Articles by Susan B. Shor

Intel announced today that it will slash prices on its processors used in mobile computers by up to one-third. The move comes as the holiday season approaches without any sign that consumer demand will grow or even remain steady, analysts said "They realize they're competing pretty heavily for every ounce of market share," Rob Enderle, principal an...

While ultra-high clock speeds may make gamers salivate, the need for ever-rising numbers in other applications is highly dubious AMD released two new chips today, the Athlon 64 FX-55 and the Athlon 64 4000+, which outperform any of its previous chips. The Athlon 64 FX-55 is geared toward gamers; the 4000+ is designed for more mainstream use. The co...

Will the caffeine and music combo make consumers want to dance in the aisles at Starbucks? Or will spills of sweet, creamy drinks stick the coffee powerhouse with a crashing failure? These questions remain to be answered as Starbucks expands its "Hear Music" franchise with 45 locations in its hometown of Seattle and the music haven of Austin, Texa...

Dell pushed further into the home-entertainment market Thursday, floating a raft of products to entice holiday shoppers with lower prices on top-shelf items such as plasma TVs. Dell has dubbed the concept behind its products "the digital living room." The company announced new photo printers and digital music players as well....

IBM and Cisco announced software security updates designed to further protect networks from worms and viruses The updates to IBM's Tivoli software will enable it to work more closely with Cisco's Network Admission Control (NAC) technologies....

Apparently Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison isn't getting the satisfaction he needs churning turf in his bid for software maker PeopleSoft The Los Angeles Times reported today that Ellison has been talking to the National Football League about acquiring a whole team to churn the turf in L.A....

Microsoft released a total of 22 patches in its monthly security update, labeling seven of them "urgent" and imploring companies to download them The software giant called three other patches "important," one level less severe than "urgent."

With the proclamation that it intends to overtake EMC as the top enterprise storage supplier, IBM announced today the DS6000, a disk storage system slightly bigger than a VCR, and the TotalStorage DS8000, which can act either as a single system or, through partitioning, as multiple systems Rich Lechner, vice president of IBM storage systems, told T...

The MP3 player market, where the iPod Mini once stood alone, will soon have several new entries. IDC predicted last month that the segment will grow from 12.5 million units sold last year to more than 50 million units in 2008 Virgin Electronics' 5 GB Player, the Creative Zen Micro and the Dell Pocket DJ5 will all crowd into the Mini's market....

Firing the latest salvo in the war over next-generation DVD formats, electronics companies Sony, Matsushita Electric and Sharp plan to release camcorders using the Blu-ray DVD format in 2005 The companies are working on a rewritable, 3-inch (8-centimeter) disc. Currently available discs are 12 cm, but they also have 25 GB of memory compared to the...

Google announced it is adding the text of books to its searchable database, furthering its bold mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Analysts say that other search engines will follow suit, but they don't expect online book-buying to change much in the short term....

Advanced Micro Devices' dual-core Opteron processor will boost performance 30 to 55 percent over single-core Opterons, the company said at the Fall Processor Forum yesterday. AMD also said it is on target to release the chips for one- to eight-way servers in mid-2005, beating Intel to market Analysts, however, question whether first-to-market will ...

The integration of a fingerprint scanner into IBM's new ThinkPad T42 series of notebooks opens the door for a whole host of secure transactions, but some analysts suggest that there are still flaws in the system The new ThinkPad incorporates a finger scanner directly into the notebook. The scan is required to gain log-on access to the portable comp...