News

Quote

"We told our management that if they need us to stay a year, that's fine. They've got blanket approval for that. If they want us to go longer than year, just a give us a couple of months' notice," station commander Kenneth Bowersox said.

Quote

The cosmic image, unveiled on Tuesday, was taken by the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) spacecraft during a 12-month scan of the entire sky. It is the most detailed all-sky image of the infant Universe, just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Quote

The European Space Agency's project to develop the camera was first reported by SPACE.com last June. While largely unheralded, T-ray imaging does not appear to be pie-in-the sky. In fact, a camera built by a company called QinetiQ and working in similar millimetric waves already last year had demonstrated the ability to peer through clothes and reveal a concealed weapon, along with much of a person's body.

Quote

Each shuttle wing has 22 carbon-carbon sections about 26 inches long and weighing perhaps 30 pounds. In between the sections are special T-seals of the same material that allow for expansion and contraction.
The leading edge of the hypersonic space shuttle takes the greatest heat when the shuttle re-enters Earth's atmosphere. The carbon-carbon was deemed better for that than the shuttle's thermal tiles, so it was placed on the nose cone and the front edge of the wings.
Curry studied what happens to reinforced carbon-carbon when it is hit by tiny, super-fast space junk, which is another active theory for what happened to Columbia.

Quote

Someday progress will stop. "No physical quantity can continue to change exponentially forever," Moore noted. Nonetheless, none of the current looming problems represents a wall, he added.

Quote

Specifically, the suit, which was brought by Cathy Baker, claims that Microsoft, Symantec, CompUSA, Best Buy and other unnamed retailers don't allow people to read "shrink wrap" licenses--agreements printed inside the box or incorporated into the software itself--before they buy a product.

Quote

IBM was the chief beneficiary of Linux server revenue, taking in some $159.9 million in sales, up from $75.6 million a year earlier. Hewlett-Packard saw sales rise to $80.2 million, up 81 percent from $44.3 million a year earlier. Dell Computer's Linux server revenue grew nearly 66 percent, but fell behind HP, with fourth-quarter sales of $77.1 million, compared with $46.4 million a year earlier. Sun Microsystems, which started selling Linux servers just last year, took in $1.3 million in the fourth quarter, up from $912,500 in the third quarter.

Quote

The world chess champion was attempting to avenge his defeat in 1987 by IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. On Saturday, he spoke with CNN technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg.

Quote

The new 3000+ chip will list for $588, nearly $200 more than its Athlon XP 2800+. Higher prices hold the potential to translate to positive results on earnings. AMD, which put together a string of earnings report losses during 2002, expects to break even in the second quarter of this year on the strength of better sales of processors like the 3000+ and flash memory. The company hopes that a cost-saving plan put into motion at the end of the third quarter of 2002 will help it along as well.

Quote

The survey, conducted in December, looked at the Internet use of 501 people over the age of 18 and found that people who spend 3.7 hours per week surfing the Web at work spend an average of 5.9 hours per week at home using the Internet for work-related purposes. By contrast, people who don't have Internet access at home spend spend more time at work -- 6.5 hours per week compared with 3.7 hours -- using the Internet for personal reasons.

Quote

Because the basic Moneo card is anonymous, there are no privacy or identity theft concerns. But if an owner loses his or her smart card, the cash that's stored onboard can be used by whoever finds it -- which is why there's a $107 storage limit.

Quote

Engineers first became aware of the mishap while watching a video of the liftoff on Jan. 17, the day after launch. After a weeklong analysis, while Columbia was still in orbit, they concluded that the shuttle had not suffered significant damage. That analysis focused mainly on the heat-resistant ceramic tiles that protect the shuttle during its fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere.

Quote

Kostelnik said a fresh Soyuz would be launched to the space station in April as planned. As part of its role in the ISS, Russia launches several Progress ships and two Soyuz capsules to the station a year. A Soyuz is always docked at the station to serve as a crew lifeboat.

Quote

As a NASA new initiative, requested funds for Project Prometheus includes $279 million, with $3 billion to be spent on the effort over five years. This consists of $186 million ($1 billion over five-years) from the Nuclear Systems Initiative introduced in Fiscal Year 2003 and adds $93 million ($2 billion over five-years) for a first flight mission, dubbed the Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter, or JIMO for short.

Quote

Bolder initiatives may be the most logical next step for NASA. Clearly spaceflight has lost its public allure, as shuttle astronauts toil in relative anonymity unless something dreadful happens. Space travel, many insiders believe, needs a bigger and more exciting goal.

Quote

Fourth-quarter sales of $4.47 billion marked an 11 percent increase from the third quarter and a 5 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2001. Servers are heavy-duty computers built to process or store data on computer networks.

Quote

The cuts come amid a slump in the handheld industry; shipments in 2002 dipped about 9 percent to 12.1 million units, compared with 2001, according to Dataquest, a unit of research firm Gartner. The Palm operating system still dominates the handheld market and is used in 55.2 percent of units shipped, or 6.7 million handhelds. About 25.7 percent of handhelds shipped, or 3.1 million units, use Microsoft's Windows CE operating system.

Quote

Austin, Texas-based Dell, the No. 2 personal computer maker, said floppy drives had been overtaken by technologies offering greater storage capacity and would become an option on its Dimension 8250 models. Other Dell models may lose the floppy by end of the year, depending on customer response. The decision was made because technologies such as USB flash memory offer much more storage capacity than floppies and are more useful with today's mega-memory computers.

Quote

Banias, which will be sold under the Pentium-M name, differs substantially from its predecessors, both from a technological perspective and in terms of how it will be marketed. Earlier Intel notebook chips were essentially desktop chips enhanced for notebook use. They consumed less power than their desktop counterparts. Laptops containing them, however, could still only run two to four hours on a battery charge. Pentium-M, by contrast, was designed specifically to fit into notebooks. Subsections of the chip go into sleep mode when not in use to conserve energy. Some Pentium-M notebooks will go as long as six hours without a battery charge.

Quote

The worm, which nearly cut off Web access in South Korea and shut down some U.S. bank teller machines, doubled the number of computers it infected every 8.5 seconds in the first minute of its appearance, said a computer security research group led by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. By comparison, the Code Red worm -- which came 18 months earlier -- only doubled every 37 minutes.

Quote

Companies like Texas Instruments began the wireless migration to devices other than laptops by shrinking the necessary silicon small enough for even a cell phone's snug confines. That paved the way for printers, personal digital assistants and even the office staple white board to abandon cables in favor of the Wi-Fi standard.
Soon, television set-top boxes, MP3 players, camcorders and even digital cameras will shed their wires as well, and the list will only grow as manufacturers try to cash in on Wi-Fi's increasing popularity.

Quote

The problem with Internet Explorer stems from a security function in the software designed to stop one domain, such as a Web site, from sharing information with another domain, Microsoft said in a security bulletin. Microsoft has discovered that such information sharing can occur when certain dialog boxes are used.

Quote

"Microsoft's response [to the open-source movement] up until now has been nonmonetary," said research director Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft, in Kirkland, Washington. "It's loosened up access to source code, made more efforts to support the government market, and created online communities that mimic those that support open-source development projects."

Quote

"Standards support is a big plus for GNOME users," the Gnome project, which develops the Gnome graphical user interface, said in a statement. "Interoperability support improves the user experience by allowing Gnome, KDE, and other applications to work together more easily."

Quote

Those involved would not say which retailers agreed to the deal, but retailers including Toys "R" Us, Wal-Mart and Target recently posted new policies on sales taxes. Amazon.com, which has partnerships with Target.com, MarshallFields.com and Mervyns.com to sell items online, notified customers of the change through a posting on its site.

Quote

With the release of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft will be casting the operating system as an alternative to Unix as well as a compelling reason for its customers to upgrade from older versions of Windows. The company has delayed the release of the operating system three times, partly due to an effort to hone its security and reliability.

Quote

Microsoft Corp. may in the future be forced to lower its software prices as a result of the growth of open source, the company cautioned in its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In its latest 10-Q quarterly filing, Microsoft said that the popularization of the open-source movement continues to pose a significant challenge to its business model.

Quote

Removal of Microsoft's JVM is only the first step in the process. Microsoft plans to make Sun's JRE available for download about 90 days after the judge's order takes effect. XP users also would have the option of downloading the JRE using the Windows Update feature.

Quote

Companies behind the Desktop Linux Consortium include several Linux sellers such as SuSE, MandrakeSoft, Lycoris, Xandros and ArkLinux; CodeWeavers, which sells software to help run Windows programs on Linux systems; OpenOffice, an open-source competitor to Microsoft Office; and the KDE user interface software.

Participants say the new consortium is in part a reaction to the behavior of one company not on the consortium's membership list: Lindows. Several of the desktop Linux companies withdrew from a Lindows-organized conference, accusing Lindows Chief Executive Michael Robertson of using the forum too much to promote his own company's wares.