Microsoft SQL Server 2000 was named the overall winner in the database software category in this year's VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC). The VARBusiness ARC is the most significant annual benchmark of the industry's solution provider and vendor relationship. It measures the overall level of satisfaction solution providers have with their software, hardware, networking, storage and Internet vendor partnerships. ARC winners signify the industry's leading vendors that solution providers look to for technology innovation and solutions in the digital economy.
The news for troubled PC maker Gateway has gone from bad to worse, with the company announcing this week that it will trim 25 percent of its global staff as it exits the Asian market and trims its presence significantly in Europe. The pullout will see the closing of all of the company's operations in Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Gateway will cut 5,000 jobs and take a third quarter charge of over $475 million as part of its new restructuring plan, and the company will also close several US-based facilities, including a plant in Salt Lake City and support centers in four states.
DOJ is up against time, and it show, they grow desperate by the minute. The following article may contain BS!
The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday asked a federal district court to quickly convene a meeting of the parties in the Microsoft antitrust case to schedule the proceedings in the remainder of the case. "Because of the strong public interest in a prompt and orderly resolution of the remaining issues in this case, plaintiffs respectfully request that the court schedule an initial status conference at its earliest convenience to address procedures and a schedule for future proceedings," the U.S. Justice Department said in its motion.
Hard drives will get a speed boost Wednesday from a new standard that will help them keep up with processors. As previously reported, the Serial ATA Working Group will announce the final version of its ATA specification at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Calif. The new standard, Serial ATA, will allow hard drives to keep up with PCs, which speed up with every iteration of processors from the likes of Intel and AMD. This not only will improve performance, but also enable PC makers to use smaller cables inside PCs, reducing heat and allowing for smaller systems to be developed. Serial ATA will allow data to be transferred at 600MB per second.
During the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) here today, Intel Corp. gave a sneak preview of its microprocessor roadmap, including the demonstration of a Pentium 4 processor running at 3.5-GHz speeds.
Zooming in on the desktop market, Intel demonstrated a 3.5-GHz Pentium 4, which based on the company's new 0.13-micron process technology. Intel showed a system, based on the 3.5-GHz Pentium 4, linked to several computers via a wireless local area network. The networking scheme was based on the 802.11 wireless LAN standard, it was noted.
Looks like Microsoft has confirmed that there was tracing technology included on the builds given out to beta testers at the end of the Windows XP beta to track down who was leaking them. Here is the post from Microsoft on it:
I wish that you'd chosen to email us privately. Yes, as other posters have surmised, this was used to track down leaky beta testers. There are a number of people no longer participating in the beta because they were directly traced to deliberately leaking builds. However, disclosing the existance of the tracing technology simply means that we will no longer be able to remove such people from the beta as easily.
Windows XP will help pull the PC market out of its tailspin in 2002 since the new operating system will give consumers a lot more reasons to upgrade than did its predecessors, according to one of Microsoft's key executives. "The timing is incredibly good for the PC industry right now," Jim Allchin, group vice president at Microsoft, said during a speech at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday. "We should have a very good next year, and when I say we, I mean the industry." The PC industry has been in a slump for almost a full year.
Intel showed off a new chip technology on Tuesday that, if successful, will allow one chip to act like two. Called "hyperthreading," the new technology essentially takes advantage of formerly unused circuitry on the Pentium 4 that lets the chip operate far more efficiently--and almost as well as a dual-processor computer. With it, a desktop can run two different applications simultaneously, or run a single application much faster than it would on a standard one-processor box.
Technical beta testers that downloaded Windows XP Home or Professional Edition from Microsoft's servers last weekend might want to be careful about giving out copies of the CD-ROMs that they generated: Microsoft has embedded a security check into each CD that uniquely identifies each tester, so the company will be able to tell if another user installs Windows XP using that tester's CD-ROMs. The security measure was unwittingly uncovered by a tester, wondering about a unique UUIDREF number in the header of the CD-ROM .ISO images, software files that are used to generate the XP CD-ROMs.
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