Morning Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 12:20 PM CET - Nov,14 2002
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- House considers jailing hackers for life - A last-minute addition
to a proposal for a Department of Homeland Security
would punish malicious computer hackers with life in prison. The U.S.
House of Representatives on Wednesday evening voted 299 to 121 to approve the
bill, which would reshape large portions of the federal bureaucracy into a new
department combining parts of 22 existing federal agencies, including the
Secret Service, the Coast Guard, and the FBI's National Infrastructure
Protection Center.
- Tech taps into portable power sources - Canadian government
researchers at the Alberta Research Council (ARC) announced this week that
they have built a
working
prototype of a fuel cell that uses hydrogen gas as a fuel but can be
adapted to run on a variety of sources such as natural gas, butane or propane.
- NASA to Delay Decision on Shuttle Replacement - NASA announced
a major change in direction today for its human space flight program,
saying it would delay development of a replacement for the space shuttle and
instead start work on a new, smaller orbiting space plane - a sort of
minishuttle - to take people to and from the International Space Station.
- tmsuk and SANYO reveals new and improved "Banryu" home-robot -
tmsuk Co., LTD., (pronounced "temzack") a small robotics firm from
Kitakyushu (Fukuoka Pref. Japan) and SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. Headquartered in
Moriguchi, Osaka, have developed an improved version of their home-robot
Banryu. The two companies wish to finalize the design and details and to
commence the marketing of the first-ever useful home robot to the general
public in year 2003. The new "Banryu", which means "guard-dragon" in
place of "guard-dog", takes on a look of an ancient reptile with a futuristic
twist. Its speed has been increased from 3meters/min. to 15meters/min., a
velocity more than fast enough for a home robot designed to travel in confined
cluttered spaces. It also is able to confidently go over gaps over 10cm,
sensing the height with sets of sensors located on its legs.
- Qualcomm GSM chip speaks many languages - Available by the middle
of 2003,
the MSM6500 processor represents Qualcomm's latest push to sell mobile
phones that are based on the world's most widespread wireless standard, GSM
(Global System for Mobile Communications). Qualcomm said upcoming cell phones
that use the new processors will be able to use networks based on GSM and
CDMA, as well as a faster version of CDMA called CDMA2000 1xEV-DO.
- Lite-On comes with stand-alone DVD/ MPEG-4 player -
Lite-On's model LVD-2001 is a DVD player with several advanced features,
including MPEG-4 playback, a photo browser and progressive high definition
output. The LVD-2001 will be demonstrated at the IA Show taking place in
Taipei on November 16th to 19th and will be in full production by February
2003.
- Start-up to put LindowsOS on sub-$1,000 tablets - A group of PC
industry veterans Tuesday took the cloak off a new company called StepUp
Computing, and revealed its first product -- a low-cost, pen-based tablet
computer that can run Windows 2000, Windows XP, and coming soon, a version of
the Linux operating system from Lindows.com. StepUp Computing's first product
to market will be a tablet computer called the
DocuNote, which will cost as little as $799 depending on the software it
ships with, the company said.
- Overclocking your ATI Radeon 9700 Pro to 400 MHz - According to
Andrew Vorobyev, new ATI Radeon 9700 Pro cards have an interesting feature:
those who tried to overclock them might have noticed a gap between GPU and
heatsink? The match lies on the GPU with heatsink removed. Notice the about
1mm gap between chip walls and the crystal! ATI's thermogasket doesn't add to
the overclocking potential (see
picture) Naturally, if you remove it, you will have a lot of thermal
grease... better chip-cooler contact easily raised the ATi R9700 Pro clock up
to 400 MHz. (source -
Digit-Life news)
- KDE 3.0.5 - According to the SuSE
README file for
KDE 3.0.5,
this is not exactly a full release of its own, as only the kdebase and kdelibs
packages were affected from the (mostly security) updates (the rest of the
packages have very minor changes). Users who already have 3.0.4 installed,
will only need to re-install these two packages, while users using older
versions, will have to do a complete installation.
- DirectX 9.0 RC 0 Officially - I've posted a download link earlier,
however this
RC0 can now officially be downloaded directly from Microsoft. Supported
Languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, English
(American), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese
(Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish. This pre-release version expires on March
19, 2003.
- BootXP 2.26 RC1 -
BootXP is an easy to use startup logo changer designed for Windows 2000
and XP that uses bitmap files or kernel files as sources. BootXP shows
animated full screen previews of the screens,sp you will see the previews as
if you were booting.
- MAME 0.62 -
MAME 0.62 has
been released (the first version under GPL!), and it supports 3596 ROM sets,
2045 unique games.
- KaZaA Lite 2.0.2 -
KaZaA Lite 2.0.2 has been released. Changes: 1) Cheats do not work in this
version 2) There won't be any upgrade pop-ups 3) The starting bug of KaZaA is
fixed.
- Alcohol v1.3.5.1112 -
Alcohol 120% (mirror)
is a CD/DVD emulation and recording software that allows users to copy a
visible and invisible discs. It enables users to create 31 virtual CD/DVD-ROMs
to play discs without needing a physical disc.
- YahooPOPs! 0.4.0 -
YahooPOPs! is an
open-source
initiative to provide free POP3 access to your Yahoo! Mail account. YahooPOPs!
is available on the Windows and Unix platforms. This application emulates a
POP3 server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora,
Mozilla, Calypso, etc., to download email from Yahoo! accounts.
- ATI Catalyst DirectX 9.0 BRC0 Drivers -
ATI
Technologies released a new beta drivers (Catalyst
BRC0) supporting DirectX 9.0 Release Candidate 0 (RC0) application
program interface (API).
- VIA 4in1 Drivers v4.43v -
VIA Arena
reports that they released a new
VIA 4in1 drivers
v4.43v (download).
The difference between different versions of the 4in1 drivers can be found by
reading
this release note file.
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Updated:12:40 AM CEST Jun,21
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