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24th October 2000 Archive

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  • Ballmer says some stock (not his) dramatically overvalued

    And AOL's nearly not a competitor after all...

    A year on from knocking five per cent off Microsoft's price through careless talk about overvalued stock, Steve Ballmer has returned to the fray by describing some companies as "dramatically overvalued." But don't hit the phones - last time he blurted that this included Microsoft, but this time around he left his own company out …

    Software 24 Oct 2000, 06:40

  • How the hack SDMI challenge was run

    Automated procedure detected failed attempts, so the survivors are..?

    All of the responses to the Hack SDMI challenge still being considered are likely to have entirely removed the watermark, according to inside information received by The Register. That doesn't mean that all - or indeed any - of them succeeded in producing an unprotected music file of tolerable audio quality, but it confirms the …

    Music and Media 24 Oct 2000, 07:47

  • New Intel TV ads ‘complete crap’

    Updated Central characters are Mac users

    You'd think Intel might do a quick trawl around its competitors' websites before signing on the dotted line for a new global ad campaign. And had the chip behemoth bothered to do this it would have discovered that the central characters in its latest TV ads are Power Mac users and feature large on Apple's website. When the …

    Bootnotes 24 Oct 2000, 10:16

  • Pentium 4 to ship bundled with Rambus

    Tech Data SKUs up Pentium 4 offerings

    With Intel's Pentium 4 launch less than a month away, US distributor Tech Data has posted details of its P4 offerings on its secure site. VARs and resellers planning to offer the chips will have to pay $900 for a 1.4GHz part and $1050 for the 1.5GHz variant. Both processors come bundled with a (rather miserly) 64MB of PC-800 …

    Channel 24 Oct 2000, 10:40

  • Dodgy executives ‘four times more likely online’

    The old ones are the worst, apparently

    The dotcom world is run by a bunch of crooks, according to research from Kroll Associates, a corporate security company. The company found that Internet executives were four times as likely to have "unsavoury backgrounds" than executives from traditional companies. The FT reports that over the last six months Kroll carried out …

    Music and Media 24 Oct 2000, 10:53

  • Dutch telco relaxed about LLU in Britain

    Can't wait to get its gear into BT's local exchanges

    Dutch telco Novaxess is refusing to get het up about local loop unbundling (LLU) in Britain despite being committed to offering ADSL services from the beginning of next year. Indeed, the Amsterdam-based company is remarkably mellow and laid back, preferring to take a more conciliatory tone towards solving the issues surrounding …

    Data Networking 24 Oct 2000, 10:54

  • Company director jailed for kiddie porn

    Naughty wallpaper but thankfully no matching curtains

    A UK company director has been jailed for three months after being convicted of downloading kiddie porn from the Net. David Mould, 45, technical director of Sussex-based Network Technology plc, was also fined £4000 and will be put on the sex offenders' register. According to the local newspaper, The Argus, Mould was arrested …

    Music and Media 24 Oct 2000, 10:57

  • Wildfire Magee mad at ‘spinmeister’ slur

    Mad, not mystic

    Reg co-founder Mike 'Wildfire' Magee today took time out from his sabbatical to angrily refute suggestions that he was a Sanskrit god. An article in yesterday's Media Guardian repeats allegations that "Mystic" Mike Magee was off to India to "be with his people" and that his peers and compatriots had elevated the man to the …

    Bootnotes 24 Oct 2000, 11:04

  • Germany bucks Apple revenue trend

    Deutschland über Apples

    If Apple is running into problems in the US and other territories, it certainly isn't in Germany. The Mac maker yesterday touted a 62 per cent rise in annual revenue as a sign that Germany is its most important European market. The company does seem to have finally had some success here. Apple has long been a minority player in …

    Mac Channel 24 Oct 2000, 12:06

  • Nat Semi issues profit warning

    Seasonal adjustment

    National Semiconductor's share took a 35 per cent tumble after the company issued a profit warning for the second and third quarters. Ericsson, one of NatSemi's largest cell phone customers, cut sales targets on Friday last week because of losses from manufacturing the phones and NatSemi said that orders for PC products were …

    Business 24 Oct 2000, 12:14

  • SGI Q1 loss beats Street

    Component shortages still hit revenues, though

    SGI managed to pull at least one rabbit out of its financial top hat yesterday, widely beating Wall Street expectations of its earnings (or lack of them) despite a predicted fall in revenue. Financial analysts had been anticipating a loss of 45 cents a share, according to Zacks Investment Research's average, but SGI turned in a …

    Business 24 Oct 2000, 12:35

  • Boxman sinks

    No buyers

    Boxman, the e-retailer, is to go into liquidation, after failing to find a buyer. The company, which burned through £50 million of shareholder funds, was losing upwards of £2 million a month at the time of its collapse earlier this month. Everyone appears to rate Boxman highly, so what's in store for less well-run dotcom …

    Business 24 Oct 2000, 12:50

  • BTOpenwoe stung by bugs

    Service supposed to be dynamic - but is not

    BTOpenwoe has been hit with technical problems that prevent people from using the high speed, always on, broadband service. People who've signed up to the £40-a-month service have reportedly been suffering access difficulties for the last week or so and at the moment there appears to be no resolution to the problem. It's …

    Music and Media 24 Oct 2000, 12:51

  • Hitachi jumps on Crusoe bandwagon

    Surely they should announce this stuff on Friday, man?

    Hitachi is the latest Japanese laptop maker to adopt the Transmeta Crusoe notebook chip. The company is expected to announce details of its new B5-sized notebook tomorrow. The potentially very low power consumption of Crusoe is proving irresistible to notebook computer manufacturers, although early machines have so far …

    Channel 24 Oct 2000, 12:58

  • Be wins PersonalJava compliance award

    Won't do much to boost its $68,000 revenue, though...

    Sun today patted Be on the head and said, "There's a good boy," for ensuring its information appliance-oriented BeIA operating system is Personal Java-compliant. Personal Java essentially provides devices with a basic Java Virtual Machine. BeIA is a trimmed down version of Be's BeOS, developed for Web pads and the like, and so …

    Software 24 Oct 2000, 13:11

  • Carrera ceases trading

    To be sold as going going gone concern?

    Carrera, the stricken system builder has ceased trading and is "operating" with only a skeleton staff. But joint receiver Panell Kerr Foster (PKF) and today confirmed that the company has not gone into liquidation. So what's happening to the "active negotiations" to sell the company as a going concern? According to the online …

    Business 24 Oct 2000, 13:11

  • UK Gov't to fund easier-to-use GUIs

    Up to a point, Lord Sainsbury

    The UK Government today announced it will hand out £4 million to anyone who can make computers easier to use. The grant will be administered by a quango (quasi non-governmental organisation) called People at the Centre of Communications and Information Technologies (PACCIT). It will dole out the dosh to research projects …

    Software 24 Oct 2000, 13:28

  • P4 set to bust 2GHz barrier in Q2 next year

    Lots of lovely confidential roadmap info leaks out

    New Intel confidential roadmaps seen by The Register put more flesh on the bones of Chipzilla's plans for the first half of next year. And the chip behemoth's promise that the P4 ramp will be its most aggressive yet certainly seem to be borne out, assuming everything goes according to plan. Desktops Pentium 4 is shown at 2GHz …

    Channel 24 Oct 2000, 13:57

  • Debt-ridden Xerox promises ‘aggressive turnaround’

    Bluechip to pauper

    Xerox, the bluechip-to-pauper imaging business, is to tackle its $18bn debt through an "aggressive turnaround plan". It says it will slash running costs by $1bn and will will raise $2bn -$4bn through asset disposals. Enough to make employees dizzy - but is it enough to satisfy creditors and shareholders? And why did the board …

    Business 24 Oct 2000, 14:22

  • Paedo ‘predator’ jailed

    Nasty blokey sent to chokey

    A paedophile has been jailed for five years after abusing a 13-year-old girl he met in a chat room Patrick Green, 33, was sentenced today at Aylesbury Crown Court after he pleaded guilty to indecent assault and of having unlawful sex with a minor. Green also admitted possessing indecent photographs of children. According to …

    Music and Media 24 Oct 2000, 14:22

  • Mobile phones get on your (ear) nerves

    What's the damage?

    Guess what? Mobile phones cause nerve damage to your ears. They also heat the skin. The latest findings come from two research groups - one in the UK and one in Australia. The UK study looked at the physiological changes during a 30-minute conversation on a cell phone. Researchers found that after just six minutes the …

    Data Networking 24 Oct 2000, 15:53

  • Oftel welcomes shared access

    Tim loses the will to live

    Oftel has today issued more guff about local loop unbundling (LLU) in Britain. In its latest draft diktat on shared access, the winged watchdog claims operators will be given the option as to whether or not they wish to provide voice calls over ADSL. It means that operators can just supply "higher bandwidth services" such as …

    Data Networking 24 Oct 2000, 15:54

  • HWRoundup: Dr Tom burns fast CDs

    And loads of motherboard action from hardware land

    The friends of the good Dr Tom take a gander at the new 12 speed CD Rewriter from AOpen. There really isn't much these companies can do on the aesthetic side. But it isn't about the package, so get over there and find out whether the insides are any prettier. The Abit KT7-RAID motherboard gets itself reviewed over at …

    Hardware Roundup 24 Oct 2000, 16:17

  • Acer to bring PlayStation games to DVD players

    300MHz Risc CPU, embedded OS and emulator combo in development

    Taiwan's Acer Labs is working on processor, chipset and software combo that will allow DVD players to run PC and Sony PlayStation games. Acer's new chip is a Risc processor, designed in partnership with an unnamed developer, and is slated to operate at around 300MHz. It will power an Acer-developed embedded OS which will host …

    Business 24 Oct 2000, 16:53

  • ALI joins VIA in race to support P4

    And DDR memory, natch

    ALI is ramping up an Athlon and Duron chipset supporting 266MHz DDR SDRAM ahead of an expected announcement from AMD on the subject next week. The chipset is set to enter production in November. ALI hopes to have chipsets supporting both the AMD Athlon and Intel's upcoming Pentium 4. It is negotiating with Intel for a license …

    Channel 24 Oct 2000, 16:54

  • Uni team claims SDMI cracked, and ‘inherently vulnerable’

    Hackers say they'll tell us how they did it RSN...

    SDMI now looks comprehensively hacked, with the release of a report by a group of security and digital watermarking researchers claiming that they successfully beat the Hack SDMI challenge. Amusingly, the team members are heavily Princeton University, one being none other than Edward Felten, whose previous greatest hit was …

    Software 24 Oct 2000, 17:37

  • Dotcom dodo loses power of speech

    Keynote Keno at Internet World

    Fall Internet World was today hit by the e-malaise when one of its main speakers turned out to be a dotcom dodo. Californian e-tailer Eve.com was signed up to send its co-founder Mariam Naficy to New York to open the show's Digital Fashion and Beauty Forum this morning. Unfortunately Eve.com went titsup.com on Friday, leaving …

    Business 24 Oct 2000, 20:11