28th February 2000 Archive

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Intel confirms price slides

Come on down, the price is right

Intel has now officially confirmed big drops in prices on Xeon, Pentium III and Celerons it made yesterday. Later today, Intel is expected to announce new members of the different three clans, in a bid to keep pace with AMD and its Athlon microprocessor range. Xeon chips The 800 MHz with 256k cache (.18) drops from $901 to $697 …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 08:17
Rise/ST Micro to challenge Natsemi

As predicted last year, X86 cross licences galore...

While we were away at the perennially appalling SnoBIT 2000, a little press release popped into our mailbox from Rise, which early last year was the wannabe x.86 player. We thought we'd heard this some little time before, so did a search on our excellent search engine to find that, sure enough, we wrote the story on the 10th of …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 08:46
Intel dumps Chips and Tech customer burden on Asiliant

No more fabbing, building, servicing any more

Getting our collective head around Intel's future plans when its number is legion (70,000) and ours is in single figures (8) is pretty tricky at the best of times. But luckily, we have as many eyes as Indra, and people who read The Reg keep them open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 366 days a year (2000 is a leap year). One …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 09:36
Intel admits SDRAM as good as Rambus memory

Problems with the i840, i820 to be fixed May

A product change notification (PCN) from Intel has supplied more details about the difficulties with three motherboards which we exclusively revealed a while back. And other documents we have seen show that Intel believes that synchronous memory can perform as well as Rambus. PCN 943 is a document Intel issued to its customers …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 10:07
Cowpland sees share price upside for Corel

CeBIT 2000 And with Borland now under the belt, the big push beckons

Will Corel now be able to mount a serious challenge to Microsoft's entrenched dominance, now that it has merged with tools vendor Inprise/Borland? CEO Michael Cowpland thinks so, as he told The Register in an interview at CeBIT. Corel has made remarkable if rocky progress from the days when it was best known as a graphics …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 11:16
BT network crash caused by software

Glitch blamed for massive outage

A software glitch has been blamed for the massive network failure that crippled much of BT's phone system on Friday. BT technicians are currently working with the software supplier to create a patch. A spokesman for BT would not name the company in question or go into specific detail about the problem, although it's hoped this …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 11:37
Sun hits back at Intel Itanium tale…

Smoky mirrors hide transparent Intel intent

RISC chip manufacturer Sun has hit back at Intel for its statements about the future of Solaris on the IA-64 platform. At the Intel Developer Forum held in a desert location a fortnight back, a whispering campaign from Chipzilla spin doctors led to an unseemly row where Sun was cast as the villain because it was not putting any …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 11:41
Sega admits 1999 loss will double to $411m

Dreamcast sales failed to meet expectations - and then some

A rather sorry Sega admitted today that sales of its Dreamcast games console aren't sufficient to save the company from serious losses for the soon-to-be-complete current financial year. Sega has, of course, been in the red for the past two years and 1999/2000 was always going to follow the trend. But while Sega originally said …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 11:52
Win2k – Sun calls in the Exterminator

Exterminator flees in terror...

The New York Times' John Markoff reports the sad failure of a Sun plot to unleash a pest extermination company on Microsoft to coincide with the big Windows 2000 launch on 17 February. Bizarrely, it all seems to have miscarried because the company hired, Western Exterminator, was worried Bill Gates might buy it and close it in …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 11:59
Fuß Notes from the Messe…

CeBIT 2000 ...and so it goes

CeBIT 2000 was in absolute chaos the first morning (last Thursday) because the traffic lights in the city went belly-up. That led one exhibitor who we met in the afternoon to complain that a journey of five kilometers had taken three hours....we travelled by tram to the Messegelande, avoiding one sort of chaos for another. When …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 12:12
Online farmers expose Reed Net House of Straw

Huff and puff but not enough stuff

Farming On-Line is getting a £7 million cash injection in return for undisclosed equity from Internet Capital Group Europe. With 18,000 subscribers paying £174 each per year, FOL dominates the British online agricultural scene (yes, there is one) and, with links to big suppliers, it could well become the de facto trading hub for …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 12:14
Berkeley scientists develop bionic chip

This sounds like it might even be the real thing

Scientists at the world renowned University of California at Berkeley are heralding the invention of the first ever bionic chip. The chip is said to be "part living tissue, part machine" and will be used to open the membrane of a cell via electrical impulses to enable the introduction of new material, or the extraction of cell …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 12:15
Freeserve joins National Lottery bid

Giant ISP gets together with Camelot and Post Office

Freeserve is to join Camelot and the Post Office as part of the consortium bidding for the next National Lottery licence. If successful, the ISP will create a joint-branded Web site that will enable gamblers to buy their tickets online. The site will be housed within the confines of Freeserve's portal. Nicholas Backhouse, CFO of …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 12:58
Prof proposes music biz ends copyright protection obsession

Allow copying, share profits like broadcasting royalties

"Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now," was the chant of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers a few years back. The Peppers weren't singing about the music industry, but recording companies looking to make sense of the Net would do well to follow their advice, according to Harvard Law School Prof Terry Fisher. Fisher …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 13:07
Govts abuse ECHELON on each other's behalf to skirt laws

We're shocked, shocked, to learn that spying is going on

Government operators routinely gather and exchange intelligence on each other's citizens, thereby skirting laws meant to curtail domestic surveillance, former Canadian spymaster Michael Frost said during an interview with the popular American news programme "60 Minutes". Frost worked for two decades in Canada's national signals …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 13:10
eXchange Holdings wants to be known as MoneyExtra.com

It's a consumer finance thing

eXchange Holdings is to group all its online personal finance activities under the MoneyExtra brand. At the same time it is changing its name to MoneyExtra.com. The company is to spend up to £18 million in promoting the name over the next year. The news accompanies full year results to 31 December which saw sharply increased pre …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 13:47
StorageTek unveils fibre channel products

New kit aimed at SAN market

StorageTek has launched two products that push it into the fibre channel tape storage market. The first is the 9840FC tape drive, the fibre channel version of the 9840 drive. StorageTek says the 9840FC "can move data at up to 20 megabytes per second with 2:1 compression, and can approach 40 megabytes per second at 4:1 …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 14:08
Oz music stores hit out at exclusive Net deal with rival

Tension mounts along online/offline border

Two Australian retailers have promised to boycott products from record label Festival Mushroom Group (FMG), which this week announced an exclusive online retail deal with rival retailer Sanity. The rebellious move comes less than a month after UK retail chain Virgin Our Price threatened to cease payments to record companies …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 14:10
AMD Flash: Gordon Bennett, it's a snafu

But questions remain over FASL jv

A senior executive at AMD's European memory group today absolutely quashed suggestions that its eight year joint venture with Fujitsu is on any kind of rocks or in any kind of a hard place. That follows a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing at the CeBIT Messe last week. Peter Heinrich, …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 14:17
L&H aims at $12bn market with Linux voice handheld

Touring the East to drum up interest

Gaston Bastiaens, CEO of Lernout & Hauspie, was about to leave for Singapore and points east when we spoke to him at CeBIT. He was going to be talking to manufacturers interested in making the L&H handheld device (it desperately needs a code name) for 20,000-word vocabulary speech recognition, packaged with the RealSpeak text-to …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 16:02
X-Box to ship fall 2001, nuke Sony, Nintendo et al

Dvorak's new world...

With Bill Gates' attendance at next month's Games Developers' Conference now confirmed (and Microsoft having registered the xbox.com domain, apparently; x-box.com having being snapped up by some crafty Germans) we shouldn't have to wait too long to find out whether the much-rumoured specifications for Microsoft's X-Box …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 16:31
Yahoo! and News Corp to merge?

Makes sense, but that's not always enough

Could Yahoo! be about to hop into bed with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp empire? The New York Times (NYT) thinks there could be mileage in the story. The paper is a little light on details, but quotes what it describes as "News Corporation executives close to the talks" giving credence to the rumours. Those rumours seem to have …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 16:41
Intel postpones 866MHz, 833MHz CuMine launch

How can we comment on an unannounced product?

Roadmaps Intel sent to both its channel and OEM partners last week showed that the company was set to release 866MHz and 850MHz Pentium IIIs today, as well as a pair of faster Celerons. But according to an Intel representative today, there are no plans to release the microprocessors in the "imminent future". That led us to ask …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 17:05
Etailers not as trustworthy as high street rivals

So says research from company with axe to grind…

Traditional high street brands such as M&S and Woolworth are more trustworthy than online ventures, according to research published by Taylor Nelson Sofres Group. Around two thirds of people questioned said bricks and mortar retailers were more trustworthy than their dotcom competitors. Seventeen per cent though that e-shopping …

Business 28 Feb 2000, 17:08