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WASHINGTON (AP) - The music and technology industries, which have battled over consumers downloading music on the Internet, have negotiated a compromise to protect copyrighted works such as movies and songs without new government requirements, people familiar with the plan said Monday. The agreement, expected to be announced Tuesday in Washington, contends that U.S. laws do not need to be amended, for example, to permit consumers to make backup copies of compact discs they purchase or copy songs onto handheld devices. The technology industry also will announce its support for aggressive enforcement against digital pirates. Under the plan, future...

Developing: U.S. intelligence agencies have uncovered information indicating Russia«s foreign intelligence service is covertly cooperating with Iraq spy agencies....

Intel introduces the Centrino family By John G. Spooner January 8, 2003, 7:46 AM PT Intel on Tuesday announced a new brand name for its next-generation mobile processor technology: Centrino. The new chip family, which includes the processor formerly known by the code name Banias, was designed to help manufacturers build notebooks that use less power and offer extended battery life, along with better wireless networking capabilities. Instead of just giving Banias a variation on the company's well-known Pentium moniker, Intel decided to set the family of chips apart with a completely new name. A few insiders at Intel had...

OK, I have a computer that's about 3 years old and I'm very attached to it. I've done lots of upgrades and improvements over the past year or so and instead of getting a new one, I'd like to do one more upgrade.Having put in a Network Interface Card, doubled the RAM to 256K, installed a CD-RW drive and replaced the hard drive in my IBM Aptiva, I'm giving serious thought to updating the processor from a Pentium III 600 MHz to something like a P4 2G or something, and I have a few questions: 1) Do I need a...

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 16 (Reuters) - In a high-tech horse race to shrink circuits on semiconductors, International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) will announce on Monday that it is in the final phases to create a next-generation 90-nanometer chip for Xilinx Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) The new 90nm technology, which measures less than one one-thousandth of a human hair, can cut the size of chips by 50 to 80 percent, said IBM Microelectronics of East Fishkill, New York. Chips serve as the brains of electronic devices ranging from cars to PCs to networking equipment. However, Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC) says it has bragging rights...

<p>Tech giants AT&T, IBM and Intel, along with two investment firms, will form a company to provide high-speed wireless Internet access across the United States, one of the biggest and most ambitious ventures of its kind to address the burgeoning Wi-Fi market.</p>

Truly remarkable results gobsmack us A SHARP EYED contributor to Ace's Hardware Forum has noticed that Intel is making some truly remarkable claims for the 3.06GHz Pentium 4. A demo on its site – it requires Flash to view – compares a spreadsheet calculation. That takes five minutes 39.9 seconds on a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 without hyperthreading while with hyperthreading, Intel claims it takes 35.58 seconds. [ Actually, if you see the demo, it is supposed to take the non-hyperthreaded P4 an even longer 6 minutes 15 seconds. (5:40 + :35) ] This is a remarkable feat and leads us...

INTEL HAS CUT the prices of its Pentium 4 in advance of the expected launch of a new 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor Thursday, according to a research note distributed by Merrill Lynch & Co. Tuesday. Advanced Micro Devices is expected to follow suit, the note said. The approximate price of the new processor, Intel's first on the desktop to feature its hyperthreading technology, will be in about the mid-$500 range, according to Merrill. To bring slower processors in line with the new chip, the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 will fall in price from $508 to $401, and the 2.67GHz and...

Itanium and Opteron contrasted Letter What are the options for Intel? By The Letternan: Saturday 09 November 2002, 10:04 THE COMPARISON SPECS on Itanium 3 and Opteron here look pretty good. This appears to show both processors passing the current fastest server chip by a significant lead. However, for x86 code, Opteron looks like it will hit the market as fast as the fastest x86 processor while Itanium 3 is a joke on x86 code. It is too bad that there are not specs available on Yamhill because I have a very strong suspicion that it was killed, not because...

AMD's new CEO, Hector Ruiz, has one hope to save his company, a new microprocessor technology called Hammer. But first he has to shake AMD's spotted history -- and a ferocious competitor named Intel. Hector de Jesus Ruiz, the new chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is a short, balding fellow who is so quiet and soft-spoken that his sentences often disappear into an inaudible mumble. In fact, sitting at a conference table in his office in Sunnyvale, Calif., hands folded in his lap, describing his company's "long history of being resourceful and sticking with it," the 56-year-old Ruiz...

It is a well known fact that there are scores of computer professionals who have been laid off and are out of work in this country. Those positions include software engineers, network engineers, and electrical engineers. Those who have lost their jobs in the past 24 months know what I am talking about. We all know WHY we've been laid off. It is because indentured servants from other lands have overrun our country with the help of Congress due to the false premise of a labor shortage by IT industry lobbyists. Here we have an opportunity to "layoff" those who...

Is AMD now ready to impact the enterprise space? Part three Hammer in the house [Part 1: Serious about servers ] [Part 2: Would you switch to AMD?]By Mario Rodrigues: Friday 25 October 2002, 09:39 IT IS PRETTY clear (see part two) that AMD has fully demonstrated the exacting requirements that the business world demands. Market perception of AMD's supposed inferior platform quality has taken all this time to erode. HP's decision to offer AMD supported (Compaq branded) desktop and notebook business class PCs should be all the assurance that one would need that AMD is now ready to aggressively...

Is AMD now ready to impact the enterprise space? Part two Would you switch to AMD? [To read Part One click here] By Mario Rodrigues: Wednesday 23 October 2002, 17:59 IN MARCH 2001, Web hosting company Rackspace managed over 3,000 servers. Patrick Condon, one of the company's founders, estimated at the time that 80% of their servers used AMD processors. "We use a lot of 1 GHz AMD Athlon processors. We found they are incredibly reliable," he said. "In fact, we have well over 1500 AMD-based servers that have been up and running 24 hours a day for over two...

Is AMD now ready to impact the enterprise space? Analysis Serious about servers By Mario Rodriques: Monday 21 October 2002, 18:37 OVER THE YEARS, much has been written and discussed about a perceived AMD weakness - stability. Many will remember Michael Dell's famous comment about the AMD environment being "too fragile". Unfortunately for AMD, even with the product recalls that plagued Intel over the years, this perception, like a ball and chain, had unjustifiably clasped itself to the chipmaker. Because stability is a prerequisite that has to be met before any major enterprise buyer would look at a company's products,...

AMD's Opteron could spur dual-core processor showdownBy Rick Merritt, EE TimesOct 16, 2002 (9:00 AM)URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20021016S0019SAN JOSE, Calif. — Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said its upcoming Opteron microprocessor will feature better integer performance than all other server processors, setting up a possible race with Intel Corp. to move to dual-core server processors as early as next year.AMD's 64-bit X86 processor running at 2 GHz in a 32-bit mode will hit an estimated SPECint base2000 performance rating of 1,202 and a SPECfp base2000 rating of 1,170, said Fred Weber, chief technology officer of AMD's computation products group, at the Microprocessor Forum...

<p>SAN JOSE, Calif.--Offering a possible peek at how Itanium processors may look in 2007, a senior Intel Corp. engineer on Tuesday unveiled the blueprint for a 1 billion-transistor processor.</p> <p>Although he discounted the idea that he was making a product announcement, Intel Fellow John Crawford nevertheless appeared to strongly suggest that his blueprint of a four-core processor would likely be developed to power future computers.</p>

SAN JOSE, California, Oct 10, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- A federal judge in Texas ruled against chip-making giant Intel Corp. in a long-running dispute with Intergraph Corp. over patents involving the Itanium processor. U.S. District Judge T. John Ward agreed Thursday that Intel's high-performance chip infringed on the patents invented by Huntsville, Alabama-based Intergraph, now a computer services company. In the suit, Intergraph claimed Intel's Itanium processor infringed on two patents related to parallel instruction computing. Intel's total liability is limited to $250 million because of a previous agreement reached as part of another patent fight between...

SUNNYVALE, Calif. (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Wednesday warned of a "substantial operating loss" and sharply lower-than-expected revenue in the third quarter, citing a weak personal computer market. The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, which is Intel Corp.'s principal rival in the market for microprocessors, said that it now expects revenue for the third quarter ended Sept. 29 of about $500 million. Analysts had been expecting third-quarter revenue of $614 million and a per-share loss of 49 cents, according to Thomson First Call. AMD said that, in light of the persistent weak demand for PCs, it had...

Intel will triple its engineering staff in Russia.

1. What are TCPA and Palladium? TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features. 2. What does TCPA / Palladium do, in ordinary English? It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with...