Scott M. Fulton

UPDATE: The newly introduced 1.66 GHz Mac mini instantly becomes one of the least expensive Intel Core Duo-based computers on the market, although its entry-level, bare-bones presentation reveals that Apple may have cut costs in more ways than just omitting the monitor and the mouse.

According to LoopRumors.com, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has introduced new Intel Core Solo-based and Core Duo-based Mac mini models, in the same form factor as the existing G4-based Mac mini.

Microsoft announced the final names and basic ingredients for its six upcoming versions of Windows Vista. Media Center and Tablet functionality will be built into the new Vista Home Premium edition, while Enterprise users will enjoy the capability to run UNIX software, and to keep their hard drive contents encrypted.

Two key milestones in the settlement of digital rights management issues regarding next-generation high-definition content, took place this week: an interim agreement on the final AACS specification, and an agreement on an interoperable DRM framework by the members of the Coral Consortium. But could the fact that they happened together, cancel each other out?

Late yesterday, word spread of the existence of a malicious worm apparently crafted specifically for the Mac OS X platform. A strange new indicator of platform legitimacy has apparently revealed itself, as Mac users - some for the first time - wrestle with the key problems, among them being, what to call this thing?

In the next step of the company's image makeover from "monopoly" to "laboratory," Microsoft today launched the first stage of its Office Live Web hosting services. Customers will be able to deploy Web sites for free, at least during the beta cycle, if they don't mind accepting a few words from their sponsor.

European Commission spokesperson Jonathan Todd confirmed to Reuters today that the EC has denied Microsoft's request for an extension to its 15 February deadline for turning over interoperability documentation for Windows.

Today in San Francisco, IBM unveiled a revolutionary new chipset that would replace the spaghetti of cables that connect today's multimedia equipment, with super-high-frequency wireless networks in the gigabit range. But will the CE industry greet IBM with open arms?

As the New York Times broke this morning, Yahoo and AOL are planning to impose a sort of "postage fee" on mail senders who seek to bypass the companies' spam filters. Senders who intend to reach mass audience can only send mail to AOL- or Yahoo-based addresses, says the Times , when they are willing to pay between 0.25¢ and 1¢ ($0.01) per message.

Mark Russinovich, the security software engineer who discovered the presence of stealth techniques to mask the presence of digital rights management drivers in Sony BMG audio CDs, announced this morning he has discovered rootkit-like stealth in two popular brands of CD emulator software.

Sophos Labs' senior technology consultant Graham Cluley told TG Daily this morning that the total number of incident reports called in to his company, as a result of the impact of the Nyxem/'Kama Sutra' mass mailing worm in Europe, was zero.

Clearly denying press reports that Microsoft would not be releasing a Beta 2 edition of Windows Vista, a company spokesperson yesterday told TG Daily that comments made last week by co-president Jim Allchin actually referred to a change in plan, but not a scrapping or skipping of the beta system.

Yesterday in a gala announcement, the nine founding members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, including Intel, announced they would collectively contribute $10 billion toward research, marketing, capital expenditures, and software development, all with the goal of furthering Itanium as a viable technical computing platform.

A report released this week by one of Europe's leading technology industry analysts, Booz Allen Hamilton, made the bold prediction that IPTV service could very well be vanquished on the continent by DTV. Services based on European digital TV standards - which are not the same as American - will provide "triple play" services faster and cheaper than will ISPs.

An Intel spokesperson confirmed to TG Daily this afternoon that the company's IA-64 platform will be dropping all on-die support for hardware-based 32-bit application execution. This includes both IA-32 and x86 platforms, emulation for which will now be moved to a software-based layer.

With 1.25 million Macintosh computers shipped in the holiday quarter, the Macintosh resurgence appears real. What distinguishes an Intel-based Mac from an Intel-based PC? Apple's senior director of desktops tells us it's nothing in the hardware, specifically - in fact, hardware isn't even really that important. Intel might be interested to know that.

Once the trusted brand of tens of millions of word processor users, WordPerfect has never quite regained its footing since Novell, by most observers' accounts, ruined the product. Now Corel is giving the brand one more try, this time by touting simplicity and compatibility.