By Intel expects to ship its first processor with four cores in early 2007, a top executive said on Friday, as the world’s top chipmaker races to win back market share.
Web Development
Fastest DVD Burner Money Can Buy
NEC has not only managed to up the burning speed with its latest drive, it’s also flogging it at a really low price. And we like that.
With the twinkly blue lasers of high density DVD and Blu-ray glimmering on the optical-drive horizon, it’s easy to imagine that manufacturers might not be fussed with further developing the last generation of DVD writers. Not so with NEC.
For starters, the ND3540 can write to every kind of disc bar DVD-RAM – which very few of us really use anyway; DVD-RAM may be a hit in the Far East, but for some reason, it never really took off here. And for every kind of writable DVD disc, the current standard write-speeds have been improved. Dual-layer burning gets a full-on turbocharge, as the ND3540 boosts minus-layer write speeds from 4x to 6x, and actually doubles plus-layer write speeds from 4x to 8x. It even increases CD burning speeds from 24x to 32x. And all this for a piffling 34 quid. That’s economies of scale at work for you – with fabrication plants set up to knock out squillions of units per run, the price, to you sah, is massively reduced.
The drive also comes in a selection of colours – beige, black and silver, depending on the colour of your PC chassis – though it doesn’t actually come with an IDE ribbon-cable, as it’s assumed that you already have one of these. It’s hard to see why you’d plump for anything else, given the abilities of the ND3540; purely and simply, it’s the fastest DVD and CD writer on the market. And it’s $88. If you’re looking for an upgrade or a new disc drive for any reason, this would be our first and only choice. Highly recommended.
NEC 3540 $88 
Verdict: The DVD writer that does it all.
D-Link Launches Web Configurator
The tool has the added advantage of preparing potential customers before they enter their local reseller or retailer. This takes someof he pressure off retailers becase the customer already has a fair idea of what they need before going shopping.
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“The aim of the configurator is quite simple . . . build and design your own network”, said Maurice Famularo, D-Link Marketing Director Australia and New Zealand.
“The SOHO portion is designed for smaller networks of between 2 and 7 computers, which is typical for a home/study or a small office/home office environment. The Small to Medium Business portion is designed for slightly larger less complex networks”, said Famularo.
You can view the Network Configurator on our web sites www.dlink.com.au or www.dlink.co.nz.
$125 Laptop To Be Launched This Month
A $125 laptop which has described as being ideal for schools and children is set to be launched this month.
A $125 laptop which has described as being ideal for schools and children is set to be launched this month. Developed by the famous MIT Media Laboratory in Boston the notebook computer will start appearing in volume in late 2006.
Nicholas Negroponte, the lab’s chairman and co-founder said at the Emerging Technologies Conference in the USA that “In emerging nations, the issue isn’t connectivity,” “That’s not solved, but lots of people are working on it in Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, etc. For education, the roadblock is laptops.” He and his colleagues believe that equipping all children in the world with their own laptop will greatly improve the level of education and help stimulate children to learn outside of school as well as in the classroom.
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The lab expects to unveil a prototype of the $125 laptop at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) on Nov. 17, according to Negroponte. The WSIS is due to be held in Tunis, Tunisia, from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18. He showed slides of the prototype at the MIT event.The 500MHz laptop will run a “skinny version” of the open-source Linux operating system. It will have a two-mode screen, so it can be viewed in color and then by pushing a button or activating software switch to a black-and-white display, which can be viewed in bright sunlight at four times normal resolution, according to Negroponte. He estimates the display will cost around $35.
The laptop can be powered either with an AC adapter or via a wind-up crank, which is stored in the housing of the laptop where the hinge is located. The laptops will have a 10 to 1 crank rate, so that a child will crank the handle for one minute to get 10 minutes of power and use. When closed, the hinge forms a handle and the AC cord can function as a carrying strap, according to Negroponte. The laptops will be ruggedized and probably made of rubber, he said. They will have four USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports, be Wi-Fi- and cell phone enabled and come with 1GB of memory. Each laptop will act as a node in a mesh peer-to-peer ad hoc network, Negroponte said, meaning that if one laptop is directly accessing the Internet, when other machines power on, they can share that single online connection.
The lab will initially target Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa and Thailand, according to Negroponte, as well as the U.S. state of Massachusetts, which has just committed to equipping every schoolchild with a laptop. Negroponte hopes to start mass production of some 5 million to 15 million laptops for those markets towards the end of 2006. Come December 2007, he estimated production of the laptops at between 100 million and 150 million, three times the number of annual shipments of commercial laptops.
Negroponte launched a nonprofit spin-off from the lab to spearhead the development of the notebook at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. The nonprofit is called One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC. The lab and OLPC are working with a number of key partners including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Google Inc., News Corp. and Red Hat Inc. on developing the laptop, according to Negroponte.
“I’ve told the governments that our price will float and go down over time,” Negroponte said. “$100 is still too expensive.” Each government will need to pay for one million laptops in advance to ensure the lab and its partners can achieve the necessary scale to persuade companies to mass produce the machines, he added. He didn’t provide any further details on how exactly the vast number of machines will be produced and shipped to their final destinations.
The laptop can be used in a variety of ways as a computer, an electronic book, a television and a writing or drawing tablet, according to Negroponte.
One issue the lab is particularly sensitive to is the grey market for computers, Negroponte said. “It’s a big deal for us whether laptops vanish in customs or are stolen,” he said. “We want to have a machine that’s so distinctive it’d be like stealing a post office truck.” The lab is even thinking of having each child’s name engraved on each laptop as an additional theft deterrent, he added.
Another obstacle is the online access schoolchildren in repressive regimes will gain. “I do tell governments we’re selling you a Trojan horse,” Negroponte said, adding it’s really up to the children as to what they access from the Internet. The huge issue he sees with the technology is how education curricula around the globe will change in response to the introduction of the laptops and Web access. “It’s something that will take decades to sort out properly,” he said.
As to children accessing pornography, the lab is working on how best to block harmful online content, he said. However, Negroponte asks people not to blame the medium. “Pornography uses the printed page, but [Johannes] Gutenberg [the inventor of the printing press] isn’t getting much flak,” he quipped.
MIT Media Lab has been involved in a number of initiatives to provide schoolchildren with laptops in the past, in Senegal and in Costa Rica and Negroponte has his own projects in Cambodia, but this is the first global push for the lab with a mobile computer developed from scratch
Intel Invests US$3m To Boost Clonebook Sales
Intel is teaming up with leading Taiwan notebook manufacturers Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics and Asustek Computer to form an initiative to push clone notebook sales in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific markets
The Mobile Alliance (MA) program is set for launch this month, according to sources among members of MA.Intel has initially invested US$3 million in the project, and the goal of the MA is to ship four million clone notebooks and reach US$2 billion in sales, the sources said.
According to MA members from
Under the MA alliance, Intel is expected to release four million CPUs – one million of which will be released in the channel for barebones units, while another three million will go to the notebook makers – to supply the MA shipments this year, the members pointed out.
Synnex Technology International was initially chosen as the distribution partner for Intel’s MA in Asia and the
Although Brightpoint usually specializes in handset distribution, the sources stated that the initial sales scale of the alliance is limited and a smaller distributor is preferred to leading distributors Ingram Micro and Tech Data.
Intel’s Mobile Alliance is targeting an eventual market share of 30-35% in the notebook market and a 60-70% share of the desktop replacement market. However, a December 2005 article cited
COMMENT: Why EMC Should Set VMware Free
EMC shareholders concerned about the stagnant nature of the company’s shares should open up a new document file right now. They should address it to CEO Joe Tucci, and they should title it “Spinoff VMware and unlock precious shareholder value.”
EMC has done a remarkable job of posting double-digit revenue gains over the past two years, while most other hardware rivals have struggled to achieve any level of consistency. Investors, however, have not rewarded EMC for this performance with its share price hovering close to $14 during the two-year span. Concerns about EMC’s inability to grow software revenue without major acquisitions and to defend a slower-growing hardware business haunt the company.
This makes a spinoff of EMC’s VMware subsidiary so attractive.
In its most recent quarter, VMware reported revenue of more than $100m for the first time in its history. EMC noted that it’s “continuing to be one of the fastest-growing major software businesses in the world.” No other start-up in the server software realm enjoys such a stranglehold on the market leader position or the incredible margins VMware achieves by selling its products for thousands of dollars per processor.
As a comparison, Red Hat recently posted second quarter revenue of $65.7m. That marked a 42 per cent year-over-year rise and sent Red Hat’s shares up to 20 per cent higher in just 24 hours.
One year ago, VMware pulled in $61m, which was a 200 per cent rise over its pervious third quarter. Moving from $61m to this year’s $100m also gives VMware more than a 60 per cent year-over-year revenue surge – far better than say, Red Hat.
At $100m, VMware also makes more money slicing and dicing Red Hat’s operating system than Red Hat makes selling and supporting its flagship product. That’s a huge edge for VMware, as its proven to be one of the few software makers that can capitalize on the open source model. The rest of the Linux server money goes to hardware makers such as IBM, HP and Dell.
Reasons to stay at home
Without question, VMware has benefitted by becoming part of EMC.
VMware’s management has always been engineer rich. CEO Diane Green is an incredibly successful businesswoman holding, with her husband, more than a 50 per cent stake in VMware, but she’s a geek at heart. Before the EMC buy, VMware spent little on marketing and depended on word of mouth.
In addition, the nature of the server partitioning market demands that customers trust that their software supplier will be around for a long time. You’re not going to slice up hundreds of systems and pray that VMware stays in business or has the support you need when something goes wrong. You have to know that for certain.
EMC helps on both fronts by pumping VMware full of marketing funds, increasing the size of its support staff and putting a big, trusted name behind the products. EMC gives VMware a more mature, solid presence.
LG To Deliver Dual-Format HD DVD/Blu-Ray
LG Electronics has announced it plans to launch a next-generation DVD player that will bridge the yawning gap between two competing formats by playing both HD DVD and Blu-ray.
AMD Flagship Goes Dual-Core
AMD has announced the immediate availability of the AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 dual-core processor, billed by the company as the most powerful PC processor ever released.
The FX-60 is the first processor in the FX line to feature dual-core processors, and features a clock speed of 2.6GHz and two 1MB L2 caches for faster processing.
The dual-core processor will boost performance in applications that are designed for multi-threading, such as games and image editing programs.
Incorporating AMD’s most advanced processor technology, the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor line features the first Windows-compatible 64-bit PC processor designed specifically for PC enthusiasts, who can play games with realistic physics, lighting and sound previously only reserved for the world of simulations, or create and manipulate digital media like a pro, claims the company.
Indeed, initial benchmarks printed on the web seem to indicate this is he most powerful processor available.The FX-60 is also potentially the last to be made for Socket 939 due to imminent changes to the Athlon 64 architecture. These include improved memory support for DDR2.
The AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 dual-core processor will be priced between $1700 and $1750.
AMD has no local website, however, the FX-60 can be purchased via AMD’s distributors. See www.legendmemory.com and www.avnet.com.au/em/
Linksys Finally Enters Mass Retail
Cisco owned Wireless group Linksys is set to get aggressive in a major push to dominate the VOIP market while grabbing more share of the home and SMB market through new reseller deals.
Linksys are getting aggressive. During a visit to Australia Senior Vice President Victor Tsao said that the company intends to dominate in the fast growing VOIP market while carving out further share of the lifestyle and SMB technology markets. Today the company announced deals with Powerhouse and Engin in the VOIP market.
Linksys opened its Australian doors well over a year ago, but despite being the leading brand in the United States with over 50% market share they found themselves largely frozen out of the domestic market. Harvey Norman turned down the opportunity to carry the gear and the only major partner Linksys could find was Coles Myer subsidiary, Harris Technology.
SHR understands Harris has done reasonably well with the gear, but the lack of a major mass retail partner and the departure of Brian Allsop as country manager for Linksys caused problems. It took a little while, but Linksys eventually replaced him with Graeme Reardon which it poached away from his role as National Sales Manager for D-Link.
It’s taken Reardon nearly six months to deliver on the latest deal, an agreement with Woolworth’s division Dick Smith Electronics.
Said Tsao”It has taken us a while but we are now up and running with a powerful range of products for the lifestyle technology and SMB markets. We have a UN equaled depth of expertise in these markets and I am confident that we will grow market share by the sheer depth and range of products that we are able to deliver over our competitors. One are where I am confident that we will be #1 is in the home and SMB office VOIP markets. We have the technology and we are now building the relationships to deliver the products to market”
The entry into the seventeen Dick Smith PowerHouse stores came about through an agreement with Ingram Micro. If all goes well the plan is to take the stock into the 164 Dick Smith Electronics stores nationally by end of the year.
“This is a very special day for Linksys,” said Graeme Reardon, Linksys regional manager for Australia and New Zealand.
In a banner day for Linksys the company has also announced a co-branding deal with VoIP provider Engin. The deal will see engin reselling Linksys routers equipped with phone ports and Quality of Service (QoS) features.
Targeting the SOHO and SMB markets and priced from $219 the new routers will ultimately be made available to engin’s authorised retailers, resellers and wholesale channel partners.
The deal comes about as the result of Cisco’s acquisition of Sipura Technology in April. Engin’s customers were using Sipura Technology’s SPA-2000 products.
10GBase-T Forces a Re-Think in Cabling TCO
With the IEEE 802.3an 10GBASE-T standards not far away, Carrie Higbie of structured cabling maker The Siemon Company discusses the TCO pros and cons of using Cat6 or better cabling plants now.