2nd February 2000 Archive
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Friends of MS flounder in court brief
MS on Trial Confused filing keeps missing the point
The first surprise in the Association for Competitive Technology's amicus brief supporting Microsoft against the DoJ and the States is that the ACT appears to be claiming 9,000 company members. A very careful reading shows that it counts the corporate members of other industry associations that have joined ACT, which is rather …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 08:39
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MS fights back: DoJ ‘rewriting law to protect competitors’
MS on Trial Desperate, audacious stuff...
Had there been a different set of facts on which to base the arguments, Microsoft would be well on the way to winning the case, judging by the arguments in the Sur-reply, as it's called, to the DoJ's and States' Joint Reply of last week about proposed findings of law. The brief is head-and-shoulders above the pedestrian amicus …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 08:44
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Dell finally shipping notebooks with Red Hat Linux
Which must make it time for IBM to wake up, right?
Dell is finally starting to ship notebooks with Red Hat Linux preinstalled, a full ten months after the company took a stake in Red Hat and made a public commitment to the OS. But despite it's apparent feet of clay, Dell's move - on two models - still gives it a marginal lead over other major PC companies, because Linux on …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 09:21
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Jobs dropped at BT as profits fall
Still raking in plenty big moolah, though
BT is to axe 3,000 middle managers in the face of falling profits, the giant telco mumbled today. Instead of being up front about the redundancies, the telco buried the announcement in a small paragraph deep in the bowels of BT's Q3 results. Some 49 paragraphs into the statement -- and after it had discussed operating profit and …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 11:34
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Intel PIII shortages hit Taiwan's board makers
Company denies packaging problems, blames 'forecasting errors'
Intel has confirmed that its Pentium III chips are in short supply, a situation that will cut demand for Taiwan's hi-tech products, industry sources say. "If the customer can't buy the [Pentium III] CPU, then they don't want to buy motherboards, or some other PC products," said Tony Yang, a spokesman for motherboard manufacturer …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 11:36
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Compaq's Capellas thinks W2k key to future growth
Alpha barely mentioned in his keynote
CEO and president of Compaq, Mike Capellas, said today that there was still a need for improved performance in its PC sector, despite better figures it turned in for its financial quarter. Capellas, speaking in London at an international press briefing, said that while he had succeeded in cutting operating expenses at the …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 12:09
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Motorola's 500MHz G4 yields very low indeed claim sources
Surprise, surprise
Motorola continues to experience major problems producing 500MHz PowerPC 7400 (aka G4) CPUs, with yields down to as little as one per cent, according to industry sources cited by AppleInsider. Said sources claim that the problem lies with the G4's architecture and Motorola's copper fabrication process. Regular readers may recall …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 12:10
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Intel execs to sell $80m shares
That's a lot of greenbacks
The champagne corks will be popping even more ferociously than normal in Satan Clara, after three top Intel geezers prepare to cash in shares worth a combined $80 million. Chipzilla's been having a rough time of it lately and - as any fule kno' - the best way to cure a dose of the blues is with a little retail therapy. So maybe …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 12:12
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2m PlayStation 2s to ship in first 2 days – Sony exec
Company ups sales predictions -- and then some
A Sony executive today said the company expects to ship a massive two million PlayStation 2 consoles in its first two days. The sound you can hear in the background is the combined noise of hundreds of Sony staff rubbing their hands in anticipation of a major boost to the company's revenues. The 'two million units in two days' …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 12:36
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Linuxcare opens support services for customer rebranding
Move should dissuade Linuxcares customers from competing with it
Linux services specialist Linuxcare today opened its support offerings to allow customers to rebrand them as their own, and said it had already signed up Hewlett-Packard, VA Linux Systems, Informix and ThinkFree.com for the Custom Solution Service (CSS). CSS, of course, marks the company's latest scheme to attract customers for …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 12:58
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E by gum e-Envoy
Blair Net project visits the North - of England, that is
Britain's new e-envoy, Alex Allan, has been out and about giving support to e-ntrepreneurs in the North of England. He managed to cram in a photo shoot with Great Britain rugby league captain Andy Farrell yesterday, and a visit to Manchester's own 'Silicon Valley' before heading for a schmooze with other new media types. …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 13:00
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Tories pull plugs on ill-fated ISP
Sleaze, Cash for Questions and even an Al Fayed parody all prove too much
The Conservative Party has pulled the plug on its ill-fated ISP by blocking all future registrations for the service. The link to sign up with Tory.org was removed from the site's home page yesterday, less than a week after The Register exposed the slipshod vetting process of the service. No one from the Conservative Central …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 13:05
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Leaked MS email reveals deal plans with BT, AT&T, Airtouch
Who needs subpoenas when the execs have finger trouble?
An apparent blunder in email addressing seems to have revealed a string of major Microsoft deals in the wireless market a month early. The recipient of the email, which is claimed to be a highly confidential Microsoft internal document, was lucky old CNET News.com, which promptly and happily proceeded to publish its content. The …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 13:06
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Sun gives NFS component to open source world – sort of
The cunning Solenoids have devised yet another licence, and it's not open source either
Sun has announced that it is giving a "key component of Network File System to the open source community." But as it transpires from the small print, only sort of, again. Sun is already well-known for its eagerness to embrace the open source community without quite going open source, and already has its own licensing system, the …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 14:41
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MS aims to straddle WAP, HTML with Mobile Explorer
While the folks back home leak like sieves, Mobile Explorer struts its stuff on the Riviera
At the GSM World Congress in Cannes today Microsoft opened up some more about its plans for its Mobile Explorer microbrowser in the wireless market. And the first mobile phone to implement Mobile Explorer, the Q from Finnish company Benefon, was announced. But as Benefon wasn't even showing a working prototype, and is only …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 14:54
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How did Intel get it so wrong?
Analysis Alarums ringing in Santa Clara
Chipzilla is keeping a brave face on things in the face of shortages of Pentium III processors that seem to be pushing its customers into the arms of AMD. So what's gone wrong in Chipzilla Centrale? Chatting to a colleague here, he suggested that perhaps the real problem is that for once, the fire drill isn't a drill. And it isn …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 14:55
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Red Hat founds ‘Xerox PARC for Linux clustering’
Project backed by Alpha Processor, so focus on Alpha CPU
Linux distributor Red Hat has clearly come to think of itself as a latter day Xerox -- today it announced the formation of a PARC-style research centre charged with developing "world class" Linux clustering technology. To be fair to Red Hat, the prime motivator here appears to be its partner Alpha Processor (API), the Samsung- …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 15:10
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Compaq's Pesatori outlines future network strategy
Interview Ex-DEC guy claims the Big Q has the edge
Enrico Pesatori, senior VP in charge of the Compaq enterprise division, set out his thoughts today on how the company will grow its server business in the future, and also discussed its reasons for dropping its development of NT on the Alpha platform. In an interview with The Register this afternoon, Pesatori said that Compaq's …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 15:20
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No repeat of Inacom deal in Europe, says Compaq
Promises, promises litter presentations
Compaq has no plans to repeat its Inacom purchase in Europe, Michael Capellas said today. The vendor's president and CEO told journalists in London: "If you're asking me if we're thinking about making an acquisition of a distribution capability in Europe, the answer is no". Last month Compaq stepped up its direct business by …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 15:35
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Intel buys in fab capacity to help tightness
Wafers, sand, shifts, crusoe, cannibals
Chip giant Intel said today it will buy a fabrication plant (factory) from Rockwell International, and the idea is that it will be able to assist the company to satisfy demand for its microprocessors in the short term. That follows our scoop yesterday, when Intel confirmed that its fab capacity was not all it could be for its …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 17:12
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DVD industry is “screwing customers” – Torvalds
Linux guru lashes out at the entertainment establishment....gently, of course
The DVD industry is motivated by fear to maintain control of their technology, which at the moment is not available to Linux users from any licensed source, Linus Torvalds claimed at the LinuxWorld Expo Wednesday morning. In an obvious set-up following Torvalds' keynote address, an audience member asked, "I have Linux on my …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 18:55
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SCO unleashes Tarantella for Linux
Caldera boss tries to install Linux on his grandmother, apparently...
SCO is to release a Linux version of its Tarantella software in Q2, and has struck distribution agreements with Caldera, SuSE and Turbolinux. Tarantella is SCO's answer to Citrix ICA, and is intended to allow diverse clients to run applications remotely on NT and Unix servers. This particular end of the business is starting to …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 19:57
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Trillian team releases IA-64 Linux to open source community
What happens when commercial development intersects with Open Source? We're about to find out.
The source code for the Trillian project, the Linux port to Intel's forthcoming IA-64, is being released to the open source community, the Trillian team announced today. The move is an intriguing innovation - 'normal' OS developers usually work with pre-production versions of new chips, but by putting code out into open source …
Business 2 Feb 2000, 20:00
