The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

18th October 1999 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

  • Gates knocks stuffing out of Paxman

    Soft-centred interview

    "You can punch him; you can explode his head; you can decapitate him; you can even put a pie in his eye." This video-clip narration, accompanied by some rather childish animated screen shots of what some people think of Bill Gates, set the tone for Jeremy Paxman's interview on BBC2 television last night. The only critical remark …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 06:26

  • More AMD Athlon prices leak out

    Battle of Coppermine commences

    AMD is preparing a further stage in its continuing battle to set the pace on prices, rather than follow in Intel's wake. As we reported here last week, the company will slash the price of its Athlon chips next Sunday in a bid to stymie Intel's introduction of .18 micron (Goldmine) mobile, desktop and Xeon workstation and server …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 07:34

  • The Survivor's Guide to Geneva 2003

    Guard against casual dress, Swiss waiters, crap accommodation, dish-washer detergent and mad women professing their undying love

    Tero Kuittinen is a survivor of Telecom 99, the international beanfeast for phone jockeys. Learn from his mistakes and you won't go far wrong, when the show next lumbers into action in 2003. * Wear a black suit and an expensive tie every damn day. It's possible to dress casually and get taken seriously at the booths... if you're …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 08:03

  • The Future is bright, the future is wireless

    Tero teases out the trends at Telecom 99

    1. Value is migrating towards the core of the networks. Voice and data merge seamlessly and huge data volume growth will turn leading IP infrastructure companies into the biggest winners of the industry. Applications and consumer devices used to access data will become commodity items, hawked at ever-decreasing prices by Asian …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 08:05

  • Telecom 99: The winners and the (many) losers

    Reaching nerdvana with Tero Kuittinen

    Yes... there were sexy concept phones never to reach the retail market.... there were spandex-clad dance troupes celebrating Eastern European telecom companies nobody has ever heard of... there was vicious rumour-mongering and shameless over-hyping. Geneva 1999 was enginerd heaven. This wasn't the right place to argue that " …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 08:06

  • 1GHz Athlon to arrive 10 Jan 2000

    But Dresden sandpit likely to hold off until mid Q1

    Sources close to AMD's plans have said that the company is likely to intro a 1GHz Athlon early next year. (see 1GHz copper Athlon production starts next week) That is likely to throw Intel into near-panic and makes the likelihood of an 800MHz Coppermine, followed by higher clock speeds shortly afterwards, even more likely. But …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 08:23

  • Citrix confirms move on Unix

    Hinted at MetaFrame Unix server will now happen. So much for NT

    Citrix is preparing to launch a Unix version of its applications server software, Codenamed MetaFrame U. The crucial factor behind this decision, as recently revealed by Citrix's senior VP, David Jones, is the company's belief that a Unix version of MetaFrame won't offend its major trading partner, Microsoft. Citrix has to tread …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 10:24

  • Roundup of the hardware sites

    We've started, so we'll finish

    Time was when if you had a 5Mb hard drive, you'd feel real lucky. Time was, actually, when if you had a floppy drive rather than a tape drive for an IBM PC, you felt lucky. Times have changed. Over at 3D Spotlight, the boys and girls are taking a gander at a Western Digital drive with 27.3Gb of storage. That should be enough to …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 10:39

  • Insight walks away from Action takeover

    Share price plummets as long awaited deal falls through

    Insight Enterprises has scrapped its plans to buy Action Computer Supplies, causing Action's share price to plunge 60 per cent. The US company today said it had ended the agreement to buy the Middlesex-based reseller "in light of a deterioration in Action's operating results". In a statement to the stock exchange, it also blamed …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 10:46

  • Canon gets 1394 ‘FireWireless’ up to 100Mbps

    Takes wireless 1394 beyond wireless Ethernet

    Canon has developed a wireless version of the IEEE 1394 bus capable of transmitting data at a rate of 100Mbps, Japanese newswire Nikkei reported today. The company said the system, currently in the prototype stage, can transfer data between devices up to 20m apart -- Canon demonstrated the technology using a VCR and a digital …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 11:39

  • More than a article of truth in Intel Cern story

    But the big x.86 boys not benefiting

    Raghu Murthi, workstation marchitecture manager at Intel Dupont, wouldn't be drawn on whether it was Cern that was moving to x.86 based systems or not. But, we know for a fact that Cern is dumping its Alpha boxes. And now we also know, because an employee has emailed us, that they are indeed buying stacks of x86 boxes. But …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 11:51

  • Ignorant American red-necks boost US Net economy

    Meanwhile, sophisticated Europeans are too busy to go online

    The development of ecommerce in Europe will continue to lag behind Northern America because Europeans are far more socially sophisticated and enriched than their red-neck US cousins. That's because US Net users have little else to do with their spare time other than stay glued to their PCs in search of entertainment or in the …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 11:53

  • MS pushes system builders back to distribution by withholding CDs

    Tier-two assemblers claim they are being squeezed

    Microsoft plans to stop providing operating system CDs to direct OEMs. From January 2000, OEMs buying software direct from Microsoft will either have to put a back up of the system on the customer's hard drive, or provide an OEM branded recovery CD that is BIOS locked to run only on individual customer systems. This will apply …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 12:02

  • Mystery surrounds TFT shortage…

    …it could be a longage, analyst reckons

    The jury is out on whether there is a shortage of TFT panels for notebooks and monitors, a senior display analyst said today. That follows reports throughout this year that notebook prices and LCD monitors would suffer price hikes as manufacturers struggled to build up supplies. But Bob Raikes, director of research at UK company …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 12:20

  • Mobile Phone Squelchers – - Register readers weigh in

    Jammit Dammit

    Thanks to all the readers who filled in the gaps on my recent piece on phone jamming(Mobile Squelcher jams cellphone calls). Now here are some answers. The Israeli company which makes mobile phone jammers is called Netline Communications and its squelcher is called C-Guard. And there's an article about C-Guard in New Scientist …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 12:27

  • Fried green brain cells at the mobile phone café

    Leading scientist hits out at industry for hiding health scare facts

    Mobile phone companies are running on blood money, according to a leading scientist. Dr George Carlo claims the industry is ignoring and hiding evidence on the health risks of mobiles. After leading a £15 million research study into cellular safety, Carlo has written to the heads of every mobile phone company about fears that …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 14:52

  • MS-Gartner in tangle over Linux-knocking reports

    Linux Myths page claims MS newsletter published by Gartner is Gartner report - now read on

    From the look of events over the weekend Microsoft would appear to have appointed Stan Laurel as VP i/c propaganda. What else can you say when Microsoft's famous Linux Myths Web page references a stack of "Gartner" reports questioning Linux's viability, and then the reports turn out to have been written by er, Microsoft? …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 15:15

  • Online advertising is no pot of gold

    Not enough cash to go round, say e-biz gurus

    Web entrepreneurs who think they can make money simply by generating advertising revenue may be in for a reality slap that will really make their cheeks smart. According to e-business evangelists at the fifth annual Jupiter Consumer Online Forum Europe in London today, there simply won't be enough advertising bucks to go round. …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 15:24

  • Free Net calls group to meet minister

    Are Blair and co. about to pull a massive U-turn?

    The Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications (CUT) is to meet the Minister for E-commerce on Wednesday to call on the government to cut the cost of Net access in the UK. News of the meeting between the lobby group and Patricia Hewitt has left many people wondering whether this is a carefully calculated PR exercise to stifle …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 15:30

  • Intel 1100MHz ‘Athlon killer’ to launch in December? Hmm..

    ...crazy speculation or big grain of truth?

    Before we launch into this one below, we'd better say what we know about Willamette already. We know, from a highly reliable source, that Intel is going flat out to demo the silicon with a date at the end of January. We know that Intel was originally supposed to introduce it in 1998. We know that Intel is now saying 2000 and …

    Business 18 Oct 1999, 16:43