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4th April 2001 Archive

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  • Xbox beta slips a notch

    Not serious. Yet.

    The Xbox development schedule has slipped a notch, but not enough yet to delay the launch this autumn, and Microsoft says development is still on track. According to a report in today's Financial Times, the beta of the Xbox SDK, which was due in March, has yet to ship. As yet, that's only a matter of a few days. But the paper …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 05:03

  • Barclaycard swoops on ShopSmart.com

    Mood Indigo

    ShopSmart.com, the UK shopping comparison service, has been sold to Barclaycard for the knockdown price of £2million-ish, in cash and shares. Barclaycard is to integrate the service into Indigo Square, Barclaycard's online shopping mall (yes shopping malls still exist). ShopSmart shareholders will hold 10 per cent of Indigo …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 08:48

  • AMD sues Alcatel over Flash cash

    Claims French co. reneged on 'hugely beneficial' supply deal

    AMD is suing French telecoms equipment company Alcatel for not buying as many Flash memory chips as it promised it would. Quite apart from the financial impact of Alcatel's alleged decision to back out of the deal, AMD is rather sensitive on the matter of Flash sales. Relative Flash chip sales is yet another yardstick AMD and …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 09:49

  • MS faces fight with OJ's Johnnie Cochran

    Another class action race/sex discrimination case

    Microsoft is facing another class action complaint 'alleging a pattern and practice of race and sex discrimination against African Americans and female salaried employees in violation of the federal civil rights laws.' And its been filed by OJ Simpson's defender Johnnie Cochran together with another major legal firm Cohen, …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 10:11

  • MacOS X to be updated within ten days

    Mac Rumour Roundup And: Euro retail chief quits as new Apple store located

    The MacOS X update that leaked out onto the Web last week should be available officially by the end of next week, according to Apple sources cited by MacOS Rumors. The update will take MacOS X 10.0 to 10.0.1, according to Apple's slightly confusing naming scheme: MacOS ten ten-point-oh-point one. It's said to improve …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 10:18

  • Hitachi, STM to license SuperH CPUs

    Form joint venture, SuperH, to take over development, licensing business

    Hitachi and STMicroelectronics are to form a jointly owned company to develop, market and license Hitachi's SuperH CPU family in the US. The agreement follows an earlier deal which will see the two chip makers collaborate on the development of the next-generation SuperH CPU, the SH-5. Incidentally, 400MHz S-5 parts are now …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 10:37

  • Which is the most ethical IT company?

    Laurels for HP, raspberries for IBM, MS, Xerox

    An annual index of 'corporate social responsibility' has placed HP second, Motorola fourth and IBM fifth in a ranking of a hundred corporate citizens. In Business Ethics survey HP is credited with "generous support of community development and education, amounting to $58 million in 1999, and an extremely employee-friendly work …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 10:54

  • Cheaper flat panels comin' at ya

    Hell's Bells, plastic OELs

    Japan's Dai Nippon Printing has come up with a low cost, quick way to make organic electroluminescent (OEL) flat panel displays. Instead of glass, the printing firm uses plastic film, according to a Reuter's report. OELs are better than LCDs because they're thinner, offer higher resolutions, they use less power and they're …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 10:55

  • Nokia man bites Orange dog

    Handset manufacturers offer Marshall Plan for beleaguered telcos

    Europe's 3G business took a remarkable turn yesterday, with Nokia, Ericsson and Alcatel lending Orange 3.5 billion Euros to subsidize its new cellular network infrastructure. Two billion Euros will be provided by Nokia alone. The deal inverts the usual cellular model, where the networks subsidize the handset operators. But the …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 11:00

  • Lawsuit alleges dodgy deals in Red Hat IPO

    Share offers of technology stocks scrutinised

    Red Hat has been accused of violation of federal securities laws in a class-action lawsuit that alleges investors were misled about aspects of its initial public offering. The suit, filed in US District Court, Southern District of New York yesterday, charges the Linux distributor, its senior executives and securities houses of …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 12:14

  • ISP HighwayOne calls in administrators

    Up for sale

    UK ISP HighwayOne has called in the administrators and it's up for sale. Joint administrator William Tacon from Ernst & Young said: "HighwayOne's difficulties have been caused by the need for heavy and continuing capital expenditure while the business has been established. "This is a high technology infrastructure business …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 12:15

  • WinXP – the screenshots

    Parallel Universes

    Right now the Microsoft Windows XP beta inhabits at least three, increasingly weird, parallel universes. The people who've got it can't tell you about it, the people who want it can't get it (and some of them also can't tell you about it), but you can get it fairly easily if you just knock around the Web for a bit and you've got …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 12:19

  • Nvidia disses chip rival in secret document

    It can't be that worried about Kyro 2, can it?

    Nvidia is bad-mouthing its competition in an attempt to persuade graphics card retailers from stocking rival products, if what purports to be a secret Nvidia presentation, leaked onto the Web, is to be believed. The presentation focuses on the recently released Kyro 2 graphics chip. STMicroelectronics announced volume …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 12:22

  • Portillo pledges Tories will repeal IR35

    Will this stop Conservative voters leaving the country?

    Shadow chancellor Michael Portillo is backing IT contractors to the hilt and has said a Tory government would repeal IR35 tax legislation - the controversial rule to reclassify most self-employed IT consultants as employees, In a column he penned for the FT he said: "Gordon Brown's proposals show a lack of understanding of the …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 12:38

  • Join The Reg Cancer Busting Team

    Buddy can you spare a cycle, or two?

    A couple of weeks ago we issued you all an invitation to join The Reg Seti@Home team. Almost overnight the crew grew to one of the biggest Seti rings on the Internet with more than 800 members. Now several readers have asked us to set up a team also for the Intel/Oxford P2P cancer busting project. How could we refuse? …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 13:51

  • Live mouse found inside PC

    Makes a change from severed fingers

    Computer repairman Gary Taylor had a surprise in store when he turned up to fix a faulty PC - he discovered a real mouse inside. A report in today's Sun details Gary's amazement when he found a rodent nested underneath the PCs hard drive. The mouse had made a nest with pieces of chewed wire, and this process had caused the …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 14:00

  • Component smugglers get 16 years

    Dodged £12m in tax and duty over 5 years

    A six strong gang of computer component fraudsters have been sentenced to more than sixteen years in prison for evading paying taxes of almost £12 million. The five men and a woman were sentenced at Manchester Crown Court. The Customs Duty and VAT fraud was carried out over a five-year period from November 1993 to October 1998 …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 14:02

  • VIA smiles over chipset sales growth

    Updated But doesn't expect it to continue

    VIA didn't seem too worried about the economic downturn when it announced it had sold 24 per cent more chips in March than February and 57 per cent up on March 2000. The company clocked up sales of NT$4.03 billion ($124 million). For the first quarter, VIA's sales totalled NT$10.37 billion ($318.95 million) – an increase of 84 …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 14:04

  • VIA KT266, Athlon's ‘fastest chipset’

    HWRoundup Ace's puts it through the paces

    VIA's latest chipset is the KT266 - and the Taiwanese firm, the world's biggest chipset maker - thinks its onto a winner. But does it pass the Ace's Hardware battery of tests? Yes it does and with flying colours too. "Overall," Ace's says, "the VIA KT266 is the fastest chipset currently available for the Athlon. It is a cheap, …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 14:35

  • Micron to ramp up DDR output through 2001

    But it's careful not to say by how much...

    Micron has followed fellow Dramurai Hyundai's recent announcement that it will be increasing DDR SDRAM production "based on customer demand". The company isn't saying how much more DDR chips and modules it's going to be making, but its does expect a "rapid ramp" and "increasing production levels" for the rest of the year. "DDR …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 14:40

  • Rise in viruses within emails outpacing growth of email

    And UK govt is going to get hammered

    The rise in computer viruses within Internet messages is outpacing the growth of email. That's the alarming conclusion of a survey by anti virus specialists MessageLabs, a firm which scans its customer's email for malicious code. It predicts the increase in virus-laden emails will be felt most acutely within government. …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 15:19

  • Apple bans PC SDRAM for users own good

    Updated Firmware update blocks non-Apple-specified memory

    Apple's scheme to eradicate crashes resulting from dodgy DRAM by blocking the use of non-standard memory through software is unlikely to be reversed - despite the number of users now stuck with useless memory modules. The Mac maker's plan emerged after it released firmware updates for Macs equipped with PowerPC 74x0 processors …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 15:31

  • Sun warns of data corruption problem with UltraSPARC III

    Firmware update fix will result in performance hit

    A potential data corruption problem involving kit based on Sun's UltraSPARC III processor means hardware needs to be updated with a patch that will impact the performance of some applications. An internal notice on the issue, which has been leaked to The Register, warns: "The SunBlade 1000 [workstation] is affected by a …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 16:05

  • Sex.com owner wins $65m damages

    That's a lot of burritos...

    A Californian e-entrepreneur has won $65 million in damages over a stolen domain name. US District Judge James Ware awarded Gary Kremen $40 million in lost revenue and $25 million in damages for the URL sex.com, one of the most popular destinations on the Net. The decision ended a five-year saga over the domain, which was …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 16:37

  • Wired reporter forced to testify at cypherpunk trial

    Name, rank, serial number....

    Wired chief Washington correspondent Declan McCullagh isn't merely covering the criminal trial of cypherpunk Jim Bell (who's in the dock accused of stalking federal agents); he's also been made a reluctant participant. McCullagh had sought to quash a subpoena requiring him to testify on concerns that he might be forced to …

    Business 4 Apr 2001, 17:19

  • Microsoft alters Passport Terms to stem Hotmail defections

    Too late, we're outta here - users

    Microsoft is to amend its Passport Terms of Use within the next day, a spokesman told The Register today. Corporate spokesman Tom Pilla said:- "People are confused, and rightly so. The Passport Terms haven't been updated to reflect our privacy policy. We're sorry." The existing Terms of Use to Passport - the authentication hub …

    Media 4 Apr 2001, 19:23