30th January 2002 Archive

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Hynix rations DDR supply

Rocketing demand

Hynix's US subsidiary is placing its supply of DDR DRAM fast memory on allocation. In other words, major customers will have to wait for product, or they will only get a percentage of the product they ordered. In turn, this will mean - if other major vendors follow suit - that spot market supply will quickly dry up and prices …

Channel 30 Jan 2002, 09:29
Matsushita, Toshiba to wire TVs, fridges, toasters

Enabling the appliance...

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co and Toshiba Corp said Monday that they plan to establish a joint venture by the end of this week that will offer internet access services to next-generation home appliances. The two electronics giants will respectively own 51 per cent and 29 per cent of Home Integrate Inc, with two smaller …

Personal 30 Jan 2002, 11:07
Mobile phone thieves face jail

Otherwised engaged

Mobile phone thieves could face up to five years in jail, following a ruling by a senior judge yesterday. Lord Woolf said that thieves who targeted mobiles would be "punished severely" and could expect custodial sentences for their crimes. The senior judge was speaking at London's Old Bailey after increasing the sentences on …

Bootnotes 30 Jan 2002, 11:11
Sun rallies Java backers to tilt at .NET

Ahead or behind? Tricky...

Sun Microsystems Inc has rallied 13 enterprise-level Java licensees to its latest specification, which is expected to stimulate the market for re-usable software components, despite concerns vendors will repeat past portability mistakes in the quest for web services, writes Gavin Clarke. Palo Alto, California-based Sun …

Software 30 Jan 2002, 11:17
Time rescues Tiny

Customers fine, creditors not so fine

Wait long enough and it shall be yours: Time Computer has bought the business and certain assets of Tiny Computer, the UK's biggest PC maker, which went into receivership yesterday. The price was not disclosed. Time, the UK's second biggest system builder, is assuming all Tiny's UK customer warranties (hurrah), but trade …

Channel 30 Jan 2002, 12:03
BBC bans use of non-MS PDAs

Palms and Psions deemed leaky subversives...

The BBC IT department has evidently taken the Microsoft shilling, in some style. Our sources informed us a while back that the company is spending a total of £61 million on Windows upgrades for approximately 24,000 desktops, and now an internal memo leaked to NTK reveals that it has banned staff from using any non-Microsoft PDA …

Personal 30 Jan 2002, 13:31
Vodafone & Orange numbers point to mobile ARPU stability

Very important acronym

The most important acronym in the mobile industry at the moment is ARPU. All the operators - at least in developed mobile markets - are struggling to push up average revenue per user (ARPU), even at the expense of growth in terms of subscriber numbers. On Tuesday, Berkshire, UK-based Vodafone Group, the world's largest …

Data Networking 30 Jan 2002, 13:53
LLU arives in Edinburgh

Ta-daaaaah

Hang out the bunting and crack open the whisky -Edinburgh has joined a select group of towns and cities that now boasts unbundled telecoms loops. That's right, according to Leith-based ISP edNET it has just started providing broadband to a city-centre company over an unbundled local loop, the first such instance in Edinburgh. …

Data Networking 30 Jan 2002, 13:55
Toshiba signs for ARM mobile Java chip

For Java-enabled phones and PDAs

Toshiba has licensed ARM's ARM926EJ-S core processor, for use in mobile phones and PDAs. The ARM926EJ-S is optimised for mobile products supporting Java; it uses ARM's Jazelle technology, and has a claimed speed advantage of up to eight times in Java execution over a software-based JVM. Toshiba has been an ARM licensee since …

Channel 30 Jan 2002, 15:36
‘Upgrade’ renders IF web bank iffie

Iffing 'ell

The Web site of Intelligent Finance (IF) – the multi-channel ebank from the Halifax – has been closed for most of the day following an upgrade that went wrong. According to vulture-eyed readers the site has been down since around 7.00 this morning. Which means that 250,000 of IF's customers have been unable to access their …

Media 30 Jan 2002, 15:38
MS wins semiconductor award!

Is there no end to this company's talent?

Microsoft has picked up a gong at the prestigious annual Microprocessor Report's Analyst Choice Awards - for the best Game chipset of 2001. In the citation, Microsoft's Xbox semi partners Intel and Nvidia (which probably did all the hard work) also receive plaudits for "demonstrating excellence in semiconductor technology …

Channel 30 Jan 2002, 16:08
AMD ships go faster mobile Durons

New customers

AMD has topped up its budget notebook CPU line with 1.1GHz and 1.2GHz flavours of mobile Durons. Nothing extraordinary here, except that these are real clock speeds and not performance-rated part numbers. The company today announced Epson Direct and Hitachi as new customers for the mobile Duron line. In OEM quantities of 1,000 …

Channel 30 Jan 2002, 16:27
UK web host downed by DDoS attack

Serial denial

Normal services have been restored after a "ferocious" distributed denial of service attack was launched against Doncaster-based hosting firm Donhosts today. The attack started in the early hours of today and forced Donhosts to take one of its Web hosting servers offline for two hours. Web sites hosted on this server were …

Security 30 Jan 2002, 17:50
Some T65s hum (but no Ericsson recall)

Ericsson denial

Ericsson has denied media reports that it has begun the recall of a line of GPRS phones which showed performance problems late last year. According to Mobil, a Swedish consumer magazine, the T65 handset was recalled by Ericsson and joint venture partner Sony, because of software problems. "This information is incorrect and …

Data Networking 30 Jan 2002, 22:13