Articles by Tim McDonald

IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) unveiled a wireless laptop computer on Thursday that features a local area network (LAN) chip built directly on the computer's motherboard. The chip allows users to connect to the Internet and peripherals, such as printers, cell phones and other mobile devices, without using cables "We consider it the Holy Grail of connectivit...

Samsung Electronics, Inc., the world's largest memory chip maker, said Wednesday it expects chip shortages to last another two years and pledged $5.2 billion (US$) to expand production The announcement at a press conference comes after concerns that an oversupply of "dynamic random access memory" (DRAM) chips caused shares in the company to drop dr...

Taking direct aim at chief rival Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE: AMD) on Tuesday rolled out its newest computer chip aimed at lower-cost computer systems, the Duron 750 megahertz processor The Duron competes with Intel's Celeron chip in the "value PC" segment, which is defined as the market for personal computer syst...

The United States is the most litigious country in the world. People sue McDonald's if their coffee is too hot. Prisoners sue if their color TVs are taken away. Doctors, lawyers, big corporations, mom-and-pop corner stores -- no one is immune to being slapped with a contentious lawsuit Except, apparently, Microsoft and all the other high-tech compa...

As the next step toward a new Internet-based strategy, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) unveiled the test version of its latest "Office" software upgrade on Tuesday. The product is designed to serve as a bridge between the old Office productivity suite, which was designed for personal computers, and the company's new focus on Web-based technology Cal...

Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) suffered a setback in its bid to produce ever-speedier microprocessors Monday when it announced it would halt production of its fastest version to date of the Pentium III chip Intel confirmed that its 1.13 gigahertz (GHz) Pentium III chip, which was shipped July 31st, has a flaw that causes some applications to fail under...

Intel Corp. announced Wednesday that it will begin building chips for InfiniBand, the emerging technology that is expected to eventually replace the way servers, networks and storage systems interact The new architecture is being pushed by computer titans IBM, Dell and Microsoft, who want the faster, more efficient technology to replace the current...

Obviously, the next president and vice president of the United States don't want to rock the boat that is speeding the so-called New Economy to deeper and richer waters. So the candidates are mouthing all the right words: "prosperity," "investment," "expansion," and "innovation." However, we in the U.S. have become good at remembering that when pol...

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced Tuesday that Compaq Computer Corp. has been selected to build a supercomputer more powerful than the world's 21 existing supercomputers combined The $200 million (US$) computer is the fifth in the DOE's nuclear weapons simulation program, called Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), which allo...

New data from research firm Media Metrix shows that while the Net is still generally dominated by those with higher incomes, the number of U.S. users with low incomes is growing faster than any other group The Internet presence of those in the under-$25,000 (US$) income bracket grew nearly 50 percent between June 1999 and June 2000, the study said....

A recent poll by the Pew Internet and American Life project showed that younger Internet users are less likely to think "cookies," the electronic tracking devices that marketers use to follow the movements of Internet users, intrude on their personal privacy In fact, the study said, 36 percent of Web surfers under the age of 29 feel electronic trac...

Chip titan Intel Corp. will unveil two new lines of microprocessors this week, including the Pentium 4, the first major upgrade of the Pentium chip since 1995 Intel officials will provide details of the new technology at the Intel Developers Forum, which starts Tuesday in San Jose, California.

A team of University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) scientists said Thursday they have come up with a microscopic switch that will speed development of cheap and super-efficient "molecular machines" that could eventually replace computers "A molecular computer will enable us to do things we cannot even imagine now," said UCLA's James Heath.

With all the recent dot-com burnouts, a lot of young high-tech workers are wondering where they can find stable jobs. Many are shying away from startups. They want secure -- make that rock-solid -- positions on career paths that can be measured in generations rather than months Well, they need look no further than a guy in Bulgaria by the name of G...

A new study from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) says that people believe the Internet has become an important source of political information in the United States, but that its power to actually influence decisions made by elected officials is minimal The findings, part of a larger ongoing project, were timed to be released during...

The glory days of the Internet are finished. Kaput. In terms of raw excitement -- the kind of pulse-racing thrill that comes with discovering something truly original, finding it has infinite possibilities and then actually making it work -- the Internet has cashed in its stock options and gone fishing The multitudes who are wading deeply into e-co...

American Internet giant Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) ran into yet another international dispute this weekend when authorities in the religiously conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia closed down one of its sites, clubs.yahoo.com Saudi authorities told Saudi newspaper al-Eqtisadiah that the site contained pornographic and other morally offensive materi...

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is in the process of selecting a panel of scientists and experts from a major university to scrutinize "Carnivore," the FBI's controversial e-mail surveillance system. The DOJ plans to make the panel's report on the system available to the public "The university rev...

A new poll by Harris Interactive reports that the number of Americans looking to the Internet for health care information has doubled to 98 million since 1998 Fifty-six percent of U.S. adults logged on to the Internet from homes, offices, colleges and other places, the study said. Of that total, 86 percent use the Internet to look up information ei...

There may soon come a time when both small and mid-sized e-commerce businesses will be rooting for the U.S. government to stick its nose directly into the broadband industry, just as it did when the country was being wired for telephone service, and again when it broke up Ma Bell There are currently a handful of bills trapped in the House of Repres...