Problems continue to dog users who have installed the collection of security and other patches and fixes for Windows 2000 that Microsoft released in late June.

Microsoft is planning to reissue the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update rollup that it first launched in late June.

While the company did not specify a reason for the planned reissue, a number of Windows 2000 users who have installed the download have been complained of a variety of problems, ranging from incompatibility with third-party security applications, to network-printing issues.

Source: microsoft-watch

The digital-music field may soon be getting a bit more crowded. Internet retailer Amazon.com reportedly is moving toward offering a digital-music service, putting it into competition with the likes of Apple Computer, Napster and RealNetworks.

The Wall Street Journal reports Amazon has held talks with record-label executives in the past two weeks about licensing music.

Citing people familiar with the discussions, the Journal says Amazon is talking about a music offering that would include options such as song-by-song downloads and a monthly subscription service. The expectation is that Amazon wants the service online later this year.

Source: AP

Wikipedia, the Web encyclopaedia written and edited by Internet users from all over the world, plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying Friday.

In an interview with German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Wales, who launched Wikipedia with partner Larry Sanger in 2001, said it needed to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing open access to improve entries.

“There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we’d freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed,” he said.

Citing a recent example of vandalism, Wales recalled how following the election of the new
Pope Benedict in April, a user substituted the pontiff’s photo on the Wikipedia site with that of the evil emperor from the Star Wars film series.

Source: Reuters

Fraudsters can get cash from ATMs because some banks fail to scan security codes in the magnetic stripes on cards, according to Gartner. Counterfeit cards are made when consumers, tricked by phishing, disclose account numbers and PINs.

According to the research firm, ATM fraud is on the rise, affecting an estimated three million US consumers in the year to May 2005, and generating losses of $2.75bn. The figures were based on a survey of 5,000 US adults.

Source: The Register

ActiveGrid Inc. this week released the 1.0 version of its open-source grid application server and application-building tools. Both are meant to help companies rapidly build Web applications that encompass user interactions and transactions and can rapidly scale to handle changing levels of Internet traffic.

Instead of designing a Web application for a given two-way or four-way server, the Lamp Application Server 1.0 is designed to run on a cluster of machines that can be expanded as necessary, ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared says. The 1.0 version performs application load balancing across the cluster.

ActiveGrid, which has received $13 million in venture-capital funding, was founded to design software that converts any set of Intel-processor machines into a grid, instead of building custom software for grid management, Yared says.

Lamp is the open-source code stack that includes compatible versions of
Linux, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database, and scripting languages Perl, Python, and PHP.

ActiveGrid is designed to work with lighter-weight technologies, such as Perl, Python, and PHP, and Web services built using the Web Services Description Language and Simple Object Access Protocol standards. Use of those technologies should allow a company to develop most of a transactional application without resorting to Java 2 Enterprise Edition or Microsoft .Net’s C#, Yared says.

Source: TechWeb

IBM will announce on Friday the availability of its fourth generation of chips based on silicon germanium technology.

The new semiconductors, named 8HP and 8WL, are twice as fast as the previous generation of chips. The previous generation chip ran at 100 GHz, while this new generation of chips will run at a maximum speed of 200 GHz.

Silicon germanium, or SiGe, technology can boost performance and reduce the power consumption of chips that go into cellular phones and other wireless devices. Though SiGe chips lead to high performance, the technology is more expensive than plain old silicon, a factor that has limited its popularity.

Source: News.com