"CHIP FIRM AMD made a net loss of $600 millon in its latest Q2 financial quarter.

It also dumped $30 mills worth of old chips it couldn't sell, in the quarter, confirming what Intel CEO Paul Otellini said two days ago about stuff swilling about in the channel.

In the same quarter this time last year AMD made a net profit of $88 million or thereabouts. It sold $1.38 billion of chips in the second quarter this year compared to $1.22 billion last year. So it sold more chips, but failed to sell them at a price which would yield a comfortable profit. PluS AMD bought graphics company ATI for a reason which the latest results fail to justify."

"Security researcher Thor Larholm called the problem an input validation flaw. He explained in a blog post that when Firefox is installed on a system, it registers a URL protocol handler. When IE encounters a reference to content inside the FirefoxURL URL scheme, it calls ShellExecute with the EXE image path and passes the entire request URL without any input validation.

That means if someone using IE visits a Web page that tries to call a Firefox URL, the Microsoft browser will launch Firefox with no other prompting, passing it the URL. Neither browser, according to Mozilla, sanitizes the URL, which would allow an attacker to make Firefox execute malicious JavaScript code. The user would have to visit a maliciously crafted Web page or open a malicious e-mail. User interaction is required."

"As part of the final Hollywood & Games Summit panel in Los Angeles, LucasArts' Jim Ward has been discussing the oft-raised question of a lightsaber game for Nintendo's Wii, saying that the company has internal prototypes running using the Wiimote.

In response to a question from session moderator N'Gai Croal of Newsweek asking: "What would it take to make a lightsaber game for the Wii?", Ward, who is President of LucasArts and a Senior VP at Lucasfilm, commented:

"We’re all over that, and internally we have already played a lightsaber game on the Wii. It’s a lot of fun, and we’ll get there."

"Advanced Micro Devices in August will begin selling its quad-core "Barcelona" Opteron processors, models that answer Intel's current products but soon will face stiffer competition.

The first Barcelona models, formally called Quad-Core Opteron, will run at clock frequencies up to 2GHz and will be available in standard and low-power versions. Faster models, both of the standard and more power-hungry special-edition ilk, will arrive in the fourth quarter, the company said. The first servers using the chips will come in September."

"At Apple stores across the country yesterday, there were the so-called iCultists, the Internet entrepreneurs and technology consultants who would have surprised you if they said they didn’t wait in line all night.

“If Apple made sliced bread, yeah, I’d buy it.” said Andrew Kaputsa, who waited outside the Michigan Avenue Apple store in Chicago. “It’s just good stuff. Everything they touch.”

"AMD's presence in workstations "plummeted" in Q1 of this year, the research indicated, while the workstation market itself continues to remain strong.

The report said that Opteron was "steadily draining share from Intel's Xeon" and that peaked at 13 per cent of the dual socket market in Q2 2006.

But that peak was the start of a fall, and in Q1 2007 AMD's share of the dual socket capable segment fell by over 50 per cent, compared to the same quarter in 2006."

"ohn Carmack, the genius behind the 3D game engines from id Software, once considered stepping away from games programming to focus on space-related endeavors. Thankfully for the games industry, Carmack appears to be still deeply rooted in games technology, as he demonstrated the next-generation 3D engine during Steve Job's address at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2007.

Called “id Tech 5,” the new engine shies away from the cramped indoor engines of id Games of yesterday. Quake Wars will take the DOOM3 engine outdoors, but id Tech 5 will make it completely nature savvy."

"Sir Howard Stringer has told the Financial Times he is aware that consumers would like the cost of the PS3 to be lower, stating the firm is working to "refine" the price of the console by Christmas.

The Sony boss said: "I think that the public would like the cost to be lower, there’s no question about that."

When asked how much Sony could cut the cost of the PS3 by, the CEO said: "That’s what we’re studying at the moment; that’s what we’re trying to refine."

He also stated that current PS3 owners are happy with the machine, but said games have a long way to go until they fully exploit the system. He said: "It takes a long time for producers, and more time because of the cost factor, to embrace the full bandwidth of PlayStation 3."

"A software pirate who sold illegal copies of Symantec Corp. software on the online auction site eBay Inc. has agreed to pay a $205,000 fine.

In an announcement today, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) trade group, which filed suit in the case on behalf of Symantec -- a SIIA member -- said the defendant has also agreed to assist authorities in identifying the parties who actually made and distributed the illegal software that was sold.

Keith Kupferschmid, senior vice president of intellectual property for the Washington-based SIIA, said the name and location of the defendant is being kept secret under the terms of the settlement."