Year: 2001

Fifteen individuals have been accused of insider trading in shares of NVIDIA, including nine of the graphics maker’s engineers. The 15 are accused of making US$1.7 million in illegal profits in March of 2000 after they learned that NVIDIA was near to closing a deal with Microsoft. Shares of NVIDIA more than doubled on March 20, 2000 after Microsoft announced that NVIDIA would be supplying the graphics chips for the company’s Xbox console.

Over the weekend, GameSpot reported that Mumbo Jumbo, the game development studio that created the real-time strategy game Myth III: The Wolf Age, had laid off the Myth III development team as part of its plan to close its Irvine, CA office and consolidate operations at its Dallas, TX headquarters. According to Run Dumant, CEO of parent company United Developers, the development team was laid off because it had no other projects lined up.

The 17th annual MacHack conference will take place June 20-22, 2002, in Dearborn, MI. The event runs for 72 continuous hours. Early registration is available through February 28, 2002 for US$425, with total registration limited to 400. Students can register for $50, with student registration limited to 50 (only those 25 and younger are eligible this year).

Microsoft has released an Entourage 2001 Hotmail patch, an updated version of its e-mail client/PIM that allows users to connect to the security-upgraded Hotmail servers, as noted by VersionTracker. The update also enables Entourage users to send and receive messages from an MSN mail account, allows the Entourage Junk Mail Filter to work with the MSN Inbox Guardian, and extends support for SMTP authentication—users can now use a complete e-mail address as their account ID.

The International Herald Tribute has published an article that highlights the reasons that Mac users use Macs, after an article two weeks ago asked readers to write in with their reasons. “I am impressed by much of what the writers had to say,” says Lee Dembart, who received more than 1,000 replies to his inquiry.