The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

Multi-vendors -- messy or marvelous?
Building infrastructures based on best of breed concepts does not work, according to Microsoft's group manager in Europe for .Net technical evangelism, Neil Hutson. Speaking in a debate with IBM's senior consultant architect Keith Edwards at the NetEvents industry gathering in Montreux, Switzerland over the weekend, Hutson said companies who build using best of breed products -- which means picking the best software, the best operating system and the best hardware for a particular job -- invariably end up with a mess.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-850636.html

IBM, Microsoft clash over .Net and Java
The rift between IBM and Microsoft over Web services widened further over the weekend when Web services evangelists from each company clashed over the relative merits of .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) for building applications that can talk to each other over the Internet. IBM's senior consultant architect Keith Edwards and Microsoft group manager for .Net technical evangelism, Neil Hutson, were speaking at the NetEvents industry gathering in Montreux, Switzerland.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-850455.html

Study: Biz still battling with viruses
Viruses continue to swarm U.S. corporations, with roughly 1.2 million incidents occurring in a 20-month period, according to a new study. ICSA Labs, a division of security-services company TruSecure, surveyed 200 organizations between January 2000 and August 2001 as part of a regular survey sponsored by Gantz-Wiley Research, Network Associates, Panda Software and Symantec Corporation. The attacks work out to about 113 encounters per 1,000 machines per month. It's a figure that's been growing around 20 encounters per 1,000 machines per month since ICSA began taking the survey in 1996.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-850608.html

Flash MX tools gear up Web design
For most Web surfers, Flash is the blinking, animated frosting on Web sites. Now Macromedia wants to make it the whole cake. The software maker is pitching Flash MX, the new version of the software to be announced Monday, as a one-stop resource for designing entire Web pages and associated applications. The update signifies a greatly expanded role from Flash's initial function as animation software.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-850095.html

Wanted: Evidence of MS security push
Five weeks after Bill Gates rang an alarm over security lapses in his company's software, people are still waiting for real evidence that Microsoft has substantially refocused its priorities. Microsoft has released some tools to help developers and customers add more security to their systems and has made much ado about retraining its developers during a security crash course that lasted all of February. But customers are still waiting to see if the company has made a fundamental shift in philosophy, said Alan Paller, director of research for the Systems Administration Networking and Security (SANS) Institute.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-850236.html

States enlist Palm, Gateway against MS
Nine states still pursuing an antitrust case against Microsoft will call executives from Palm and Gateway to testify in court hearings to help make their case for severe sanctions against the company, according to a court filing this week. The states, who have refused to sign on to a settlement between Microsoft and the U.S. Justice Department, listed executives from the two companies among more than a dozen witnesses they plan to call during hearings set to begin on March 11 on what sanctions should be imposed on Microsoft, according to pre-trial statements filed with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-850073.html

Morpheus: Open source saves the day
Days after millions of people found themselves locked out of StreamCast Networks' Morpheus file-swapping network, the company has released a new software tool it hopes will resuscitate its service. The new software, called Morpheus Preview Edition, is based on open-source Gnutella technology, software that has been a mainstay of the file-swapping world since 2000. Until Tuesday's surprise shutdown, the Morpheus service was based on technology licensed from Dutch company Kazaa BV.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-850071.html

Microsoft: Xbox is not scratching discs
Microsoft, whose Xbox game machine debuted in Japan 10 days ago, said Monday that several Xbox users had reported that the console was scratching game discs, but there was no need to recall the hardware or software. The software giant said the DVD discs spinning in the console most likely were improperly placed on loading trays or by the sliding tray itself and caused the small scratches.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-850149.html

Net efficiencies roil a lumbering industry
A turf war has broken out between a tiny start-up and giants of the multibillion-dollar electronic data interchange industry, highlighting what some see as a last-ditch effort by a handful of outdated but powerful businesses hoping to resist the Internet's pull. The conflict -- involving accusations of market bullying and threats of lawsuits and complaints to federal regulators -- offers a glimpse into the midlife crisis of EDI, which for decades has allowed companies to exchange purchase orders and other documents through proprietary, interconnected systems known as VANs (value-added networks).
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-850045.html

Media exec calls for piracy crackdown
A top media executive Monday said 1 million movie files were downloaded illegally on the Internet each day and called for a renewed crackdown on online file services that promote digital piracy. "Our content must be protected from unencrypted, illegal file sharing," Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corp., told an assembly of media executives at the FT New Media and Broadcasting Conference in London. "We're in the process of raising a generation to think that stealing is OK," he added.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-850584.html

San Francisco top wireless hot spot
They might be shrouded in fog and clouds for much of the year, but a new survey ranks San Francisco and Seattle the hottest metropolitan regions in America. That's because those areas have more wireless Internet access points, or "hot spots," than other regions in the United States, according to HereUare Communications. The San Jose, Calif.-based company helps entrepreneurs build and maintain wireless Internet access, also known as Wi-Fi. According to the second annual Hot Spots Report, Internet users in the San Francisco Bay Area can tap wireless connections at 257 public access points, including restaurants, hotels, cafes and airports.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-850535.html

RealNetworks, Intel strike software deal
RealNetworks, readying the "gold," or final, version of its latest software for playing audio and video over the Web, said Monday that it signed a deal with Intel to include its products with motherboards. RealOne, the successor to the popular RealPlayer and RealJukebox, will be released in its final version this week and will be bundled with motherboards that Intel sells for use in so-called white box, or generic, PCs, the companies said. Financial details of the arrangement were not disclosed.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-850435.html

Games designer pushes boundaries
The name Hideo Kojima could soon be as well known as those of leading Hollywood directors like Ridley Scott or James Cameron. This Japanese game designer is the brains behind one of the most influential games of the past few years, Metal Gear Solid, and its eagerly anticipated sequel. With Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2), Mr Kojima has elevated the art of game design to the level of films.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1853410.stm

Paper That Acts Digital
Things go digital. That's just the way it is. Computers, phones, organizers, the tools in your doctor's office, music, cameras, movies, even dog tags and picture frames -- they've all been transformed by digital technology. Yet there's one artifact that has stubbornly resisted the trend -- paper. Despite countless attempts to digitize it or replicate its qualities electronically, paper refuses to get with the program. For the past few years, companies have been trying -- not entirely successfully -- to replicate paper's visual properties using electrostatically charged beads or capsules -- pressed between transparent sheets of plastic -- that turn black or white when zapped with an electric current.
http://www.business2.com/articles/we...,38392,FF.html

Scripting flaw ripe for Web worm
With a survey estimating that a million Web sites are vulnerable to a set of newly discovered scripting flaws, security experts are predicting that a worm that uses the software bugs to spread could be on the way. As previously reported by CNET News.com, the flaws occur in Web server modules using the Personal Homepage scripting language, more commonly known as PHP. The language is widely used among sites built on open-source software and allows such sites to create Web pages on the fly.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-850752.html?tag=cd_mh

BMWs hit the road with Microsoft
Cars in BMW's new line, the BMW 7 Series, are equipped with a special kind of Windows: the Microsoft kind. Microsoft's Windows CE software will allow BMW drivers to navigate, make calls and control many of the cars' other features. The BMW 7 Series was launched in Germany last fall and has just been released in the United States. The new line of BMWs use a navigating system from Siemens, called the Siemens VDO Automotive AG, which includes Microsoft's operating system. Microsoft also recently announced the launch of Windows CE for Automotive v3.5, the newest version of its software for cars based on Windows CE.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-850353.html?tag=cd_mh

Study says online fraud saps sales
Merchants lose a higher percentage of sales to fraud online than offline, according to a new report from GartnerG2. Merchants surveyed by GartnerG2, a service from research firm Gartner, reported that they lost 1.14 percent of all online sales to fraud in 2001, or about $700 million. During that same time period, Visa International and MasterCard reported that about .06 percent of physical world sales were lost to fraud, said Avivah Litan, research director at GartnerG2.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-850258.html?tag=cd_mh

Kodak to unveil digital cinema system
Eastman Kodak on Monday said it would unveil a digital movie projection system here at the ShoWest movie theater convention this week, marking the photo giant's formal entry in the emerging market for digital cinema. Rochester, N.Y.-based Kodak, a leading maker of film and photographic equipment, has been testing digital movie projection equipment for a couple of years, but has only demonstrated prototypes to small groups.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-850183.html?tag=cd_mh

Survey on Web: The thrill is gone
The Internet has lost its novelty for many U.S. users but is turning into an increasingly important tool for everyday living, according to a study released Sunday. As Internet users gain more online experience, they report a slight dip in the length of the average online session, from 90 minutes to 83 minutes over the course of one year, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found. But experienced users said they were more likely to use that time for activities such as working from home, checking bank-account balances and making travel reservations, rather than simply browsing.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-850108.html?tag=cd_mh

Slashdot joins the ad-free melee
News for Nerds" Web site Slashdot.org has joined the dark side, lining up with leagues of other Net publishers to start selling larger, more imposing advertisements and placing a premium on commercial-free pages. Slashdot, whose discussion boards are a favorite among techies, will start displaying bigger ads on its Web pages Monday, after announcing it would do so in late October. To placate visitors opposed to ads altogether, the site will also sell a subscription to promotion-free pages.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-849372.html?tag=cd_mh

Come on girls... you've got to kiss the newsman