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The cuts, which had been anticipated, are part of the company's plan to reduce expenses by $350 million next year in an effort to reach profitability on lower sales.

About 1,000 workers whose jobs are being cut were notified Thursday. As previously announced, the company will take a restructuring charge of several hundred million dollars in the fourth quarter.

The move comes as AMD has been losing market share to larger rival Intel amid a generally sluggish PC market.

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The overclocking performance and CPU scaling at 3GHz are what impress me most with this new processor. You don't have to run with HyperThreading enabled (and of course you may not even wish to run the processor on a board that even supports it) and as a single processor with HyperThreading off, it simply flies.

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All in all, the Pentium 4 3.06GHz is the fastest PC processor available. The fastest Athlon XP system we tested, the 2800+ chip running on an nForce2 system, isn't widely available yet, over a month after we first reviewed it. The Athlon XP 2800+ can challenge even the Pentium 4 3.06GHz for supremacy; which one is faster depends entirely on what you want to do.

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Viewed in such a light, the AthlonXP 2800+ definitely becomes a better option for someone on a "budget." Its performance is generally quite close to the P4's, would be most-likely tied against a P4 DDR platform, and the package is almost half the price of Intel's.

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The Pentium 4 processor at 3.06GHz is here and it certainly means business not only breaking the impressive 3GHz barrier but sporting a new technology called Hyper-Threading (HT). Wouldn't it be nice to have dual processing support from a single processor? Well in theory, at least, you can with the latest processor from Intel.

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The Hyper-Threading technology is not new but it's the first time that Intel is introducing this technology to the desktop environment. Although most of today's benchmarking software do not fully take advantage of the added performance that Hyper-Threading offers, users will have to see it to believe it.

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As you can see, the new Hyper-Threading enabled 3.06GHz CPU makes quite an impact on simulations that benefit from extra threads. Increases in IL2, Falcon 4.0, Comanche 4 (surprisingly it seems to run on multiple threads- did not know that!) and our synthetic benchmarks are roughly 10-20%. That would fall right in line with the ~25% increase Intel says are possible with Hyper-Threading. Either way, the scores with and without HT are fantastic. Hyper-Threading is just extra on top... ok a lot extra.

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Intel is once again changing the face of computing with their Pentium 4 Hyper-Threading and just think about this for one moment. Imagine how much better the performance will get as software developers start programming with HT in mind. Intel's Hyper-Threading is in its infancy and we are bound to see even greater things coming from it in the near future.

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Do you need a time during your busy day to choose what noise enters you ears from time to time, well, today, I may have a nice light, full-featured alternative for you. Samsung indeed has been producing high quality components from ram to hard drives, monitors, LCD TFT screens and countless products for the home. Let's see if this model of MP3 player follows the trend ...

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The case is undoubtedly beautiful and high style. One of the things I really enjoy is the door. An aluminum case is great but when you see standard beige drives installed, it just kind of takes away from the beauty. With the door, you can install anything you wish and keep the ugliness hidden

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The KD7-RAID Motherboard is an excellent choice due to its onboard 6 Channel Audio, LAN, RAID, USB2 and overclocking ability. The performance and stability is excellent as well and let's not forget this motherboard is very well priced. Also, it supports AGP 8x, however, currently there are no performance benefits when using an AGP 8x capable Video Card! Watch the Video to find out more...

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This is a great board in general as well as a great overclocker. None of the onboard stuff seems to affect the overclocking at all. That is what is so interesting about this board. It comes with tons of good features and is one of the best overclocking motherboards on the market for the Intel 845 Chipset.

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2 months ago, VIA released the "brand new" KT-400 chipset. The improvements over the KT-333 chipset include AGP 8X support, unofficial DDR-400 support and 8X V-Link between the north and south bridges. By looking at the so-called "improvements", one has to wonder WHY on earth does VIA name it as KT-400 instead of KT-333 8X.

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Ahh, Q3. It's always loved the bandwidth available to a Pentium 4, and here we see it stand head and shoulders above the AthlonXP. The trend of the P4 2.66 performing close to that of the P4 2.8 also continues here. Overclocked we can hit an amazing 421 fps!!!

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As for the new high-end wireless iPaq, the Pocket PC h5450 includes Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity, a fingerprint reader for owner authentication and a powerful infrared port that allows the device to work as a universal remote control. (The h5450 received FCC approval last month.) However, the model also features a high-end price: $699.

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SOURCES SAID a lawsuit was filed by a trustee acting for the creditors of former graphics company Visiontek against Nvidia, Mitac, BFG Technologies, Advanced Equities and several individuals.
The action, in Cook County, Illinois, seeks an injunction, damages of $50 million and punitive damages that a jury will have to decide.

The court case outlines various allegations that a judge and jury will have to decide.

One is that some former Visiontek employees started their own company within Visiontek while still employed by the company.

It's also alleged that some of the named individuals worked for Visiontek's former investment firm, Advanced Equities, and that these individuals used inside knowledge and Visiontek resources to start a new company called BFG Technologies, and then to wind down the former company.

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The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker has been working on delivering the next major desktop and server versions of Windows--code-named Longhorn--by late 2004. Although the desktop version of Longhorn is still expected within this time frame, a server version is not expected until 2005 or 2006, the company said.

Until Windows XP, the company had been releasing desktop and server versions of its business operating systems around the same time. With the latest change, Microsoft may have to grapple with customer confusion as it works to get its operating system release schedule back on track.

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The TACHYON G9700 PRO is also equipped with on-board hardware monitoring (fan, voltage, temperature, etc.), a specially developed driver for overclockers that will allow end-users to clock their VPUs at up to astonishing 400MHz core-speed.

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From JC
I am now committed to supporting an OpenGL 2.0 renderer for Doom through all the spec evolutions. If anything, I have been somewhat remiss in not pushing the issues as hard as I could with all the vendors. Now really is the critical time to start nailing things down, and the decisions may stay with us for ten years.

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IBM launched the new plan last month. The idea is that by using advanced computer networks and other new technologies, businesses will be able to buy computing power as it's needed, similar to the way electricity is purchased.

Big Blue is making a big bet on the model, setting up a new on-demand computing group and committing to spending $10 billion on research and development, company initiatives and acquisitions, CEO Sam Palmisano said recently.

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Model New Price Price Cut (%)
Pentium 4 3.06GHz $637 -
Pentium 4 2.80GHz $401 21%
Pentium 4 2.66GHz $305 24%
Pentium 4 2.60GHz $305 24%
Pentium 4 2.53GHz $193 20%
Pentium 4 2.40GHz $163 15%
Pentium 4 2.20GHz $163 15%

Intel Celeron Pricing, effective November 10, 2002
Celeron 2.20GHz $103 -
Celeron 2.10GHz $89 -
Celeron 2.0GHz $83 20%
Celeron 1.80GHz $69 18%
Celeron 1.70GHz $54 23%
Celeron 1.40GHz $54 N/D
Celeron 1.30GHz $54 N/D

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A weak PC market, a build-up of its Athlon and Duron processors among PC makers and distributors, and aggressive competition from Intel took their toll on the company during the third quarter.

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Fueled by seasonal demand, Asustek Computer, Gigabyte Technology and Micro-Star International (MSI) reported record-breaking sales and shipment performances in October, with figures much higher than the market had expected.

Another first-tier maker Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), however, did not share the same sales growth as its industry counterparts. Posting NT$5.282 billion for its October revenues, the company in fact suffered a slight month-on-month sales decrease of 3.2%, reportedly due to delayed shipments from its OEM clients in notebook sector.

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But the way minerals are aligned in ancient rock shows that the planet's magnetic dipole occasionally disappears altogether, leaving a much more complicated field with many poles all over the planet. When the dipole comes back into force, the north and south poles can swap places.

The last reversal happened about 780,000 years ago, over a period of several thousand years. Now Gauthier Hulot from the Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris and his colleagues think they have spotted early signs of another reversal.

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To begin with they've built the card on the larger and theoretically much more stable 8 layer PCB used previously for the Ti4600 cards only. Next they've teamed the GPU up with a full 128MB of 3.3ns BGA memory and finally they've added a very efficient all-copper heat sink and aluminium RAM sinks front and rear to keep things cool. Finally they've increased the core and memory clocks from the standard 250/444 (core/memory based on a 128MB configuration) to a not insubstantial 250/550. They may be relative newcomers to the video card scene but it seems they know what they want when it comes to building a very desirable product, question is have they managed it?

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Both versions of the cleaners perform the same function, they suck up dust The wired version is actually a lot more powerful and while it doesn't look as cool as the Shuttle it certainly is the best performer. I will go through the features of each cleaner individually.

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The only gripes I have with the case are its cost, availability and it's uncanny knack of picking up all fingerprints and making them visible. I like my cases clean so it's a lot of maintenance, especially if you are in and out of it all the time like I am, my grubby mitts get everywhere.

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Overall our opinion of the newer 166MHz AMD Athlon XP2700+ is a big step in the right direction and things can only get better in the forthcoming months and with a AMD Athlon XP2800+ also in the offering soon. The many analysts will be thinking about the next generation because simply AMD have proven they can produce a successful processor on a 0.13micron process with a 166MHz bus and add a higher clock speed to this Intel may not find it so sweet but only time will tell if and when this all happens.

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Red is the first and only thing that comes to mind when you look at Iwill’s latest 845PE chipset based P4HT-S motherboard. Sure, we’ve seen red PCBs before, but Iwill’s gone quite a few steps further and colored all the PCI and AGP slots red, along with the memory sockets and the RAID connectors- even the heatsink bracket surrounding the CPU is red! Did we mention that the fan on the North bridge also has red LEDs? Lets take a look at the red hot P4HT-S and see if it sizzles in performance as well.

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It seems to be difficult to get Twinmos PC 3200, in particular 256 MB modules outside of Asia, but several other 3rd party manufactures like Corsair are now also using the Winbond DDR 400 chips for their top of the line products.

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To sum-up, you could say that the AOpen AX45-8X Max was a true pleasure to work with; it is at once fast, stable, and feature-rich. We would have loved to have tested it with an AGP 8X card as well, just to see how much more performance can be gained from the new standard, but unfortunately, our Radeon 9700 was installed in another system at the time.

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I have seen many great looking cases in my day, and this is by far one of the bests; not only in looks, but also in quality.

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To help increase the capability of this card, Albatron decided to stick some ram sinks on over the video ram to help increase performance by keeping the ram cool. If you plan on running this card above the default memory clock speeds then these become a more important addition. Of course I ripped off these sinks to see exactly what lie behind them.

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The plaintiff states had sought changes to Microsoft software code, such as compelling the company to release a second version of Windows with the middleware removed; auction the code for Office so it can be adapted to other operating systems; publicly disclose the software blueprint for Internet Explorer; and carry on Windows Sun Microsystems' version of the Java virtual machine for 10 years.

But Kollar-Kotelly rejected these remedies, in part because they "seek to convert certain legitimate aspects of Microsoft's business model and/or product design into a model which resembles that of other industry participants simply for the sake of changing the status quo," she wrote in a 344-page opinion.

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Kaspersky Labs said the message, sent Thursday to subscribers of the company's "Virus News" e-mail dispatch, had actually been sent by hackers masquerading as the company. The hackers had managed to break in to Moscow-based Kaspersky's computer system and steal the mailing list for the newsletter, the company said.

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To do this, Microsoft is working with Forbes, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, Slate and two foreign economic magazines, France's Les Echoes and Germany's Wirtschafts Woche, to build tools for publishing a trial set of electronic magazines that will available for download sometime in 2003.

The effort is an attempt to build on other digital publishing initiatives like that of e-books, a once-heralded business that has struggled to catch on in the mainstream. People have yet to become comfortable with on-screen reading for great lengths of time, and limitations in technology have hampered wide adoption of portable reading devices.

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Tablet PCs won't make a big impact next year because customers will be put off by a lack of applications, clumsy hardware designs and high cost, according to Gartner Dataquest.
The analyst predicted that Tablet PC sales will total 425,000 units in 2003, representing just 1.2 per cent of worldwide notebook shipments.

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The study, led by Dr. Tetsuya Nakazawa and published in the November issue of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that workers who spent more than five hours per day in front of a computer screen reported significantly higher complaints of sleep-related symptoms and mental stress.

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Top Microsoft executives, including co-founder Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, have long derided open-source software as being everything from a "cancer" to "Pac-Man-like." But those messages have failed to diminish the popularity of open-source programs such as Linux among developers and customers, according to a Microsoft memo distributed at a strategy meeting in Berlin in September.