6th July 2000 Archive

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Via, Intel kiss and make up (but not having kids)

Money changes hand, legals sorted

Via has secured licensing rights to produce chipsets for Intel-produced Pentium III and Celeron microprocessors. It will pay unspecified royalties and a lump sum for the privilege. In turn, Intel is dropping lawsuits against its upstart rival in the US, Singapore and the UK. A complaint with the International Trade Commission, …

Channel 6 Jul 2000, 09:09
CD replicators landed with $1.5m piracy bill

Should have asked more questions

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has netted $1.5 million from two CD-ROM replicator companies. The businesses, based in Central Europe, paid the financial "settlements" following their involvement in copying and distributing unlicensed Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe and Macromedia software. The BSA agreed not to name and shame …

Business 6 Jul 2000, 09:16
Anand duffs up Celery 700s with the Duron

Plus all the latest hardware goodies

More Celerons for you today. We missed one fromAnandtech last time, so we'll put it right today. His scores show the Duron consistently ahead, even performing well enough to be considered with the higher end of the market. The Celeron on the other hand, fits in snugly in at the low end. Put rather starkly: "If you care about …

Hardware Roundup 6 Jul 2000, 09:54
Build it, multiboot it, and overclock it

Mobos, chipsets and GPUs from the regular hardware sites

First a brief foray into the world of operating systems with a look at a "how to" on Tweak 3D. The site has a step by step guide to multibooting your computer with Windows and Linux. It has been written with the less experienced in mind, so if you are "Granny", this is where you can learn to suck eggs. Also PC Scoop have got …

Hardware Roundup 6 Jul 2000, 09:54
Dr Tom checks Cyrix's Samuel

Plus an all time HW Top 10 for gamers

What are the ten best things that have ever happened in gaming hardware? Would you rank the 3dfx Voodoo graphics accelerator above the PC CDROM? And how important do you think mouse-based gaming is? Check out Planet Hardware for their top ten. Fodder for many discussions we think. Meanwhile, the good Dr Tom wonders whether the …

Hardware Roundup 6 Jul 2000, 09:54
Intel cans 800MHz Xeon, few hurt

But watch out for the 16th July

Chip giant Intel confirmed this morning that lack of demand from its customers has led it to can the up-and-coming 800MHz Xeon. We revealed the existence of this part when we published details of the firm's roadmap earlier this year. An Intel representative said that PC customers preferred to wait for a faster Xeon processor …

Channel 6 Jul 2000, 10:00
Return of the Son of Willamette

Another bloody codename to remember

Intel's 479 pin son of Willamette, due for launch next year, now has its very own codename, Prescott. A die shrink from 0.18 to 0.13 micron, Prescott and its associated Tulloch chipset are expected to support both synchronous and Rambus memory. ® Related stories Rambus rambushes DDR camp Tulloch, Willamette and Northwood …

Channel 6 Jul 2000, 10:54
Ask Doctor Spinola…

The good and bad Doctor Spinolas answer your questions

Dear Dr Spinola, I have recently got hold of a copy of Lernout and Hauspie's excellent translation software and wonder if you could demonstrate to your readers just how good it is, compared to the famous AltaVista Babblefish? Perhaps you could reproduce this question, for example, in French, and then translate it back into …

Bootnotes 6 Jul 2000, 11:31
Major vendors cagey on Transmeta support

IBM, Compaq just evaluating Crusoe, not committing to it

IBM's interest in Transmeta's Crusoe mobile CPU appears to be cooling. According to IBM program director Leo Suarez, cited by VNUNet, Big Blue's Crusoe-powered ThinkPad 240, shown at PC Expo last week, was just a proof-of-concept machine, not a product announcement. "Our engineering team will be validating that we can bring to …

Channel 6 Jul 2000, 11:50
White van man wins Web commerce war

Get out of banking and into deliveries

E-commerce is proving to be a boon to the so-called "white van man." Northgate, a commercial light vehicle rental company, has reported almost 50 per cent growth over the last year as more and more businesses are using its rental fleet. The company's chairman said growth has been significantly boosted by the popularity of online …

Business 6 Jul 2000, 11:54
Lies, Damn Lies and BOFH Statistics

Episode 25 All in a bad cause

BOFH 2000. Episode 25 So I get this tape in from the courier and it's marked - AS PER USUAL - "Ultra Urgent". Which means that The Boss is going to be in any time to see how.. "How's that tape going?" The Boss asks, trundling into the office at warp factor .0000000003 before I have a chance to nudge it off the table and into the …

BOFH 6 Jul 2000, 12:01
Big Blue-Big Q join forces

SAN deal worth one billion nicker

IBM and Compaq have agreed to team together to make their storage networking interoperate, in a deal intended to cut other players, such as HP, but especially EMC, off at the gulch. The deal will mean that both players will sell and market products from each other's portfolio. Compaq will use Big Blue's Shark enterprise …

Business 6 Jul 2000, 12:13
Fifty BT stores fail to open

No point - they can't take any money off you

In a rare state of sobriety, an eagle-eyed Reg hack spotted a mysterious sign stuck in the window of BT's shop in London's Oxford Street this morning: "Due to technical issues, this store will be closed until further notice." On checking with BT central, it transpired that over 50 BT stores across London failed to open due to …

Business 6 Jul 2000, 12:20
Parrots get online

It is not dead, it's just browsing

The domain names www.parrotsonline.net and www.parrotschat.com have not yet been registered, but if researchers at MIT Media Labs have their way, they might be soon. New Scientist reports that US scientists are trying to teach a parrot to surf the web. Arthur, an African Grey, can switch between four "sites" at the moment, but …

Music and Media 6 Jul 2000, 12:51
RIP will turn Britain into police state – Clinton Web guru

UK government 'clueless'

Bill Clinton's Web guru has come out against Tony Blair's Internet snooping plans - saying they are tantamount to turning Britain into a police state. Esther Dyson, adviser to the US president, said the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill should be scrapped, today's Times newspaper reports. "You don't want a police …

Music and Media 6 Jul 2000, 13:12
Via-Cyrix runs into PR problem

Updated 666MHz, deal with Intel, what next?

Sources close to the manufacturers of the Cyrix-branded Centaur microprocessor said today that technical difficulties are preventing Via from producing 666MHz versions of the chip. Via announced the Cyrix III chip in Taipei last month, in a blaze of publicity. Joshua died officially inside Via last week, partly because …

Channel 6 Jul 2000, 14:54
Kannel sets itself up as the WAP Apache

Free, open source, it works. What more do you want?

Aside from WAP's other problems has been the age-old issue of proprietary structures. Everyone and their dog appears to have a WAP gateway and of course they've never bothered to make sure theirs will communicate with anything but what they're interested in. Enter Kannel. The company has set up a free, open source WAP gateway …

Music and Media 6 Jul 2000, 14:57
Philips to unite MP3 and CD technology

eXpanium encourages users to rip CDs, download MP3s from Net

Consumer electronics giant Philips will set the proverbial cat among the music industry's pigeons when it launches its eXpanium MP3-based CD player later this year. The device, the same size as a standard portable CD player, is designed specifically to play discs jammed full of MP3 files ripped from the users own CDs or …

Business 6 Jul 2000, 15:13
Sony doubles CD capacity

1.3GB comin at ya

Sony believes that by modifying the manufacture of CDs it can double their capacity to a maximum of 1.3GB by 2001. The company said yesterday that it would begin licensing 'double-density' CD technology this September in conjunction with Philips Electronics. CD drives (ROM, RW, etc.) would require little or no modification to …

Business 6 Jul 2000, 15:32
Email is the British Jerry Springer

Today's show: Dad you're a nutter!

Kids have it easy these days. Email is what we all dreamed of when teenagers - you get to tell your parents what you think of them and they can't interrupt or send you to your room. But in terms of getting things off your chest, you would be hard pressed to find a better story than that of Sufiah Yusof and her barking father. …

Music and Media 6 Jul 2000, 15:37
The Reg greets readers in person

Up close and personal. If a little taken back

We are proud of what we see as a pretty good relationship with you, the readers. But then we were surprised when Christian Treczoks and Edith Geradz from Cologne in Germany literally turned up on our doorstep. Considering we'd also all had a very drunken Reg dinner the night before, the arrival took on a surreal air. ("I …

Bootnotes 6 Jul 2000, 16:00
Bill Gates runs M$ at 2mm per hour

Business @ the Speed of Thought

Bill Gates may have a brain the size of Washington State, but that doesn't mean he is particularly quick on his feet when it comes to dishing out business advice. Last year, the Microsoft chairman distilled some of his thoughts on technology and commerce in a book, Business @ the Speed of Thought. But how fast does thought …

Bootnotes 6 Jul 2000, 16:04
Intel CuMines stiffed by suppliers

A factory is a complicated thing

Continued difficulties in obtaining components is behind the latest delay in Intel Coppermine processors, we can report. According to Japanese sources, a sliver of ceramic used to make Coppermine chips run at the right speed is still in short supply. Although Intel CuMine chips are based on plastic packages, making a silicon …

Channel 6 Jul 2000, 16:07
Euro Parliament to investigate Echelon

Europe hopes to join the party

The European Parliament voted Wednesday to investigate allegations that the United States and allies like Britain and Canada have been abusing their Cold War surveillance apparatus to favour their own industries in international competition. Specifically, the Euros charge the US National Security Agency (NSA) operates a vast …

Music and Media 6 Jul 2000, 16:18
Cheap Brit mobiles attract phone smugglers

Lorry loads taken to the middle east

More than half a million mobile phones bought in Britain have disappeared overseas to be re-sold on the grey market. This figure is an estimate offered by "a senior executive at one of the four British mobile networks" to the Financial Times. And according to the article, the problem is costing network operators in the UK …

Data Networking 6 Jul 2000, 16:54
3D mall is just such a stupid idea, we can't believe it

Virtual real shopping. Or is that real virtual shopping?

You can almost hear the conversation: "Buying on the Internet's fine, but it's not like doing it for real." "Oh, I know what you mean. I like to browse." "Browse, yes. And walk about, go into shops. It's just more natural." "Oh, I know. What we really need is an online real shopping centre [laughs]." "Hang on. I've got a …

Music and Media 6 Jul 2000, 17:11
5K coding challenge

And other tasty morsels from our favourite hardware sites

Thanks to Ars technica, we can bring you the results of the 5K code challenge. The premise: What if coders only had 5K of space to write in, how much cool stuff could they make? Some of these are really cool, and have that whole retro feel to them. We like numbers two and four best. Storage Review has got its mitts on an IBM …

Hardware Roundup 6 Jul 2000, 17:19
Cyrix III: P6 clone by name, but not by performance

tecChannel benchmarks find it lacking on the speed front

VIA's P6 clone, the Cyrix III, underperforms Intel Celeron in a series of 2D applications and Windows 98SE benchmarks, run by tecChannel. In its review comparing the Cyrix III with a clutch of rival offerings from AMD and Intel, tecChannel summarise performance as "rock bottom: Only the predecessor Cyrix II is even slower. …

Channel 6 Jul 2000, 19:53
What the hell is – the Echelon scandal?

Europe's aflame, but we are underwhelmed...

In the past week increasingly scandalised Echelon stories have ripped across Europe, following the publication of a European parliament report into the shady spook system. But in all the sound and fury there are aspects that haven't really been properly covered - how little of Echelon's claimed activities we didn't know about …

Register Full Coverage 6 Jul 2000, 19:55
World's first cyborg: man/machine or pipedream?

Is Terminator technology tugging our arm or our leg

Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, will breach the human/computer divide by implanting a 2.5cm microchip into the top of his arm. Signals from a computer will cause the chip -- which is connected to the nerves in his arm -- to send out various electrical impulses and thereby control how his arm moves …

Register Full Coverage 6 Jul 2000, 19:58
Dell web site is ‘the worst in the world’

Wanna wait 24 days for a reply?

There's good PR bunnies and crap PR bunnies. Lewis PR has sent out an HILARIOUS release with pix of different-sized beards illustrating which beard size relates to specific IT abilities. How we laughed. But thoughtful Rainier UK sent us the results of this year's survey into how major corporations use the wacky world wide web …

Music and Media 6 Jul 2000, 21:35