Box chip linux mod x

News Digest 27-Jan-03: Lindows Wins One

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Lindows.com Summary Judgment Motion Dismissed

A judge dismissed Lindows.com's motion for summary judgment Wednesday in its trademark-infringement tangle with Microsoft, leaving the issue to be decided at a jury trial scheduled for April. Microsoft initially sought to have Lindows.com barred from using the "lindows" term while the case was being decided. The court rejected that request, after which Lindows.com filed for summary judgment. Microsoft filed suit against Lindows in the U.S. District Court in Seattle in December 2001, charging that "lindows" infringes on Microsoft's Windows trademark. Lindows.com's counterargument is that "windows" is a generic term for graphical software interfaces.

Read the full story on: Lindows.com

Taiwan Allows Its Biggest Chip Maker to Go to China

Taiwan has given a green light to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's biggest maker of computer chips, to build an 8-inch silicon wafer plant in China, the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced Wednesday.  Taiwan previously banned its high-tech industry from going to rival China in fear that the export of sensitive technology would weaken the island's leading position in the semiconductor industry.

Read the full story on: ComputerUser

Microsoft's Next-Generation Secure Computing Base

Microsoft has dropped the code name of its controversial security technology, Palladium, in favor of this buzzword-bloated tongue twister: "next-generation secure computing base." On Friday, the company said that the name Palladium had become tarnished by controversy surrounding some elements of Microsoft's security push. In additional, it faced a potential legal battle with a small firm over the Palladium name. Microsoft unveiled Palladium last summer with the goal of allowing companies to wall off data, secure communications, and to identify their systems and those of business partners.

Read the full story on: CNET News.com

IPv6 Task Force UK Works on Five-Year Plan

A task force has been formed in the UK to promote wider adoption of IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol. The IPv6 Task Force UK, which held its first public meeting at University College London last week, aims to produce a roadmap for IPv6 deployment in the UK. It also wants to educate end users and service providers about the technology and to work with government to shape public policy on the deployment of next-generation Net technologies. Many countries are starting to deploy IPv6 including UK's major trading partners and competitors, hence the need for the UK's Internet industry to act or risk getting left behind.

Read the full story on: The Register

DRAM Prices Continue to Sink

The combination of weak demand from PC OEMs and a spate of inventory reductions by memory traders and distributors sent DRAM prices down dramatically on the U.S. spot market this week. Pricing for 128-Mbit and 256-Mbit PC-133 SDRAM in the by 8 configuration this week has fallen by an average of 5% on the U.S. spot memory market. Meanwhile, pricing for Double Data Rate (DDR), PC-266 SDRAM in the by 8 configuration has fallen by an average of 12%. iSuppli predicts PC unit sales will rise 13.8% in 2003, compared to 3.9% in 2002. Driving the rise in sales will be an increase in corporate buying, as companies strive to replace aging systems purchased in 1999 in anticipation of possible Y2K disruptions.

Read the full story on: EBN

Melbourne Company Pushes XBox Mod Chip

A company based in Melbourne claims to have released a mod-chip for Microsoft's X-Box games console which allows users to play homebrew games, original imports, run debug executables and is Linux-compatible. The company, OzXChip, claim they have avoided any legal hassles by using the open-source Cromwell Linux BIOS. The chip is easily "flashed," as well. OzXChip claim that they have been swamped with demand for the new mod-chip.

Read the full story on: ZDNet Australia

Can a Human Being Fit on an iPod?

Life science technology is about as cutting-edge as it gets, but now it's apparently also hip. At least that's the image projected by University of New Hampshire researcher Will Gilbert, who has taken to carrying around the human genome on his Apple Computer iPod. Gilbert, who heads the bioinformatics group at the university's Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, loaded the 3 billion chemical nucleotide letters in the human genome on his iPod one day when he discovered it would be faster than waiting for his network to copy the information. With 4x compression the human took up less than 1GB of disk space on his 5GB iPod, Gilbert estimates.

Read the full story on: PCWorld.com