Intel Corp. over the weekend cut prices on its 64-bit line of desktop processors.

The Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker reduced the cost of its five single-core Pentium 4 6xx chips from 20.15 percent to 33.72 percent.

All feature 2MB of Level 2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus, with the key difference being the frequency of the chips. The largest price cut was in the 3.6GHz Pentium 4 660, which dropped from $605 per 1,000 units shipped to $401. Pricing on the 3.4GHz 650 was slashed 31.92 percent, from $401 to $273.

The 3.8GHz 670 was cut by 28.91 percent, to $605, followed by the 3GHz 630, to $178, and the 3.2GHz 640, to $218.

Intel has begun pushing its dual-core chips, and started rolling out the capability in its Pentium line, first with the high-end Pentium Extreme Edition in April, and then with the Pentium D chip in May.

Source: eWeek

IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities, Big Blue said Monday.

The contribution would allow the addition of dynamic hypertext markup language accessibility technology to version 1.5 of Firefox, the company said. With this technology, Web pages can be magnified, automatically narrated or navigated from a keyboard instead of from a mouse, IBM said. For instance, the amount of tabbing required to navigate a spreadsheet can be minimized for people with mobility disabilities.

In addition, developers can work on “rich Internet applications” tailored for the disabled or elderly. Such applications can run without requiring people to install additional programs on their PCs.

IBM has already helped integrate into Firefox support for Microsoft Active Accessibility, an industry standard for access technologies such as screen readers, which read software and content aloud.

Source: News.com

The Recording Industry Ass. of America has acknowledged that P2P file-sharing is less of a threat to music sales than bootleg CDs.

The RIAA’s chief executive, Mitch Bainwol, last week said music fans acquire almost twice as many songs from illegally duplicated CDs as from unauthorised downloads, Associated Press reports.

According to Bainwol, in turn citing figures from market watcher NPD, 29 per cent of the recorded music obtained by listeners last year came from content copied onto recordable media. Only 16 per cent came from illegal downloads.

Legal downloads accounted for four per cent of music acquisitions, while official CDs accounted for almost 50 per cent of the total.

Source: The Register

A US district court has ruled against Google in a trade mark action over the sale of the terms “Geico�? and “Geico Direct�? in AdWords, its keyword advertising service. The judge found that there was infringement where the terms were used in the text of sponsored ads.

Car insurance firm GEICO sued both Google and Yahoo! subsidiary Overture in May 2004 over the sale of its registered trade marks as sponsored search terms in the keyword advertising services of both search engines.

According to GEICO, the court has stayed the trial for 30 days to give the parties an opportunity to settle. If the parties do not settle, the trial will continue on the question of damages and on the issue of who is liable: Google or Google’s advertisers.

Source: The Register

A Florida man who ran a bulk e-mail company was convicted on Friday of stealing more than 1.5 billion data files from Acxiom Corp. in what federal officials said was one of the largest recorded cases of data theft.

Scott Levine, 46, of Boca Raton, Florida, will be sentenced January 6 after a U.S. district court jury found him guilty on 120 counts of theft by computer, two counts of fraud and one count of obstruction of justice.

Each theft count carries a possible sentence of five years and a $250,000 fine while each fraud count could result in 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The obstruction count could bring a 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine.

Jurors acquitted Levine of money-laundering and conspiracy charges.

Prosecutors said Levine, during a 16-month period that ended in August 2003, exploited a security weakness in Acxiom’s system to steal the files, which he hoped to use to inflate the value of Snipermail.com Inc., his bulk email company, which is now out of business.

Source: eWeek