US Attorney probes Jobs' stock options

The US Attorney's Office in San Francisco has confirmed that it has begun a criminal investigation into stock option grants at Apple. Specifically, prosecutors are examining the 7.5 million options supposedly given to Apple CEO Steve Jobs at a special meeting October 2001. ...more

AMD launches three new dual core Opteron chips

AMD has upped the ante in the battle for the next generation of x86 class servers with the announcements of three new versions of its dual core Opteron range. The three new chips span the range from one-way devices for workstations through to a version aimed at large eight way enterprise class servers. The three new parts announced are the Model 880 for up to eight-way enterprise servers that equates to a 16-core machine while the Model 280 is targeted at high performance dual-processor workstations and servers. ...more

Company calls on JPEG2000 supporters to help 'save' standard

Image processing software developer, ER Mapper, is turning to the JPEG2000 user community in its bid to fight off another legal challenge from Lizardtech, a company which claims the company's image compression technology infringes its patents. Lizardtech claims that ERM infringes US patent #5,710,835. This technology was originally developed by Los Alamos National Laboratories, and licensed subsequently licenced by Lizardtech. ...more

An MP3 and digicam combo

Comdex is usually a major platform on which to announce new products, and this year is no exception. In the unlikely pairing of digicam and MP3 player, LG has announced the Digital Music Eye. Its 2Mb built in memory will give you 30 VGA-quality pics, but you'll have to store your tunes on a separate 64Mb MultiMediaCard. ...more

Google still leads Web search but rivals catching up fast

Google remains the world's favourite search engine although rivals Yahoo! and MSN are catching up fast according to analysts Keynote Systems. 'Google is the king of customer experience in the search engine industry, but Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves are improving,' said Dr. Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote. ...more