Intel sued over performance

A small group of PC owners has filed a class action lawsuit against Intel, Gateway and HP, alleging that the companies misled them into believing that the Pentium 4 was a superior processor to the Pentium III and AMD`s Athlon, reports PCWorld.

The complainants allege that there is "no benefit" to consumers in choosing the Pentium 4 over the Pentium III. In fact, they go so far as to say that the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III or the AMD Athlon.

The important distinction in this suit appears to be that the complainants are not saying the companies lied about their clock speed, but that despite its higher rating, the Pentium 4 is more sluggish than its predecessors. [More at PCWorld]

Microsoft has withdrawn its free TrueType Web fonts, saying they were being "abused". The company put forward a range of reasons for the withdrawal, including the fact that they already ship with Windows XP and Mac OS, and that most users who want them have already downloaded them.

In a response to Extremetech.com, a company spokesperson said the real reason was that the company found the fonts were being repackaged, modified and shipped with commercial products in violation of the licensing agreement. One of the first organisations to withdraw an application on the strength of this announcement was the Debian/Gnu project which dropped a TrueType application.

Sun`s foray into the world of Linux last week was criticised by experts who were expecting the company to announce significant improvements to the Linux kernel it released, rather than the RedHat 7.2 clone that was released.

The organisation has reacted to criticism, saying that it still plans to develop its own extensions for the next version of Sun Linux. The plan, it seems, is to draw the best of two worlds - Linux and Solaris - and integrate them over time.

Sun CEO Scott McNealy, a regular critic of RedHat, said at LinuxWorld that the company was ensuring that the distribution was Linux Standards Base-complaint and not just RedHat or IBM compliant. [More at TheRegister]