Gage entertainment handset to compete with Nintendo's
Gameboy Advance SP. Expected selling price N-Gage is around USD300, or USD160
subsidised.
The
current fad in Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) design seems to be the incorporation
of miniature keyboard into the unit. Sony Corp launched its latest PDA CLIE PEG-UX50
in Japan. It comes with sub-megapixels digital camera and either Bluetooth or
802.11b WiFi connectivity built-in. Expected selling price is RM2,800 when it
becomes available in September.
Immediately
available is the Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 (Z 5600). Announced last year, it has a
hidden QWERTY thumb keyboard. Selling price is around RM2,000.
Not
available for the near future is Bsquare's Skeye.Mobil, also spots a slide-out
QWERTY keyboard. It comes with GSM/GPRS digital cellular support built-in, includes
a strip-down MS Internet Explorer browser that supports Java and Macromedia Flash.
This device, however, is a concept unit and is not being mass manufactured.
Current News
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