Neowin.net

At the beginning of the year, recordable DVD drives were a high-end item found only in top-notch desktops. But by the end of the year, consumers will likely be able to get them in $1,000 machines. The gloomy state of the economy and fears about terrorism mean PC manufacturers may be driven to sell new PC holiday releases--even high-end models with DVD burners--at bargain prices.

In a sales season with dismal prospects, a $1,000 PC with a DVD+RW drive "might be a compelling enough reason to get people out to buy," said Stephen Baker, an analyst at NPD Techworld.

Computing giant Hewlett-Packard, which zoomed to the top in retail sales a few years ago in part as a result of adopting CD-rewritable (CD-RW) drives early, will likely offer PCs with DVD-rewritable drives for prices of about $1,000, Baker said. HP currently sells such desktops for about $1,350. By comparison, at the beginning of the year Apple released an iMac with a DVD-recordable drive for $1,799.

To spend more than $2,000 on a PC in the holiday season, it looks like consumers will have to buy a high-end notebook, a massive desktop system or a newfangled tablet PC.

For holiday sales, Emachines plans to refresh its desktop lineup in October. It will hold to existing prices, which start at $399 after rebates, but improve the technology found inside its machines. The company is also working on a new, relatively inexpensive, flat-panel monitor that will be available in both 15-inch and 17-inch sizes later in the fourth quarter.

Wilcox declined to offer more details on Emachines' new lineup. But sources familiar with the company's plans say its new top-of-the-line system will be based on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon XP 2200+ processor and will sell for about $1,000.

News source: ZDNet
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It is the ability of Slapper to create its own network, experts said, that makes this worm different from its predecessors, such as last year's Code Red worm or this summer's Scalper worm.

"Slapper is new in the sense that [infected machines] keep in touch with each other using their own network," said Russ Cooper, Surgeon General of TruSecure in Herndon, Va.

"Code Red made no attempt to coordinate hosts. All the infected hosts had similar instructions--to initiate a DOS attack against a particular address--but it wasn't a coordinated attack," Cooper said.

Unlike Code Red, however, the current version of Slapper circulating the Internet does not appear to be programmed to carry out attacks.

"My understanding is that there is not code to send instructions. [Slapper hosts] can receive notifications from other hosts--send and receive packets--but they can't really talk to each other," said Cooper.

Still, Cooper cautions that future variants of the worm might include the ability to send and receive instructions, making sophisticated attacks possible.

"One thing the attacker may have planned was to get this little worm in first, find out what hosts [it infects], then send out a variant that lets me send out instructions. I know we had 10 versions of NIMDA and 3 [versions] of Code Red within a couple weeks."

Others experts, however, worry that even in its current form, the Slapper worm can still pose a considerable threat to organizations that are infected, and that might find themselves the target of attacks from Slapper hosts.