Intel's on the Skulltrail of AMD's Quad FX

Intel has dropped a bombshell on AMD by announcing its own dual-socket PC platform aimed at the enthusiast market. As quickly as the detonation was delivered at the Intel Developer Forum, it was over: the company's senior vice president, Eric Kim, gave few details aside from showing a stock slide of two processors side-by-side and giving the codename of the new platform - Skulltrail. It's an appropriate name given that it looks likely to murder AMD's Quad FX dual-socket platform. ...more

MyDoom-O accidentally trips up Google

A fresh variant of the MyDoom virus is quickly creating a seething mass of infected machines collectively targeting Google, crippling the search service for a number of hours. Email scanning company MessageLabs says it encountered 23,000 copies of MyDoom-O within the first five hours following the discovery. Sophos too says it has received many reports of the new version. ...more

Press fooled by dummy iPod phone

Media reports that pictures of the rumoured iPod phone have been leaked are causing red faces as the purported pictures are nothing more than a mock up. Reports in PDA France about a front cover picture of French title 20 Minutes magazine in, and some UK publications, are claiming that the pictures represent the final version of an iPod phone that will be launched by Apple at the forthcoming Apple Expo in Paris. But the pictures are nothing more than a mock up designed for the cover of the UK's leading Apple title, MacUser, published in May this year. ...more

HP and Phillips announce DVD plans

Two members of the DVD+RW Alliance have announced their plans to add DVD-R capability to their existing DVD-RW products. The DVD+RW Alliance is a consortium of companies with interests in DVD+RW that includes Hewlett Packard, Phillips, Sony, Verbatim, Ricoh and Yamaha. The group announced that the addition of write-once (DVD-R) capabilities to its DVD-RW products has been slated for introduction by this summer. ...more

Jobs: scrapping the iPod mini is a risk

Steve Jobs has admitted that the decision to scrap the iPod mini in favour of the new iPod nano is a 'bold gamble'. The Apple CEO told the New York Times that the mini had accounted for half of all iPod sales and that any delay in the nano would have had a huge impact on revenues. He explained that the potential for late problems with both the nano's custom chips and miniaturised circuit board could have held it up. ...more