News Bits: Dell to Use 20M AMD CPUs, Saying No to School Laptops, FireFox Beta 2.0 Released

Saying No to school laptops

Programs that equip every student in a classroom with a computer were introduced to schools around the country a few years ago. Now, some parents and educators are having second thoughts over the higher-than-anticipated costs and the potential for inappropriate use by kids. The programs were launched a few years ago in order to 'bridge the digital divide' between students who had home computers and those who didn't. If every student has a computer, it makes it easier for educators to use educational computing tools without having to go back and forth to computer labs.

Schools are proceeding cautiously, and many are rethinking the best way to improve learning. Funding can be a problem, as there are many hidden costs involved.

Parents are worried that the round-the-clock computer access could be encouraging kids to spend too much time online, and possibly browsing dangerous websites. Yet others are very enthusiastic about the laptop programs - having a laptop can help kids pick up a lot of opportunities they otherwise might not have gotten.

Read More

Dell to use 20 million AMD CPUs

DigiTimes reports that about 20 million AMD CPUs will be used in Dell servers, desktops, and notebooks between Q4 2006 and Q4 2007. Notebooks will take up around four million CPUs, with desktops and servers using the remaining 16 million. AMD declined to comment on the report.

Sources have speculated that AMD may face a situation where demand exceeds supply. The shortage will probably surface in the channel market; PC vendors will be given priority. AMD plans to ship 12 million notebook CPUs in 2006, ~15% of the world's CPU market.

Read More

Mozilla Firefox Beta 2 released

After a short delay, Mozilla's Firefox Beta 2.0 has been released to the public, and is still on-schedule for the release of the final version on September 26. It can be found here.

New features in Firefox 2.0 include a refreshed user interface, built-in phishing protection, improved tabbed browsing, browser session restore, inline spell checking, and better search capabilities.

Read More

Intel to lay off 10,000

Intel could be looking to slash 10,000 jobs, about 10% of their global workforce. The job slashing campaign could start as early as Tuesday according to reports. Intel says it has been lacking in efficiency in sales and marketing, and its ratio of sales to marketing staff is too high. The majority of the job cuts will probably be in marketing.

Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, is expected to announce the results of the internal analysis after the stock market closes on Tuesday.

Read More

 

I am curious about the market share of Firefox in the site. Could the admins post some browser stats?

 

It's very high.

IE - 46%
FF - 37%
Opera - 3.4%
Safari - 1.8%

 

For MXM upgrade:

1 Firefox 44.71%
2 Internet Explorer 6.x 38.35%
3 Opera 6.71%
4 Internet Explorer 7.x 3.76%
5 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible 2.82%
6 Others 0.82%
7 Mozilla 0.59%
8 Safari 0.59%
9 Internet Explorer 5.x 0.47%
10 Java/1.5.0_06 0.47%

'Nyways, I'm wondering how deep AMD dropped their pants for this one. I don't think they are making much profit on their new 'costumer'.