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Intel said the size of each Madison will be 374 square millimeters, will consume a maximum of 130 watts, and will have 410 million transistors, the basic circuitry elements out of which chips are assembled. Until now, Intel had said only that the processor would have "about half a billion" transistors.

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The chip will debut at around 2GHz and come out with a performance rating number in the mid-3,000s, added Dirk Meyer, senior vice president of AMD's computational products group. Current Athlon performance ratings top out at 2,800.

The 1MB version--the one that will contain 100 million transistors--will mostly be sold into servers and be marketed under the Opteron name, sources say. A smaller version with 256KB or more of cache and an integrated memory controller will be marketed to desktops under the Athlon 64 name.

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The 5.25 tonne telecommunications spacecraft was marooned when the Proton K rocket carrying it malfunctioned. It had launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan late on Monday.

At its current altitude of only 175 kilometres, experts say the craft will lose altitude and break up in the Earth's atmosphere within a few days. It is unclear how much debris from the satellite might survive reentry and fall to Earth.

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The vulnerability could give hackers and online vandals the ability to take control of Solaris-based systems, stated an advisory released late Monday by security software developer Internet Security Systems. Sun Microsystems' spokesman Brett Smith confirmed that the company knew of the flaw.

"We are aware of the problem, and we are working on a patch," he said, adding that Sun had been working with ISS on a patch, but problems during testing had delayed the fix. "We are trying to get it up as soon as possible."

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Now many of the biggest high-speed ISPs are considering capping the amount of bandwidth that their subscribers can use per month, a move that could undermine subscribers' free swapping ways--something that many lawsuits have not yet been able to achieve. If people know they have a limited amount of bandwidth available, the thinking goes, they'll be less likely to download voraciously or allow people to upload songs and music from their computers.

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If a judge says Sharman can be sued in the United States, Kazaa will get sucked into the same legal maelstrom that has grabbed Napster, Aimster, Audio Galaxy, Grokster and Morpheus, closing some of the popular services and threatening the existence of the others. The Kazaa case is the biggest yet in the recent copyright wars that have been testing the international reach of U.S. courts.

The judge did not rule on the issue Monday, but observers said he appeared ready to order Sharman to stand trial. A ruling is expected in the next several weeks.

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Investigators may have an extremely tough time locating the attackers, however. The flooding of networks, in what are known as distributed denial-of-service attacks, is typically done using forged source addresses sent from servers compromised by the attackers before the actual assault, a double level of indirectness that is hard to crack.

But the need to find the attackers has grown in importance, Petro said, given that the recent trend of attacks has shifted from targeting company networks to targeting the infrastructure of the Internet itself.

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More than 30 states recently approved a pact that would help create a unified sales tax for the Internet. Currently, states are prohibited from requiring out-of-state companies to collect sales tax, which effectively means that many Internet purchases are free of sales tax. The new plan is part of a proposal to get Congress to authorize a simplified sales tax method that would apply to those purchases.

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Instead of the original 677MHz FSB (front-side bus) speed and dual-channel DDR333 memory architecture, Intel on November 15 informed its motherboard clients that its upcoming Springdale chipsets will support an 800MHz FSB and dual-channel DDR400.

Taiwanese chipset designers Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and VIA Technologies may both feel the impact, industry sources said. SiS, though having Pentium 4 technology licensing from Intel, will need to adjust its product designs and change the FSB standard of its new-generation chipsets, including the SiS648FX and SiS655, from 677MHz to 800MHz.

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If a judge says Sharman can be sued in the United States, Kazaa will get sucked into the same legal maelstrom that has grabbed Napster, Aimster, Audio Galaxy, Grokster and Morpheus, closing some of the popular services and threatening the existence of the others. The Kazaa case is the biggest yet in the recent copyright wars that have been testing the international reach of U.S. courts.

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Although not as obviously pornographic as BMX XXX, nVidia's rendering of a scantily clad pixie left little to the imagination. Filmy, almost sheer leaves cover the wood sprite's private parts -- and seem to be added as an afterthought. The rendering, created by one of the Final Fantasy designers, is both beautiful and slightly unsettling.

According to an nVidia representative, a version of this demo does exist with the leaves removed. "We're bringing porno to graphics", chortled the exec, who wished to remain nameless.

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Depending on how eDNA might have been implemented, Congress could have enacted a law requiring Internet providers to offer connectivity only to authenticated users, or government regulations could have ordered that fundamental protocols such as TCP/IP be rewritten or new ones created to handle authentication techniques.

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Ostensibly, the goal is to design a new living organism capable of turning raw materials into hydrogen to solve the world's energy problems. But success would bring extraordinary new possibilities for scientists to alter and augment the natural world, together with difficult ethical, security and philosophical questions about the nature of life. The work will be carried out at the Institute of Biological Energy Alternatives, Maryland.

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While online gaming via PCs has generated several financial successes, analysts and game publishers expect adoption of online gaming via consoles to grow slowly over the next several years. Limiting factors include low U.S. penetration for broadband Internet connections and slow growth for the home networking gear needed to extend Internet connections to the living room.

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Venter and Smith said they will delete a gene that gives M. genitalium the ability to adhere to human cells, as well as another 200 genes that confer upon the organism the ability to survive in a hostile environment. The end result will be a delicate creature, at home only in the warm nutrient bath of a laboratory dish.

Venter left the top position in January at the genome company he helped found, Celera Genomics Group, as the company changed its business model to concentrate more on developing drugs.

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Comdex is special for another reason for Eagan--he got married in Las Vegas during Comdex five years ago. Eagan and his fiancee had been planning to wed at a big family affair in January. However, she was home feeling stressed about the wedding while he was at Comdex.

So, Eagan had his bride-to-be fly down to Vegas, and the two got hitched at the Excalibur--dressed as King Arthur and Lady Guinevere, no less. The family event took place in January, but it wasn't until years later that Eagan broke it to the guests that the real nuptials took place at a trade show.

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"The new ATI driver collection supports all recent versions of ATI-manufactured graphics boards, from the Radeon 8500 to the company's current speed demon, the Radeon 9700. The drivers enable support for version 2.0 of the OpenGL graphics specification used in many computer games and other graphics-rich applications"

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There are some types of problems that are more likely to benefit from his way of thinking, he said. Economists are beginning to base their research on algorithms. Human vision likely uses algorithms that could be adopted in computer vision. Understanding the algorithms and rules that govern the formation of biological tissue could vastly improve transplants and medicine.

"What I think is going to be possible is to have computational models of biological cells in which all the possible processes going on will be represented by little programs," Wolfram said. Those new models could lead to the ability to design drugs and predict their effects, he said.

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"For example, FIFA World Cup from EA Sports lets you choose the speed, direction and angle of your shot on goal all the same way -- you press a button when a sliding indicator on the screen reaches its desired setting. An equally addictive treat, JAMDAT Bowling, works similarly, as does Tiger Woods PGA Tour Wireless Golf from EA Sports. The games don't pose many challenges in the way of eye-hand coordination. But they offer just enough nice touches (a picture of a turkey flashes on the screen when you get three strikes in a row in bowling) to inspire your imagination to take over."

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The flaw affects IIS Web servers using the Microsoft Data Access Component (MDAC) to talk to a database. Servers running the latest software, MDAC 2.7, are free from the security hole, as are servers on which an administrator has run the IIS Lockdown Tool, an application that helps secure systems.

Windows computers, except those running Windows XP, are also vulnerable if Internet Explorer 5.01, 5.5 and 6 are present, as they also use the data access component. However, attacks on such systems are harder to accomplish, Terwoerds said. Outlook Express 6 and Outlook 2000 are immune to attack in their default configurations, and other versions of the mail client can be made safe by using the Outlook E-mail Security Update, she said.

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Ditching PS/2, serial, and parallel ports gave Abit a little extra room to squeeze more USB and Firewire ports onto the AT7 MAX, but it also cut down on the board's compatibility and expandability. PS/2 keyboards, mice, and KVM switches were unusable with the original AT7 MAX, and the board's three PCI slots left some enthusiasts wanting.

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Recently many companies have released USB Storage drives from sizes ranging from 16MB all the way to 1GB on a small device around to the size of a lighter. Not only do these storage drives enable quick transfers and the ability to store more data, but they require no driver installation on many of the newer operating systems. (True plug and play!) But can we really say goodbye to the floppy disk?

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The Goliath 2 SE is huge! I don’t know how else to describe it. As you see in the picture below, the size is just over 3 inches and the weight of the copper makes it quite heavy. The fins used to dissipate heat are very thin and do a very impressive job of allowing cool air through the heatsink as well as getting rid of heat. Thanks to its copper base, good temps are anticipated from it.

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As I said before, I am impressed with Lycoris. They have made a good start at making Linux accessible to the casual user. There is a long way to go yet but the makers should be proud of the work they have done. It is capable of competing with Windows in the home, something which other distro's of Linux have not yet achieved. However Lycoris could not compete with Red Hat or similar distro's in a workstation environment. Then again, you wouldn't use XP Home edition as a workstation OS. Lycoris is to XP Home what Red Hat is to XP Professional.