Intel adds dual-core to Itanium roadmap

Intel yesterday announced it was pulling its dual-core processor efforts into the design of its Itanium 2 successor, Montecito.

The company also said it plans to ship the Itanium 2 processor, code-named Madison, in the middle of this year.

After Intel`s first two Itanium 64-bit processors met only average success, the company is hoping that familiarity with the underlying design will make the Itanium 2, the next generation, much more of a success.

"We`re seeing great progress with our next-generation Itanium 2 processor, Madison," said Jason Waxman, a marketing manager for Intel`s enterprise processor line. "Madison is on track." [ExtremeTech]

The US Supreme Court yesterday upheld a law extending copyright protection by 20 years, delaying the time when creative works such as Walt Disney`s Mickey Mouse, F Scott Fitzgerald`s novels and George Gershwin`s compositions become public property.

The 7-2 ruling was a victory for the US Justice Department, large media companies and song publishers that argued the longer term was needed to protect a vital industry that contributes more than $500 billion to the US economy.

It dealt a defeat to an Internet publisher and others who challenged the 1998 law for limiting free speech and harming the creative process by locking up material that they said should be in the public domain for all to use without charge.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasised the court was not passing judgment on whether the extension was a wise policy decision and added that the law does not violate free-speech rights. "It protects authors` original expression from unrestricted exploitation," she said. [Reuters]

Next time you sell your old computer think about what you`re giving away. Two MIT graduate students, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, bought 158 used hard drives at second-hand computer stores and online auctions. Of the 129 drives that functioned, 69 still had recoverable files and 49 contained "significant personal information" such as medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and 5 000 credit card numbers. One even had a year`s worth of transactions with account numbers from a cash machine.

It is estimated that about 150 000 hard drives were "retired" last year, according to research firm Gartner Dataquest. Many end up in the dustbin, but many also find their way back onto the market.

Garfinkel and Shelat, who reported their findings in an article to be published on Friday in the journal IEEE Security & Privacy, said that on common operating systems such as Microsoft`s Windows, simply deleting a file, or even following that up by emptying the "trash" folder, does not necessarily make the information irretrievable. Those commands generally delete a file`s name from the directory. But the information can live on until new files overwrite it. [Silicon Valley]

This week on TechNiche:
NVidia readies video-recording boards
Palm changes handwriting recognition software
Nokia woos Linux developers