5th October 1999 Archive

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Prague outfit prepares NetBeans development tools

And may have caught Sun's eye

With more and more attention being given to Java, tools developers have become very sexy. NetBeans, based in Prague, and founded in July 1997 by Roman Starek (previously with Sybase, Informix and PowerSoft) is one of the more prominent second wave Java tools developers. Its venture capital was arranged through EDventure Holdings …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 07:13
So how old is the Net, and did Sputnik invent it?

Our Graham braindumps 42 years of history...

Some people have decided that the Internet is 30 years old and are celebrating its trigesimus. Well, save the candles, because there are plenty of other anniversaries that are in many ways quite as important. In a strange way, the Internet resulted from a non-collaboration between the USSR and the USA, with the UK contributing …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 07:18
MS-commissioned secret audit clears MS over Hotmail holes

Huge victory for self-regulation, says Man in Suit

Microsoft has been entirely exonerated over the ghastly cock-up that opened up the email of 50 million Hotmail users to all and sundry. The exoneration comes in a secret report of an audit that was carried out by a "big five accounting" firm which Microsoft won't name. One might of course speculate that this is the sort of thing …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 10:26
Freeserve takes a piece of the music retail action

Splashes out £2.6m on stake in CD retailer

Freeserve is buying 15 per cent of UK online CD retailer InFront. The Dixon's ISP will splash out £2.6 million cash for its stake of the company, which trades as Streets Online and trades through the Freeserve portal. Freeserve said its existing business arrangements with Streets Online had been extended to September 2001. John …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 11:44
MCI WorldCom Sprints into telco mega-deal

Updated World's largest ever merger bid sees three-way tie-up in US market

A dramatic day of bid and counter bid ended with upstart American telco MCI WorldCom coming up trumps with a $129 billion bid to buy US rival Sprint. The deal is the largest corporate takeover ever and completes the union of the three biggest rivals to AT&T in the long-distance telephony market, MCI, WorldCom (who merged last …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 11:50
One in three Brits owns a mobile phone

Cellphone vendors cash-in on summer bonanza for pre-pay phones

Almost three million UK punters bought a mobile over the summer - that's two phones sold per second. Which means that since you started reading this story, another 10 mobiles have been sold. Users were queuing up to swell the coffers of the mobile phone operators, with BT Cellnet beating off rivals by netting 923,000 subscribers …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 13:17
Day of the robots is coming, says UN

No it isn't, world + dog replies

Repeating a prediction that has been made incorrectly only a million times before, the United Nations said today that the market for domestic robots will take off in the next few years. The market for robots that can vacuum, scrub the floor, empty dishwashers and so on will grow to be worth a world-wide total of $3.3 billion by …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 13:49
New XML indexing engine

Comes with Java XML to HTML convertor

A new XML indexing, conversion and retrieval engine called XRS has been developed by Dongwook Shin, a visiting scholar at the US National Library of Medicine. It appears to have a few advantages over existing engines. XRS allows several retrieval options, including retrieving any elements, the weighting of elements, and a query …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 14:44
Jewish Web sites slug it out

Not so much a case of David and Goliath, more David and smaller David

The UK's youngest Internet tycoon is facing an online battle with a copycat Web site which claims he is too young to do the job properly. Benjamin Cohen, teen founder of jewishnet, is worth a cool £5 million. The lad featured as the most junior member of The Sunday Times' list of Web millionaires published at the weekend. …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 14:58
IBM points Power4 ‘Gigaprocessor’ at 2GHz

The wraps come off the roadmap today, but it'll still be over a year before it ships

IBM will flesh out its next generation Power4 line of PowerPC processors at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose later today. Power4, which IBM first started talking about as Gigaprocessor at last year's Forum, is aimed for 2001 (won't it be busy then, friends?), will have 170 million plus transistors and will consist of two …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 15:14
iMac II to show its face today

Top secret launch to be announced by Jobs, don't tell anyone

Apple is today expected to launch the next versions in its range of iMacs. The company is keeping mum about the launch – or C2 revision as it has been named - but has been unable to stop reports popping up all over the Web. It is believed that the colourful computers will be announced by interim CEO Steve Jobs at a press …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 15:46
US firm previews 140GB media disk storage

Based on fluorescent incoherent light technology, of course

C3D yesterday showed off new storage technology which it says can offer over 100GB of storage on one disk. The US company demonstrated fully-working prototypes of a 140GB, read-only CD-sised disk and a 10GB read-only credit-card sized card (in other words less than half the width of a PC card). C3D now needs manufacturing …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 15:51
MS aims for e-education leverage via $25m MIT deal

The five year project follows a $20m Gates donation in April, coincidentally, no doubt

Microsoft has struck an interesting and unusual funding deal with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Under the terms of the agreement Microsoft will fund joint research into new teaching technologies to the tune of $25 million, over five years. So far so clear enough, but the project, dubbed "I-Campus," is a little out …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 15:54
Sex shame at 30,000 ft exec puts Nortel tagline into practice

Come together

Yesterday, the tabloids were crawling all over two strangers arrested for having sex in front of other passengers on the Dallas to Manchester flight. Ignoring pleas from cabin crew, the married execs were "engulfed with lust and stripped off after downing free booze in Business Class", The Sun reports. "Nothing and no-one could …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 16:08
Cut-price Nissan on sale via Web

Not £14k, not £10k, do I hear £180..?

Special offer for fast moving Register readers: buy a new Nissan car worth £14,000 for just £180. Well, almost. The problem is that you can't actually buy the £180 car from the catalogue site, new-car-net, displaying the comfortable Nissan Primera 1.6 available in 'five door-hatchback, estate and four-door saloon versions'. A …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 16:20
AMD takes SledgeHammer to beat Intel's Merced

But curiously, the strategy's a lot subtler than the codename...

AMD is today poised to build on the buzz surrounding the Athlon by announcing its 64-bit successor, SledgeHammer. It's scheduled to ship in 2001, after Intel's H2 Merced/Itanium target, but it appears AMD has been reading Intel's roadmaps diligently, and has an ambush planned. For over a year now Intel has been talking down …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 16:30
Chipzilla takes bite of Net business

Latest acquisition pushes Intel further into the Internet

Intel is to buy IPivot for $500 million, its third Internet acquisition. The chip giant said it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the Californian, privately-held company which designs and makes "Internet commerce equipment". Its products make traffic between servers and the Web faster and more secure. IPivot has …

Business 5 Oct 1999, 17:30