Following in the wake of Melissa and Chernobyl, a new and destructive email virus known as the ExploreZip worm is spreading across the Internet. First reported on Sunday, the worm is similar to Melissa in that it uses Microsoft Outlook on Windows systems to propagate itself, masquerading as an email from a known source in order to trick users into activating it. The similarity ends there, however- Melissa was mostly harmless and indeed practically benign compared to the ExploreZip worm, which destroys Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files on infected computers. Needless to say, this could put paid to years of work in moments, making the worm much more dangerous than Melissa. 

The silver lining to this cloud is that the worm is unlikely (at least, in it’s present incarnation) to spread with the kind of alarming rapidity displayed by Melissa. This is because the worm uses a slightly different strategy of propagation- instead of sending emails to everyone on your address list, it replies to all mail in your inbox with a message that says “Hi [recipient name]! I received your email and I shall send you a reply ASAP. Till then, take a look at the attached zipped docs. bye.", or possibly variations on this theme as the virus mutates.  The emails are accompanied by an attachment with the filename zipped_files.exe, an .exe file posing as a self-extracting zip file, comparatively large at 200KB. Clicking on the apparent zip file to open it will result in an authentic-looking error message, while the worm will immediately search through all hard drives from C to Z and destroy files with the extensions .doc, .xls, .ppt, .c, .cpp, .h or .asm by making these files 0 bytes long. 

The worm is at present believed to have originated in Israel, where it was first detected on Sunday, reaching the other parts of the world by Wednesday. Review Zone, incidentally, has already weathered the storm, not without damage. One of the most disturbing aspects of all this is the emergence of viruses which attempt to combine the rapid-spread capability of Melissa-type email viruses with increasingly destructive payloads. This means that, even if this particular virus doesn’t spread far, the virus authors have succeeded in one thing- they have injected paranoia into our lives. Remember, the ExploreZip worm is still spreading, so expect mutations to pop up soon (if you recall the umpteen different versions of Melissa and the CIH virus that eventually showed up) –meaning, don’t just be on the lookout for attachments exactly like the one described above and elsewhere on the net, but be careful of all email attachments you receive regardless who they are from and what the message says. Be careful what you click.

If you ever doubted whether the sheer frenzy of 90s chip battles would ever be seen in the next millennium- well, shed those doubts immediately. Intel are already girding their loins for 21st-century chip wars. You can glimpse the future from their announcement that they plan to make chips with more sophisticated production techniques in 2002. They plan to use larger wafers- the thin slices of semiconductor material on which the chip’s circuits are formed- to reduce production costs by 30 per cent, by moving from 200 millimeter wafer sizes to 300 millimeter sizes. This will increase production yields since more chips are produced per wafer. Meanwhile, Intel also intend to make the move to a 0.13 micron process at that time, from the current 0.18 micron process technology. The smaller 0.13 micron production technology will allow for faster and smaller chips than possible with current technology. 

As if that weren’t enough, Intel will also make the move to copper (to replace aluminum interconnects) in the footsteps of IBM, who have already made the shift and are manufacturing copper-based PowerPC chips. The PowerPC processor architecture is used in IBM’s own RS/6000 Unix machines as well as being used by Motorola to make PowerPC chips for Apple iMac. Nintendo has also announced that IBM copper-based PowerPC processors would be used in Nintendo’s Dolphin next-generation game machine, due to arrive next year. Meanwhile, AMD are also making the shift to copper-based production techniques with their K7 processor. "With our 0.18 micron process technology now in production, it is time to aggressively step up our pursuit of our next generation process technology development," said Intel vice president and general manager of the Technology and Manufacturing Group Sunlin Chou, in a statement. "We plan to be the first to ramp production on 0.13 micron technology with copper metallization, initially on 200 mm wafers, and then on 300 mm wafers."

IBM’s director of product marketing for their Netfinity line, Jim Gargin, said that IBM will debut its Netfinity 8500R with 8 Intel Pentium III Xeon processors at the PC Expo conference on June 21. This is more or less a doubling of the power currently available in mainstream Intel-based servers, and will be for sale for prices starting in the low $20,000 range, from the third quarter of this year. "We're launching an all-out attack on the high end," Gargin said. 

New technologies and high-end features to be introduced by these servers will include their “Cornhusker” technology, which allows up to eight Windows NT servers to share processing tasks, the SP switch (conveniently snatched from IBM’s RS/6000 Unix servers), which can transfer data at 2.4GB/sec. The SP switch will support groups of up to 14 Netfinity machines, though the Cornhusker system is still only eight-way and IBM will have to use Linux and other Unix operating systems to go over that. Whether Windows 2000 (expected toward the end of this year) will solve some of the problems caused by Windows NT will remain to be seen.

Computer graphics chipmaker S3 have announced two new chips based on their new Savage4 architecture, the Savage/MX and the Savage/IX, for the portable PC market. Targeting gamers and business users, the new chips are expected to provide faster and better 3D graphics for notebooks.
The notebook market has not, as yet, enjoyed much in the way of cutting-edge graphics technology, mostly because power consumption has to be kept to a minimum and graphics chips tend to be powerhungry. S3 CEO Kenneth Potashner says, however, that they have a “very low power-consuming product”, with S3 claiming desktop-equivalent performance, three times faster than that currently enjoyed (or otherwise) by notebook users. Both the MX and the IX versions were engineered at 0.18 microns, and both are AGP 2x compatible, with other features including DVD playback. The MX version, with 4MB RAM, will cost $42, while the IX will be available in 4MB, 8MB and 16MB versions at $49, $56 and $68 respectively. Notebooks based on these chips are expected to ship by September.

Motherboard maker A-Trend introduced a new Slot 1 motherboard with integrated graphics- nothing that impressive so far, but then the integrated graphics chip will be nothing less than the 3dfx Voodoo3. The board will also include 4 PCI and 2 ISA slots, supporting processor speeds of up to 550MHz and up to 512MB of unbuffered SDRAM or 1024MB of buffered SDRAM. The board will include a hardware monitoring device called the Golden-G, fitting onto the CPU’s heatsink, that will detect CPU temperatures and monitor system voltage. 

Graphics chipmaker nVIDIA intends to drop their popular TNT brand name with the upcoming release of their NV10 chip- which will not, as expected, be called the TNT3. What will it be called then? nVIDIA decided to take advantage of all that creativity floating around out there and held a competition, asking people to send in suggestions. They ended up with over 8000 useable suggestions, which they narrowed down to a final short list of 25. nVIDIA spokesman Derek Perez released a few names on that short list; Silk, Slick and Predator among them. Is it that nVIDIA want a slicker (or silkier), more predatory sound than “TNT3” to trumpet when the NV10 goes up against the competition, or is the computer industry finally beginning to escape the tyranny of sequelitis? The company will announce the chosen name in a months time.

Scientists at Hitachi’s Cambridge Research Lab, with some help from researchers from Cambridge University, have developed a new type of memory chip that currently goes by the ungainly monicker of PLEDM. This stands for Phase-State Low Electron Drive Memory, which means that the new type of chip will use the state of electrons, held in stacks of transistors, to store data. Hitachi’s claim is that this technology will allow bits to be written in ten nanoseconds, which is faster than DRAM, and that performance will not degrade as the transistors get smaller, unlike DRAM. So who needs DRAM then? Well, for one thing PLEDM is not exactly commercially available right now. Hitachi’s team have constructed a single PLEDM cell using a 0.2 micron process and are now looking to extend that into a full memory chip. Hitachi says PLEDM technology will likely be ready to go into production by the time DRAM technology reaches the 1GB level.

On Tuesday & Wednesday, motherboard manufacturer ABIT announced the release of two new motherboards, the BE6 and the BP6. The BE6 is a Slot 1 BX motherboard, ho hum, seen those before. The BP6 is a dual Socket 370 board, and we haven’t seen any of those before.....but the real catch here is, both of these boards support the Ultra DMA/66 IDE protocol. ABIT says they accomplished this “with the help of specially designed ABIT hardware”...would we love to take a look at this specially designed hardware or what? Other than this, both boards will also offer ABIT’s OnNow feature, allowing users to suspend their computers without closing desktop applications, as well as some familiar features like WinBond hardware monitoring and the Soft Menu II jumperless setup. Both boards will have eight 
(5 PCI, 2 ISA and 1 AGP) expansion slots and feature the full list of features ranging from AGP 1.0, USB and APM/ACPI power management to Wake On LAN and Wake On Ring, not to mention PC99 compliance. None of these are exactly new features –the UDMA/66 support is the real deal here. Of course, the upcoming JX chipset (and it has been “upcoming” for some time) will support the UDMA/66 protocol anyway, but it looks as if ABIT just couldn’t wait.