Monday, October 30, 2000		Latest in IT world

It’s curtains for eve.com

It’s curtains for the popular beauty e-tailer, www.eve.com, which was started in June 1999. The site went down from October 20 and displayed message on its site — "We hope that shopping with us has been a ‘beautiful’ experience. Thanks for your support." This portal had plans for an initial public offering, but finally, the promoters decided to close it down due to dramatic shifts in the market. Thus, the resource crunch finally took its toll on yet another portal, which resulted in laying off of more than 164 workers. Though the portal’s performance had improved in the past couple of months, yet it was not sufficient enough to be sustainable. With the closure of many prominent portals, Net entrepreneurs have developed cold feet, as it appears that the bubble of dotcom is fast bursting.

 Love bug variant

The most damaging virus so far — "Love Bug" is once again in the news as it has plagued the e-mail system. The virus, which comes with a header, "US President and FBI secrets," is actually a new name of an old virus, which hit the computer users worldwide nearly five months ago. Like its predecessor, this virus also enters the computers as an attachment and destroys the image files and spreads itself via Microsoft’s Outlook address book. This month-old variant of the deadly old virus is equally damaging and leading anti-virus companies have sounded alert for it. Virus hunters feel that since the nasty love bug, 43 other variants of the same virus have hit the computer world and have been contained.

Asian country to buy supercomputer

The world’s biggest personal computer manufacturer is now planning to sell a supercomputer worth $ 1 million to an Asian country, the deal for which is likely to be completed by the first week of November. Supercomputers and other high-end segment computers make up to 52 per cent of Compaq’s sales, while the rest of the sales are covered by personal computers. A supercomputer is a very high performance computer, which has the capacity to perform several times better and faster than a normal personal computer. Going by the statistics, a super computer can make at least three million trillion calculations per second! These super computers are being used in various fields like defence, energy, scientific research, weather, medical research and nuclear energy.