11th March 2002 Archive

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Virgin wants to bed Playboy

Mobile romp for porn openings

Virgin Mobile could give its punters access to soft core porn if negotiations with Playboy prove successful. Talks are underway although at this stage it's not known what exactly could be on offer. However, according to the FT Virgin is looking ahead to 3G so that its users can download colour pictures from the Net, play games …

Mobile 11 Mar 2002, 11:02
Vizzavi scraps ISP for new recruits

Con-solly-day-shun

Vizzavi - the Internet/cellphone portal backed by Vodafone and Vivendi - is refusing to accept new punters for its unmetered fixed line ISP service. Anyone trying to sign up to the £12.99 a month service gets the following message: "Sorry, Vizzavi is no longer accepting new ISP registrations. Thank you for your interest in …

Music and Media 11 Mar 2002, 12:40
VIA preps very small mobo

All a board for CEBIT

VIA Technologies is expected to launch a very small format motherboard this month. Called the mini-ITX, the fully integrated mobo measures up at 170mm x170mm (yes, it's square), making 50 per cent smaller than the FlexATX form factor, VIA claims. The Mini-ITX is supplied with an 800MHz Eden x.86 C3 processor (in EBGA packaging …

Channel 11 Mar 2002, 12:40
Widescreen TV gunman shoots himself in the head – twice

Update A bit extreme, perhaps

A gunman who took hostages in the Rembrandttoren office complex in Amsterdam today, shot himself in the head - twice. Yes, he's dead. His hostages are safe, so all's well that ends well. The gunman was protesting about the quality of his widescreen TV, which he was "forced" to buy because movies showed black borders on olde TVs …

Bootnotes 11 Mar 2002, 12:52
AOL embraces Linux and Mozilla, plans to drop MS Explorer

Newsforge scoop

Sources inside AOL and Red Hat say AOL is making a major internal switch to Linux, and the long-rumored AOL default browser switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla -- or at least Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine -- is well under way, but AOL will probably not offer an AOL client for Linux in the forseeable future …

Software 11 Mar 2002, 13:26
Shareware payment biz collapses

Authors left in the dark

Shareware authors face an anxious wait to find out if they will receive any money following the demise of RegisterHouse.com, which has filed for voluntary liquidation. The site is down and the company has ceased trading, but a search through Google's cache reveal that the Scottish site acted as a "trusted third party, providing …

e-Business 11 Mar 2002, 13:56
SMT Xeons count double for Win2k Server licences

No gain without pain...

The introduction of Intel's new Hyper-Threading technology is providing Microsoft with a handy mechanism for getting more money from Windows 2000 Server customers, for encouraging users to switch over to Windows .NET Server, or both. It kind of depends on how .NET Server pricing pans out, but as far as Win2k Server goes it's …

Software 11 Mar 2002, 14:12
US pension fund giant to oppose HP-Compaq merger

Junior is pleased

The biggest pension fund in the US came out against the merger of Hewlett Packard Co and Compaq Computer Corp on Friday, marking a bitter end to what had been a sweet week for the pro-merger camp. However, dissident HP board member Walter Hewlett will be delighted by the California Public Employees' Retirement System's (Calpers …

Business 11 Mar 2002, 14:34
AOL plans cable acquisitions as broadband boss goes

Europe going cheap

AOL Time Warner Inc has joined the group of companies circling Europe's debt-burdened cable operators as it seeks to develop its broadband strategy following the set-back in December 2001 when it lost the battle for AT&T's Broadband cable division to Comcast Corp. Chairman Steve Case told French business daily Les Echoes …

Telecoms 11 Mar 2002, 14:34
Creative snaps up 3DLabs

$170m buy

Creative Labs is beefing up its graphics business with the $170m agreed takeover of 3DLabs. The deal is constructed two-thirds cash/one third stock. Creative is already a shareholder of 3DLabs, so in effect it's paying itself for some of the business. The companies reckon that the acquisition will result in increased market …

Channel 11 Mar 2002, 15:05
Mobile phone sales drop

You'll have to speak up, I'm on the mobile...

Global sales of mobile phones fell for the first time last year, according to boffins at Gartner. Even though punters bought a whopping 399.6 million phones last year this was still down 3.2 per cent compared to the year before. Part of the reason for the dip is that many markets in Europe have reached saturation point, …

Data Networking 11 Mar 2002, 15:05
Visiontek pumps up Europe campaign

Claims first for Nvidia TI4600 card

Visiontek, the US retail graphics board specialist, is the first company to launch a high-end Nvidia TI4600 graphics card in Europe. The board is called the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 and it's shipping through Wortmann AG and Maxcom GmbH in Germany and Man and Machine Ltd, in the UK. No we hadn't heard of Man and Machine either. …

Personal 11 Mar 2002, 15:46
Porn purveyor charged with purloining Army bandwidth

Looking at five years in the glasshouse

A man has being charged with conning the US Army into providing high-speed access to video feeds from his porno Web site by pretending it was a communication link for NATO forces in Bosnia. Gilbert Benjamin, 49, of Neptune, New Jersey, has been charged with mail and mail fraud as well as filing false government claims, Reuters …

Music and Media 11 Mar 2002, 15:47
Jim Allchin on the WinXP component question

When the censor's scissors haven't struck...

Steve Ballmer's paranoid fantasies about how many zillions of versions of Windows there would have to be if the States got their way were one way of dealing with the issue of componentisations of Windows, but the deposition of fellow MS exec Jim Allchin seems to have covered the issue in a more rational way. We say "seems to," …

Software 11 Mar 2002, 16:25
Win-XP kills Verizon DSL

As if the service wasn't bad enough already

On Friday morning my Verizon DSL Internet access died. This was hardly unusual, so I paid it no mind and simply took an unscheduled long weekend. But Saturday morning it was still dead, and there were no reports of service outages in my area. Clearly this would require some looking into. I experimented a bit and came to suspect …

Software 11 Mar 2002, 18:00
ICQ hack theories flood into Vulture Central

Walking on deathrow

Our recent story about a possible mass hack of ICQ inspired many of you to turn sleuth. To recap, a Reg reader discovered that both of his accounts had suddenly become disconnected and the passwords no longer worked. The email addresses for both accounts, which were divided between divided between MacOS machines and Windows …

Security 11 Mar 2002, 22:43
Computers and human language: a new website

Grammarians: dead from the neck down

The University of Brighton has set up a Web site dedicated to computer systems which can speak and understand ordinary human language. And let's be honest - that's no mean feat. According to experts human language is "monumentally subtle and complex" with each us able to produce and understand a potential hundred million …

Music and Media 11 Mar 2002, 22:50