Scarlet note

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This future growth for Tablet PCs will be driven, IDC believes, by increased marketing efforts from OEMs and Microsoft, and a steady refining of product lines - new models will be more attractive to a wider cross section of users.
Another Acer-only feature is GridVista, which can carve the screen into a variety of divisions, allowing the user to set applications to load in default areas.
‘Internet fraud is on the increase and we work with our colleagues in law enforcement across the globe to stamp down on those criminals using other people’s identities to steal. We are particularly grateful for the assistance provided by our counterparts within the US Secret Service and the FBI for their close cooperation in connection with this investigation.’

PC Pro’s technical editor Gareth Ogden said: ‘On an Athlon XP 2700+/512MB of PC2700/KT400 system, the 9800 Pro is quite a bit faster than the 9700 Pro (and GeForce FX) with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, in most tests.’
TV broadcast to mobiles has arrived in the UK, as Orange and 3 launch new channels.
The study of 329 large UK companies, employing 2,000 staff or more, found that most companies sold old computers onto second dealers or to staff instead of using professional disposal companies. The survey, carried out by encryption company Pointsec, found that only 17 per cent of respondents destroyed data stored on hard disks on-site.
Microsoft says that Virtual Server 2005 offers simple installation, web-based management of virtual machines and physical servers, as well as storage and networking. Prices start at $499 for the Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition with support for up to four processors. Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition supports up to 32 processors and will cost around $999.

The device is compatible with both Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X.
The search engine with a twist, Ask Jeeves, has had to shed 180 staff in the US due to mounting losses.
According the latest survey, the effect of shrinking price differentials between singles and albums (where a single can cost up to £4.99 while the average price of a CD album is now £9.79), competition from other entertainment products and illegal downloading have all played their part. The falling cost of albums, however, has meant sales there have gone up by 12 per cent to 228 million units annually. An all time high.
The current number of subscribers is now 18.6 million, down from its peak of 26.7 million in September of 2002. Although AOL is lauding today’s more technical user, the drop in subscribers is just as likely to have led to the redundancies.
In a brief statement the company defended its Harmomy technology, which enables songs downloaded from its own online store to be played on an iPod.

Finally, Microsoft said it will offer a royalty-free licence to its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) technology to encourage developers to create VHD-based applications that extend the capabilities of the VHD file format.
F-Secure has now given the virus a Radar level 2 warning.
CEO Michael Cappellas commented: ‘At the end of the day, this merger is about market leadership. We are ready to move forward.’ The merger would put PCs from the merged companies back in the top slot, after Compaq was ousted to number two by Dell last year.
BT has gone underwater for its broadband rollout to Cornwall.
Running on a 1.7GHz Pentium M, it has a 15in XGA or SXGA+ screen (with a 1,400 x 1,050 resolution). With 256MB of DDR SDRAM, options for the optical drives include 24X CD-ROM, 8X DVD, 24X CD-RW/DVD or 4x DVD+RW. It weighs 2.36kg.

‘Where were the watchers and guardians, where were we?,’ he asked during his easter sermon in Brussels’ cathedral.
Matt Whipp
Alun Williams
Of those passwords kindly donated, the most popular was ‘password’, with 12 per cent. That means that one in eight of us use this and not necessarily just for work. Two thirds of those questioned used the same password for everything - including online banking and home computing.
The RIAA will have suspected - when it presented its list of over 130,000 songs to be removed - that Napster would not fully comply. But now the terms of the battle will change, moving away from the wider original issues of people swapping music. It will become a more narrowly defined legal issue over whether Napster has complied with the terms of a legal ruling. It seems that Napster has not been able to comply, and courts traditionally move strongly and quickly to enforce their own authority…
The smart phone market also posted a healthy quarter, shipping 838,000 units - a 22 per cent increase year on year. While market leader Nokia only managed a 1 per cent growth, it still clung on to an 80.2 per cent share. Up and coming Sony Ericsson continued to make inroads, with a 14 per cent share and a year on year growth of 7,442 per cent. And you can expect Orange (with its SPV range) to post a similar yearly growth rate - it already boasts 5.3 per cent of the market (with no figures for the previous year).
The Memory Products Group saw sales decrease 4 per cent, and AMD is in the process of shedding its Spansion Flash memory subsidiary, which it jointly owns with Fujitsu - the companies having merged their memory operations in July 2003.
Podcastdirectory.com

Darren Lock
Google Earth is the latest addition to Google’s local search product suite, joining Google Local and Google Maps. Users can delve deeper into local information, whether exploring a vacation destination or researching a new home or apartment. They can also combine multiple layers of information, such as cross-referencing school districts with address look-ups of available homes, business listings and public transportation, and save their results for later use.
‘But it’s unfortunate that software patents exist, that this sort of gracious permission is even necessary.
Dabs
though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built.’
The company has a number of large customers, such as Vodafone and the Philippine’s largest network operator ePLDT. We were told the company is also in negotitations with a number of other European carriers.
The survey found that 77 per cent of women surveyed would prefer a new plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace and 56 per cent prefer it to a weekend trip to Florida.
Simon Aughton
In a bid to bridge the increasingly entrenched positions in the bitter next generation DVD war, HP has appealed to the Blu-ray group to adopt two new technologies that would make the format more appealing to PC users.
Nicole Kobie
Central to this is the new 64-bit PowerPC chip from IBM, able to handle much bigger amounts of data at any one time that its 32-bit predecessors and competitors, it also enables exponentially greater amounts of RAM, theoretically as much as four terabytes. Even at the current maximum of 8GB, the new Power Macs can have twice as much RAM as 32-bit systems, and are capable of holding and processing entire 3D worlds, large 2D images and sophisticated scientific projects entirely in RAM.

Johansen himself has not mentioned the venture on his So Sue Me blog, and DoubleTwist Ventures’ website comprises nothing more than a homepage and an email address. So far the sole evidence is an interview with GigaOM.
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‘We want to remove the barriers to Wi-Fi,’ said the CEO of Broadreach, Magnus McEwen-King, ‘and this hotzone shows that it is possible to bring wireless Internet access to a much wider area than ever before.’
The design of the computer is based on a custom BlueGene/L ‘compute card’. The board consists of two nodes, each containing two central processing units (CPUs) and includes four megabytes of dedicated memory. Also fitted on the circuit board are a memory controller module and nine separate memory chips.
Yahoo! says it will boost storage for its email services in a bid to take some of the steam out of Google’s free 1GB Gmail service.
Under the partnership, Rapport, backed by semiconductor chip legend Gordon Campbell, will provide the Kilocore technology while IBM will contribute engineering services, foundry and ASIC technologies.
services.

A Seattle-based web entrepreneur has achieved the perfect political cybercrime, without breaking any laws.
Tiny Computers has introduced a 10-point Customer Service Charter as it rolls out 140 Powerhouse concessions across the UK.
Not that New York University business school Professor Nicholas Economides thinks that Microsoft has much to worry about in this case. ‘I don’t believe that the class action suits are a serious problem for Microsoft,’ he told Reuters, adding that he thinks the company will settle out of court.
The 12 per cent claim has now been dropped. Outgoing MCPS-PRS Alliance chief executive Adam Singer, who announced his departure yesterday, said that a few issues regarding the definition of revenue remain to be resolved, but, in common with BPI chairman Peter Jamieson, he expressed satisfaction with the agreement.
While many notebook manufactures have taken advantage of Intel’s upgrade to its Centrino platform to present heavyweight, full-powered desktop replacements, AJP is taking more of a budget tack.
Don’t hold your breath, though. The reports - in the

Exhibition organiser Key3Media was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy even as its showcase event Comdex Fall opened its doors in Las Vegas yesterday
Are you seeing instances of viruses infecting other platforms?
Before the suspension, $10bn had been raised for the operating rights. After a similar successful revenue-generating exercise for the UK and Germany, some analysts expected Italy to raise over $20bn. However, 13 bidders took part in the British auction earlier this year and only six companies were competing in Italy.
The latest figures based on the findings of two different Internet market research companies reveal that in March 2002 US Web users spent almost 13 million hours searching in Google, but just 5.4 million in Yahoo and 4.9 million in MSN Search.
DEE plans to produce two or more additional movies, this year, and therefore will raise additional capital of NT$500-700 million, the company noted. This year, DEE will release its movie ‘Mail Order Wife’ in the US on March 14, and in Taiwan in April, as well as another movie ‘Sledge’ in June-July, the company said.
J Allard, the Microsoft corporate vice president who oversaw Zune’s development has also said that PlaysForSure will continue to be supported.
While Italy and Germany may be first, the Commission is reportedly also in talks with Austria, France and Belgium, among other countries.
will need to install extra network elements that support the subscriber base, at considerable expense,’ said principal analyst Stuart Carlaw.
It has

The European Parliament appears to have rejected calls to include copyright infringement among the activities that may be investigated under the forthcoming EU data retention laws.
Darren Lock
This is a trend identified by Paoli, that Microsoft had to get support for XML technologies on the sever side, such as with BizTalk - it doesn’t make sense to work on the client if the backend can’t support it. Continuing the theme, Paoli highlighted the ‘XML investment’ made in Office 2003, which - he claimed - provides important groundwork for further XML growth.
Portability is also enhanced with a sliding handle, a remote control that slots into (and out of) the device itself and a carrying case.
Fast and simple scans can be achieved via a USB 2.0 connection - 480Mbits/sec of data roaring into the machine. You’ll need a USB 2.0 port on your PC, although it’s also backwards-compatible with USB 1.1 and there’s an IEEE1394 (FireWire or i-Link) port, too.
‘We’ve seen Symbian surge before,’ said Canalys director and senior analyst Chris Jones. ‘When the Nokia 9210 Communicator hit the shelves one year ago. This is quite common when a new product launches, but often proves unsustainable. We knew there would be another one this quarter, but the 7650 is aimed at a wider audience and the indications from the channel are much more positive this time.’
Lee Patch, VP, legal affairs, Sun Microsystems, said: ‘Sun applauds the European Commission’s decision in the Microsoft case… This decision is an important precedent for defining the principles of open competition not just for today, but for the future of a vibrant and vital worldwide IT industry. We look forward to participating in an exciting period of innovation that will deliver the tangible consumer benefits that derive from competition on
Obviously wary of causing chagrin among early adopters - already at least £345 lighter due to buying at the original European price - Microsoft also confirmed today a system for refunding gamers who supported the format from the off. Anyone who has already bought an Xbox, or buys one in Europe up to April 25, will be eligible to receive two free games and a free controller in the wake of the cut. (Xbox games retail at £45. Xbox controllers sell for £25. So that works out as £115 in total.)
wake-up call to those who abuse the Internet for illegal purposes. Leading businesses are teaming up, pooling resources and sharing investigative information to stop this illegal activity at the source,’ said Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel at Microsoft. ‘At Microsoft we are combating this problem in every way we can, including with legal action, to help ensure that our consumers are protected from fraud.’
‘Last year, the iPod was still all about music, with a little TV thrown in,’ he wrote. ‘This year, iPods address consumer interests from downloadable movies to jogging enthusiasts, all while not compromising the primary music function. And with thousands of iPod accessories and car integration kits available, Apple has moved to selling complete music solutions to fit a wider variety of needs.’
There are three new AMD family members: the 1.1GHz mobile AMD Athlon 4 processor, the 900MHz mobile AMD Duron processor and the 1GHz AMD Duron processor, which is for desktop PCs.