20th April 2000 Archive

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British women are the new Net nerds

And we thought Surf was a washing powder

British women are the new Net nerds, a Government survey claims. No longer is the typical online surfer a mid-twenties male, who can't get a girlfriend and still lives with his parents. It seems that in the next six months, women aged 25 to 40 will account for six out of ten new Web users in the UK. Females made up 40 per cent …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 07:17
Compaq readies users for the nuthouse

There's fright at the end of the tunnel

An otherwise dismal and bleak presentation of Microsoft's Pocket PC - which it appears to believe is the answer to the Palm - was lightened by three incidents at Leicester Square club Home last night. Several key IT hacks, including venerable and venerated fellows from PC Magazine UK, were shunted into a dark alcove where they …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 07:48
Trident, Via settle legal disputes

Via coughs up $10.17 million. Is it really over?

Chipset firm Via said it has come to an agreement over all and any pending lawsuits between itself and Trident Microsystems. Via will dish out over $10 million to Trident for desktop driver licence fees, and in return, the latter will drop pending lawsuits in both the US and in Taiwan. But, and there is a but, in a strange …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 08:24
Price of Rambus RIMMs drops shock

As much as by 68 per cent shock

Kingston Technology, purveyor of memory modules, said today that it has dropped the price of some of its Rambus RIMMs by as much as 68 per cent. The average amount of the drop is 35 per cent, Kingston said, and a representative from the firm said that the reason was greater availability and shorter lead times for RIMMs. This …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 08:44
Micron readies DDR memory salvo

Forget the Dramurai™, it's the Samurai™

Micron, a major worldwide manufacturer of memory, said today that it will demo three platforms using double data rate (DDR) memory at WinHec 2000 in New Orleans next week. The products it will show include a dual processor platform. Although Micron does not say this is better than Rambus, it does point to benchmarks conducted by …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 08:55
We're Intel. We make muthaboards™

Some of them don't work properly

Welcome to Intel ® technical support. Here is a genuine post: Hello Peter Thank you for your post. There is no recall on the Intel® CC820 desktop board. -- Regards John S. MCSE, A+ Intel Technical Support Hey! This guy got an A+ in his Microsoft exams! That means he must know everything there is to know about hardware (even if …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 09:02
Apple Q2 profits jump 72 per cent

Margins, earnings, revenue all up and be decent amounts

Apple yesterday announced a near doubling in its second quarter profits, jumping from $135 million last year to $233 million this time round. That said, Apple once again padded out its results with an exceptional item - if something that's been a consistent feature of the company's last half-dozen or so quarters can be called a …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 10:51
Mugabe mocked on Zimbabwe embassy Web site

Not famous for his sense of humour

Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, may use fear and violence as the crude tools of authority to "rule" his country in crisis, but he obviously doesn't scare everyone. Proof of this can be seen at the Web site of the Zimbabwe Embassy in Washington DC where the guest book is brim-full of anti-Mugabe rhetoric. In fact, there's …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 10:51
ZDNet buys LinuxDevices.com

Money talks, community walks

ZDNet has bought LinuxDevices.com for an undisclosed sum, but probably for less than finding enough knowledgeable, authorititive journalists to cover the embedded OS patch itself. In the press statement announcing the deal, Dan Rosenweig, ZDNet's president and CEO, makes a nod in the direction of editorial content - "Rick …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 11:03
Dotcom Cinderellas can't go to the Ball

Netshaken, not stirred

Dotcom Cinderellas are mothballing their glad rags today after the organisers behind a sparkling evening out decided to cancel the e-industry celebration. According to the Guardian, the organisers of the Netshake Awards (nauseatingly described as the "'Oscars' for Britain's Net industry") decided to boot the ball and awards …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 11:24
Those computer games awards in full

PR bunnies forget to tell anyone though

We are proud to finally disclose the winners of last night's computer games Oscars in London (we had too many individual emails asking for the results, so we're posting them). A quick note about the delay between event and this posting, however - it's not our fault. Four phone calls to five people and two emails to different …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 11:42
Access all areas: DVD chipping torpedos Hollywood

And what's all this stuff about 'Connected-DVD'?

Up to 70 per cent of DVD players sold in Europe are 'chipped', making a mockery of industry attempts to control the market through hardware-embedded copyright restrictions. And by the next year, multi-region DVD players made in China and retailing for under £100, will be widely available, Jim Bottoms, of Understandings and …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 11:50
Motorola to take over Scottish Hyundai fab

£1.3 billion purchase to created 1350 jobs

Motorola is buying and re-equipping Hyundai's fab in Dunfermline, Scotland in a production expansion project that will cost the company around £1.3 billion over the next five years. The Dunfermline plant will eventually employ 1350 people, Motorola said, adding to the 6500 staff it already employs at its three Scottish plants in …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 12:04
ATI Rage 6 info ‘leaked’

Updated And will it really be called Radeon?

As predicted, ATI will unveil the chip codenamed Rage 6 on Monday, and thanks to a stage-managed 'leak' to Reuters, we know a little bit more about it now. According to ATI, Rage 6 will feature 30 million transistors and be "twice as complex" as a Pentium III. It can churn out 30 million triangles per second, the company claimed …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 14:11
Jenkins Web site protests killer's innocence

He didn't do it, claims remarkably honest and comprehensive site

Sion Jenkins, the deputy headmaster found guilty of murdering his foster daughter has set up a Web site claiming a miscarriage of justice. Jenkins was jailed for life in July 1998 for battering 13-year-old Billie-Jo to death with a tent peg. His prosecution rested mainly on the discovery of 150 "invisible" blood spots on his …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 14:33
ISP tells miffed subscribers to shop elsewhere

'Customers have every right to vote with their feet,' says Screaming.net boss

Screaming.net subscribers should stop whinging about the ISP's move to 24/7 unmetered access - if they don't like it, there's nothing stopping them from going elsewhere. No one at World Online, the e-outfit that bought out Localtel and Screaming.net earlier this year, said as much - obviously - but reading between the lines that …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 14:42
Metallica drops Yale from anti-Napster suit

Move follows university's ban on controversial application

Metallica said yesterday that it will let Yale University off the hook for allegedly aiding and abetting copyright infringement after the well-known US educational institution banned its students from using Napster, the controversial 'seek, locate, download' music software. Napster is the target of a copyright infringement, …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 15:00
1GHz Coppermine shouldn't be hot stuff

Intel gets tough on its thermals

Tom's Hardware Guide – one of our favourite sites – was bemoaning its observation that all the Gigahertz Pentium III systems it had seen had gigantic heat sinks, featuring a special copper 'heat pipe' that leads to yet another heat sink outside the case. THG reckoned that this heat sink added an extra cost of between $50–80 to …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 15:26
Car PCs – who needs 'em?

(traffic) jam tomorrow

While Windows CE is in the news this week as a result of Microsoft's pocket PC marketing push, the mini operating system has another potentially huge target market that always appears to be on the back burner – the in car PC. A study made in November last year claimed that revenues from in car computing will rise from less than …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 15:30
Janet Reno licks chops over Mafiaboy arrest

He has to be guilty; he's all they've got

US Attorney General Janet Reno glowed with pleasure during a Wednesday press conference as she wagged her finger and called for the Canadian courts to punish Mafiaboy for causing DDoS mayhem on the Web back in February. "I think that it's important first of all that we look at what we've seen and let young people know that they …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 16:11
Forget PCs, TVs, mobiles, PDAs – we know the future

And it's printers, says one of world's largest printer manufacturers

While many people are still recovering from the 1990s paperless-office mania ("What do we need paper for anyway?". "I'm not talking to you until you stop being so daft"), Carly Fiorina, IT babe and head of Hewlett-Packard has swung the other way. The printer is going to become the centre of a new "internet-based ecosystem", …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 18:08
Steve Ballmer's vision for the future of mankind

Experience your life through a custom user interface

The experience of using the Internet will be substantially different ten years from now, Micro$oft President and CEO Steve Ballmer predicted during a speech he delivered on the future of technology to students at George Washington University earlier this week. "Our industry is going to re-make itself over the next several years …

Business 20 Apr 2000, 20:13