Itanium sales off to a slow start
Intel spent nearly 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop Itanium, but the first version of the chip has faced slow sales so far. In the third quarter the first full quarter of Itanium sales manufacturers sold just $13.7 million worth of servers containing the chip, which comes to less than 500 servers, according to market researcher IDC. By contrast, Gartner research shows that 2,601 Itanium servers were shipped in the third quarter, an increase over the three shipped in the second quarter. The discrepancy between the IDC and Gartner figures apparently comes from the fact that companies have shipped many Itanium servers for demonstration purposes.

The Itanium’s humble start, while not completely unexpected, underscores the immense challenges that lie ahead for Intel, allied computer manufacturers and software developers that are gunning to make Itanium the standard for complex computing in the next decade. Intel however, says it isn’t disappointed with the sales numbers.

Google search engine widens its Net
Internet search engine Google has announced that it now offers direct access to more than 3 billion Web documents, including newsgroup postings back to 1981. The company’s index, searchable at www.google.com, previously linked to about 2.5 billion documents. Its archive of Usenet postings had gone back about six years. The Usenet archive, available in Google Groups, now contains 700 million messages in 35,000 categories. Usenet is an Internet-based bulletin board that predates the World Wide Web. Google also deployed a feature that pulls up headlines relevant to a search from various newspapers and news agencies.

Feds crack down on software piracy
Authorities in 27 US cities and five countries have seized computers and arrested five people in a long-running undercover operation into an international software piracy ring. US officials said the suspects stole and distributed all types of media, including Microsoft Windows operating systems, computer games and high-quality copies of new movies like ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Monsters’. The software industry says it loses an estimated $12 billion per year due to piracy.

SONICblue to Sue TiVo Over TV recording patent
SONICblue said it plans to file a patent infringement lawsuit against TiVo, a day after SONICblue said it sought licensing talks with the rival digital video recorder maker. The Santa Clara, California-based company, said the suit, to be filed in that state’s Northern District Federal Court, will allege that TiVo’s technology infringes upon SONICblue’s patents. It demands that TiVo stop producing the infringing products and pay unspecified damages.

The move is the latest in a sparring match between the two companies in the budding market for digital video recorders (DVR), a set-top box which records television shows onto a hard drive. TiVo is the market leader, but claims only about 300,000 subscribers to its related service for individually tailored television recording. Most buyers of the TiVo box also subscribe to the related service.

Hitachi Cable to set up venture with Corning unit
Hitachi Cable, Japan’s third-largest maker of electric wires and cables, said it had agreed to set up a joint venture with Corning Cable Systems, a unit of US firm Corning. The 50-50 venture in Japan would make fibre-optic cables, said Hitachi Cable, in which the nation’s largest electronics maker, Hitachi, has a 51percent stake. The venture is expected to be established in January and would likely start operations in August, Hitachi Cable said.