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Domain: pcworld.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pcworld.com.
Stories · 758
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1.8 Inch Removable Hard Drives Coming
bedessen writes "According to an article at PCWorld.com, a new type of removable storage known as iVDR will be demonstrated at January's Consumer Electronics Show. The iVDR standard (backed by a consortium consisting of a number of manufacturers) describes a lightweight, compact, removable hard disk drive compatible with a wide range of applications from AV to PC devices. The products on display will come in 2.5" and 1.8" form factors with parallel and serial ATA interfaces. Capacity will start at 80GB for around $170, but manufacturers hope to drop this to under $80 and well as double the capacity by next quarter." Here's hopin' -
16x DVD-R Drives Planned for 2004
madsenj37 writes "From this article at PC World: 'Mitsubishi Electric has developed a more powerful semiconductor laser that should pave the way for 16X DVD writers to be commercially available by about 2004. The new laser is able to deliver pulses of light at a power of 200 milliwatts, which is double that of lasers used in today's 4X DVD writer drives, the Tokyo company said this week.' It goes on to say that a whole Digital Versatile Disc Could be written in about 3.5 minutes." -
16x DVD-R Drives Planned for 2004
madsenj37 writes "From this article at PC World: 'Mitsubishi Electric has developed a more powerful semiconductor laser that should pave the way for 16X DVD writers to be commercially available by about 2004. The new laser is able to deliver pulses of light at a power of 200 milliwatts, which is double that of lasers used in today's 4X DVD writer drives, the Tokyo company said this week.' It goes on to say that a whole Digital Versatile Disc Could be written in about 3.5 minutes." -
Virtual Volunteering
An anonymous reader writes "Virtual Volunteering is new to me, so I thought that I would pass the info. along. Given the downturn in employment and the need to keep an active resume or CV, becoming a 'Virtual Volunteer', may be just the way to refresh your outlook and your resume. A PC World article talks about two sites which list numerous opportunities; Volunteer Match lists 41,538 opportunities associated with 23,359 organizations, and World Computer Exchange which 'is a global nonprofit organization committed to helping the world's poorest youth bridge the disturbing global divides in information, technology and understanding. WCE does this by keeping donated PCs, Macs, and Laptops out of landfills and giving them new life connecting youth to the Internet in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.' There are most likely more organizations like this out there, anybody have a special one that they are associated with?" -
MPAA Countersues 321 Studios
Squash writes "321 Studios, makers of DVD X-Copy, is being Counter-sued by the MPAA. You may remember them filing suit to allow thier software to be produced and sold. Interesting point: the MPAA wants to claim all profits from sales of the software, which is now being bundled with some DVD burners." -
MPAA Countersues 321 Studios
Squash writes "321 Studios, makers of DVD X-Copy, is being Counter-sued by the MPAA. You may remember them filing suit to allow thier software to be produced and sold. Interesting point: the MPAA wants to claim all profits from sales of the software, which is now being bundled with some DVD burners." -
X-Force Changes Vulnerability Disclosure Policy
BitHive writes "ISS has changed their policy for announcing security vulnerabilities. The new guidelines will give vendors thirty days to come up with a fix before disclosure is made, though there are a number of exceptions that can prompt faster disclosure. From the PC World article, these are: "The vendor issues a patch or announcement; an in-depth discussion of the problem occurs on a public mailing list; active exploitation of any form of the vulnerability occurs on the Internet; ISS receives reliable evidence that a vulnerability is in the wild; the media reports the vulnerability; or the vendor is unresponsive."" -
UnitedLinux Ready for Official Launch
Anonymous Coward writes " PCWORLD has the word that UnitedLinux has completed beta testing of the first release of its open source Linux operating system and is ready to launch the product as planned next month, said company manager Paula Hunter Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Frankfurt, Germany." -
Intel Pushes Pentium 4 Past 3 GHz
denisbergeron writes "Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06 GHz. But the great avance will be the hyperthreading technology (already present in Xeon) that allows multiple software threads to run more efficiently on a single processor." -
Gartner Survey: Consumers Don't Want Crippled CDs
robkill writes "According to GartnerG2, 77% of consumers believe they should be allowed to copy CD's for personal use in another device. 82% believe they should be allowed to make personal backup copies of CD's. Let's hope Senators Hollings and Berman are paying attention. More details can be found in this PC World article." -
Car Digital Assistant
suman28 writes "The Japanese company Clarion plans to sell a car with built-in PC that runs Windows which car browse the web, play tunes and store an address manager. The stats on the computer are nice - a 166 MHz RISC processor with 64MB RAM and 8MB video. That seems like a lot for a car." -
Passport for Linux On the Way
mrsam writes "PCWorld reports that Microsoft comissioned Ready-to-Run Software, a small software vendor, to port the Passport server software to Solaris, Red Hat Linux, AIX, and HPUX. Oh, joy." -
ACLU Campaign Challenges Patriot Act
Nept sent in a pointer to this story about the ACLU starting a media campaign challenging the PATRIOT Act. Good to hear. -
New Zaurus Prototype, Sony Palm OS 5 Devices, Yopy 3500
dnomla writes "There is an article on PC WORLD giving a few details on the next revision of the Sharp Zaurus PDA. Sounds like the display is wider now than the current longer display and folds up. Not a whole lot of information, but at least we know there's a new model on the way. I really like the current Zaurus, can't wait to find out all the details." Also in handheld news, Lee writes "Sony just announced the first Palm OS 5 devices, available later this month. These are the first Palm OS devices to include an ARM processor! Get the scoop at Palm Infocenter or see them at Sony Style." Reader Big Mike also points out the new model of Yopy (3500) being previewed at www.yopy.at. -
New Zaurus Prototype, Sony Palm OS 5 Devices, Yopy 3500
dnomla writes "There is an article on PC WORLD giving a few details on the next revision of the Sharp Zaurus PDA. Sounds like the display is wider now than the current longer display and folds up. Not a whole lot of information, but at least we know there's a new model on the way. I really like the current Zaurus, can't wait to find out all the details." Also in handheld news, Lee writes "Sony just announced the first Palm OS 5 devices, available later this month. These are the first Palm OS devices to include an ARM processor! Get the scoop at Palm Infocenter or see them at Sony Style." Reader Big Mike also points out the new model of Yopy (3500) being previewed at www.yopy.at. -
Mouse Scans Palms to Verify ID
p00kiethebear writes "'Fujitsu is eyeing a variation on the centuries-old art of palmistry as the latest biometric weapon against unauthorized access to computer systems and facilities. The company has developed a computer mouse that will scan the palm of the user and deliver not a look into the future but verify the identity of that person.', With a .5% error rate I wouldn't be surprised if we saw this in offices within the next few years." -
Combined DVD Burners Coming Soon
MonMotha writes "Sony recently announced plans to make a DVD burner capable of supporting both the - (DVD-R and DVD-RW) as well as the + (DVD+RW and DVD+R) standards for burnable DVD media. This move could spur the adoption of DVD burners, which have been poor sellers so far, partly due to the lack of a single standard for writable and rewritable media. The drive will not support the older DVD-RAM due to it's plastic casing." -
Intel, OEMs Face Lawsuit For Megahertz Marketing
prostoalex writes "A group of PC owners filed a lawsuit against Intel, Gateway and HP, stating that companies spread misleading information about Pentium 4 processor performing faster than Pentium 3 or Athlon. The complaint alleges that 'the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon.' PC World has more details in its story." I wonder if the same litigants have a suit against the USPS for ads leading one to expect prompt service from courteous, competent employees. -
New Two-Headed Hard Drive Intended To Secure Web Sites
dlur writes: "This article states that Scarabs (In Japanese), a Japanese company, is developing a hard drive with two heads, one read-only and another that is read/write. With this comes two cables, the read-only side going to the external web server, and the r/w cable going to an internal protected server. While this should make it quite a bit tougher for script kiddies to place their mark on a page, I doubt it will stop any real hackers from getting to a site's DB as that would still need to be r/w." -
FCC Allows Bells to Sell Your Telephone Usage Data
Devistater writes "Spotted on hardocp. The FCC said in a ruling yesterday that telephone companies can sell your name, who you call, and for how long you talk to anyone who is an "affiliate." No longer is this required to be an opt in marketing approach, now its OPT OUT. Sounds like spam is coming to the telephone world, and what an egregious breach of privacy. Article on PCWorld has some of the details." There's also a short Reuters story and a good one on ecommercetimes.com. -
FCC Allows Bells to Sell Your Telephone Usage Data
Devistater writes "Spotted on hardocp. The FCC said in a ruling yesterday that telephone companies can sell your name, who you call, and for how long you talk to anyone who is an "affiliate." No longer is this required to be an opt in marketing approach, now its OPT OUT. Sounds like spam is coming to the telephone world, and what an egregious breach of privacy. Article on PCWorld has some of the details." There's also a short Reuters story and a good one on ecommercetimes.com. -
Peekabooty, Camera/Shy Released
An anonymous (how appropriate) writer sends "Peek-a-Booty, a program designed to circumvent mechanisms (such as China's Great Firewall) limiting access to websites, has been open-sourced. It's listed as a "Beta" on SourceForge, but the Peek-a-booty website seems to encourage people to start using it." And Doug writes "PC World reports about a new tool to encrypt text with a click of the mouse and bury the text in an image. After posting an embedded image on a Web site, someone can notify intended recipients by e-mail with code words such as 'Go to this URL to see pictures from my birthday party.'" -
Transmeta Unveils 256-bit Microprocessor Plans
nam37 writes "PCWorld has an article about how Transmeta has outlined its initial plans for a new 256-bit microprocessor dubed the TM8000. They claim it will offer significant advantages over their current TM5x00 line of chips. The processor will be a switch to a 256-bit VLIW (very long instruction word), allowing twice as many instructions in one clock cycle and greater energy efficiency." The article also touches on the popularity Transmeta enjoys in Japan, noting that 92% (CD: corrected from 55%) of the company's revenue comes from there. -
A First Look at Netscape 7
David_Bloom writes: "PC-WORLD has released an article giving a rundown of the just-released Preview Release 1 of Netscape 7. An especially interesting feature in this new version is tabbed browsing, which allows you to have multiple web pages open at once in one window, which you can view using a tab-based MDI." -
A First Look at Netscape 7
David_Bloom writes: "PC-WORLD has released an article giving a rundown of the just-released Preview Release 1 of Netscape 7. An especially interesting feature in this new version is tabbed browsing, which allows you to have multiple web pages open at once in one window, which you can view using a tab-based MDI." -
A First Look at Netscape 7
David_Bloom writes: "PC-WORLD has released an article giving a rundown of the just-released Preview Release 1 of Netscape 7. An especially interesting feature in this new version is tabbed browsing, which allows you to have multiple web pages open at once in one window, which you can view using a tab-based MDI." -
Consumer Groups Protest SonicBlue/ReplayTV Order
bigmouth_strikes writes: "As a follow-up to this story about SonicBlue having to track ReplayTV usage, PC World reports how several privacy and consumer groups protest the court order. The Electronic Privacy Information Center will support and appeal and Consumer Electronics Association released a press release where they condemn monitoring individual users preferences. SonicBlue have until June 24 to put the tracking in action, and the data collected will determine whether the users of ReplayTV meet the "Fair Use" criteria established in the Betamax case." -
802.11b at 22mbps
Radi-0-head writes "According to this article at PCWorld.com, "U.S. Robotics (USR) has boosted the speed of its latest range of wireless LAN products for small businesses to 22 megabits per second, while retaining compatibility with existing 2.4-GHz systems built to the IEEE 802.11b standard..." Sounds to me like a great alternative to 802.11a." -
Hitachi Demos Water-Cooled Notebooks
Sprocket writes: "Water-cooled processors, currently the domain of supercomputers, high-end servers, and garage hobbyists, may be about to enter the mainstream. Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor and is planning to commercialize the product for corporate users in the third quarter of this year... read more" -
I Want My MTV... PC?
Tsar writes: "MTV Networks is putting their imprimatur on a line of entertainment-oriented PC's to be available early this year. Targeting the college-age crowd, they'll have TV & radio tuners, DVD players, remote controls, and 'MTV-specific content.' CNN has this article on CNN's SCI-TECH page, but the original story was posted last Thursday on IDG.net. There's also news of MTV's impending digital music player, which uses DataPlay's 500MB matchbook-sized discs with built-in digital rights denial^H^H^H^H^H^Hmanagement." -
I Want My MTV... PC?
Tsar writes: "MTV Networks is putting their imprimatur on a line of entertainment-oriented PC's to be available early this year. Targeting the college-age crowd, they'll have TV & radio tuners, DVD players, remote controls, and 'MTV-specific content.' CNN has this article on CNN's SCI-TECH page, but the original story was posted last Thursday on IDG.net. There's also news of MTV's impending digital music player, which uses DataPlay's 500MB matchbook-sized discs with built-in digital rights denial^H^H^H^H^H^Hmanagement." -
New "Power Glove" for the PC
friedmud writes "I just saw an interesting technology demo over at Essential Reality. It is of a "glove-like" device that allows you to interact with your computer. In particular the demo(which is very viewable using the CrossOver plugin) having to do with 3D Studio Max was just incredible (almost too incredible - but hey, we'll have to see) - they put together a model of a mouse in seconds by "molding" it using the "glove". It looks like the SDK is out, and the product is supposed to ship soon. News blurbs can be found at: PCWorld, Yahoo" -
IBM DeskStar 75GXP Hard Drive Failures?
Sean Kelly asks: "Like a lot of other people, I went out and bought myself a nice 60GB IBM DeskStar 75GXP (ATA100, 7200rpm) hard drive to put in my sparkling new computer. Boy was that a mistake! A few months after I got the drive, it failed with horrific grinding and clicking noises, plus random data loss. So I RMA'd the first one and got a 'SERVICEABLE USED PART' replacement from IBM, which died of the same death after another few months. Not getting the hint, I RMA'd that one. Last week, I got the refab. drive back from IBM and it has already died, in less than a week! This time I did some site searching and found many people are having problems with this drive. Sites such as The Inquirer, Hexus, Tech Report, Hardware One, Sysopt, and even this PCWorld have dedicated articles, forums and user reviews to these failing and defective drives. From what I can understand, IBM is not publicly acknowledging that they screwed up here. How many other people out there have had their 75GXP (or 60GXP) drives fail? What size were they? What part number? What did IBM do about it? It is my opinion that IBM should do something about this, since I've seen an unnaturally high number of complaints about this drive now that I started looking for customer feedback. Also, here is a letter I sent to IBM explaining my frustration with them. It has more information in it." -
Acer Laptop W/Fingerprint Recognition System
Dekaner writes "Acer has announced the TravelMate 740 with a built-in fingerprint recognition security system. The fingerprint sensor is part of the notebook? s palm rest. Users must train the recognition system, which is then used to boot the machine or to decrypt files stored on the hard disk. The TravelMate has a 1.2 GHz Pentium III processor, a 15-inch screen with a resolution of 1400 by 1050 pixels, built in 56K modem and Ethernet connection, and it can be supplied with either 128 or 256 MB of memory. It can be configured with a second hard disk, CD-ROM, DVD, or a DVD-CD-RW drive. It will go on sale in October." -
USB 2.0 For Linux
SilentTone writes: "PCWorld is reporting that USB 2.0 or high speed USB will be hitting Linux first half 2002. Intel is already providing space on its Pentium 4 motherboard for the USB 2.0 controller. With a transfer rate of 480Mbps (more than firewire's 400Mbps) it seems promising." Update: 09/04 23:02 PM GMT by H : So, somewhere between my preview and going live, I seem to have "lost" the link - if you find it, please post below. I'm looking - in the meantime, this is a good Linux and USB tutorial, and Blue Cat Linux is supporting USB 2.0. HA! Found it - story updated. -
USB 2.0 For Linux
SilentTone writes: "PCWorld is reporting that USB 2.0 or high speed USB will be hitting Linux first half 2002. Intel is already providing space on its Pentium 4 motherboard for the USB 2.0 controller. With a transfer rate of 480Mbps (more than firewire's 400Mbps) it seems promising." Update: 09/04 23:02 PM GMT by H : So, somewhere between my preview and going live, I seem to have "lost" the link - if you find it, please post below. I'm looking - in the meantime, this is a good Linux and USB tutorial, and Blue Cat Linux is supporting USB 2.0. HA! Found it - story updated. -
The New Athlons
An anonymous reader linked us to an article about the new batch of athlons. The story talks about the new 1.1 ghz mobile athlon 4, and also good price cuts for the older ones. I'm thinking its time to build my game machine. -
ATI & Nvidia Duke It Out In New Gaming War
geek_on_a_stick writes "I found this PC World article about ATI and Nvidia battling it out over paper specs on their graphics cards. Apparently ATI's next board will support pixel shader 1.4, while Nvidia's GeForce3 will only go up to ps 1.3. The bigger issue is that developers will have to choose which board they want to develop games for, or, write the code twice--one set for each board. Does this mean that future games will be hardware specific?" -
CD-R Prices Could Triple This Summer
Suppafly writes: "According to this story at pcworld.com cd-r media prices are going to skyrocket once the surplus of CD-R media is used up and companies return to having a shortage. 'Consumers ... can expect discs to sell for about 35 to 40 cents at retail.' This doesn't sound good for those of us who backup damn near everything to CD-R." Some spares couldn't hurt, either way. -
CD-R Prices Could Triple This Summer
Suppafly writes: "According to this story at pcworld.com cd-r media prices are going to skyrocket once the surplus of CD-R media is used up and companies return to having a shortage. 'Consumers ... can expect discs to sell for about 35 to 40 cents at retail.' This doesn't sound good for those of us who backup damn near everything to CD-R." Some spares couldn't hurt, either way. -
MSN Buys 500,000 Qwest.Net Customers
SEWilco writes: "MSN is expecting to increase its users by 10% in a deal with Baby Bell Qwest. Although the MSFT press release does not specifically state it, according to Mercury News and Reuters/Yahoo a later conference call confirmed that Qwest.Net will be replaced by MSN service. MSN said it will 'strike deals with companies that own their own infrastructure rather than wholesalers' in a PC World article pointed at by a recent DSL discussion. You can't strike a much bigger deal than this, unless you get all of a Baby Bell's voice customers too." A few readers have written in unhappy that they're about to become MSN customers, too. -
Crashing And Burning In The DSL World
Aarthek writes: "As I was doing my usually daily browse I came across this story from PCWorld. After my experiences with PhoenixDSL being transfered to Telocity, and Telocity not delivering the service. I've been wondering how much longer companys like Rhythms can stay 'in the game.'" The article has a brief postmortem on DSL providers who have already dissolved and paints no rosy picture for the survivors. Low margins, high barriers -- sounds like another case of DSL Woes. -
Maxtor's "Sturdy" Hard Drive
robkill writes "PCWorld has this article on a new drive by Maxtor, using 1 platter, 1 head and 70% fewer moving parts. Using one side of a 30GB platter, the drive holds 15GB and has a smaller height as well." Well, it's not huge, but it's sufficent size - and with more durability, putting it into mobile devices becomes easier to do. -
Corel Chief On Corel, Open Source, .NET And Others
taylor_b writes "CEO Chief Derek Burney has some interesting ideas about open source. Among other things he says in this interview that the open source concept is 'one notch better' when you keep the code to yourself. And Corel wonders why the community never received them with open arms?" It's actually more interesting than just that comment - Burney has an interesting perspective on what's needed to make Linux/Open Source ultimately work. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm sure you folks can debate it *grin* -
A New Tack In Search Engine Formulation
An unnamed correspondent writes: "PC World reports that 'big-shot Web directories such as Yahoo and LookSmart' are missing thousands of the best links, which a new startup HotLinks has in in their directory by building it from people's bookmarks." This sounds like a smart idea (building from people's own bookmarks), but is it doomed to create in-breeding of links? That is, in a search engine based on bookmarks, will they be able to get enough "new blood"? -
FireWire Goes Long Distance, Experimentally
P-Rod writes: "PC World.com News has an article detailing how Japanese researchers have created a low-cost way to send information through FireWire cables 100 meters at 400 Mbps. The current form of the Apple-created high-speed peripheral interface (known as the IEEE 1394 industry standard and dubbed i.Link by Sony) is limited to distances of 4.5 meters at that speed, its present top speed, unless a repeater device is used. This could bring new options to computer networking, especially considering FireWire's superb ease of use over Ethernet. " -
Netscape 6
An anonymous reader noted an article that showed up on PC World discussing Netscape 6. The beta is gonna start up on Tuesday ... ya know what the strangest part is? Calling it 'Netscape 6'. We've been thinking of it as 'Mozilla' for so long, thinking of it as 'Netscape' seems so ... boring. -
News on Pentium IV
MotaK writes "Ace's Hardware and ARS-Technica has reported on PC Worlds article on the Willamette Processor, dubbed the P4. This proc. will apparently be only a 200Mhz frontside bus, and launch sometime in 2000. " -
Helping Linux Newbies Move to the Next Level
NoWhere Man writes "PCWorld has a "here's how" article on how to get the most out of your Linux box. It's basically a very extensive and userfriendly step-by-step instruction on how to recompile your kernel to make it smaller and more compact." Kernel recompilation and optimization is old hat for experienced Linux people, but articles like this, especially in "non-Linux" publications, are necessary to help new Linux users become more adept. Kudos to PCWorld for running it! -
Helping Linux Newbies Move to the Next Level
NoWhere Man writes "PCWorld has a "here's how" article on how to get the most out of your Linux box. It's basically a very extensive and userfriendly step-by-step instruction on how to recompile your kernel to make it smaller and more compact." Kernel recompilation and optimization is old hat for experienced Linux people, but articles like this, especially in "non-Linux" publications, are necessary to help new Linux users become more adept. Kudos to PCWorld for running it!