15th November 2000 Archive

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Half-price Quantum HDDs not for sale here

CDW dishonours 'offer'

US e-tailer CDW has become the latest in a string of dotcoms to cock-up its online pricing. But the company says it will not honour the price, which offered Quantum hard drives at around half of what they should have cost. The drives in question, 9.2GB Quantum Atlas 10K II, normally cost around $350, and CDW currently has them …

Business 15 Nov 2000, 00:01
AOL philanderers beware!

Hotbootee is on your case

An American woman has devised a useful sideline in talking dirty in AOL chatrooms to suspected - and unsuspecting - errant husbands. For a flat fee of $35, Elizabeth Field, owner of InfidelityBusters.com will check out if the man - who has to be a member of AOL - is straying from the fold. Field's clients supply her with a …

Music and Media 15 Nov 2000, 10:17
Ericsson Red Hat Bluetooth web pad heads for Europe

Linux appliance has platform pretensions

Although the giant halls at Las Vegas are supposed to be individually themed, every one lists "Information Appliances" on its menu. The term is becoming as ubiquitous as "uses electricity"... and is probably about as redundant. Well... if they aren't information appliances what are they supposed to be doing, heating the room? In …

Business 15 Nov 2000, 10:28
MP3 players go little and large

Comdex Gizmothon: Convergence Trinkets'r'Us

Is there no beginning to this convergence innovation? LG Electronics again showed its small, dinky MP3 player with a built-in camera, called the Digital Music Eye, that looked tiny and stylish. However with 32Mb of storage it's more of a camera than an audio player. The MP3 player market seems to be polarising pretty rapidly. …

Music and Media 15 Nov 2000, 10:43
Brits like online shopping more than our Euro cousins

More like the Yanks really

UK net usage patterns are something of an anomaly among our European cousins. While our continental friends are reluctant to fork out for products online, the UK has taken to online shopping rather better. Around 32 per cent of households now shop online in the UK - seven per cent higher than in the mainland, according to Phil …

Music and Media 15 Nov 2000, 10:46
Click here for the winner of HP Brio computer

Sorry for the delay - it was Chad's fault

You may remember a while ago we ran a competition to win a top-of-the-range Hewlett-Packard Brio computer (well it was when we ran the comp). We were inundated with entrants - yeah, we know, everyone says that, but really, we had bags full of little, annoying bits of paper. Anyway <drum roll> the winner of the amazing, …

Site News 15 Nov 2000, 10:49
ICANN releases TLD shortlist

It's all gone dotty

ICANN has release the shortlist of new domain suffixes. The ICANN board will vote on which will be adopted on Thursday. The .kid domain has been dropped from the ballot sheet and there is no sign of .sex or .xxx domains either. The .kid suffix was suggested as a way of creating safe places for children to be on the net, and . …

Music and Media 15 Nov 2000, 11:45
ALi DDR chipsets hit full swing in December

Pentium III, Athlon, mobile flavours

ALi is to pump up out volume production of DDR SDRAM chipsets for both Athlon and Pentium III platforms in December. At Comdex, the company is demoing ALiMAGiK1/MobileMAGiK1 support for AMD Athlon and Duron CPUs and Aladdin Pro 5/Aladdin Pro 5M support for Intel Pentium III. MobileMAGiK 1 is the industry's first chipset …

Channel 15 Nov 2000, 11:46
ATI unwraps mobile Radeon

Nvidia spoiling tactic

Notebook graphics market leader ATI yesterday unveiled its response to Nvidia's attack upon its marketshare: an upcoming mobile graphics chip based on its Radeon technology. The announcement comes just a week after ATI introduced the shipment of an updated version of its Rage Mobility 128 chip, the M4, which suggests yesterday' …

Channel 15 Nov 2000, 11:49
Intel cranks up mobile CPU to 1GHz

Sometime next year

Intel is working up a release of a 1GHz mobile CPU in the first half of next year, or in other words, sometime in the next seven months. And in a technology demo at Comdex, the company is signalling it's unwillingness to give any quarter to Transmeta. The product on show is an IBM sub-notebook using an Intel 500MHz chip and …

Channel 15 Nov 2000, 11:56
Cube Clones Continue

Linux box apes Apple

Now this is a machine that's really going to get Apple's legal department rubbing their hands in glee. Taiwan-based DA Computing launched its Komodo Server at Comdex this week, and if it's not a Power Mac G4 Cube rip-off, we're Steve Jobs uncle. Komodo, it transpires, is a small office server, designed to provide LAN-connected …

Mac Channel 15 Nov 2000, 12:17
DRAM slump: now it's Europe's turn

Euro doldrums

Memory prices on the spot market and for forward contracts showed a ten per cent decline in ICIS-LOR's latest world DRAM price survey. The research company attributes the fall to European doldrums, with a weak Euro pushing up PC prices and pushing down sales. The spot prices for 128Mb DRAMs (PC-133, 16Mb x 8) for the 30 days …

Business 15 Nov 2000, 12:33
Apple in a fix over switch

Power Macs fail to power on

Apple has confirmed the existence of a hardware hiccough that cause Power Mac G4 power switches to fail - but as yet has not issued a fix for the problem. According to initial reports on Apple's support bulletin board, the glitch causes the desktop machine's power switch to burn out, which renders it inoperative. It also …

Mac Channel 15 Nov 2000, 12:39
Compaq gets fashion conscious

Get a Presario 1400 with Eddie Bauer's name on it

In what can only be interpreted as an attempt to grab a slice of the "computer-as-fashion-accessory" market space so ably occupied by the iBook, Compaq has launched a special edition Presario 1400, in a co-branding exercise with US clothing retailer Eddie Bauer. The computer manufacturer says that the special edition notebook …

Business 15 Nov 2000, 12:57
Letsbuyit wants £48m to help it into the black

Wowgo.com is Wowgone

Letsbuyit.com is looking for E80 million (£48 million) from investors to tide it over until it can get back into the black. Sales for the three months to 30 September were up 28 per cent on the previous quarter at E9.3 million (£5.6 million). Most of the business was from Germany as UK sales are flat. The company cut marketing …

Business 15 Nov 2000, 12:58
IBM cutting the cord by June 2001

All notebooks to get wireless LAN technology

IBM has said it will integrate wireless LAN technology into all its commercial notebooks by the end of the first half of next year. Fortunately this is not yet another attempt to plug Bluetooth technology. The machines will all support the 802.11 standard, which works on the same frequency as Bluetooth, but has a range of 300m …

Business 15 Nov 2000, 13:43
Virgin whines about cybersquatting

The lawyers have written letters

Richard Branson's commercial empire has sent lawyers' letters to people who have registered domain names similar to its online off-licence, virginwines.com. The naughty people concerned have registered virginwine.net and virginwine.org. Neither site actually has anything on it yet, which is probably just as well. The company …

Music and Media 15 Nov 2000, 13:44
Casualty mobile phone callers jailed

Three months and some stitches

Two blokes have been jailed for using a mobile phone in an accident and emergency department. David Kerr, 24, got three months. He was in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary suffering from a serious face wound. His mate Bryan Ballantyne, 22, got 60 days. Both ignored requests from staff to stop phoning, as well as notices banning the …

Data Networking 15 Nov 2000, 13:45
Sony cuts UK PlayStation bit allocation from 128 to 28

Brits to get 'revolutionary' 28-bit console

Sony is punishing UK PlayStation 2 buyers for the European Commission's decision to classify the console as a video game by withholding 100 of the machine's 128 bits of processing power. At least that's the implication behind what's written on the PlayStation 2 specification chart on Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's UK Web …

Business 15 Nov 2000, 14:43
Vodafone a big fat hypocrite

The people have spoken

Yesterday we ran a story detailing Vodafone's attempts to shut down a mobile spamming company. The company concerned, Webcom International, sends out text messages to millions of phones every week. It is breaking the law says Vodafone; no we're not, says Webcom. Anyway, all of this was a bit rich for a number of our readers who …

Data Networking 15 Nov 2000, 15:18
KDE League formed to promote Linux UI

Gnot Gnome

Linux user interface development operation KDE today launched an attempt to promote its K Desktop Environment GUI as the industry shifts ever Gnome-ward, particularly in the light of Eazel's development of Gnome's next-generation UI. The KDE League's prime goal is to promote the use of KDE among individual and corporate Linux …

Software 15 Nov 2000, 15:41
Intel confirms P4 license talks

DDR chipsets for Willamette coming rsn

Intel veep Paul Otellini, boss of Chipzilla's Architecture group, confirmed at Comdex that the company is in talks to license the P4 system bus to other chipset vendors. It's unlikely anyone else would want to build another RDRAM version to rival Intel's own i850 Tehama, so that means DDR SDRAM. Otellini stated that Intel's …

Channel 15 Nov 2000, 16:12
MP3.com preps MyMP3.com mk. 2

Advertising and subscription models to run in parallel

MP3.com will relaunch its MyMP3.com 'virtual Walkman' service by the end of the month, now it's able to put the legal turmoil of the past year behind it. MyMP3.com will be split into two strands, said MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson today. The first will be paid for by advertising, the other by punters. The advertising-funded …

Music and Media 15 Nov 2000, 16:28
HWRoundup There is hardware outside Las Vegas

not much, admittedly, but we found it

Other than Comdex it is kind of quiet at the moment, isn't it? Obviously we at El Reg are out there doing the Vulture thang in Las Vegas. Or at least, our Andrew Orlowski is out there. He's managed to score an interview with Mr. Penguin Head himself, Linus Torvalds. More on that at it arrives. So, turning to other themes, what …

Hardware Roundup 15 Nov 2000, 17:27
Freeserve: it gets worse

Official apology doesn't apologise + reader concerns

Freeserve had sent us a copy of its statement regarding the appalling mass mail of customers demanding money or the boys will come round. In it, it claims it didn't know the email was being sent out and apologises for any distress. However it then goes on to say that the email still stands and all those receiving it will have to …

Music and Media 15 Nov 2000, 17:38
SMS messages cause Reebok riots

Is there anything you people wouldn't do if there was a free gift at the end of it?

A mobile marketing firm caused mayhem in the Lakeside shoping centre, Thurrock, when it sent out a text message offering a free pair of Reebok trainers to whoever turned up at a new shop with their phone. The store manager was a little overwhelmed when over 50 people turned up within four minutes, the Financial Times reported. …

Data Networking 15 Nov 2000, 18:05
ZDNet journalist goes mad

Maybe he secretly wants to write about flowers or somefing

It can be hard having to write a regular opinion piece. First off, it's easy - you get all your pet hates out - but then as the weeks go by, it gets harder and harder to come up with original ideas. At some point every columnist has found himself writing a load of nonsense by mistake in the vain hope of having an interesting …

Bootnotes 15 Nov 2000, 18:12
Mobile phones are penis extensions

Pub research proves it

Mobile phones are penis extensions, with men more interested in using the devices to snare a shag than for business purposes. That's according to a study of Liverpool lads, who apparently like nothing more than to get their phones out and play and fiddle with them in public places. Not so with women, who prefer to keep them …

Data Networking 15 Nov 2000, 23:57