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18th September 2000 Archive

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  • Sun's McNealy gets $68.6m for year's work

    Big fat bonus, big fat stock options

    Lucky Sun Microsystems boss Scott McNealy saw his annual bonus leap 38 per cent to $4.8 million for the fiscal year 2000. In all, the Sun founder's salary and compensation package was worth an attractive $68.6 million for the year ended June 30. This included a base salary of $103,846, down from $116,154 the previous year, …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 07:26

  • Apple steps closer to PC-compatibility

    Fun for you BSD nostalgics

    The prospect of running the latest Mac operating system on your latest PC has taken a step, leaping from the outlandish to the highly-improbable. Apple released the source code to its Mac OS X kernel in April under the name Darwin, and a milestone has been reached as developers have successfully booted Darwin inside a Mac-based …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 07:30

  • Siemens finally gets shot of UK fab

    Atmel and UK Govt come up with the readies

    As reported by The Register over a week ago, Siemens looks to unload UK chip plant, US wireless communications chip maker Atmel has agreed to take over Siemen's North Tyneside chip plant, mothballed since 1998. Atmel has secured a £28 million grant from the UK Government and is believed to be paying Siemens around $35 million …

    Channel 18 Sep 2000, 08:55

  • Crazed Kiwis run Celeron at 1057MHz

    Don't try this at home folks

    Wacko New Zealand site OCTools has succeeded in running (briefly) a hapless 566MHz Celeron at almost 1.1Ghz. All that was needed was 2 Gallons of Flourinert (cost: $1,000), copious quantities of dry ice and 30 litres of liquid nitrogen, large blocks of aluminium, tubing, clamps, thermometers and neoprene sheets, a couple of day …

    Channel 18 Sep 2000, 11:03

  • IDC: will Europe leapfrog US in e-business?

    Analysis Ah, but what is Europe?

    There's trouble brewing when American market researchers make pronouncements about the behaviour of Europan Internet markets without having any real appreciation of the cultural issues. There's still a great tendency for them to regard Europe as one market, when in reality multilingual countries like Belgium and Switzerland …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 11:39

  • Linux Today cries foul over Windows MSNBC poll surge

    Bots it all about then?

    Strange goings on in an online operating system poll run by Microsoft partner MSNBC have raised the ire of Linux Today, which has questioned the strange way in which Win2k/ME surged into the top slot on Saturday, with a surprise 50,000 votes in favour, or thereabouts. As Kevin Reichard says in an email to MSNBC, "It strains …

    Software 18 Sep 2000, 11:47

  • BT evacuates bowels

    Surftime supported by high fibre network

    We knew that Internet access was a big issue but BT has highlighted the detrimental effects it can have on your health. The inability to control your own sphincters is usually a sign of rabid old age, total fear or heavy intoxication. We're not entirely sure which category BT's Net package Surftime fits into, but then that's …

    Bootnotes 18 Sep 2000, 12:02

  • Reader's Letters H-1B Visas

    You sound off - in our most heartfelt world-weary mailbag ever.

    It's a bit humbling when something as complex and subtle as the H-1B Visa debate sparks off a mailbag that takes the argument into ever more complex and subtle territory. But you've done that this week, and your reaction to the reappearance of the American engineer's worst friend Norman Matloff covered seasoned opinion from US …

    Letters 18 Sep 2000, 12:30

  • HWRoundup Dr Tom initiates integrated mainboard action

    Aladdin TNT2 punch up with i815e

    Tom's page focuses it attention on the world of integrated mainboard chipsets today. Warming up with a pitched battle between the new Aladdin TNT2 and the i815e, this also looks at the rest of a crowded field. Go here for all the gory details. Up your Abit KT7-RAID motherboard's core voltage with this. The author's recommend …

    Hardware Roundup 18 Sep 2000, 12:37

  • CEO's laptop nicked: company secrets on the loose

    Was it one of us scum journos that stole it?

    The personal laptop of Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs has been nicked from a hotel conference room just after a briefing with business journalists. The laptop, which appears to have no better security than a simple password and was said to contain a number of valuable company secrets, was left on an adjacent table for 15 to 20 …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 12:46

  • And you thought we didn't like BT

    Click here for crazed, irrational outbursts

    Blimey. We've been emailed from the creators of a new site, imaginatively called BTHateWorld in response to the telco giant's Internet service BTOpenWorld. Now, we at The Reg are the first to point out BT's abject failure to do anything that doesn't make it instant money while also not allowing anyone else to compete effectively …

    Bootnotes 18 Sep 2000, 13:00

  • Competition OPD rude phrase winners

    The jury's finally back from the Mason's Arms

    Over 250 readers who obviously have rather too much time on their hands submitted entries for our OPD Rude Phrase competition. Our favourites in the commendably-brief category were "THANKYOU FOR THE HEAD HERE IS YOUR QUARTER", from Andrew Valderas and the more graphic "I WISH 2 M_T MY WILL_E ON TO YOUR DOUBLE D_ZZZ", sent in by …

    Bootnotes 18 Sep 2000, 13:38

  • Olympics shaft the Internet

    And you thought everyone was keen to get involved online

    If you want to keep up to date with what's happening in the Summer Olympics, don't bother with the Internet and British TV won't help you too much either. How come? Money of course. The International Olympic Committee has already made it clear it is trying to clean up its image by stamping on drugs and taking a hard line with …

    Music and Media 18 Sep 2000, 13:43

  • Human Genome out on CD

    Cool boffin gimmick

    Boffins. Where would we be without them? Like this Dr. Tim Hubbard, head of human sequence analysis at the Wellcome Trust's Sanger centre in Cambridge. Presumably because he had nothing better to do, he has crammed the working draft of the human genome - the genetic instructions on how to make a human being - onto a CD. …

    Software 18 Sep 2000, 13:49

  • IBM's Olympic brand madness

    Any other make of computer has to be taped up

    IBM is among a range of other "global brands" to have gone completely insane and paid for the privilege of removing competitors from the confines of the Sydney Olympics. In the good old days, corporate sponsoring consisted of billboards and logos on tickets etc etc but now where money is more important than anything else (this …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 14:56

  • BOFH gets Outsourced

    Updated After a fashion

    BOFH 2000: Episode 32 "Outsourcing!" The Boss and Head of IT chuckle delightedly to each other as they roll, in tandem, into Mission Control. "It's brilliant!" Sigh. "No it's not!" I cry, looking up from the Games Patch page I'm currently engrossed in, "We get some outsourcing company in here, let them charge us through the …

    BOFH 18 Sep 2000, 15:03

  • HP CD writer screws Win2K machine

    Review Nice drive, shame about the Win2K support

    Is it just me? Every time I try an HP product under Windows 2000, something nasty happens. In the case of my trusty old OfficeJet all-in-one, nothing happens at all as there still aren't any Win2K drivers for it. Still, installing WinME seemed to get round the problem, but that's not really the point, is it? It was with some …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 15:45

  • Action doubles online business to £50m

    Shows off new CEO

    Action Computer Supplies saw online sales orders double over the last year. The UK reseller, which is anxious to shed its image as a mail order IT outfit, said orders through its B2B site action.com reached £50 million for the year ended August 31, with a run-rate approaching £70 million. Action re-launched its site last …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 15:59

  • Nat Semi unveils next gen Geodes

    Net appliances comin at ya

    National Semiconductors has announced its next generation of the National Geode family of Net appliance (IA) processors. This comprises three specific single chip devices designed for: set top boxes (the SC1200); thin clients (the SC2200); and personal access devices (the SC3200). The Net appliance market is expected to grow …

    Channel 18 Sep 2000, 16:23

  • eBay removes murdered child autopsy pics

    Tightens user policies

    eBay has tightened user policy on its site after an attempt to sell an autopsy photograph of an eight-year-old boy. The photo and other crime scene pictures were brought to eBay's attention after a complaint by US support group the Parents of Murdered Children. eBay removed the pictures from the site, but the action wasn't …

    Music and Media 18 Sep 2000, 16:34

  • Nottingham leases laptops to kids

    Parents pay £5.50 a week, schools pay the extra

    Nottingham has become the first city council to buy laptops for all its school kids. Not that they will be giving them away, but leasing them at around a tenner a week, with contributions coming from schools, parents and local businesses. It is the largest implementation of Microsoft's Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative so …

    Business 18 Sep 2000, 16:38

  • Allo. Funny goings-on with AOL's IM

    Wonder if it has anything to do with the FCC and Time Warner?

    Last Thursday, little bits of information started slipping out that the FCC was demanding AOL open up its instant messaging software as a precursor to allowing the Time Warner merger to go through. We were glad of it, not only because that without this measure AOL/Time Warner would be just too powerful but also because the FCC …

    Music and Media 18 Sep 2000, 17:12

  • Judge slams Palm Pilot and Web use in Las Vegas murder case

    Names and shames guilty jurors

    A US judge has slammed jurors who revealed murder trial information on the Net and used a Palm Pilot to track press reports on the case. The trial came to a head on Friday when former stripper Sandra Murphy and her lover Rick Tabish were given life sentences for the murder of casino magnate Ted Binion. The two were initially …

    Music and Media 18 Sep 2000, 17:13

  • Kuro5hin returns with added Mojo

    Rusty and Dylan parlay parlez-vous

    The Kuro5hin community should flash back any minute now, two months after a denial of service attack took the site down. Pronounced "corrosion" and not "Kew-ro-five-hin" (we were soooo relieved to discover), K5 modestly set out to do be a better Slashdot than Slashdot, and rapidly gained a reputation this spring as an …

    Software 18 Sep 2000, 17:58

  • Nextel security glitch nipped in the bud

    A good outcome, for a change

    Register reader Mike Koper alerted us to a security flaw in cellular service provider Nextel Communications' on-line Account Manager Friday which would have enabled users to access other customers' account details. Koper's discovery is of a class that plagues many similar on-line services, where logging in generates a URL to a …

    Music and Media 18 Sep 2000, 22:59