2003 March

Geek.com has a nice news post reminding us that 10 years ago in March 22 of 1993, Intel unveiled the original Pentium processor, a processor that spawned a complete family of processors, making it the most widely used PC chip in the market for 10 years now…

An IT Consultant describes his triumph using the Knoppix Live CD as a rescue CD to revive a dead Win ‘98 system…
“…Knoppix has proven to be an amazing tool. Digging into the menus a little more I can’t help but be awed by the amount of power that has been packed into this little CD-wonder. […]

In a report today that was likely in response to an earlier piece, Wired told the story of old school hacker’s, those who believe in the ideal of freedom, who believe that true hackers would never have done what was attributed to hackers in the earlier piece, more specifically bringing down the english language site […]

I’m an online-news technology buff, and I can see this as a wonderful tool for online news photos. It’s called Fotonotes. Basically, it’s a tool for annotating JPEG pictures inside the pictures themselves. With the software, you can map out specific parts of a photo (say, a person’s face) and then attach mouseover text to […]

“Apple is developing a consumer-level tablet system, according to recent information obtained by Spymac sources. Rumors of an Apple-branded tablet have been circulating for some time, with increased expectation prior to January’s Macworld Expo. At the expo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that 2003 would be the year of the laptop — and tablet technology […]

“An attempt to create the Holy Grail of home entertainment - a disc that plays on any DVD or CD player - has been branded a failure by an international working group. Music and movie buffs currently have to choose between CD for stereo music, DVD-Video for full-length movies with digitally compressed surround sound, and […]

“AOL Time Warner on Friday confirmed it is readying a new service that would allow subscribers to skip through TV programming without installing new hardware. In its annual filing with securities regulators, AOL Time Warner said that it expected to test the new service it has been secretly developing — known as Mystro TV […]

Started by Phil Goldman, the co-founder of WebTV and formerly a Microsoft employee, this company is offering UCE (spam) protection of the challenge/response variety. There are others on the market that do this, but what makes this one particularly interesting is that Goldman applied for a patent on the technology back in ‘97 and it […]

Highlighting the shortcomings of the Wi-Fi Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security standard, Microsoft on Monday rolled out its own alternative for Windows XP users, new software that promises increased security in the areas of data encryption and user authentication.
Microsoft announced the availability of a free XP download with support for the standards-based Wi-Fi Protected […]

” The U.S. government has discovered a powerful resource in its war against terrorism — credit-card records, hotel bills, grocery lists and other records detailing the private lives of its citizens.
Government investigators are turning to commercial databases to track down and isolate possible hijackers and suicide bombers before they strike, raising fear among privacy […]

“A U.S. Attorney’s office alleges that eBay’s payment service violated laws over
processing gambling payments. It’s asking for a chunk of earnings and interest in
settlement.”

Folks at The Xbox Linux Project have gotten Linux to run on an un-modified Microsoft Xbox. In fact, you don’t even have to open the Xbox up to boot and install the Xbox Linux Live Plugin Distribution. All it involves is to install a small savegame.

“So is Google Compute a cool new Google search feature? Nix. Google Compute uses your computer’s idle computing power to work on a research problem — if you’ve heard of SETI@Home you’ve got the idea. (The current Google Compute project is a protein research project called Folding@Home, though the page indicates that you may have […]

In the past week we’ve had Mandrake 9.1 released, followed by pre-release copies of SuSE 8.2, so now it’s Red Hat’s turn. If you’re an RH subcriber, you can get RedHat now; if not, you’ll have to wait for it to be formally released.
According to the article, 9.0 is designed to “meet the needs […]

Updating your NVidia graphics card drivers under Linux should be a little easier now. Not only are official drivers now being made for the OS, actually installing them should be a much less painful experience. You can get the program from NVidia’s Driver Pages.

Systems running Sendmail are at risk of hacker attacks because of a flaw in the way the commonly used e-mail server software handles long e-mail addresses, experts warned Saturday. This second serious bug announced this month has some Sendmail users looking for alternatives.
Information from CERT can be found here.

AOL’s got a problem - many of its 34 million US dial-up users now want broadband, and they’re going elsewhere for it. The solution? ‘AOL for broadband’, a standalone product available without an AOL connection, costing $14.95. It apparently offers unique content that is not available to non-subscribers, as well as offering the level of […]

Via MozillaZine: “The first fully compiled Minotaur binary is now available on Mozilla’s FTP servers. I’m sure builds for other OSes will follow pretty soon. Mind you, this is only a very early build, so I’m sure that theme switching will be fully implemented in the near future. Anyway, if you wanna try it, the […]

You ask it questions about people, and it does its best to give you answers, and it’s pretty accurate, too.

Check out the low version number! This operating system is news to me. It seeks to run Windows NT applications and drivers with open source software. It looks to only support Windows NT 4.0 right now, rather than Windows 2000 or XP, but the idea is interesting. I’ll be very impressed […]