21st January 2000 Archive

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Roy Taylor sort of abandons 3DSL ship, joins Nvidia

The letter says it all

We heard that Roy Taylor, a staunch supporter of the The Register from day one, was going to join Nvidia. And now we have the confirmation. A letter from John Byrne, joint MD with Roy at 3DSL, to his customers says it all and we can't improve on it, except to say that we wish Roy and of course his old mates all the best, so here …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 09:08
Geoworks patent claim lobs grenade into WAP Forum

Looks like the Forum may have messed up big time...

Geoworks announcement that it will be seeking fees and royalties from WAP phone manufacturers and sites because a patent it holds (US 5,327,529, also filed in Japan, and granted in July 1994) is used in the WAP protocol, has thrown a cat among the pigeons. There are several worrying aspects to this, the least of which is …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 10:08
A Linux, Transmeta Web-enabled Diamond Rio for CeBIT?

Beyond saying it's doing a Transmeta appliance, S3 is being pretty coy

S3 could show a Transmeta-based Linux appliance as early as next month, at Europe's CeBIT show. The company yesterday announced that it was working with Transmeta to produce a Crusoe-powered Linux Internet appliance. But yesterday's announcement wasn't exactly heavy on detail. It's to be part of "a larger family of planned …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 10:57
Fujitsu Siemens PC sales don't shine

Major roll-outs frozen, company says

UK sales have failed to live up to expectations for Fujitsu Siemens Computers' first post-merger business quarter. Like many PC vendors, it saw a freeze in corporate spending for the last three months of the year as managers were too scared of Y2K to buy kit. In contrast to healthy European PC sales, which grew 20 per cent, the …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 11:22
WD junks SCSI as HDD wars take toll

3400 layoffs at Seagate and WD

Seagate is issuing redundancies to 2900 workers in Thailand, and smaller rival Western Digital is putting 420 staff on the job scrap heap. Seagate says the staff cuts are the latest round of the reorganisation last year which will see the company reduce its 77,000 headcount by ten per cent this September. As an indicator of …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 12:06
Y2K spending freeze fails to chill Sun

Profits, revenue sees double-digit growth

Sun cocked a snook at rival hardware vendors hit by a Y2K-inspired downturn in hardware spending when the it announced its Q2 2000 results yesterday. The smug server company posted profits for the period of $353 million, up 35 per cent on the same period last year. That translates to 21 cents a share, a smidge above the 20 cents …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 12:12
Lucent posts 23 per cent profit plunge

Couldn't ship enough fibre-optic kit

A disappointed Lucent yesterday posted a 23 per cent fall in profitability yesterday when it announced the results of its first quarter of fiscal 2000. The comms company said it made $1.25 billion during the three months to 31 December 1999, though after one-off items, that figure falls to $1.18 billion. This time last year, it …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 12:14
ALi bridges S370, Slot One gap

Acer Chipset is your flexible Intel friend

Acer subsidiary ALi announced a chipset which supports both slot One and socket 370 PC systems and also includes multiple memory support for both PC-133 and PC-100. The Aladdin-Pro 4 chipset is claimed to offer high performance at a cost-effective price but may indicate uncertainty by chipset manufacturers as to where the market …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 12:21
Motorola claims alcoholic PC breakthrough

Battery needs a pint after a hard day's night

A fuel cell technology developed by Motorola is to use alcohol to deliver longer life for mobiles and notebook PCs. And the so-called "fuel cell technology" uses alcohol and requires refills when the battery goes flat. That means that at the end of a long day, just like your common or garden Register staffer, your laptop will …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 12:32
Big Blue ships extra ThinkPads

Still pricey little numbers though

IBM today started shipping more members of its ThinkPad family in the UK. The ThinkPad 600X, an expansion on the existing ThinkPad 600 series, uses Intel's Pentium III in three basic model configurations. The first has the 450MHz chip, with 64MB, 13.3in XGA TFT and 6GB hard drive. It is priced at £2750 (Windows 98) and £2826 (NT …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 12:36
Sony to launch e-commerce biz to serve PlayStation 2 users

PlayStation.com to form basis of next year's full digital media delivery service

Sony is to set up a new subsidiary to sell content, software and hardware to PlayStation 2 owners via the Web. The company, PlayStation.com, will be formed at the start of February -- one month ahead of the Japanese launch of the console-cum-information appliance. Not surprisingly, PlayStation.com will sell consoles, hardware …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 12:49
Gateway profit falls – don't have a cow, man

Promise of jam tomorrow once AOL deal beds down

Gateway saw profits fall but still managed to meet revised (downward) forecasts for Q4. The direct PC vendor, set up by the son of a cattle farmer, posted pre-tax profit at $126 million, down five per cent on the previous year. Excluding charges connected to its deal with AOL in October, Gateway clocked up earnings of $139 …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 13:00
InterX share price goes through roof

From £2.50 in November to £13 today, blimey

There's no stopping those Internet investors once they get an idea into their heads. But InterX doesn't seem to be doing too badly out of it. Since we all got into work this morning, the company's share price has jumped over £1.20 to £13.87. This is more than a £3 hike in a week. The share price increase stems back to 29 …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 13:39
Excite@Home escapes Usenet Death Penalty

And they all lived happily ever after

The fatwa against spam tolerant Excite@Home -- which threatened to excommunicate the company from Usenet -- has been lifted. Although Excite@Home will be relieved that the nuclear option was avoided this time, it's been warned that if levels of abuse and lack of response return to their earlier levels within the next month, the …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 13:42
E-envoy can't surf

It's into the drink for UK gov's Mr Internet...

Britain's groovy e-envoy Alex Allan is at it again, this time with a splendid array of photographs on his personal Web site. The site -- already a home for the lyrics of all the Grateful Dead songs -- shows four pictures of Allan in the 1980s in an ingenious attempt to get into work at Her Majesty's Treasury during a train …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 13:48
£40m fibre optic network to link London & Liverpool

Telewest splashes out big time

Telewest is to plough more than £40 million into a high-capacity fibre optic network linking Liverpool and London, the company disclosed today. The announcement was made in association with Worldwide Fiber Inc and will bolt on to Telewest's existing 2,200 mile fibre optic network in England. Telewest will build the 700 mile …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 14:26
Free Net calls trial extended at X-Stream

Problems still dog service, but you were warned

The X-Stream Network has decided to continue offering its users 24/7 0800 dial-up access to the Net once its trial finishes at the end of the month, The Register can reveal. The rapidly expanding British ISP was due to call time on the trial at the end of January, but has decided to extend it "indefinitely" to its 550,000 users …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 15:27
Gates discloses 5 per cent stake in Avista, stock rockets

To him that hath...

Bill Gates has had to disclose that his private Cascade Investments holds 5.01 per cent of Avista Corporation. It's a strange percentage to hold - one wonders whether he, or his investment manager Michael Larsen, particularly wanted to exceed a 5 per cent holding, and so had to make the disclosure. But, as we pointed out …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 15:28
Spice Girls cash in on Web – big time

Tell us how much you want, you really, really want

The Spice Girls stand to make over £1 million an hour performing in cyberspace. The figure came from today's Daily Mail, which revealed the group signed an exclusive three-year deal to perform a series of shows online for subscribers. The paper worked out that, in theory, if 10 million people paid £10 to watch Sporty, Scary, …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 15:40
Journalists to meet in pub shocker

Free drinks from Computer Weakly hacks

Computer Weakly, the UK's best IT publication (Eh? -Ed), is stuck out in the wilds of Surrey on the 110th floor of the Ministry of Magazines, so can claim with some justification that it is somewhat detached from the throbbing heart of the Metropolis. Indeed, after each new round of IT publishing mergers and takeovers,hacks …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 15:53
What, no MSOffice? US DoJ re-equips with WordPerfect

Is Corel picking up on the soft targets or what?

Corel's winning streak continued today with the news the US Department of Justice has signed a three year deal with the company for WordPerfect software for its 55,000 staff. But before you ask, no, Windows is the platform - the software is WordPerfect Office 2000 Standard and Professional, rather than WordPerfect 8 for Linux. …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 16:15
High bandwidth with old technology

A rolling stone gathers no CMOS

A former division of electronics giant Motorola claims to be developing technology to provide high-bandwidth speeds of 40Gb per second, using technology that dates back to the early 80s. Details are patchy, but On Semiconductor claims that it can already provide speeds of 6Gb per second using Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL), usually …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 16:39
AMD to massacre Intel on St Valentine's Day

850MHz part timed to spoil Intel's party

Reliable sources have told The Register that AMD will release an 850MHz Athlon processor in mid-February, just in time to put a damper on Intel's up-and-coming Developer Forum. The AMD product, which will be available in volume shortly after the announcement, is likely to force Intel to up the ante. Intel may well do so during …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 16:50
Windows 2000 OEM prices leaked

Jan 24 trade launch revealed in CRN scoop

Microsoft sources today confirmed OEM versions Windows 2000 will ship from distie warehouses on Monday 24 January. They also confirmed that yesterday’s CRN.com’s scoop on OEM prices was accurate to "within a couple of dollars". So here are the prices, as posted by CRN: *Windows 2000 3-pack $386 *Windows 2000 Server $725 The …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 16:56
Crusoe robs ARM of chip wunderkid status

Classic momentum stock out-momentumed

ARM Holdings, the fabless wonder, has seen its share price falter on uncertainty over the impact that Transmeta’s Crusoe chip will have on its business. This morning, ARM shares fell 158 pence to £28.60. Merrill Lynch has "repeated its 'buy' rating and £54 stg price target for ARM Holdings, advising investors to pick up the …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 17:00
AMD K6-III mobile may trash Transmeta on thermals

No wonder it's transmuting, this computing...

The K6-III microprocessor is in desperately short supply, we can confirm, leading to speculation that the desktop version of the microprocessor is, as we suggested some time back, not long for this world. Instead, AMD will position the K6-III, with level two cache on board, as a very cool embedded processor. When we say cool, we …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 17:16
Russian wannabe Merced-killer claims Transmeta credit

Saddened by lack of name-check at launch - sabres at dawn impending?

Elbrus International, the Russian chip design outfit that says its E2K chip design would be a Merced-killer if only it could raise the money to build it, is claiming Transmeta's Crusoe family of chips owes a lot to its designs. Crusoe, which was publicly unveiled earlier this week, is intended to combine high performance, low …

Business 21 Jan 2000, 17:17