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The troubles for AOL started on June 3, 1999, when "scovey" posted a message accusing Nam Tai's president of "manipulat[ing] the stock [of] this and other smaller companies." Then on Jan. 8, 2001, "scovey" posted another message, titled "sinking again." The message, according to court records, including the following sentence: "This low tech crap that they produce is in an extremely competitive and low profitability industry. I see see-sawing of the stock with no real direction."

Within 18 days, Nam Tai filed a complaint in California Superior Court claiming that this message was part of a concerted effort involving 51 other anonymous scribblers to "manipulate the price of Nam Tai stock to their advantage." The Hong Kong maker of electronic components alleges the defendants committed libel and violated California's unfair business practice statutes. It sought injunctive relief, and compensatory and punitive damages.

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The latest crop of gadgets is set to debut at a high-profile launch in New York on Thursday. Weighing 3 to 4 pounds and costing north of $2,000, the PCs use a specialized version of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system that's optimized for pen input.

Merrill Lynch Chief Technology Officer John McKinley said the current crop of tablets running Microsoft's software is by far the best pen-based computing effort to date. However, he doesn't see sales taking off right away. Among the reasons is that, as good as Microsoft's handwriting recognition is, it still has just as much trouble deciphering bad script as any other handwriting recognition program.

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The list, which has been making its way through newsgroups and discussion forums frequented by programmers, enumerates 101 of Mozilla's capabilities that author Neil Deakin says Microsoft's market-leading IE browser lacks, including the ability to navigate numerous browser windows through tabs and the ability to block pop-up advertisements.

Deakin, a 28-year-old Toronto resident, contributes occasionally to the Mozilla open-source project and maintains a tutorial on Extensible User Interface Language (XUL), a Mozilla technology for creating the browser interface with common Web development languages rather than native computer code.

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A report issued Wednesday by Gartner Dataquest predicts that the machines, based on a new version of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, will account for just 1 percent of worldwide notebook shipments in 2003, for a total of about 425,000 tablet PCs.

While they may find wider adoption in niche markets that are currently using pen-based tablets, "only the bravest" will have adopted tablet PCs widely by the end of 2003, Gartner Dataquest vice president Leslie Fiering said in a release.

Research firm IDC also predicts that tablet PCs will get off to a relatively slow start, selling about 575,000 units in the United States in 2003 and about 1 million units in 2004. The total U.S. notebook market will be about 13 million units in 2003, IDC predicts, about 8 percent of which will be ultraportables.

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See, the really neat thing about having an acrylic PSU mod is the fact that the light spreads to the edges, therefore the edges basically glow. Notice how the edges are a bright blue and the PSU mod itself isn't?"

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Both the cards that we looked at today performed reasonably well. Although we must say that we were slightly disappointed with Gainward's overclocking. Even though it performed identical to the MSI, we have this image formed of Gainward that its amongst the best overclockers- and this is based on our previous experience with their cards.

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Overall the Soltek SL-75FRV has been very stable throughout the testing and benchmarking. While the DDR400 scores are disappointing this isn't isolated to Soltek boards by any means but a bug within the KT400 chipset. The DDR333 scores are on par with other KT333 based motherboards however take into consideration the entire package and you'll see that Soltek is offering quite a package here for under $100.

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To say that I am excited about this card would be an understatement. Not since the days of the Voodoo5 5500 have we had a serious contender for the NVIDIA speed crown. Don't get me wrong, I love NVIDIA's products, and own several of them; but serious competition only makes the market better for all of us.

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While it might be a bare product without any extra features, the stylish silver PCB and overclocking capabilities would make it a great hit in a computer used just for show purposes. Even though it’s based on the older i845E chipset, with a high quality stick of memory, it will be able outperform most of the i845PE boards available on the market.

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NVIDIA plans to offer the AGP 8x part of the Ti 4200 mainly to give users the choice of a performance graphics card at an attractive price point. Ideally, buyers of the nForce2 platform can immediately take advantage of the AGP 8x interface using the GeForce4 Ti 4200-8x.

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Its unique design not only allows it to obtain impressive levels of performance, but may also make it a collector's item in its own right; the OTES cooling system isn't found anywhere else. Lets you think otherwise though, not only is the OTES system pretty, but it also has a lot of muscle.

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The consumer electronics giant's semiconductor division on Monday debuted the main guts of a DVD+RW drive, including an integrated chipset, optical pickup unit, firmware and reference design, that can record speeds up to 8X. The company will license and sell components for the drive and expects manufacturers to have them available in the first half of next year.

"In the PC world, time to market is everything, and the rational here is to help drive makers to hit those tight windows and give them the quickest time to market," said Roger Gregory, a marketing manager in the company's semiconductor group.

Philips holds key patents for the DVD+RW format and stands to make significant revenue from royalty fees if the DVD+RW format becomes the dominant one in the market. The company has been one of the major promoters of the DVD+RW format along with Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and other members of the DVD+RW Alliance. The other major formats in the DVD-rewritable market include DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM, which are being promoted by another industry group called the DVD Forum.

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Ollila said the era is over in which Nokia could focus purely on new designs and features for its basic phones. Of the color screen models it expects to ship in 2003, Nokia said roughly 10 million will double as personal organizers, offering services such as e-mail and calendars.

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I used to run a self assembled watercooling system and while it was a lot of fun to setup and run, I have to say I enjoyed the simplicity of hooking up the QuietPower hardware to my system. Attaching a pair of waterblocks is something anyone can do and shouldn't be scared of. Water and PC's really do go together if done properly and it's done properly here.

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And amid the plastic pumpkins and reflective child safety vests and cheap costumes I found a shelf full of lighting effects. Most were pretty typical blacklights or just oddly-shaped bulbs, or otherwise pretty pedestrian items. But one item jumped out at me--a small plasma globe. It had a plastic witch attached to it, or there were some with a skull instead. But in a fraction of a second, I had formulated a plan. I decided it was worth ten bucks to see if this idea was really too crazy to work. The item came with an instruction sheet that warned against using it in the vicinity of any microchips.

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Well just like I expected the waterblock is more waterflow resistant then the GeForce 3 block but this doesn't seem to affect the real world performance by much. I think it's because the tunnel in the waterblock is so short that a faster waterflow wouldn't do much.

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You might think we sound like a bunch of “ATI Fan-boys” from this review, but it’s hard to suppress the hardware-lust inside of us after spending a great deal of time with the coolest desktop video card ever made – and until NVIDIA does something to top the AIW 9700 Pro, that lust and love will stay put.

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In a move to boost the performance of four-way or greater servers without necessarily boosting their cost, Intel on Monday introduced the latest iteration of its Xeon Processor MP. The new chip is faster than its predecessor, features twice the integrated Level 3 cache memory, and is the first Xeon Processor MP manufactured on the company's 0.13-micron process.

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W32.Braid, also known as PE.Brid, can spread to PCs running any version of Microsoft Windows. People who use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 and 5.5 may find that their computers automatically become infected, because Braid uses an old flaw in Internet Explorer to automatically execute the attachment that carries it when the e-mail message is viewed. Patching the program with Service Pack 2 will solve the problem, Network Associates said in its advisory on the virus.

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AOL's new offer includes the AIM Enterprise Gateway, which allows system administrators to manage the use of messaging software from behind a corporate firewall. It can be configured with a private domain service that allows administrators to manage IM screen names from corporate directories.

It will also let managers keep tighter control of employees' use of the service, letting mangers log, audit and create reports on all AIM communications so they can be monitored for legal, regulatory and accounting compliance.

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Market acceptance for the ASROCK motherboards is said to be rather strong, as the products are priced at around US$45-50, only a few dollars higher than motherboards from Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS). More importantly, sources at Asustek said that no confusion between the positioning of ASROCK and Asustek motherboards has been reported.

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No, this was not leaked on purpose.

Yes, we are upset about it, and it will have some impact on how we deal with some companies in the future, but nothing drastic is going to change in terms of what support is going to be available.

Making any judgements from a snapshot intended for a non-interactive demo is ill advised.

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This board has an outstanding array of features and is very much the overclocker's friend with a mostly intuitive and highly flexible BIOS to configure. We didn't have any overwhelming problems with it, and the only instabilities we ran into that weren't directly related to over-overclocking the board were with software and not hardware. The onboard 10/100/1000 adapter is a huge plus, and the Firewire and USB 2.0 support make it ideal for media transfer and conversion applications. Once Serial-ATA devices enter the market, this board will become even more useful. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a cornerstone to a video production workstation, gaming machine, or just general all-around system.

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The ASUS V9280S is a good card with a higher than nVidia reference core and clock speed- although we would've liked to see it overclock more. Hitting 300/650 is not bad at all for a Ti4200 but we have seen the older Ti4200s reach higher core and the memory on the ASUS is spec'd at 650, so it would have been nice to see those Copper heatsinks pull at least another 20-30MHz.

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As you have seen from the benchmarks, this video card leads the other Ti4200s in almost every test due to its higher default clockspeeds. When overclocked to 315/686, it even surpasses the flagship model Ti4600. That’s something no other Ti4200 has been able to do as of yet.

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Considered in isolation, the SOYO P4X400 DRAGON is a good motherboard, but when considered with respect to the other Pentium 4 chipsets currently on offer, it is decidedly average.

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Temperature controlled fans on heatsinks are not exactly commonplace. They have potential to cool effectively and quietly, but few hardware reviewers take any serious notice. Is it because they don't work?

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The Radeon 9700 Pro made a mockery out of the benchmarks we've thrown at it today. Whether or not you need it will depend on a lot of things. I've made it very clear in our bottlenecking article that with great video card power, you'd better have the CPU to back it up.

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We were truly blown-away by this board from start to finish. Its rich feature set has no rival in the current market, and it proved itself to be a pleasure to use, and a breeze to operate throughout out tests. And, as if that isn't enough, it's Overclocking performance is excellent, and will allow users to extract every drop of power from their CPUs.

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The Ti4200 GeForce4 is right now pretty much the only option available to the performance crowd not willing to shell out the $350+ for a Radeon 9700, so it sells itself.