Swiss town votes online

A small Swiss lakeside village made history this weekend with the country`s first legally binding Internet vote. Authorities said 323 voters cast their ballot through the Internet, 370 by mail and only 48 went to the polls. The vote in question regarded the granting of taxpayer funds to renovate a restaurant, with 61.3% voting in favour.

The 1 162-strong electorate of Anieres, a wealthy suburb of Geneva, traditionally votes by mail. Sunday`s vote marked the first time they could vote online, through a special Geneva state Web site using a regular home computer. Residents had to type in a series of security codes, their date and place of birth, then cast their vote. [Reuters]

Intel has confirmed that the dual-core Itanium has been delayed until 2005. The dual-core "Montecito" chip was originally supposed to be released next year, but Intel will instead launch a Madison core faster than 1.5GHz with 9MB of on-chip cache.

Intel plans for future versions of Itanium to have multiple cores sharing a single level 3 (L3) cache. An Itanium processor with 9MB L3 cache would have about 500 million transistors just for the cache. [Geek.com]

Microsoft is journeying deep into the enemy heartland this week, by opening a stand at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in an attempt to pick up wavering Unix users.

Microsoft reportedly plans to deploy 15 staff at the New York-based event in an attempt to spread the Windows mantra. The company will demonstrate four products and its gotdotnet.com online service for developers.

This is Microsoft`s second appearance at the show, and the company is expanding its stand and drafting in more Microsoft programmers than product managers in an attempt to bond with conference-goers. [CBROnline]

Macromedia has broadened its portfolio of content creation and publishing tools with the acquisition of privately held Presedia, a provider of online presentation and e-learning software. Macromedia says Presidia`s software draws on its Flash technology to offer presentation and e-learning software in both a hosted and licensed manner. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The software allows users to publish directly to a live server. It is compatible with Microsoft Office applications, allowing users to drag and drop documents into Web pages and have Contribute convert them into HTML.

Macromedia says it will add Presidia`s technology to its Macromedia Information Convenience product line-up. In November, the company announced the first product in that range, Contribute, which is an application designed to permit non-technical business users with no HTML knowledge to create and make changes to Web pages. [CBROnline]