27th August 1999 Archive
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Sports Internet gambles on Surrey Group
Deal values bookmaker at £19.7m
So what do you do when you are a Internet "sportal", when you have a stock market listing but next to no revenues? This one's a no brainer: you buy a bookmaker. Latest merger on the block is Sports Internet, which is buying Surrey Group plc for £19.7 million in shares. For the faint-hearted Surrey shareholders there is a cash …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 07:29
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Web precursor Xanadu project goes open source
A brilliant collection of ideas that was never going to ship - so is it relevant?
Project Xanadu, a 1960s hypertext vision and the industry's most delayed vapourware, is putting some of its code on the Web as open source with an X11 licence. Ted Nelson, Xanadu's guiding light, invented the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 but failed to develop a working system incorporating it. Despite this, he and his …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 08:34
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Motorola goes live with 200+ node Linux cluster
Los Alamos Labs to use system for high-level crunching
Motorola is designing next generation semiconductors with the aid of a 200+ node cluster Linux system capable of 0.5 teraflops in peak floating point performance. The system is from Atipa Linux Solutions, and uses Red Hat as the OS. The existence of a system of this size makes it clear that Linux is going places in terms of …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 08:37
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MS ActiveX security holes publicly demoed
Richard Smith of Pharlap washes dirty linen in public
Several security problems with Windows 98 were embarrassingly exposed at a security conference earlier this week. At the 8th Usenix Security Symposium in Washington DC, Richard Smith of Pharlap Software showed how ActiveX controls designed to help technical support could be used to gain access to users' PCs. Smith has been …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 08:46
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Intel's Barrett proposes bus jaw-jaw rather than war-war
NGIO-Future IO parties close to compromise
The long running bush-war over the future shape of bus technology looks set to come to a peaceful conclusion, as Intel CEO Craig Barrett offered a laurel branch of peace at a Dell jamboree yesterday. The dispute pitched mighty Intel, Dell and Sun, with a solution they call NGIO (new generation input/output) against the equally …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 08:49
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Win2k next year – we have a target launch date
This year, next year, some time never
It seems that The Register's take on W2000 being delayed until next year has got big stout running legs. (Story: Gates hints Win2k shipment will slip to next year) One of our friendly readers who seems to have inside knowledge of said plans but wants to keep his job, is claiming that a target launch date has been set for the end …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 09:04
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Action 2K slams MS and others over Y2K info
Software manufacturers keep changing their minds over compliance status
The UK's Action 2000 campaign group is setting its sights on software packages whose manufacturers seem to be unable to decide whether, or how, Y2K-compliant they are. And Microsoft products are strong performers in the list of shame. As we've pointed out here in the past, Microsoft has an unfortunate habit of both discovering …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 09:23
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SMP Alphas running at 833MHz
One gig just a shave away
Despite the hoo-haa caused by Microsoft dropping NT64, and making the Big Q look more than a tad embarassed, Compaq and its partner Samsung are plugging away with the Alpha chip. Sources very close to supersecret labs said yesterday that Samsung Alpha processors clocking 833MHz without anything but air cooling are running in …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 09:27
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AMD resists Intel price cut pressure
Chimpzilla stands firm
AMD has denied claims that it will cut prices on its Athlon chip to match rival Intel's moves earlier this week. AMD said that rumours of price drops were untrue, and it would stand firm with its current prices. Rana Mainee, AMD's European research director, said Intel was following AMD's lead, and not vice versa. "We changed …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 09:35
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Linux does well on AMD Athlon platform
Review by hardware site puts it through its paces
A reviewer on one of the Web's many hardware sites has installed Linux on an AMD Athlon K7 and reports good results from the experience. William Henning, over at CPU Review, installed RedHat 6.0 on a 600MHz Athlon machine after some problems with Mandrake 6.0. He believes the problems he had installing Mandrake are to do with it …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 10:06
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Amazon does privacy U-turn
Breaks purchasing circle after civil liberties uproar
Amazon.com has completed an embarrassing policy U-turn after outraging civil liberties groups in the US. The online bookseller's decision to create "Purchase Circles", which reveal what different groups of people have bought providing market intelligence and trends in purchasing habits, has come under heavy fire from critics. …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 10:34
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Tom's Hardware says Athlon can o'clock to 1GHz
Phew...get those screwdrivers out
Our friends over at Tom's Hardware Page have produced a guide to overclocking the AMD Athlon K7 processor. But, as we've cautioned before, you'd be as well not to try this unless you are very experienced. The guide to overclocking the Athlon was produced to allow experienced individuals to tweak the processor at speeds which …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 10:59
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Apple panic preps Power Mac G4 proxy
'Yikes!' to temporarily replace much-delayed troublesome 'Sawtooth'
Reports on The Register back in July that Apple may not ship Power Macs based on the upcoming PowerPC 7400 (aka G4) appear to have been confirmed by sources within the Mac maker. Previously, we reported that attendees at an Apple publishing roadshow in Toronto had been told by company people that the Power Mac G4, also known by …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 11:18
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Singapore hit by Compaq job cull
Sixty-two per cent of workforce bite the bullet
Compaq is to slash its Singapore budget in October, casting off 1600 of its 2600 jobs, representing a massive 62 per cent of its payroll. The company plans to sell its plant in Yishun in northern Singapore, and says that its redundant workers could find jobs with the new owner. Compaq officials would not comment on potential …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 11:29
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Chosen few to rake it in thanks to SDMI support
Aris watermarking technology costs up to $50,000 per year plus 25 per cent of gross revenues
Everyone knows the digital music market is a licence to print money -- and none more so than the technology companies at the heart of the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). Take Aris, developer of the watermarking system to be incorporated into Phase One of the SDMI's specification for protecting music held on portable …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 11:49
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Online sales hit logistical brick wall
Delivery is the key to success in ecommerce, research claims
As e-commerce takes off, online retailers are being hit by the logistical nightmare of delivering the goods to their customers. A report from Forrester Research suggests that as the number of e-sales passes the two billion per year mark, companies will have to rethink their distribution strategies. The research company says that …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 12:31
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ICANN moves on cybersquatting
Procedures for dispute resolution in the pipeline
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that has control of the .COM. .NET and .ORG domains, took the first steps towards establishing a procedure to deal with cybersquatting yesterday at its board meeting in Santiago, Chile. ICANN was set up by the US Department of Commerce to internationalise and …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 12:56
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Has Intel been caught sabotaging Intergraph?
The non-appearance of a crucial certification letter could be the key
Intergraph's return to the Federal Court in Alabama(Earlier story) over what it claims is Intel's failure to comply with the terms of a Preliminary Injunction could spell big trouble for Chipzilla. If Intergraph is to be believed, Intel has just carried on screwing up its business, despite what the judge says. Intergraph claims …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 12:59
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Bug found up Bill Gates' ass
Dear dear, how long is this one going to be up
If you go to this Microsoft page, you are invited to submit a bug report for a product we didn't think was part of the software company's fundamental strategy. But, as we went to press, something was very wrong with the headline which reads: "Do you think you've found a bug in Microsoft Bill Gates Anus 2000?" Ahem. Piles of fun …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 15:09
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Amiga ends ‘freedom of information’ policy
Opinion And, in the face of users who still think it's 1985, who can blame it?
Amiga, inc. today scaled back its attempts to be rather more open with the Amiga community than it has in the past. Set in motion by Amiga president Jim Collas, Amiga Glasnost centred on regular updates on the company's progress both as a business and as a technology developer. However, according to the company's Web site, "for …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 15:23
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MS trashes own 64-bit plans by killing Alpha NT
Analysis The company is hurting itself, and boosting Unix and Linux
It may be some time before we learn who really killed NT for Alpha, but it's the stray bullets that are likely to have hit 64-bit NT - Alpha and Intel versions - that will turn out to have been the real news. All of the evidence points to Microsoft's high end OS strategy now descending into chaos and delays, with the Linux and …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 15:27
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How Microsoft hedged its 64-bit Alpha NT bets
Posted two statements on the same day
We've now received copies of two postings Microsoft did on the same day about the future of 64-bit Alpha NT. Both appeared on August 24. In the first posting, Microsoft said: "This announcement does not currently affect our plans to develop and support 64-bit versions of our products on the Alpha platform. Compaq, as well as our …
Business 27 Aug 1999, 17:44
