Mobility

With an abundance of aging technology from the 1980s, Montreal

Consider the difference between an all-you-can-eat buffet and a restaurant with an

Microsoft Corp. wants PC makers to mount cell phone-like displays on the lids of laptop computers so users can check the time, battery status, appointments or see if new e-mail has arrived without having to open and start up their PC.

Now that Carly Fiorina is leaving the helm, the survivors at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) must decide how to move forward with a company that analysts feel is either weighed down by low-margin businesses or missing opportunities to reach customers. One of the more contentious debates surrounding HP's acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. in 2002 was the reluctance on the part of long-time HP executives and shareholders to increase the company's stake in a low-growth, low-margin business like PCs. PC market growth has hovered above 10 percent for the last several years, but is forecast to fall below that pace in 2005 and 2006 as consumers, HP's strongest customers, slow their purchases of new equipment, according to IDC and Gartner Inc.

Researchers from IBM Corp., Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and Toshiba Corp. unveiled the long-awaited Cell microprocessor Monday, revealing a multicore, multithreaded gaming engine described as "a supercomputer on a chip." The three companies disclosed some of the first technical details about the four-year project at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Netscape all suffer from the "moderately critical" vulnerability that allows the spoofing of address bar URLs and SSL certificates, but, incredibly Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer gets a clean bill of health.

Intel Corp. recently released the upgrade to its Centrino chip, which includes support for more wireless protocols, improved graphics and better sound, and is now on par with performance of its best desktop PC chip, the Pentium 915, the company said.