Word: softram
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...response to the court challenge, c't's editor, Christian Persson, and one of its writers, Ingo Storm, engaged the services of a software engineer, and together they went through the program line by line to try to plumb its inner workings. Their findings: the one patch of SoftRAM 95 code remotely resembling a compression algorithm never gets used by the program. Moreover, the two subprograms actually called on to manage memory usage appear to be copies of programs that Microsoft hands out free. Both modules increase a computer's capacity using "virtual memory," a memory-expansion technique considerably more...
...complete nonsense," says Syncronys president Rainer Poertner of c't's charge. "The compression algorithms are at the heart of our technology." Does SoftRAM 95 actually compress data held in memory chips? "Absolutely!" he insists. Poertner points out that a recent customer survey conducted by Dataquest, a market- research firm, showed that most SoftRAM 95 owners are quite satisfied...
...least one other researcher has repeated Persson and Storm's software dissection and confirmed their conclusions. "I found exactly what everyone else found," says Oregon's Russinovich. SoftRAM 95's main component, he says, is "little more than copies of the sample programs provided in Microsoft's development kit. The differences are cosmetic...
Meanwhile, the company has raised eyebrows for other reasons. According to the New York Times, Syncronys was not subject to lengthy Securities and Exchange Commission scrutiny or the high cost of an initial public offering because it merged with a corporation that had already gone public. Yet on SoftRAM 95's box, the company lists its ticker name as nasdaq:sycr, even though its shares are still not approved for trading on the national over-the-counter exchange. (Syncronys' stock trades on the OTC bulletin board, which is supervised by NASDAQ...
Against all odds, Syncronys still has one group of loyal supporters: those legions of customers who continue to report their satisfaction with SoftRAM 95. And the indomitable Poertner remains unbowed. He can be seen regularly on the Internet fiercely debating his critics. He also turned up last week at the giant Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas to announce new versions of SoftRAM, including one for the Macintosh...