Enhanced performance from smaller chips, promises AMD

While Intel holds court at its Developer Conference in San Jose, AMD has been trumpeting technical innovations of its own - the production of 10 nanometer double-gate transistors. AMD is highlighting its research as the basis for a ten-fold performance leap for the transistors - the basic on/off switches within integrated circuits - that are the basic building blocks of microprocessors. The breakthrough relates to the Fin Field Effect Transistor (FinFET) design, which AMD has now achieved on transistors one sixth of the size of the smallest currently in production. ...more

Red tape blamed for Euro music service delays

Apple and Roxio have both blamed record label bureaucracy for holding up the launches of iTunes Music Store and Napster in Europe. Eddy Cue, Apple's VP of Applications and Internet Services, and Chris Gorog, president & CEO of Roxio, which owns Napster, were speaking at the MidenMet event in Cannes, France. Reuters reports that both said significant obstacles stand in the way of Europena equivalents to the successful US music downloads services. ...more

Counterstruck by CounterStrike Retail v1.0

Kenneth Henry reviews the retail version of CounterStrike, the combat simulation game. Missions CounterStrike (CS) was just another multiplayer mod for the two year old gaming classic Half-Life. Then something happened, not least the labour of love put in by the mod's programming team (full credits are at www. ...more

Microsoft turns up the heat on spammers

Microsoft is claiming success with the widespread adoption of the anti-spam Sender ID initiative. The company is also introducing new smart spam filters which 'learn' how to detect junk email. As the developer of the world's most-used email client in Outlook and the world's biggest web mail service in Hotmail, Microsoft has an interest in promoting methods of keeping the spammers out of the inboxes of its customers as effectively as possible. ...more

Grokster closes down

In what looks to be a final victory for the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the Grokster file swapping service has closed down and has agreed to pay $50 million in damages. Grokster has also agreed to stop distributing its p2p software. The home page of its site now reads 'There are legal services for downloading music and movies. ...more