2004 review: AMD battles Intel for processor crown

Was 2004 the year that AMD succeeded in becoming a leader, rather than a follower, in the world of computer processors? Certainly, the one-time cloner of Intel processors has been challenging the Santa Clara giant, particularly in the 64-bit computing stakes... ...more

Broadband is letting technology down, says Gates

Bill Gates said on Wednesday that broadband Internet access was the Achilles heel of the technology revolution. Speaking at Microsoft's CEO summit, attended by top technology leaders, Gates said that broadband wasn't cheap enough to gain acceptance quickly. "There is no hardware limitation that will affect what you want to do, but there is one exception and that is the cost of broadband communication, primarily to the home," said Gates. ...more

Apple finds open source turning sour

Apple's relationship with the open source community has come under renewed attack after reports on the Web that KHTML developers are unhappy with the way the direction that Apple has taken with Safari. KHTML is an open source rendering engine - the software that takes the HTML and Javascript code that makes up Web pages and turns it into something readable on a computer screen. Apple chose it, rather than the Mozilla Gecko engine, when it decided to develop its own browser, namely Safari, which was released in January 2003. ...more

eMac line gets overhauled

Apple has followed today's iMac upgrades with an overhaul of the eMac line. The two models are bumped up to 1.42Ghz G4 processors ans the SuperDrive-equipped (DVD-R/CD-RW) version sees its RAM doubled to 512MB. ...more

Toshiba calls back Sony notebook batteries

Toshiba has announced that it will replace 340,000 Sony-manufactured laptop batteries, the third such recall by a major notebook maker in little over a month. The company said that the lithium-ion batteries, installed in Dynabook and Dynabook Satellite laptops manufactured between March and May this year, could fail because of problems with both power storage and transmission. Ohmori reassured Toshiba users that the fault as not the same one that led both Apple and Dell to recall more than four million batteries after verifying that they could overheat, in some cases causing users to get minor burns and in extreme circumstances resulting in laptops bursting into flame. ...more