The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

You can run but you must read

Apple sings the praises of DVD
Apple Computer on Monday said it had shipped nearly half a million computers with DVD recording drives capable of making movies that consumers can play in home DVD players. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company also said it had shipped more than 2 million DVD recording discs. Manufacturers shipped more than 600,000 DVD recording drives last year, according to Gartner. Manufacturing sources put the number shipped by Pioneer Electronics, the manufacturer making Apple's drive, below 400,000.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-877789.html

Court gives go-ahead to Hewlett suit
A Delaware judge ruled Monday that Walter Hewlett may pursue a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard, a decision that could potentially pose problems for the company's proposed merger with Compaq Computer. Hewlett, the HP director who opposes HP's acquisition of competitor Compaq, alleges in his lawsuit that HP's management effectively bought shareholder votes by striking a business deal with a major shareholder and misled investors about integration plans.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-878145.html

SBC: Tighten rein on MS Web plans
Antitrust sanctions in the Microsoft trial should aim to preserve competition in the emerging market for Internet-based services, an SBC Communications executive testified Monday. Larry Pearson, leader of a team at the No. 2 regional telephone company that is developing SBC's Unified Messaging Service (UMS), said Microsoft was well-placed to crush this product, scheduled for initial release later this year. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is considering the demands of nine states for stiffer sanctions against Microsoft for illegally maintaining its Windows monopoly in personal computer operating systems.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-877930.html

Watch out for pop-up downloads
Web surfers who thought online advertisements were becoming increasingly obtrusive may be dismayed by a new tactic: pop-up downloads. In recent weeks, some software makers have enlisted Web site operators to entice their visitors to download software rather than simply to view some advertising. For example, when visiting a site a person may receive a pop-up box that appears as a security warning with the message: "Do you accept this download?" If the consumer clicks "Yes," an application is automatically installed.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-877592.html

Can Bertelsmann's copy lock stop leaks?
BMG Entertainment, the major record company owned by German media giant Bertelsmann, said it will begin this month to protect promotional releases of its CDs against copying. That means free samples of new albums sent to U.S. radio stations, retailers and the press will come packaged with software that prevents songs from being copied onto computer hard drives. BMG will begin the trials with the April promo releases from artists Cee-Lo and Donnel Jones. Recipients of free CD promos have been at the top of a list of suspects behind leaks of unreleased tracks onto the Internet.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-878106.html

Sony shrinks PS2 chips -- cuts costs
Sony Computer Entertainment says it has combined two of the processor components of its PlayStation 2 on a single die, which should significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing the market-leading video game console. The company has combined the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesiser chips into a single unit using a 0.13-micron manufacturing process, said Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi in Japanese trade publication Nikkei Microdevices. The original PlayStation 2 chips were designed to be manufactured on a 0.18-0.15 micron process.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-877756.html

Win XP to upgrade with more -- or less
Microsoft this summer will institute some changes to Windows XP as part of a proposed settlement agreement meant to benefit consumers and increase competition. But some state trustbusters and Microsoft's chief rivals aren't convinced that those changes go far enough. The software maker says it plans to start testing Windows XP Service Pack 1 as early as next month, with a final release slated for late summer. The update will introduce support for Mira wireless devices and the Freestyle digital media interface.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-876747.html

AOL's Parsons looks to digital future
Broadcasters must embrace new technologies and develop products for the next generation of digital entertainment, Richard Parsons, incoming CEO at AOL Time Warner, said Monday. In an opening keynote speech to a crowd of media executives at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Parsons emphasized a need for the industry to work together to address the opportunities and threats that technology brings to the marketplace. He flagged interactive TV and video on demand as areas of development. He then quickly described enemies the industry "dare not ignore:" digital piracy and technologies that strip advertising out of content.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-878170.html

Clinton backs tech war on terror
Bill Clinton has been outlining how technology can play a key role in defeating the new brand of terrorism. The former US president said that information management systems similar to those used by the big mass mailing companies could provide an early warning about suspicious behaviour. "More than 95% of the people that are in the United States at any given time are in the computers of companies that mail junk mail and you can look for patterns there," he told BBC World's ClickOnline.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1912895.stm

A unified theory of software evolution
Software evolution, i.e. the process by which programs change shape, adapt to the marketplace and inherit characteristics from preexisting programs, has become a subject of serious academic study in recent years. Partial thanks for this goes to Lehman and other pioneering researchers. Major thanks, however, goes to the increasing strategic value of software itself. As large-scale programs such as Windows and Solaris expand well into the range of 30 to 50 million lines of code, successful project managers have learned to devote as much time to combing the tangles out of legacy code as to adding new code. Simply put, in a decade that saw the average PC microchip performance increase a hundredfold, software's inability to scale at even linear rates has gone from dirty little secret to industry-wide embarrassment.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...man/index.html

How to uninstall Brilliant Digital's software
Brilliant Digital Entertainment quietly installs its own software with every copy of the Kazaa file-swapping software. The Brilliant Digital software, which is being progressively distributed over the next few weeks, can later be remotely "turned on" to become part of a new network. Executives from Brilliant Digital and Kazaa's parent company say people can uninstall the Brilliant Digital or Altnet software from their computers without interfering with the Kazaa program itself. This is true, but it's not an easy process.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-875274.html

Theft of data tops security woes
U.S. companies and government agencies report losing more money from theft of proprietary information than any other type of attack on their computer systems, according to a new study. Viruses remain the most common type of cyberattack, according to the seventh annual joint FBI/Computer Security Institute (CSI) Computer Crime and Security Survey released Sunday. "What's particularly impressive is that financial losses seem to be really rising," said Richard Power, editorial director of San Francisco-based CSI, an association of information security professionals.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-877427.html?tag=cd_mh

Will Wi-Fi overwhelm satellite radio?
Satellite radio stations aren't too happy rubbing bandwidth shoulders with Wi-Fi wireless networks. The two wireless industries broadcast their signals on radio waves separated by only a small buffer. So far, that buffer has kept the millions of Wi-Fi networks from interfering with radio broadcasts by Sirius Satellite Radio or XM Satellite Radio. But the radio companies don't think the relative calm will last, so they are asking the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to step in.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-877572.html

Broadcasters conference digs into digital
Internet and digital TV streaming technology is poised to take center stage at events held during the National Association of Broadcasters 2002 conference, which opens Monday in Las Vegas. The 79th annual conference, which highlights the convergence of Internet, cable, satellite and traditional broadcasting, will showcase a variety of emerging technologies for digital set-top boxes, video on demand, personal video recorders, and Internet audio and video streaming.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-877566.html?tag=cd_mh

Lessig's doomsday look at cyberspace
The hype is deserved: Lawrence Lessig's "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World" offers a devastating analysis of how the freedom and creativity originally built into the Internet are now being built out of it by corporations and lawyers with a vested interest in controlling what people do online and deciding who has access to what. An impassioned follow-up to Lessig's celebrated "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," written in 1999, "The Future of Ideas" is an elaborate warning: about who is calling the shots in cyberspace; about what it means that controlling interests such as the Recording Industry Association of America, Fox Networks and AOL Time Warner have made the Internet a war zone of intellectual-property disputes.
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-877317.html?tag=cd_mh

Overture sues Google over search patent
Paid-search listing company Overture Services has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google, saying the rival search service overstepped its bounds with its ad-placement tools. Overture said the suit, filed late Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, applies to all Google products that are not related to its mathematical search methods -- techniques whose results have endeared Google to Web surfers the world over for their objectivity and relevance. The lawsuit follows a similar case that Overture filed against FindWhat.com in January.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-876861.html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on