Our Roadmap for 2004

Once again we gaze into our crystal ball and predict the trends that we see in the coming year JANUARY Hogmanay shocker! SCO announces it is to extend litigation to those who infringe its 'valuable brand equity' and has sent a 'cease and desist' order to Scotland. Google formally announces it is to issue an IPO 'sometime this year'. Analysts estimate the offering could be worth $20 billion. ...more

AMD falls back into the red

As expected, AMD plunged back into the red in the final quarter of 2004 despite a rise of 29 per cent in processor sales. The company reported a net loss of $30 million compared with a profit of $43.2 million for same quarter in 2003. ...more

NEC-Mitsubishi launches new Diamond displays

Aimed at the professional market, NEC-Mitsubishi has introduced new 19in and 22in CRT monitors. Featuring a SuperBright Diamondtron tube, the models - Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 93SB and Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 230SB (pictured) - support brightness levels up to 250cd/m?. Furthermore, brightness is adjusted automatically according to picture content which, NEC-Mitsubishi believes, make them ideal for Web design and DVD viewing. ...more

Critical security vulnerability found in Skype

A highly critical security vulnerability has been discovered in various flavours of the Skype IP telephony software. A boundary error exists when handling Skype-specific URI types such as 'callto://' and 'skype://'. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow and allows arbitrary code execution when the user clicks on a specially-crafted Skype-specific URL. ...more

Last century codecs for next-gen Blu-ray

As Sony prepares for the introduction of the first commercial Blu-ray products early next year, its film and TV division is planning to release its first movies on the format using a decade-old codec. Don Eklund, senior vice president of advanced technology for Sony Pictures, has revealed that the it will encode with the same MPEG-2 technology used for DVDs. 'Advanced formats don't necessarily improve picture quality,' said Eklund. ...more