Year: 2002

PC analyst IDC has raised its 2002 growth forecast for PC shipments from 1.8 percent to 3 percent. The firm cites stronger than expected retail sales and growing demand in Western Europe as reasons for the revision. Shipments are expected to decline in the first quarter from the year-ago period, but grow upwards of 10 percent in the third and fourth quarters. In 2001, worldwide shipments of PCs declined 5.1 percent for the first time since 1985, according to IDC.

Lotus recently released a pre-release version of the Mac OS X Notes/Domino 6 client. The final version of Notes/Domino 6 is expected to be ready in the third quarter of 2002.

Addonics Technologies today announced a Combo CD-RW/Copier that features a 52x source CD-ROM drive and a 32x12x40 CD-RW as the destination drive, and a 16x Pocket CD-RW. The Combo CD-RW/Copier can be used as a standalone CD duplicator or as an external CD-RW drive, and is available with a FireWire interface for US$520. The 16x Pocket CD-RW is a small, lightweight CD-RW that reads at speeds of 24x and re-writes at 10x.

The potential for profitability has returned for memory makers as prices have risen over the past five months, according to c|net. The price hikes in memory can be partly attributed to Fujitsu and a series of smaller Taiwanese manufacturers exiting the PC memory market or curtailing production, while other manufacturers are trying to sell excess production facilities. In 2002, the number of memory cells is expected to increase 40 to 45 percent, while demand is expected to grow by 55 percent.

FrontBase has released FBScriptAgent, a free, AppleScript-savvy application for Mac OS X that forwards commands to a FrontBase database. The application can send raw SQL commands in addition to starting, stopping, creating, and deleting FrontBase databases.