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17th August 2001 Archive

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  • HP products stiff except sub-$100 printers

    Profits down 89%

    Hewlett-Packard has suffered an 89 per cent drop in Q3 profits - but the good news is that was above its reduced forecasts. HP enjoyed sales of $10.1 billion for the three months to 31 July. This was down 14 per cent from the $11.8 billion revenues a year ago. Net profit was $111 million, down from $1.05 billion in Q3 fiscal …

    Business 17 Aug 2001, 10:12

  • Industry Standard goes titsup.com

    Can't survive on $40m a year

    Industry Standard, the mag that chronicled the dotcom boom and bust, has joined the ever-growing list of companies to go titsup.com. Employees were told of the closure in a memo issued yesterday in which the magazine's publisher, Standard Media International, said it was seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Only 15 of the …

    e-Business 17 Aug 2001, 10:17

  • TSMC to make Intel i845 and VIA P4X266

    Bridge over troubled wafers?

    TSMC is in something of an invidious position it seems: it will be producing rival Pentium 4 chipsets from those two most bitterly opposed chip companies, Intel and VIA. Intel has signed TSMC to produce its i845 chipset (aka Brookdale), at a rate of 2000 8in wafers a month this quarter, but increasing on a quarter-by-quarter …

    Channel 17 Aug 2001, 10:43

  • Dell warns of falling sales in Q3

    Losses rocket to $101m in second quarter

    Dell has reported a $101 million loss for the second quarter, while warning investors to prepare for falling sales in Q3. The loss from the Texan PC giant was largely due to a pre-tax charge of $742 million to cover job cuts and site closures, and compared to a $603 million net profit for Q2 the previous year. Excluding the …

    Business 17 Aug 2001, 11:01

  • Roll up for the Regovision song contest

    Competition Wanted: One Reg corporate anthem

    What exactly, you were wondering, is the above photo all about? Why is Kieren McCarthy standing in London's Regent Street wearing a foam rubber Beenz costume? Why is John 'Lips' Leyden peering over Elvis's shoulder while a man advertising a golf sale on his hat checks his voicemail in the vain hope that someone, …

    Bootnotes 17 Aug 2001, 11:03

  • Music biz patents anti-rip encryption technology

    Want to copy a CD to a PC? Then pay up

    Recording industry organisation the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has come up with yet another scheme to foil listeners who rip CDs on their PCs. Details of the method appear in a patent filed by IFPI. The patent, GB2357165, centres on encrypting the track time codes stamped onto every music disc, New …

    Personal 17 Aug 2001, 11:04

  • Scoot.com rescued by £45m bid

    Phew

    Online business directory - Scoot.com - has escaped the breakers yard after selling its classified ads business, Loot, to the Daily Mail for around £45 million. The deal still needs shareholder approval but the rescue bid does at least ensure that Scoot.com survives for a while longer. As part of the agreement, the Daily Mail …

    e-Business 17 Aug 2001, 11:09

  • Ericsson reshuffles and names new COO

    Per-Arne Sandstrom to take heat off CEO

    Ericsson has had a management reshuffle and appointed a new chief operating officer, Per-Arne Sandstrom. Mr Sandstrom is currently the head of Ericsson's US marketing department and will move into the job on 1 September. Meanwhile, head of the global systems unit Mats Dahlin will go to EMEA markets division; head of the multi- …

    Business 17 Aug 2001, 11:19

  • Newsbytes hack seeks to embarrass EL Reg

    Nice try, little man

    The Washington Post's tech-news repeater Newsbytes has implied that we were talking bollocks when we revealed several credit card hacks in a recent story entitled "Hacking IIS- how sweet it is." In that piece we claimed - on the basis of something called evidence - that StrawberryNet.com; mWave.com; and Stic.net had been hacked …

    Security 17 Aug 2001, 11:21

  • BT to offer wireless PDA for Xmas

    According to its supplier...

    British Telecom's wireless PDA will ship in time for Christmas if comments made by the telco's hardware supplier are anything to go by. The device, based on Intel's ARM-derived Xscale processor running Windows CE, is being produced by the telco by Taiwanese handet maker HTC. And HTC this week said it had received the order from …

    Personal 17 Aug 2001, 11:30

  • Job losses may follow Toshiba DRAM output cuts

    Company attempts to rein in chip division's losses

    Toshiba's plan to shut down memory production at its Japanese Fab 1 plant to cut output by 25 per cent could be accompanied by staff reductions, the company has warned. The threat followed an admission that Toshiba's semiconductor operation will post a loss for the first six months of its financial year. The loss is being …

    Channel 17 Aug 2001, 11:57

  • PC war report

    Who's selling how many in UK/Europe

    In light of Gateway's imminent departure from the UK and Ireland, combined with Dell and HP's sales troubles, we thought we'd bring you the European and UK PC market data from Gartner. Just to illustrate how things are going. The figures show how many units of desktops and notebooks the top five5 vendors shipped in Q2 2001. …

    Channel 17 Aug 2001, 12:08

  • Blistering fast Web server benchmark from IBM, Zeus

    3Gbps throughput

    A Web server performance of more than 3Gbps data traffic has been claimed on an IBM pSeries box running software from Zeus. According to Zeus, the performance of 9,106 recorded using the SPECweb99 benchmark on a pSeries 680 is equivalent to 50 per cent of the peak Internet traffic passing through Europe's largest Internet …

    Data Networking 17 Aug 2001, 12:15

  • MS patch-scanner for Win-NT, 2K, IIS, SQL

    And not a moment too soon

    We've been eager to spill the beans about this for weeks, and even hinted at it in a previous story. Today it's official; MS has released a command-line application, HFNetChk, which will scan all NT and/or 2K machines in a network from a single location and compare their currently-installed patches with the latest ones available …

    Security 17 Aug 2001, 12:39

  • Hacking IIS – how sweet it is

    Updated Shopping sprees for carders

    We've looked over a few recent credit-card database compromises brought to our attention by CardCops (formerly AdCops), an organization which tries to get the straight dope on e-commerce hacks directly from the blackhat community to better inform merchants of threats to their systems. The most recent victims CardCops has seen …

    Software 17 Aug 2001, 12:40

  • Yahoo! guilty! of! kidnapping! rape! torture!

    So says ridiculous American association

    Yahoo! is to blame for incidences of kidnapping, rape and torture reckons some god-awful, blinkered and self-satisfied member of the American Family Association. Patrick Trueman has taken the recent example of a 15 year-old girl from Massachusetts who was kidnapped and then subjected to days of abuse to embark on a fire and …

    Media 17 Aug 2001, 13:40

  • BOFHs beware OpenView, NetView flaw

    Bug threatens network management mission control

    A potentially devastating vulnerability involving components on the network management software of Hewlett-Packard and IBM's Tivoli division has come to light. According to an alert published by CERT, systems running HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM) Version 6.1 and Tivoli NetView Versions 5.x and 6.x are vulnerable to a …

    Security 17 Aug 2001, 14:02

  • UK railway on track with broadband

    Small change, small beer

    Britain's beleaguered railways are doing their bit to bring broadband services to the nation. Railtrack - the outfit that maintains tracks and stations across the country - is to install 30 broadband kiosks in 14 stations so that travellers can while away the time when their train is late. Brighton-based Kiosk outfit - …

    Broadband 17 Aug 2001, 14:13

  • Bill Gates article 'utter b*ll*cks'

    FOTW Lame Flame?

    Re. Bill Gates spells out the future Prepare yourselves, it's a long one.... Michele "Xenomorph" Gaggia writes: Dear Sir, I usually like to read the Register for its intelligent, witty and objective insight in the IT world, but this article is hitting so many common places it really rates as "utter bollocks" in my book. …

    Letters 17 Aug 2001, 14:36

  • DNA database used to crack cold crime cases

    No rest for the wicked

    US police forces are turning to using DNA databases in order to shed fresh light of cases investigators had thought unsolveable years ago. In an interesting article on the subject, Reuters reports that the creation of a comprehensive DNA data bank by the FBI, which is called CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), has led to the …

    Data Center 17 Aug 2001, 15:20

  • BT in call centre emergency row

    Can't talk - must work

    An investigation has been launched into why a worker at a BT call centre in Wales wasn't allowed to take an emergency phone call from her husband. David Bebb from Treorchy in South Wales claims he tried to contact his wife, Ann Marie, after their 10-year-old son, Sam, was rushed to hospital after opticians discovered a lump …

    Business 17 Aug 2001, 15:23

  • Kids' Swapit Web money revived

    Online currencies not entirely dead in water

    While Beenz officially died yesterday, today, an online currency - the Swapit - has been revived. Webswappers bought its rival Web site SwapitShop from Granada Media for an undisclosed cash sum. Granada Media shut the site down in June over money (what else?) and Webswappers was just one of several interested parties in …

    e-Business 17 Aug 2001, 15:42

  • Reg job ad attracts perverts and dyslexics

    Well, what did you expect?

    Register Reporter Required This week's advertisement on the site aimed at pumping some fresh blood into The Register's editorial team brought in a couple of interesting offers. One applicant and reader, Zeb Davis, seemed to have everything we were looking for. And more... Dear Mister Blincoe, I have bean reeding The Register …

    Letters 17 Aug 2001, 15:44

  • Time employee robs bank

    Big screen Haxploitation action

    An employee of Time Computers uses his hacking skills to help rob a bank in the comedy film The Parole Officer. The Time techie uses a virus to makes sure all the alarms in all the banks in Manchester go off as the robbery is taking place. The character, Colin, works in the Blackpool branch of Time, which is a concession …

    Bootnotes 17 Aug 2001, 15:47

  • Definitive list of ‘dangerous’ Big Brother spin-offs revealed!

    It's 1984 gone mad

    TV stars move into Pig Brother sty Many thanks to Christian Cook for this excellent list of Big Brother possibilities. If George Orwell's timeless stand against loss of freedom being reduced to a voyeur fest of celeb wannabes wasn't bad enough ("Oh no, I have to clean the chickens again, so this is what losing your political …

    Letters 17 Aug 2001, 15:54

  • Net traffic doubling every six months

    Can't be all porn

    The Internet is growing faster than ever, with traffic doubling every six months. That's according to a survey by networking startup Caspian Networks through the first quarter of this year, based on data gained from carriers under non-disclosure agreements. Since 1997, Internet traffic has been growing by a factor of 2.8 per …

    Media 17 Aug 2001, 16:08

  • Hollywood working on movies over Net

    Vague plans greeted as visionary

    All the big movie studios have announced they will work together on a system to deliver movies over the Internet. MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros said they think the number of people in the US with broadband connections has made it feasible to offer an on-demand service over the Net. In usual sycophantic style, …

    Media 17 Aug 2001, 16:12

  • ‘Pillock’ chastised for trying to paint dark side of moon red

    Scientists come out in force

    Millions wanted to paint dark side of moon red Tim Richardson's story about one man's stunt aimed at colouring the moon red by using laser pointers caused a few raised eyebrows among the more scientific members of our readership. Could this moon-decorating stunt work? Here's Domonic Fulford's thoughts on the matter: This man …

    Letters 17 Aug 2001, 16:17

  • Reg hacks face gallows

    Readers Letters Tyburn Tree awaits...

    Readers Letters 'You are a blackard of the first water' Elizabeth the Queen Mother is dead According to reader Paul Kerriage, our earlier coverage of a premature story on the death of the Queen Mum may have landed us in deep water with the Windsors. Your correspondent is clearly unaware that it's spelt "Blackguard". Also, …

    Letters 17 Aug 2001, 16:46

  • Intrinsity to sample Intel-beating CPU late 2002

    Performance leader... or Exponential Technology 2.0?

    As chip makers like Intel, AMD and Motorola struggle to drive up their products' clock speeds while ensuring they are still economic to manufacture and sell, a little-known semiconductor company believes it can outshoot the big guns with faster and - more importantly - cheaper chips of its own. The company, Intrinsity, this …

    Channel 17 Aug 2001, 18:48

  • Stelios takes battle to AOL

    Pic exclusive Cheeky

    Continuing his PR stunt battle against AOL, EasyEverything boss Stelios Haji-Ioannou parked one of two advertising lorries outside AOL's UK headquarters - and we've got the photo to prove it. We had a go at Stelios on Monday because he'd promised us he would plonk the lorry, complete with huge 'tear up your AOL account' poster …

    Media 17 Aug 2001, 18:51

  • We won't tell you what this patch does, but apply it NOW

    Novell declares Defcon One on GroupWise patch

    There's an extremely serious security problem with GroupWise that requires an immediate patch, but the problem is apparently so bad that Novell can't even bring itself to tell its users what it is. The Utah-based software firm has issued an email to its GroupWise 5.5 Enhancement Pack or GroupWise 6 users asking them that to …

    Security 17 Aug 2001, 18:53