Title:_____________
January 26, 2009
By John C. Dvorak

    It's no coincidence that the computer industry peaked around the year 2000, went into a serious decline, stabilized at the low point a couple of years ago, and has since collapsed again.
    A confluence of reasons is responsible for this, but when it comes to the industry bringing this on itself, one major event may have taken down the entire business.
    I'm speaking about the announcement of the Itanium processor. This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years, and not because Intel blew too much money on its development or that the chip performed poorly and will never be widely adopted. It was the reaction and subsequent consolidation in the industry that took place once this grandiose chip was preannounced.
    We heard that HP, IBM, Dell, and even Sun Microsystems would use these chips and discontinue anything else they were developing. This included Sun making noise about dropping the SPARC chip for this thing — sight unseen. I say "sight unseen" because it would be years before the chip was even prototyped. The entire industry just took Intel at its word that Itanium would work as advertised in a PowerPoint presentation.
    Because this chip was supposed to radically change the way computers work and become the driving force behind all systems in the future, one promising project after another was dropped. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it?
    The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel — and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
    It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above.

(Adapted from PCMAG.COM)

Title:_____________
January 26, 2009
By John C. Dvorak

    It's no coincidence that the computer industry peaked around the year 2000, went into a serious decline, stabilized at the low point a couple of years ago, and has since collapsed again.
    A confluence of reasons is responsible for this, but when it comes to the industry bringing this on itself, one major event may have taken down the entire business.
    I'm speaking about the announcement of the Itanium processor. This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years, and not because Intel blew too much money on its development or that the chip performed poorly and will never be widely adopted. It was the reaction and subsequent consolidation in the industry that took place once this grandiose chip was preannounced.
    We heard that HP, IBM, Dell, and even Sun Microsystems would use these chips and discontinue anything else they were developing. This included Sun making noise about dropping the SPARC chip for this thing — sight unseen. I say "sight unseen" because it would be years before the chip was even prototyped. The entire industry just took Intel at its word that Itanium would work as advertised in a PowerPoint presentation.
    Because this chip was supposed to radically change the way computers work and become the driving force behind all systems in the future, one promising project after another was dropped. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it?
    The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel — and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
    It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above.

(Adapted from PCMAG.COM)

Title:_____________
January 26, 2009
By John C. Dvorak

    It's no coincidence that the computer industry peaked around the year 2000, went into a serious decline, stabilized at the low point a couple of years ago, and has since collapsed again.
    A confluence of reasons is responsible for this, but when it comes to the industry bringing this on itself, one major event may have taken down the entire business.
    I'm speaking about the announcement of the Itanium processor. This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years, and not because Intel blew too much money on its development or that the chip performed poorly and will never be widely adopted. It was the reaction and subsequent consolidation in the industry that took place once this grandiose chip was preannounced.
    We heard that HP, IBM, Dell, and even Sun Microsystems would use these chips and discontinue anything else they were developing. This included Sun making noise about dropping the SPARC chip for this thing — sight unseen. I say "sight unseen" because it would be years before the chip was even prototyped. The entire industry just took Intel at its word that Itanium would work as advertised in a PowerPoint presentation.
    Because this chip was supposed to radically change the way computers work and become the driving force behind all systems in the future, one promising project after another was dropped. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it?
    The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel — and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
    It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above.

(Adapted from PCMAG.COM)

Title:_____________
January 26, 2009
By John C. Dvorak

    It's no coincidence that the computer industry peaked around the year 2000, went into a serious decline, stabilized at the low point a couple of years ago, and has since collapsed again.
    A confluence of reasons is responsible for this, but when it comes to the industry bringing this on itself, one major event may have taken down the entire business.
    I'm speaking about the announcement of the Itanium processor. This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years, and not because Intel blew too much money on its development or that the chip performed poorly and will never be widely adopted. It was the reaction and subsequent consolidation in the industry that took place once this grandiose chip was preannounced.
    We heard that HP, IBM, Dell, and even Sun Microsystems would use these chips and discontinue anything else they were developing. This included Sun making noise about dropping the SPARC chip for this thing — sight unseen. I say "sight unseen" because it would be years before the chip was even prototyped. The entire industry just took Intel at its word that Itanium would work as advertised in a PowerPoint presentation.
    Because this chip was supposed to radically change the way computers work and become the driving force behind all systems in the future, one promising project after another was dropped. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it?
    The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel — and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
    It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above.

(Adapted from PCMAG.COM)

January 23, 2009
Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide
By JOHN MARKOFF

    A new digital plague has hit the Internet, infecting millions of personal and business computers in what seems to be the first step of a multistage attack. The world’s leading computer security experts do not yet know who programmed the infection, or what the next stage will be.
    In recent weeks a worm, a malicious software program, has swept through corporate, educational and public computer networks around the world. Known as Conficker or Downandup, it is spread by a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability, by guessing network passwords and by hand-carried consumer gadgets like USB keys.
    Experts say it is the K1K1 infection since the Slammer worm exploded through the Internet in January 2003, and it may have infected as many as nine million personal computers around the world.
    Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters.
    Many computer users may not notice that their machines have been infected, and computer security researchers said they were waiting for the instructions to materialize, to determine what impact the botnet will have on PC users. It might operate in the background, using the infected computer to send spam or infect other computers, or it might steal the PC user’s personal information.
    Microsoft rushed an emergency patch to defend the Windows operating systems against this vulnerability in October, yet the worm has continued to spread even as the level of warnings has grown in recent weeks.
    Earlier this week, security researchers at Qualys, a Silicon Valley security firm, estimated that about 30 percent of Windows-based computers attached to the Internet remain vulnerable to infection because they have not been updated with the patch, despite the fact that it was made available in October.
    Unraveling the program has been particularly challenging because it comes with encryption mechanisms that hide its internal workings from those seeking to disable it.
    The program uses an elaborate shell-game-style technique to permit someone to command it remotely. Each day it generates a new list of 250 domain names. Instructions from any one of these domain names would be obeyed. To control the botnet, an attacker would need only to register a single domain to send instructions to the botnet globally, greatly complicating the task of law enforcement and security companies trying to intervene and block the activation of the botnet.
    Several computer security firms said that although Conficker appeared to have been written from scratch, it had parallels to the work of a suspected Eastern European criminal gang that has profited by sending programs known as “scareware” to personal computers that seem to warn users of an infection and ask for credit card numbers to pay for bogus antivirus software that actually further infects their computer.
    One intriguing clue left by the malware authors is that the first version of the program checked to see if the computer had a Ukrainian keyboard layout. If it found it had such a keyboard, it would not infect the machine, according to Phillip Porras, a security investigator at SRI International who has disassembled the program to determine how it functioned.

(Adapted from The New York Times)