8th November 2001 Archive

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Top BT beancounter to quit

Update Another one bites the dust as losses rise

BT's highly respected finance director, Philip Hampton, is to quit the monster telco after just a year in the job. The news - widely trailed in weekend newspaper reports - comes hard on the heels of last week's announcement that chief exec, Sir Peter Bonfield, is to step down at the end of January. The result is that BT now …

Business 8 Nov 2001, 08:45
Chip biz to shrink 5.5% next year

No recovery 'til 2003

The world semiconductor business will shrink by 5.5 per cent next year, market watcher Future Horizons has forecast. "Q4 will be flat on Q3's already lacklustre performance," the company said. "This will delay the market recovery by at least two to three quarters, and negative dollar growth in 2002 is inevitable." That's in …

Channel 8 Nov 2001, 10:34
Opera tolerating MSN.co.uk goes live

Strangely, its better under IE

Microsoft's UK-targeted portal, MSN.co.uk, is now live with the XP colours, nearly two weeks after MS's 25 October Win XP launch and MSN's global look and feel relaunch. What's more, the site seems to be accepting browsers other than those created by MS. Although not widely tested yet, a cursory attempt with Opera 5.0 and 5.12 …

Media 8 Nov 2001, 11:43
Eurolinux goes ballistic over Euro patent ‘coup’

EPO totally out of control...

The Eurolinux Alliance has called for the sacking of the board of the European Patent Office, following what it describes as a "juridical coup" mounted by the Munich-based outfit. The "coup" takes the form of a new EPO examination directive which effectively extends patents "to software, business methods and mathematics... and …

Software 8 Nov 2001, 12:13
BTopenworld tops 60,000 broadband punters

Progress

BTopenworld announced today that it has 62,000 broadband subscribers, more than doubling its customer base in the three months to September. However, BT's mass market Internet division is still losing money giving rise to unkind quips that the business should be renamed "BTopenwound". According to the latest figures, at the …

Broadband 8 Nov 2001, 12:25
mmO2 readies itself for flotation

Announces new 3G sharing deal and pocket PC

BT's mobile arm, mmO2, today announced a 3G-sharing deal with Telfort Mobiel in the Netherlands to tie-in with BT's second-quarter results. The deal will mean substantial cost savings and adds to its sharing agreement with Deutsche Telekom in the UK and Germany, so all its 3G bases are now covered. It has also announced a new …

Business 8 Nov 2001, 12:58
WinXP system builder blues

It gone don' me wrong

Windows XP is causing UK system builders a great deal of misery. Pre-loading the software is a pain, and Microsoft has not managed to resolve compatibility issues between the OS and the WorksSuite Money 2001 module, which means that Money does not work. The MD of one major UK system builder, who asked not to be named, said: " …

Channel 8 Nov 2001, 12:59
Toffs expelled for making Ecstasy from Net recipe

Got an E in Chemistry

Four pupils at £16,000-a-year private school Glenalmond College have been expelled after making the dance drug Ecstasy from instructions found on the Internet. The boys, all aged 17, produced the drug MDMA using the school's equipment but were then caught by staff having taken their finished product, The Times reports. Their …

Media 8 Nov 2001, 14:39
UK Net use continues to surge

Hang on, didn't Oftel say...

Home Net use in the UK continues to grow apace with more than one million new users hooking up between June and September. According to Net number crunchers, NetValue, there are now more that 15 million home Net users in the UK - a 53 per cent increase during the last year. Furthermore, there appears to be little evidence that …

Media 8 Nov 2001, 14:54
Government cocks up another computer project

£300m Ministry of Defence mess

The government has added to its litany of computer system cock-ups with a £300 million system at the Ministry of Defence which has had to be overhauled. The system is supposed to handle to pay, pension and HR services for all staff in the armed forces and was contracted out to EDS on a 12-year contract by the then newly formed …

Business 8 Nov 2001, 15:21
Sony's next gen Aibo dogs hit market

Woof

Sony has showed off its third generation Aibo robotic dog. Canine V3 features more sensors for interaction, more LEDs for a wider emotional range, new behavioural patterns and upgraded control software. Looking distinctly more robotic and a little less shiny than its second generation brothers, the ERS-220 is supposed to fill …

Personal 8 Nov 2001, 15:49
US Net penetration hits plateau

Is this the peak?

Internet penetration has levelled off in the US with an increase of just one per cent in the last year, according to the results of the Harris Poll. The results from the global market research and consulting firm, Harris Interactive, found that 64 per cent of adults in the US currently access the Net - up a smidgen from 2000. …

Media 8 Nov 2001, 15:59
Trium Eclipse: fab colour, power guzzler

Review Simon Rockman puts it through the mill

At 110g and 118x49x25mm, the Trium Eclipse mobile phone is a little chunky by today's standards. This is explained by the fact that it has a fantastic colour screen which guzzles power. On top of that, it's got GPRS and a loudspeaker function. The model I reviewed was a late prototype, lacking GPRS. It may well ship without it …

Personal 8 Nov 2001, 16:12
DRAM sales to grow 16% next year

Bouncing back - as will CPU sales

Market research companies may have a negative to cautiously positive outlook on next year's worldwide chip sales, but the business' own Semiconductor Industry Association has a more optimistic forecast. Sales will rise six per cent next year and 21 per cent the year after, the organisation forecast yesterday. That compares …

Channel 8 Nov 2001, 16:13
Those new-look tougher MS judgment terms in full

How the nine States muzzled The Beast

At some considerable risk of serious psychological damage The Register has over the past couple of days constructed a line-by-line before and after picture of Microsoft's proposed sentence.* Before, as you will recall, we had a spineless cave-in on the part of the DoJ which essentially left Microsoft to pillage the world with …

Software 8 Nov 2001, 16:32
nForce PCs a go-go

The Germans got there first

PCs built using Nvidia's nForce integrated chipsets are thicker on the ground than first thought. Though US manufacturer MicronPC is claiming it is first to get a machine out, Germany's 4MBO was there ahead of it. It announced a WinXP, Athlon XP nForce box, called the e-Force, to coincide with the launch of Windows XP on 25 …

Personal 8 Nov 2001, 16:50
Proxim favours Mac OS X over 9

802.11a drivers hit next-gen operating system first

Wireless networking specialist Proxim has favoured Mac OS X over Classic for its upcoming IEEE 802.11a 108Mbps LAN system. Yes, we were surprised too. Most vendors' software roll-out plans centre on targeting Mac OS 9 first and Apple's next-generation operating system second - sometimes a distant second. Not so Proxim. Drivers …

Mac Channel 8 Nov 2001, 17:05
Proxim doubles 802.11a wirefree bandwidth to 108Mbps

Non-standard, but available now

Proxim has launched wireless networking technology which doubles the next-generation 802.11a standard's maximum bandwidth from 54Mbps to 108Mbps. Notebooks integrating the technology could hit the market as early as Q2 2002, the company said. The corporate-oriented Harmony Fast Wireless system operates in the 5GHz band - …

Data Networking 8 Nov 2001, 17:15
Philips CD-RWs climb Mount Rainier

Format support in 2002

Philips says all its CD-RW drives shipped from early 2002 will include its EasyWrite technology, which is essentially native Mount Rainier format support. The announcement is not surprising as Philips is one of core proponents of the format, alongside Compaq, Sony and Microsoft. Recently, open source developers were granted …

Personal 8 Nov 2001, 17:52
US judge's Nazi Net ruling turns worldwide law on its head

Creating a maelstrom of legal argument

US federal judge Jeremy Fogel has decided that Yahoo! can't be bound to pay a fine imposed by a French court over the sale of Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo's US Web site. By deciding to consider whether law courts could determine what Web sites based in other countries can host, he had already created a dangerous precedent. By …

Media 8 Nov 2001, 18:20
I say Petabyte, You say Pebibyte…

Let's call the whole thing off

It turns out that we right first time with our assertion here that 144,115,188,075,855,872 bytes equals 144 Petabytes. A large number of you wrote to tell us that it's actually 128 Petabytes. But as correspondent Philip Skov Knudsen points out "Just because hundreds of people claim something to be true, that doesn't necessarily …

Personal 8 Nov 2001, 18:24
Logica slashes jobs

Surprise surprise

Logica has surprised no one by announcing that it will cut between four and five per cent of its staff in response to the "worsening economic environment". We revealed last month how Logica had sent an internal email which effectively cancelled Christmas for all its staff to cut costs. The company declined to comment on …

Business 8 Nov 2001, 18:26
McNealy takes on The Mob

$8m "bought" the Government - claim

Sun boss Scott McNealy gave the DoJ his lengthiest harangue at the company's AGM for stockholders yesterday. "I finally got my PR team to let me unleash on this," said McNealy, who didn't waste the opportunity, describing the settlement as "disgraceful and unconscionable and beyond belief." McNealy ran through a list of …

Business 8 Nov 2001, 18:41