4th January 2000 Archive

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Daily Net Finance News: 16-30 Nov 1999

intro

30 Nov 1999 Tesco is selling £2 million worth of groceries online each week, the company said today, making it one of the biggest e-supermarkets inn the world. 29 Nov 1999 The Inland Revenue, and Customs and Excise, are to let people file their tax return online, the Government said today. The first electronic submissions are …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 09:30
HP Pavilion refresh to include today's 533MHz Celeron

Intel to bring release date forward a week

Sources only a fag* paper away from Hewlett Packard have revealed a refresh of HP Pavilion PCs due any day now. One of the machines HP will introduce uses the AMD K6-II, while another uses the brand new Celeron 533MHz part which Intel is expected to announce today, a week ahead of the date we predicted last century. The HP …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 10:49
AMD K6-III not dead, merely resting

Plans for new variants during 2000

Rumours that AMD's K6-III is destined for the chip gulag have been scotched by the company today. Instead, AMD will roll out new variants of the K6-III during this year and will continue to develop the product, a representative of the firm has confirmed. But AMD has acknowledged that the part is not as popular in the retail …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 12:59
Samsung shows off 288Mb Rambus chip

Memory is made of this...

Samsung yesterday said it had finished work on a 288Mb DRAM chip based on the Direct Rambus format. The South Korean manufacturer announced plans to start mass production of the semiconductor this month. It aims to churn out two million units of the RDRAM component, which is based on 0.17-micron technology, per month, the Korea …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 13:09
Multimedia Corp takes WeddingGuide UK stake

Net and marriage go together like horse and carriage

The Multimedia Corporation has bought a 6.8 per cent stake in WeddingGuideUK.com, "the leading UK website for engaged couples and newlyweds" for £500,000. This includes the acquisition of loan stock, so presumably it will be repaid some of this money (or convert to equity at a later stage). Mike Barratt, the founder and "UK …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 13:57
French proposal plans state Free Software Agency

The law pushing open software as the French state standard is taking clearer shape

A proposed French law adopting free and/or open source software as the official state standard has been rewritten and tightened up, following the French Senate's pioneering experiment with electronic discussion. The new text, originally proposed as loi 495 but now retagged 117, cleans up terminology, but perhaps the most …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 14:45
Kyocera buys Qualcomm Terrestrial

But don't forget the Iridium investment, folks...

Yasuo Nishiguchi, the president of Kyocera Japan, has snapped up Qualcomm's terrestrial based division -- the CDMA people -- for a vast amount of money which the company will not disclose. Kyocera is one of the biggest mobile phone manufacturers in Japan, and found itself associated with the ill-fated Iridium venture last year. …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 15:56
Transmeta screws up on Y2K – Where's Man Friday when you need him?

Updated And good news on VCR bug

This is absolutely the last update on this lengthy Y2K story on The Register you will see this year, unless people fix the bugs real quick. First an update on VCRs. A technical support reader in Kenya reports that you don't have to worry too much about your auto-set date, because this year's calendar is the same as 1972's. We' …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 16:05
Staples furious at Compaq Presario freeze-ups

Twenty five per cent return rate too high. Wait for Feb 16

Another source at a major US retailer has written The Register to confirm, and complain about the Presario 5800 freeze-up we reported last week. A source at Staples US said there was around a 25 per cent return rate on the Presario 5800 series at stores throughout the US. Most PC companies that ship systems expect between a one …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 16:34
London Dome countdown explained

Y2k bug ate my news agenda…

Those nice folk down at London's Millennium Dome have taken time out from sweeping up the remains of last week's mega-party to end the confusion over the countdown on the Dome 2000 Web site. We had already reported on the site's clock which was used - back in 1999 - to count down to the year 2000. Now it claims there are only …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 17:00
Eye in sky plan to control UK cars' speed

Government control-freakery stretches into space...

The British government's latest madcap scheme to sort out the country's transportation has been all over the press here today. The powers, in their infinite wisdom, have been part-funding a project to build satellite-controlled speed regulators that stop cars exceeding the limit. The most disturbing thing about the scheme is …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 17:04
Acer & TSMC set wedding date

Ring the bells – Stan Shih must be happy

Chip maker TSMC-Acer Manufacturing Corporation (TASMC) has confirmed it is to merge with chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The consolidation with Acer's chip division will take place on 30 June, when TASMC will be absorbed into TSMC at an exchange ratio of 6-to-1 of TASMC to TSMC. The move follows a …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 17:22
VA Linux Systems to launch open source one-stop shop

Latest Linux company to pick up on the portal business model

VA Linux Systems will take its SourceForge open source software foundry out of beta and into the commercial mainstream later this month. SourceForge is essentially a large-scale distributed project management system that allows open source development team leaders to juggle the contributions of staffers and external programmers …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 19:13
MCI launches Net barrage with AppNet artillery

Dot-com kits and broadband too

E-business kit maker AppNet has made a deal with MCI Worldcom to deliver what it calls "end-to-end e-business solutions" to MCI business customers, the company announced today. MCI will re-sell AppNet's numerous Net services under its own name to its own customers, much to the delight of AppNet, which is naturally eager to …

Business 4 Jan 2000, 23:03