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Tablet PCs draw a rousing welcome By John G. Spooner CNET News.com February 28, 2003, 5:19 AM PT Manufacturers are having a field day with their new tablet PCs. Top vendors Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba say sales of their tablet PCs--tiny portable computers fitted with pens, touch screens and handwriting-recognition technology--are exceeding predictions made before the devices' November launch. The machines are based on Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition software. Toshiba several times has increased production of its Portege 3500 tablet, after having trouble meeting initial demand, said Mark Simons, vice president of Toshiba's transactional business group. Meanwhile, HP's "tablet...

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. will cut software prices in Taiwan by a quarter to settle an investigation into unfair trade practices, the island's competition watchdog said on Thursday. border=0 alt="Special Coverage"> New products, new ideas and new thinkingInnovations 2003   It will also sell the components of its Office XP suite of software separately and share its closely guarded source code for the Windows operating system with the government, the cabinet's Fair Trade Commission said. "Microsoft Taiwan's concrete action to lower prices of Microsoft products is exactly in line with the Fair Trade Commission's goals of maintaining orderly...

TOKYO - Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates (news - web sites), in Tokyo to court top government officials as Japan ponders switching to rival software, assured his hosts that the company's Windows operating system is secure, officials said Wednesday. Latest news: · No. 2 Inspector to Discuss Iraq Missiles AP - 1 hour, 34 minutes ago · Bush Defends His Father on Saddam Issue AP - 1 hour, 51 minutes ago · Divided Security Council Meets on Iraq AP - 2 hours, 3 minutes ago Special Coverage   While Japanese government computers still mostly run on Windows, concerns about...

An MIT engineer turns tiny robots into big money. James McLurkin has won the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT student prize for inventing. Working in a field called microbotics, McLurkin has invented some of the world's smallest self-contained robots. He's also researching how to build robot ``swarms'' that could someday tackle dirty, dangerous, or dull tasks that humans avoid. The work by the 30-year-old computer science graduate student has been featured in an exhibit at Boston's Museum of Science, in which tiny robotic ``ants'' are programmed to emulate the behavior of real insects. McLurkin says he started ``geeking out'' -- as he put...

A Washington court ruling could see SQL Server developers liable for millions of dollars in licensing fees. The judgment concerns a contract dispute between Timeline Inc. and Microsoft, over three patents relating to datamarts. In Microsoft's interpretration of its licence with Timeline, published in a press release in July 1999, "all users of Microsoft SQL Server 7, Office 2000 and other Microsoft products that utilize this type of technology are unencumbered by Timeline's patents." Timeline disagreed. The Washington Court of Appeal judgement plumped for the company. The company reckons that some SQL Server developers could face bills in the...

Microsoft Accidentally Slips Office 2003 Beta Onto The WebBy Techweb NewsMicrosoft mistakenly posted the second beta of the newest Office to its Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), but yanked it several hours later. The sneak, which several users were able to download before Microsoft withdrew the posting, revealed that the suite will be called Office 2003 when it releases mid-2003, as TechWeb reported earlier. Other tidbits gleaned from the brief appearance include the bundling -- in the beta, at least -- of the OneNote and InfoPath applications, as well as the inclusion of SharePoint Portal Server 2.0.

The Microsoft/Sendo battle is the thing that is definitely on everybody's lips, here at Cannes 3GSM. And one question has many people here puzzled: "Whatever happened to Marc Brown?" - or more accurately, what didn't happen to him?. Marc Brown, for those who didn't read the trial transcripts, was a Microsoft employee, who was Microsoft's official nominee to the Board of phone maker Sendo. He was given the job because Microsoft bought 5% or so of Sendo's shares, as part of their "strategic partnership" which ended in tears last October/November, and in fisticuffs soon after. That was when Sendo cancelled...

A consulting group that scrutinizes the source code underlying several operating systems has found that a key networking component of Linux is of higher quality in several ways than that of competing closed-source software. Reasoning, which sells automated software inspection services, scrutinized part of the code of the Linux and five operating systems, comparing the number and rate of programming defects. Specifically, Reasoning examined the TCP/IP, a key networking technology, and found fewer errors in Linux. "The open-source implementation of TCP/IP in the Linux kernel clearly exhibits a higher code quality than commercial implementations in general-purpose operating systems," the...

Despite the bluster associated with our technological society I fear we may have fallen back in the development of new technology. Look how far we have come in the last 200 years. What have we accomplished in the last twenty years? I dare say little, if anything! Here are some points to consider, - The Space Shuttle was designed in the late seventies and built in the early eighties. Do we even have a viable replacement on the drawing board ready for production? - Cellular phones date back to the seventies. First common utilization as VHF and UHF amateur repeater...

Nuclear-powered drone aircraft on drawing board   19:00 19 February 03 Duncan Graham-Rowe   The US Air Force is examining the feasibility of a nuclear-powered version of an unmanned aircraft. The USAF hopes that such a vehicle will be able to "loiter" in the air for months without refuelling, striking at will when a target comes into its sights. With a nuclear drive a Global Hawk could fly for months without landing (Image: GETTY NEWSERVICE) But the idea is bound to raise serious concerns about the wisdom of flying radioactive material in a combat aircraft. If shot down, for instance, would an...

Source: National Aeronautics And Space Administration Date: 2003-02-19 NASA Sets Initial Requirements For Next-Generation Orbital Space Plane SystemFeb. 18, 2003 -- NASA today released the top level requirements for the Orbital Space Plane (OSP), a next generation system of space vehicles designed to provide a crew rescue and crew transport capability to and from the International Space Station. These requirements set the foundation for the design of the vehicle and its associated systems. The Level I requirements for an OSP system were developed based on NASA's missions, as defined in the Integrated Space Transportation Plan, input from industry and...

Fuji surpasses 6 megapixels By Sandeep Junnarkar Staff Writer, CNET News.com February 19, 2003, 10:01 AM PT update Fuji Photo Film on Wednesday unveiled two high-resolution digital cameras built around new sensor chips that are designed to capture more precise variations of light and dark. The new Fujifilm FinePix F700 offers a resolution of 6.2 megapixels using Fuji's new proprietary chip called the Super CCD SR, or charge-coupled device with super dynamic range technology. This chip, introduced in January, mixes a regular pixel sensor with a new type modified to capture high-intensity light. Fuji said that as a result, the...

At the Federal Communications Commission these days, Commissioner Michael Powell and his one-time protege Kevin Martin have introduced a new slogan: "What, me worry?" While the communications sector suffers though a crisis of stifling overregulation, the commission seems ready to accept an outbreak of litigious new rules at the state and local levels. As the FCC prepares to meet again later this week, the telecom industry's woes are jeopardizing the future of the U.S. economy. Since the March 2000 peak, telecom has seen a $1 trillion loss in market cap among 17 companies, not to mention another thousand related bankruptcies....

Mobile phone manufacturer Samsung yesterday paid out £17m for a 5% stake in Symbian, the mobile phone software joint venture part owned by British technology firm Psion. The deal, announced at the 3GSM World Congress, is a slap in the face for Microsoft which is trying to compete with Symbian in the market for software that powers so-called smartphones, which can send picture messages and receive video as well as make calls. Last year Microsoft fell out with its first handset partner, Birmingham-based Sendo, which instead opted to use a Nokia system that operates alongside Symbian's software. The US company's...

Oracle admins are in for a busy time with the publication of no less than six vulnerabilities over the last week. Four of the vulnerabilities are buffer overflow flaws affecting various components of Oracle9i Database Server. Then there's two flaws affecting Oracle9i Application Server, which pose denial of service risks... or worse. Some are potentially very nasty indeed. Oracle describes them as critical and that's not the half of it... The buffer overflows in Database server involve: the ORACLE.EXE binary, the TO_TIMESTAMP_TZ function, the TZ_OFFSET function and DIRECTORY parameter of Oracle9i Database Server. These are explained in greater depth in...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Available soon: You step into a booth where a 3-D body scanner sends more than 300,000 data points from your body to a computer. Then you select style, fabric and design features from a clothing manufacturer on the Internet and e-mail your body scan. Soon you receive a custom-fitted garment. Thanks to a major donation of software, worth as much as $600,000, from Lectra Systems, Inc., apparel students at Cornell University are the first in the country to produce automated custom patterns for garments. They use a sophisticated body scanner, which generates an individual's detailed measurements from...

Sunday, February 16, 2003 The 'terahertz' camera at work: This man is fully clothed.   Voyeurs take note: a portable, cheap camera that can see through objects and clothing may be available for sale to common folk in as little as five years, say British-based space researchers.The camera, built by a European Space Agency-funded team working at a lab in central England, could one day be used to find skin cancer or hidden weapons, reveal wounds beneath animal fur or bandages, spot forged works of art, even pierce through fog.The technology was unveiled last fall, but it was just...

It will begin with a sharp crack, like the sound of a bolt of lightning hitting its target. In an instant, Baghdad and its environs will go dark. Even though turned off, fluorescent lights and television sets will glow and the smell of ozone mixed with the odor of smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Palm Pilots will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Computers, and every bit of data on them, will be history. Suddenly there will be a deadly quiet as internal-combustion engines shut down never to...

February 15, 2003 Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time • posted by Dan Gillmor 07:41 PM• permanent link to this item NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a special column running in tomorrow's San Jose Mercury News. We're posting it early to get the story out. Weblogs are going Googling. Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals. The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing...

I need to know if there is any way a URL could show up in the IE 5.5 history list without the browser having actually visited that page. I also need to know if a document URL could show up in the recent Document folder without the browser having browsed to that URL.