Year: 2002

Celine Dion’s newly released album, “A New Day Has Come,” is embedded with Key2Audio copy protection in Germany and several other European countries, according to The Hollywood Reporter. When inserted into a PC or Mac, attempting to play the disc will likely crash the machine. In addition, some Mac users report that the CD will not eject normally and could cause damage to the CD-ROM drive’s firmware.

Modeless Software has released Liquid Ledger 1.0, a new personal finance solution for Mac OS X. The software lets users record bank and credit card activity, track monthly expenses, manage the trading activity of investments, track assets and liabilities, and more. Liquid Ledger 1.0 sells for US$40.

The Omni Group has released OmniWeb 4.1b2, a new public beta version of its popular Web browser for Mac OS X. The new beta adds improved Java support, further CSS improvements, less memory use, improved stability, a number of new language localizations, and dozens of minor improvements and bug fixes.

Stone Design today released StampInStone 1.0, a new toolfor Mac OS X that adds a text or image watermark to every page of a PDFdocument. Features include options for stamping underneath or over eachpage, an option to stamp the update time or date, the ability to save stampsfor later reuse, the ability to relocate the stamp with a simple click anddrag, and more. StampInStone 1.0 sells for US$49.

Sony, NEC, and IBM Japan will raise the prices of their PCs by 11,000 to 20,000 yen (US$83 to $150) over the next two months, according to Kyodo News Agency, as reported by Dow Jones. The increases, which are said to have been prompted by Apple’s recent iMac price hike, will cover higher component costs — prices for some RAM have nearly tripled from lows last year, while LCD display costs have risen about 30 percent.