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To: Uncle Frank who wrote (18542)	2/23/2000 8:28:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

uf: Qualcomm CEO predicts death of wired phones by 2005...FYI.. <<LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif., Feb 23 (Reuters) - Five years from now most people will be using wireless telephones for both voice communication and Internet access, not traditional telephones lines, Irwin Mark Jacobs, the chief executive officer of high-flying mobile phone technology company Qualcomm Inc. (NasdaqNM:QCOM - news) said on Wednesday. ''More and more we are going to see a situation where a wire telephone hooked to a wall will become an object of some surprise,'' Jacobs said at conference held here on the topic of growth company stocks. San Diego-based Qualcomm, which holds a patent on so-called CDMA wireless chips, currently has about 50 million subscribers that use its technology and could add 20-30 million by 2001, the CEO said. CDMA, or code division multiple access, technology takes information contained in a signal and spreads it over a wide bandwidth. More than 75 companies have so far been licensed to use Qualcomm's technology. ''Just 15 years ago people said we would be lucky if there were over a million subscribers by the turn of the century,'' Jacobs noted. But growth has come at a much higher rate due largely to falling per-minute prices for cell phone usage, the CEO said. ''We are still not in Europe in any significant way, but even those companies say they should be using CDMA, so hopefully that will change,'' he added. Currently, the GSM (global system for mobile communications) is the wireless standard that dominates in Europe. Early this month Qualcomm signed a deal with Swedish telecoms firm Ericsson to jointly develop a technology that makes cell phones more versatile. Qualcomm is now working to develop technology for wireless communication through airlinks to antennas that let electronic devices like phones, computers and printers communicate with each other and the Internet. The next generation of chips that combine voice and data will displace the company's existing CDMA business by the end of next year, followed about six months later by HDR, or high data rate, chips, which roughly double voice capacity and support data rates of over 300 kilobits per second, Jacobs said. This technology will allow high-speed Internet access to the estimated half of U.S. homes that cannot receive DSL or cable modem access. It will also be priced competitively with those services, the CEO said. ''We now ship chips with eight voice channels per chip. The HDR has 32 channels per chip,'' he added. This will open up a broad new range of capabilities for wireless equipment, which will likely replace existing devices such as laptop computers and Walkman stereos, Jacobs said. ''You will be able to walk in to an office or an airport and hook up to a monitor for display, then leave the bigger peripherals behind for the next person to use,'' he explained.>>

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (18542)	2/23/2000 9:10:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 54805

Mr. Softie plays hardball with some potential hackers <G>...FYI... <<Wednesday February 23, 8:40 pm Eastern Time Microsoft says it foiled hacker assault on Web site SEATTLE, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) said on Wednesday that hackers had tried to topple its corporate Web site, but the software giant said the assault, the latest in a string of crippling attacks on major Internet operations, had done little damage. The Tuesday morning ambush of microsoft.com did not crash the Web site as in other cases, but caused a brief slowdown in initial page viewing of about 3 to 7 percent, Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn said. That meant some people who clicked on a Web page on the site failed to see it the first time they tried. ''It was very minor, to be honest, so some people saw some slowdowns,'' Sohn said. The assault on the Redmond, Wash.-based company followed similar disruptions recently at several large Web operations such as Yahoo! Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news), Amazon.com Inc. (NasdaqNM:AMZN - news), eBay Inc. (NasdaqNM:EBAY - news), CNN.com (NYSE:TWX - news) and Buy.com Inc. (NasdaqNM:BUYX - news). Those were ''denial of service'' strikes, in which hackers set up automatic programs to hijack many other computers that then pounded the Web sites with so many requests for information that legitimate users could not gain access. Instead, Microsoft suffered what Sohn called a ''syn-flood'' attack that disrupts communication between a PC and the Web site server so that the server continually sends requests asking for the visiting computer's identification, devouring its processing capacity. Microsoft immediately reported the trouble to authorities, Sohn said, but declined to elaborate. The perpetrators of the earlier attacks have not been caught despite being the subject of an intense federal investigation. The Microsoft site was relatively unaffected because it had enormous capacity to deal with legions of visitors who often swarm the network to download the latest software upgrades or test products, Sohn said. ''We have a ton of overhead on this site. We can support terabytes and terabytes of downloads,'' Sohn said. Microsoft technicians, in a heightened state of alert after the other recent assaults, had quickly pinpointed which Internet addresses the attacks were coming from and shut off their access to the company's Web site, Sohn said. Sohn said Microsoft's new flagship product, the Windows 2000 operating system that it launched last week to run corporate networks, acted as a sturdy barrier against the unwanted attention. ''The guys running the network swear to me that a year ago we would have been in big trouble, but with Windows 2000, nobody could knock our servers over,'' Sohn said. ''Between the robustness of the OS (operating system) and the security features built in, it really helped withstand the attack.'' Shares in Microsoft rose 7/16 to 94-1/4 in trading on the Nasdaq on Wednesday.>>