Once a mere copycat, AMD keeps cranking out innovative products, to the point where it finds itself on the leading edge of processor and system bus technology. But should you bank on a company that has earned the wrath of the world's largest chipmaker. You just gotta love a Cinderella story. Advanced Micro Devices is the hardscrabble kid who came to Silicon Valley with a dollar and a pack of Luckies and ended up in a building with its name on top. AMD’s rapid rise from startup to $5 b...

Microsoft is cutting back its Longhorn client's planned feature set so as to be able to make its current delivery targets: Beta 1 by next year and final release some time in 2006. Microsoft officially confirmed what had been leaked by developer sources late on Friday: changes to its future roadmap for the desktop version of Longhorn. And while developers and customers who expected they'd be required to rewrite their applications to take advantage of Longhorn may be happy with Microsoft's road...

Nullsoft Winamp is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity music player for Windows. Winamp supports MP3, CD, Audiosoft, Audio Explosion, MOD, WAV and other audio formats, custom appearances called skins, plus audio visualization and audio effect plug-ins. additional features including free-form skins, a new decoder, built-in cross fade, and an advanced Media Library. Change Log: a) Security bug fix Fix for upside down videos through DirectShow c) JTFE v0.96c d) Added prompt when loading a skin...

Physicists have carried out successful teleportation with particles of light over a distance of 600m across the River Danube in Austria. When physicists say "teleportation", they are describing the transfer of key properties from one particle to another without a physical link. Long distance teleportation is crucial if dreams of superfast quantum computing are to be realised. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Science used an 800m-long optical fibre...

The Norwegian hacker famed for developing DVD encryption-cracking software has apparently struck again--this time breaking the locks on Apple Computer Inc.'s wireless music-streaming technology. Johansen, an open-source advocate, has been critical of Apple's proprietary system, which largely restricts Apple's hardware and software products to work only with each other. On his Web site, for instance, Johansen praised a newly developed technology by RealNetworks Inc. that will make songs f...

With downloads of XP Service Pack Two due to begin on Monday, Microsoft is bracing itself for an expected flood of requests from users. On Monday morning US time (6.00pm in the UK) Windows users with Automatic Update turned on will be able to start downloading the 80MB (compressed) patch, albeit slowly at first. Microsoft estimates that 40 per cent of UK users use its Automatic Update service. "We won't be at full capacity on Monday. We'll be throttling the number of users who can downl...

A 19-year-old Minneapolis man pleaded guilty Wednesday to unleashing part of the MSBlast worm attack that wreaked havoc on the Internet last summer. Jeffrey Lee Parson admitted creating the "MSBlast.B" variant, also called "teekids," by modifying the original version of the worm and adding a backdoor that granted him control of infected computers, federal prosecutors said. "Sending out a computer worm may be viewed as a harmless prank," John McKay, a U.S. attorney, said in a statement. "Bu...

Caution in all things… While the eagerly awaited XP SP2 has finally got its release date, it looks like Microsoft's crown jewels of security revamps - thought to be costing the software behemoth $300m - could cause businesses as many headaches as it cures. Many businesses may find installing the service pack plays havoc with their custom-built software as well as bought corporate applications, for example, as their systems are reconfigured by SP2. It's a problem that has already hit t...

Apple Computer Inc. is unhappy with RealNetworks Inc.'s move this week to make its RealPlayer music service compatible with Apple's market-leading iPod digital music player and may take legal action to counter it, the company said on Thursday. Apple said in a statement it is "stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod," adding: "We are investigating the (legal) implications." Apple said once its iPod software is updated it is "highly lik...

The most recent version of the e-mail worm uses search engines to find new victims to infect and may be the cause of delays on Google, AltaVista, MSN* and Yahoo. A new variant of the MyDoom worm that hit the Internet hard on Monday is causing massive e-mail slowdowns across the Web, and it may be to blame for problems plaguing several search engines. Variously named MyDoom.M, MyDoom.M@mm or MyDoom.O, the new worm is little different from its predecessors in most of its behaviors and chara...

According a CNET News, Longhorn will run on older systems. "Although Microsoft is recommending that computers be pretty modern to fully run the next version of Windows, Longhorn will probably also run on a good number of older machines." "The bad news is that Longhorn is going to look and run quite differently on those older systems. Computers with a 3GHz processor and 512MB of memory, for example, will get all of the bells and whistles including fancy graphics and the ability to ha...

According CNET News, Microsoft has finally unveiled 64-Bit WindowsOS which has been named WindowsXP x64. There's no question about it: 64-bit computing is the future, because it promises better performance and room to grow for memory-hungry applications and operating systems. In fact, millions of people already use desktops and laptops with 64-bit processors that have been available from AMD since 2003 and Intel since February 2005. With the release of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition a...

Winbeta has an exclusive review of Longhorn 5048 Build (Presented at WinHEC). Along with other new features, two most important and striking features are DWM and Redesigned Start Menu . DWM or The Desktop Window Manager is a component that manages window policies, behaviors and visual appearance. Redesigned Start Menue If you're like me, your programs menu has no doubt become a massive, unwieldy list of programs, with multiple panes on the fly-out menu. That's a real nuisa...

AMD launches Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ processors for server and workstations and unveils AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core processor for consumers and business users AMD officially launched its dual-core Opteron processors for high-end servers Thursday at an event in New York City. The company is also preparing a dual-core desktop processor dubbed the AMD Athlon 64 X2, which will launch in June and go head to head with Intel's dual-core Pentium chips. Dual-core processors are the next evolutio...

Microsoft has posted a critical fix to Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) on its Windows Update site, and pushed it to users relying on Automatic Update. The problem, which has actually been public since December 2004, also affects Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. In some cases, installing third-party anti-virus or firewall software -- Microsoft didn't name makers or package titles -- can bring down the operating system in a Blue Screen of Death with a cryptic erro...