Wednesday's Waffle Iron

Better late than never... it's tech news!

1. As expected, the EU has fined Microsoft nearly 500 million Euros and forced it to unbundle the Windows Media Player from XP. It's a record fine, but nothing Microsoft can't handle. Ten members of Congress fired off a letter to European Competition Commisioner Mario Monti saying that the US was cool with Microsoft and that the Europeans should be, too.
2. The RIAA is suing another 532 suspected file sharers, 89 of them college students at Georgetown, Indiana, Marquette, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC and Villanova.
3. Intel is dropping clock speeds from its chip names, going with such BMW-like designations as M745. Makes sense since mobile Pentiums run faster at slower clock speeds.
4. The Feds have nailed the Texas phisher. Zachary Hill of Houston plead guilty to using phony emails purporting to be from AOL and Paypal to collect financial information from consumers. Hill used the information to purchase more than $47,000 worth of goods.
5. Online games sales broke the $1 billion mark last year. That's up 167% from 2002.
6. The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has hit two. Version 2.0 of the free graphics program is available from gimp.org.