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The Bugbear virus infects computers running the Windows operating system and an unpatched version of Internet Explorer 5.5, according to an advisory posted by security company Symantec. A flaw in MIME (the multipurpose Internet mail extensions) lets a malicious program attached to an e-mail message execute when the text of the message appears in Outlook. The software problem was patched by Microsoft almost 18 months ago, but some users apparently have not updated their computers.

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"A reasonably prudent Internet user in circumstances such as these would not have known or learned of the existence of the licensing terms before responding to defendants' invitation to download the free software," the judges wrote.

Monday's decision could undermine the enforcement of online pacts, sometimes known as click-wrap licenses, and could lead companies to rethink the use of agreements that customers are not required to actively click on.

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October 1, 2002; Taipei, Taiwan - Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS) today announces monthly revenue for September of NT$ 1,667M (~US$49M) based on the company's preliminary estimate. This is a 84% increase over September 2001, and a 28% improvement from August 2002. The 2002 year-to-date revenue is estimated at NT$10,870M, a 49% increase over the same period a year ago.

SiS stated that both the chipset unit shipment and sales hit record high in September. Growth from new products, including the SiS648 core logic chipsets and graphic chip Xabre series add momentum to the existing product lines.

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Intel will up the stakes later this quarter with a 3GHz Pentium 4 containing Hyperthreading, a performance-enhancing technology that lets a chip handle more transactions simultaneously, similar to how a two-processor computer works.

Still, the performance race is somewhat theoretical from a consumer's perspective. In recent months, AMD has announced chips but then released them later and in lower quantities than initially expected. In the first half of the year, AMD announced chips the same day that PC makers began to sell computers containing them.

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Independent validation was undertaken to show that the benchmark tests were objective--a common concern in the industry. AMD, for example, said earlier this year that benchmarks from BapCo were altered to favor Intel.

Andersen has largely been dissolved because of a series of accounting scandals.

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New Red Hat Bluecurve: Conveniently organized, user-friendly desktop with numerous graphical enhancements and icons.
OpenOffice.org: Most advanced open source office suite.
Robust suite of configuration tools: Tools to set up configurations for several system services and settings, including firewall, peripherals, Apache, Samba, and small network settings.
Personal firewall tool: Graphical tool to easily customize your security settings.
Red Hat Network integration: Point-and-click utilities to monitor and integrate existing updates for your system.
Upgraded core components: Updated C compiler, toolchain, and kernel deliver the latest Linux technologies.
Web server powered by Apache 2.0: Powerful, flexible, secure open source Web server that powers the Internet.
New accessibility features: GUI support for Braille and mobility-limited language interfaces.

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Several manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard, are evaluating ways to use an offshoot of the Universal Serial Bus 2.0 specification called USB On-the-Go. Using it, a person could plug a handheld or digital camera straight into a printer to produce a photo. PDAs also could swap documents directly or back up data by connecting directly to a portable hard drive. The technology is also expected to be used in cell phones and MP3 players.

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In IBM's technique, the nanotubes are not damaged. Researchers take a crystal formed from layers of silicon and carbon and heat it to 1,650 degrees centigrade. The silicon evaporates, leaving an exposed layer of carbon. Because the carbon formerly was bonded to the silicon, it is freed to bond with another material. In this case, it bonds with itself, curling up to form a tube.

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He expects the displays will initially draw interest largely for use in game machines but will eventually be used widely in products from PCs to TVs.

Mikio Katayama, general manager of Sharp's mobile LCD group, said volume production of the screens will start within the next few months and the first products using them will hit the market early next year.

Three-dimensional displays that need no special glasses have been around for some time, Bold said. But the main challenge was making it possible to switch between the ordinary 2D mode and 3D with the push of a button, while providing the same image resolution in the 2D mode as in a standard display without 3D capability.

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PC makers have been pulling back the warranties on their computers in an effort to reduce costs, and hard-drive makers Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital are about to follow suit. The three drive companies, which combined have about 85 percent of the drive market, will alter their warranties from three years to one year. The changes will only be for drives sold for desktop PCs and some consumer-electronics products, which traditionally have one-year warranties or less, according to representatives from all three companies.

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Lindows and AOL have a lot in common. They both have spent time in court with Microsoft. Both on the other end of lawsuits. A deal makes a lot of sense for Lindows and AOL. Lindows gets instant access to 35 million AOL customers and AOL gets software they own (Netscape, AIM, etc.) distributed to the public without having to deal with Microsoft.

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Even though the software, due to appear in devices Nov. 7, can match against the many different types of handwriting in its database, it can't adapt to an individual user's style of writing and learn, for example, that the person never crosses his or her T's.

That's been a source of some debate within the company. Chief Software Architect Bill Gates is pushing to let the operating system begin to recognize an individual's handwriting quirks and expand the database on that user's machine. But others within Microsoft say such a capability could do more harm than good, and the company would do better to just update the operating system's master database periodically.

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Red Hat 8 includes the OpenOffice software package, an open-source answer to Microsoft's popular Office package; Ximian's Evolution e-mail and calendar software; and Red Hat's new "Bluecurve" desktop interface, a customization of the traditional KDE or Gnome interfaces. Red Hat 8 uses the Mozilla Web browser but no longer includes the Netscape browser.

But users who want to play digital music MP3 files will need to look beyond Red Hat, which removed software to play files in that audio format because of patent-license issues.

Bluecurve is Red Hat's attempt to make the KDE and Gnome interfaces look the same, bridging a divide in the Linux universe, said Erik Troan, Red Hat's director of product marketing, in an interview Wednesday.

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Today’s fast-paced “fly-through” applications and games will see significant improvements in overall performance due to the doubled AGP 8X speed. By combining the performance and scalability of AGP8X GPU and a high performance 128MB DDR frame buffer; the GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP 8X GPU delivers more than two times the graphics performance of competitive products.

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Linux, like the Unix operating system on which it's based and other operating systems, has had its share of security problems, but often the problems come with higher-level software such as the SNMP service for letting administrators manage servers or the Apache program for sending Web pages to browsers. Guardian Digital aims to stomp out many of those problems by what software is used, testing it with the other software and in some cases writing new programs, said Chief Executive Dave Wreski.

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Phoenix is similar to other offshoots of the Mozilla project, including Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, according to the site. But the browser is written using XUL (Extensible User Interface Language), and it's designed to be cross-platform. It works on Windows and Linux operating systems.

Like its predecessor, Phoenix comes with some bugs, however. The browser doesn't allow people running Linux to tab through forms, for example. The development group is already working on a successor to Phoenix, which will include an updated wallet feature and download manager, among other improvements.