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Elite Troops Get Expanded Role on Intelligence By THOM SHANKER and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON, March 7 — The military is placing small teams of Special Operations troops in a growing number of American embassies to gather intelligence on terrorists in unstable parts of the world and to prepare for potential missions to disrupt, capture or kill them. Senior Pentagon officials and military officers say the effort is part of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's two-year drive to give the military a more active intelligence role in the campaign against terrorism. But it has drawn opposition from traditional intelligence agencies like...

Still think the Mac mini’s not a good value compared to budget PCs? If you want to compare Apples to, well, apples, you might want to have a look at Aopen’s new MiniPC, once it’s unveiled tomorrow at the Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco, Calif. In 2005 AOpen generated interest when it unveiled its MiniPC, a Pentium-based Windows-compatible PC computer with a stunningly similar design as Apple’s Mac mini. Now AOpen is countering Apple’s Intel Mac mini introduction with its new MiniPC, the MP945. It costs a bit more, but sports some features the new Mac mini doesn’t have....

Advanced Micro Devices plans to announce three new 2.6GHz Opteron models Monday, the newest step in its steady effort to encroach on a market that rival Intel once had to itself. The new dual-core Opteron models 185, 285 and 885 run at 2.6GHz and show performance improvements of about 4 percent to 15 percent compared with earlier top-end models running at 2.4GHz, said Brent Kerby, AMD's Opteron product marketing manager. The announcement comes a day before AMD's top competitor begins its twice-annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The 185 model is for single-processor systems and will be available within...

APPLE LAPTOP HAS LOOKS AND BRAINS David Pogue 3/2/06 The MacBook Pro's camera and power help with iChat video meetings. REMEMBER the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance? If you're a fan of the Macintosh computer, meet the five stages of switching to Apple's new laptop: lust, anticipation, delight, dismay and waiting. Ordinarily, it's not really news when a computer company introduces a new laptop model. You don't see newspaper headlines blaring, "Gateway's New P32-XC5 Adds Faster Processor, Third U.S.B. Port." But the new Apple MacBook Pro ($2,000 and up) is a different story. Although...

Intel Announces Plans to Build $300 Million Chip Assembly Plant in Vietnam HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (AP) -- Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, announced plans Tuesday to build a $300 million chip assembly and testing factory in southern Vietnam, giving a huge boost to the country's efforts to raise its high tech profile. The facility, which will be built in Ho Chi Minh City's Saigon Hi-Tech Park, marks the single largest U.S. investment so far in its former wartime adversary. The deal is considered a significant one for Vietnam in its campaign to attract more foreign investors. "We...

SCO WAS taken out behind the woodshed by Intel a few days ago in one of the more unfriendly court filings in a long and extremely unfriendly case. The 64K question is not what happened, that is more than adequately documented on Groklaw, the real question is why SCO, or its attorneys got so stupid. The short story for those not reading along with PJ, Darl and the gang is this, SCO faced a discovery cutoff in late January, and by all accounts had little or no evidence as the curtains were being drawn. It was desperate for an extension...

A utility has been released that will allow the Intel-oriented version of Apple's Mac OS X operating systems to be run on machines other than the company's own iMac and MacBook Pro. However, the coder behind the patch, Maxxuss, warned that the software is a work in progress and that there's "still a lot of work to do". That said, for folk who like to "play around", he said, the software will help them get started. The code requires a computer with an SSE3-supporting processor. It also appears geared toward set-ups in which Mac OS X is run alongside another...

Just as the bragging rights for dual-core chip supremacy are dying down, Intel gave the first glimpse of a quad-core chip coming next year. Clovertown, a four-core processor, will start shipping to computer manufacturers late this year and hit the market in early 2007. Clovertown will be made for dual-processor servers, which means that these servers will essentially be eight-processor servers (two processors x four cores each). The company will also come out with a previously announced version called Tigerton around the same time for servers with four or more processors. Core expansion will be a dominant theme for Intel...

Macworld.co.uk reports on Needham & Co analyst comments about what they expect from Apple in the coming months. While some of the information appears speculative, the analyst claims that a video iPod will indeed arrive soon: According to our sources, the screen on the video iPod will occupy the entire front of the current iPod with a touch-activated scroll wheel. Assuming the same form factor as the current iPod, this move will increase the size of the screen three-fold. This corresponds to recent rumors that a touch-screen iPod is in the works. This technology would also tie in recently revealed...

Homegrown terrorist Jeffrey Leon Battle considered America the “land of the kaffirs,” or unbelievers, and the American people “pigs.” He once lamented to an acquaintance—who happened to be a government informant—that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did not sufficiently damage the U.S. economy. “This is the land of the enemy,” he said of his own country in a May 8, 2002, conversation secretly recorded by the government. He explained to a friend how his “burning desire” to become an Islamic martyr had inspired his aborted quest to join forces with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he could kill American...

Well, *now* SCO's really gone and done it. They got used to IBM's restraint, I guess, and told a story to the Utah court, and now they are being called on it. First, we saw Oracle dispute SCO's story about the subpoenas in its motion to quash in California, and now Intel has filed in Utah a Nonparty Intel's Response to SCO's Motion For Leave to Take Certain Prospective Depositions [PDF], and they are hopping mad. Mad enough to tell Judges Kimball and Wells that what SCO said about Intel is "unfair and untrue": Although Intel takes no position on...

Though the precious dream of dual-booting our Intel Macs has not descended, a convenient alternative has arrived. Although fully functional on developers releases of OS X for Intel, the WINE compatibility layer, which allows Windows programs to run on *nix systems including OS X, was not available for the public release of 10.4.4. However, thanks to the hard work of the folks at Darwine and their contributors, it appears this barrier has been broken! Find out how to compile WINE and view screenshots in our forum. Read more and see screen shots on the OSX86 Project website...

Word reaches the Deeplung ear that Intel's Yonah processor, which ships under the Intel Core Duo moniker, has features that aren't being exposed to the consumer. Intel's Sossaman is the key, and Sossaman is the codename for an ultra low voltage Yonah to be shipped under the Xeon brand, into the server and workstation space. And it transpires that Sossaman supports iAMD64, er, sorry, 'EM64T', symmetric multi-processing with another Sossaman Xeon, and hardware virtualisation. Intel's implementation of the 64-bit extension to x86, SMP and hardware VT are all missing from the official specs of Intel Core Duo consumer processors, despite...

Answering concerns over Apple's switch to Intel-based processors, one analyst assures that Macs are still relatively safe. Larry Seltzer of eWeek says that although non-Mac (traditionally Intel-based) computers are typically more prone to attack than Macs, "rarely, if ever, are the existence of vulnerabilities related to the specifics of one processor architecture versus another." Seltzer maintains that familiarity with Windows on an Intel platform does not equate to familiarity with Mac OS X on an Intel platform. "If Apple's market-share shoots up and attackers suddenly have a better shot of finding Macs to attack, then more malware will be written...

"The recent move by Apple Computer to begin shipping Macintosh computers that use microprocessors from Intel could open the door to more attacks against computers running the company's OS X operating system, security experts warn," Paul F. Roberts reports for eWeek. "The shift to Intel processors from the Motorola Power PC processors will make it easier to create software exploits for Macintosh systems, and could result in a steady stream of Mac exploits in years to come." "The change could put more pressure on Apple to build security features into OS X, according to interviews conducted by eWEEK," Roberts reports....

DAVOS, Switzerland - FBI director Robert Mueller said Thursday the United States now acts on intelligence from any place in the world to fight terrorism but has not sacrificed individuals' rights to privacy in that effort. However, during an interview with The Associated Press, Mueller would not discuss renditions, the practice of covertly moving imprisoned terrorist suspects between countries outside normal legal processes. He also would not elaborate on the National Security Agency's listening without a warrant to telephone calls in the United States that Bush administration officials believe involve al-Qaida terrorists. Lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether it...

Red Hat representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week that the company plans to add support for Apple's new Intel Macs to its popular distribution. Fedora and several other commonly used Linux distributions support the PowerPC architecture used by Apple in the past, and Red Hat wants to ensure that its software will continue to run on new Apple hardware in the future. The current impediment is the Extensible Firmware Interface, a relatively new BIOS replacement designed by Intel that is not yet commonly used or widely supported. Linux EFI support already exists in the form of elilo, a special version...

A self-professed Mac lover who jump-started a prize award for the first person to figure out how to boot Windows XP on an Intel-based Macintosh is confident that someone will step forward to claim the bounty, now at nearly $6,000. "I'm an optimist," said Colin Nederkoorn of Houston, Texas, and the creator of The Contest Web site. "I think someone will claim it." Nederkoorn's site spelled out his requirements and tossed $100 into the pot to get things rolling. As of mid-day Wednesday, he'd collected $5,747 as the prize for "the person/group that can make dual-booting Mac OS X and...

Can you run Windows on the new Macs, or Mac OS X on other Intel hardware? Apple's announcement of new Macs based on processors from Intel raises an interesting question: Since both the Mac and Windows operating systems now run on Intel-based hardware, shouldn't it be easy to run both on the same computer? That simple question deserves a simple answer. But there isn't one — at least not right now. Reaching the nirvana of running the two most popular desktop operating systems on one machine is a lot harder than you might expect. Apple has said that it wasn't...

Steve Jobs' much publicised claim of a two-to-three-times speed increase in the new Intel-based iMac is bunkem, according to the latest benchmark tests. The new Intel-based iMac G5 is not much faster than its PowerPC predecessor, Macworld has discovered. Macworld benchmarks show that the iMac G5 running an Intel 2.0 GHz Core Duo gained only between 10 to 25 percent in performance compared to the IBM architecture, far lower than the doubling in throughput widely claimed by Apple. The magazine carried out a series of tasks using two Apple applications, iMovie and iPhoto, discovering that performance boost ranged from worthy...