Saturday Tech Madness - tech
(hx) 05:11 PM CET - Dec,07 2002
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- Macworld Expo/Tokyo canceled - The show's producer, IDG World
Expo Japan, has decided to
cancel next year's show. In an e-mail, parent company IDG blamed the
cancellation on a lack of interest from exhibitors.
- Viagra May Help Some Infertile Women Get Pregnant - A small
percentage of women with infertility due to problems with their uterine lining
were able
to become pregnant after taking the drug Viagra in a vaginal suppository
form, according to a new report. Viagra (or sildenafil, as it is known
generically) appears to increase blood flow to the uterus, increasing the
thickness of the uterine lining, or endometrium. A relatively small number of
women who cannot conceive are infertile because their uterine lining is too
thin.
- Security hole exposes Tower Records - The glitch allowed anyone to
peruse Tower Records' Web site to
view its
database of customer orders dating from 1996 through this week, including
home and e-mail addresses, phone numbers and what music or video products were
purchased. More than 3 million such records were exposed.
- $300,000 for victims of URL scam - Companies that sold web
addresses that failed to work have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) charges and
pay $300,000 (L191,000) to customers. The FTC alleged that after 11
September 2001, the domain name sellers launched an aggressive spam campaign
to advertise domains ending in '.usa'.
- Instant photography coming up - If you're the proud owner of a
camera phone,
you'll
most likely be acutely aware of the fact that such devices have very limited
memory capabilities. Most carriers offer some sort of online storage
solution for users to store their pictures in when the built-in memory runs
out - but now there's a way to store pictures in a more tangible manner,
thanks to Totalmass' new
Longstreet solution. To be deployed in early 2003 by MangoFoto, a
subsidiary of San Fransisco based Totalmass, the Longstreet solution has been
developed by Totalmass to allow owners of camera phones to wirelessly transmit
pictures to have these printed on good, old-fashioned paper.
- Wireless Electricity Becomes a Reality - During a mid-day press
conference in chilly New York City, MobileWise showed off a handful of
functioning prototype powerbases and retrofitted mobile devices that all use
the company's new
MobileWise chipset and enable "Wire-Free" electric power. One chip, the
tiny Adapter Controller, goes inside the mobile device and the other, the
Contact Controller, gets built into the power base station. These power bases,
which were shown in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and colors, are each
covered in an array of gold-plated contacts. The retrofitted mobile devices
also have a pair of contracts. With properly configured handheld devices, the
bases can, according to company CEO Andy Goren, change any flat surface into a
charging/power station.
- Hacker From the 'Hood Tells All -
Hacker Cracker: A Journey from the Mean Streets of Brooklyn to the
Frontiers of Cyberspace ($24.95, William Morrow & Co.), describes Nuwere's
childhood in Brooklyn's rough Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The book
isn't focused solely on hacking. Nuwere writes about his mother's battle with
drug addiction and her death, his own depression and suicide attempts and life
as a street gang member.
- Lite-On IT to cut back DVD-ROM drive shipments next year -
Lite-On IT, the world's largest DVD-ROM and CD-RW drive manufacturer,
will cut back DVD-ROM drive shipments next year due to high technology
licensing fees and decreasing profit margins. Licensing fees for DVD-ROM drive
technology costs about US$10 per unit, about one-third of a drive's
manufacturing contract price. If Taiwan-based companies cannot solve this
issue, they will not be able to sustain profitable operations when DVD-ROM
drive prices fall further, said Michael Gong, general manager of Lite-On IT's
optical disc drive business unit.
- NVIDIA NV18/NV28 and AGP 8x Investigation - On September 25, NVIDIA
introduced its new graphics chips supporting the AGP 3.0 standard and 8x
data-transfer speed. When naming the chips, the company didn't exert
imagination so we have got "NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 with AGP8x" (unofficially
known as NV28) and "NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440 with AGP 8x" (NV18). Actually, NV18
and NV28 only differ from NV17 and NV25 by their AGP 8x support. Besides, they
also feature higher working frequencies.
In this
review we will try to find out the advantages brought about by the
increased frequencies and the AGP 3.0 support.
- IDE RAID vs. SCSI: Who Will Win? -
It's clear
that every interface has its own advantages and shortcomings. SCSI means
reliability and high performance, but also high price. Moreover, it needs a
costly controller. IDE means huge capacities and much lower storage cost for
1MB than in SCSI HDDs. But IDE drives are much less reliable and to build a
fault-tolerant disk subsystem you need to combine them into mirror RAID arrays
(and this requires at least one more drive and a RAID-controller).
- Easily and Safely Installing a Motherboard -
Building or upgrading your system can be a rewarding and educational
experience. However, it's often a painful learning experience. It's been said
that good judgment is the result of experience -- and experience is the result
of poor judgment. We're going to offer up our own experience, so you can
proceed directly to the "good judgment" category. Just because we've broken
the heatsink clip off a CPU socket, or crushed the corner of a CPU by
incorrectly installing the cooler, doesn't mean you need to learn in quite
that manner.
- Microsoft Office 11 Preview - WinSupersite has posted
a preview on Microsoft Office 11.
- A-Blast - There's
nice
shooting game written in Macromedia Flash.
- ICQ Plus v3.5 -
ICQ Plus (download)
allows you to change the appearance of ICQ. When installed, ICQ Plus
integrates with ICQ by adding a menu item to the main menu. Choosing this menu
item brings up a dialog which lets you configure ICQ's appearance in several
ways. You can apply a predefined skin or create one yourself. ICQ Plus also
allows you to change the appearance of individual features as well. This new
version added support for ICQ2003a build 3777.
- DirectX 9.0 RC2 released - Microsoft has released
DirectX version 9.0 Release Candidate 2. Remember it's ONLY BETA which
will expire on March 19, 2003., so download only on your own risk :P
- Phoenix 0.5 (Naples) -
Phoenix
is (win32
~
linux) a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon,
K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and
designed to be cross-platform.
- WinOnCD 6 FixPack 1 -
The first FixPack for the great CD mastering program WinOnCD 6 has been
released.
- ATI RADEON BIOSes - Omegacorner.com has been updated
with new
BIOSes and Flash utilities for ATI's Radeon 8500 and the 9700 graphics
cards.
- Saphire ATI Radeon Drivers v7.80 - I've noticed over at Saphire
that they have released
a 30MB file that contains new Win9x/ME/2k/XP ATi Radeon
9700/9500/9000/8500/7500/7200/7000 classed video cards.
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Updated:12:40 AM CEST Jun,21
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