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Archived
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Archived News - June
2001
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From the Yahoo! News article:
A U.S. appeals court on Thursday unanimously
overturned a lower-court order that would have split Microsoft Corp.
in two, but left intact the lower-court finding that some of its business
conduct amounted to illegal maintenance of its Windows monopoly.
If you don't remember, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson went and ran
his mouth to the press before the case began and now
"Although we find no evidence of actual bias,
we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings
before the District Court and called into question the integrity of
the judicial process,'' the court said in its ruling
If you're interested in the DOJ v Microsoft case, check out the
yahoo news article, there are numerous links to other articles and
stories there.


From the Yahoo! News article:
Microsoft said it will not introduce Smart Tags
when it releases the final version of Windows XP, due in October, or
in the standalone version of its new Web browser, Internet Explorer
6.
There has been some controversy over smart tags since Microsoft announced
the idea a few weeks(?) ago.
See the story below for more information about what
smart tags were supposed to do.


What are "smart tags"? Well, they're really smart, if you're
Microsoft. From the
ZDNet Interactive article:
The Smart Tags feature automatically scans the
Web pages that a Windows XP user browses, and then inserts new links
beneath certain words, like the names of companies, products or whatever.
If the user clicks on that Microsoft-created link (link to Bill Gates'
speech on how Microsoft innovation benefits consumers), a new browser
window opens with more links to Microsoft owned-sites (links to MSN,
HotMail, Microsoft.com and Expedia.com) or other sites and Web pages
chosen by the company.
Why do you think it was so important to win the browser
war? (what's a browser?) The company that controls the browser controls
content. If you everyone has to use your browser, you can do all kinds
of crazy stuff. You can insert links to your own company, links to buy
stuff whenever your products are mentioned. You can charge other companies
to have links to their stuff - a great new source of income. What's to
stop you from disallowing links to competitors (what competitors?) or
web sites you just don't want users to see?
In all fairness, Microsoft has not finalized its decision to include smart
tags in upcoming products.
Related
links:
Previous Register stories on smart tags
Smart tags
due in WinXP browser
Smart
tagging in OfficeXP: what Melissa did next
ZDNet
Interactive editorial on smart tags


Planet Hardware has a good
article entitled "How
to nuke your pc," but a more appropriate title might be, "How
to back up your vital information before you reinstall your operating
system," but what do I know? It is a good article and it shows you
how to save your email, addresses and other stuff you might want to keep.
They give good advice, like how to back up your ICQ and MS Outlook information.
If you asked me, I'd tell you that if you used ICQ or Outlook, you should
ask a friend to punch you in the face, but that's just me. Hey, whatever
.
Their article is a little thin when it comes to the actual "nuking"
of the pc (my favorite part), reformatting the hard drive. If you want
more information on how to "nuke" a pc, let me know, I'll talk
your ear off.
I've been thinking of whipping up a similar article, but now I don't have
to...
ps I "installed" (read "fought with for 3 days") LINUX
the other day. What a p in the a. I still have to recompile my graphics
drivers (huh?) and I just barely got Samba
working after about 20 hours of scratching my... uh... head.
Luckily, I put LINUX on its own hard drive, and I just might have to,
"install LINUX" at the bottom of deception
pass if you know what I mean...

According
to the Privacy Foundation, "a Web bug is a
graphic on a Web page or in an e-mail message designed to monitor who
is reading the page or message... In many cases, Web bugs are placed on
Web pages by third parties interested in collecting data about visitors
to those pages."
Well if you want to try to reduce how much you are monitored while you
are online, you might want to try this out.
I think Bugnosis only tells you if "web bugs" are present. It
doesn't do anything about it. I suggest you check out the Bugnonsis
FAQ if you are looking for more info on how to get rid of these things.
I think the term bug is a little misleading. In computing, a bug is usually
an unexpected defect, fault, flaw, or imperfection.
The Privacy Foundation version is more along the lines of a
concealed listening device.
Microsoft calls bugs features
.
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More AMD DP ...er MP (multiprocessor) news
source: various
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AMD Zone takes the cake for good news
today:
"ASUS Announces A7M266-Dual
Socket A Motherboard with AMD Multiprocessing
Technology."
If you didn't know, ASUS is my personal favorite motherboard manufacturer.
The Dual Athlon motherboard should begin shipping in July.
Speaking of dual Athlons, Ace's
Hardware has an excellent review up. I agree with Chris (from
AMDZone), this review at Ace's puts all other reviews to shame.
I guess AMD has released a 1.4GHz model of their AMD Ath(a)lon procesor.
Catch the reviews: Accelenation
(formerly FullOn3d), AMD
MB, AMDZone,
CPU Review, Gamers
Depot, Hexus.net,
Tech
Report, Tweak3D,
Ok, I leeched these links from HardOCP...
AMD also launched a 950MHz Duron processor, but who gives a rat's ass,
right ?
In unrelated news, House of Help
(not the guys who did "Jump
around") has a How-To
guide on putting together your own computer, focusing on the motherboard
and other nitty-gritties... At Tweak Central we like to call this "Rolling
your own."
In yet more unrelated news, on the Intel
front there's a story
of nasty balloon-pulling on the Inquirer (I finally learned how to
spell Inquirer... ok, I copy-pasted it). From the story
"According to today's Economic News, representatives
from Intel Taiwan pulled down large balloons advertising Via's P4 chip
set, with the newspaper claiming that was at the prompting of INTC's
legal department"
According to (wonderboi) Anand, the
balloons were allowed to stay up.
I think Intel's just a little upset because VIA
is
prepping their chipset for Pentium4 with DDR support (so Pentium 4
users can use something other than RAMBUS memory) and according to VIA,
P4 on DDR is faster. Yeah, right. We'll see about that, but it WILL be
cheaper.
There's
also news of a ton of motherboards sporting Intel's i845 (aka Brookdale)
chipset with SDR (PC133) memory support. Intel's
agreement with RAMBUS prohibits Intel from supporting DDR solutions for
Pentium 4, but if you must have "Intel inside", at least
you don't have to have evil... er RAMBUS inside as well.
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Tweak Central passes 100,000 hits... no
thanks to you guys
source: Home grown
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Tweak Central quietly passed 100,000 hits on Tuesday morning, no thanks
to you guys! I swear I had to put up half of those hits myself. I know
100K hits is baby-stuff to "real" sites like HardOCP
and AnandTech (cough). Those guys do
over 100K hits a day.
Thanks again to everyone who has visited over the years. Hopefully you
were able to learn something, or at least found a link
to another web site where you learned something .

JC has some assorted benchmarks
of dual Athlon systems so you can see how they perform. JC got them from
various sources, so don't take them to be gospel, but more like ball-park
figures.
Ace's Hardware also has some
Daul Athlon benchmarks. Ace says he got them from this
page.
You can expect to see more of this nonsense as the release date is Monday
(06/04).
ps - If the smooth G you're going to have to shell out for a dual athlon
board, 2 cpus and a new power supply is a little too steep 'fer ya', there's
news of cheaper 760MP (dual) motherboards on the way soon, perhaps
by July. There's hope yet for us poor bastards.

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