Monday, August 28, 2000		Latest in IT world

 Beware of Pokemon Pikachu

A new virus has been discovered recently, which spreads very slowly and damages the computers over a period of time. This virus comes as an e-mail attachment and is attached to a Japanese "Pokemon" animated character. It has already damaged several computers in the USA over the past 2 months.

This virus is named as "Pokemon Pikachu," and it spreads through Microsoft Outlook e-mail attachments or through Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. It gets transmitted into the computer of all those people who download this attachment, which has animated character of Nintendo's Pokemon video game. Once it reaches the computer, it attacks the address book and automatically sends copies of the message to everybody whose address figures in the person's address book.

Beware of any attachment, which shows the animation of the Pikachu character from Nintendo's Pokemon video game. This virus deletes all Microsoft Windows files, including operating files even upon repoening the system. Experts say that this virus is a variant of the love bug that rocked the computer world by affecting over 45 million computers in the last few months.

Intel has announced a new chip for cellular phones and hand-held sets. This design will be the successor to its StrongArm chip architecture.

The new design will be called XScale, and will be used in the future generation of handheld computers and mobile phones. Intel has demonstrated a prototype XScale-based chip running at 1 GHz, but it did not unveil specific chips.

At 1 GHz, the XScale chip would consume 1.5 watts of power and can also be run at10s of milliwatts. According to Intel, the new design will enable entirely new types of wireless devices that can be powered by a single AA battery.

Taiwani chip giant Via Technologies, has announced that it will launch a new range of computers by combining the features of desktop systems and Internet appliances in order to capture the lower end of the PC market.

The company has plans to make computers on its Cyrix III processor, which is quite small and consumes less power than other chips. These device will be designed to perform all Internet-related jobs, like e-mail and Web browsing while providing the speed required for common computing tasks such as Word Processing and spreadsheets.