19th April 2002 Archive

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Sun flat, but looks happy

Profits to return in June?

Sun reported flat revenues at $3.1 billion in the most recent quarter yesterday, and scraped a narrow loss of $26.1m. But margins were a whopping 42 per cent, which Sun attributed to inventory improvements, and the company sits on a cash pile of $6 billion. While Sun continues to beef up its chip team in Austin and elsewhere, …

Hardware 19 Apr 2002, 08:50
Transmeta chairman adds gwana-gwana to latest figures

Recovery slow, painful - soundbytes match

Chip startup Transmeta reckons it's on the road to recovery, despite losing another $23.2 million in the most recent quarter. Transmeta's business collapsed last year in spectacular fashion, and although it reported a 273 per cent increase in revenues to $4.1 million, it's a far cry from the $18.6 million it earned in the …

Channel 19 Apr 2002, 08:52
The Register zooms up the “the” Google Charts

22 with a bullet

Our thanks to Tim Guest for pointing us to Google's decision to stop ignoring the word 'the' if you search for it alone. The search spews up about 2,560,000,000 results". Top of the 'the' chart are Acrobat and Flash download pages. And The Register? At time of writing we come in at 22, immediately behind TheFreeSite.com and …

Music and Media 19 Apr 2002, 09:05
Nokia Q1 heralds another gloomy year for mobile vendors

Poor demand

Nokia Corp, the world's number-one mobile handset vendor has been forced to downgrade its sales forecasts for the entire year, after the mobile phone market failed to ignite in the first quarter of 2002. The company reported first-quarter sales down 12% at 7.01bn euros ($6.23bn), and net profit down 11.4% at 863m euros ($ …

Mobile 19 Apr 2002, 09:21
Bouygues to launch i-mode services and bid for 3G license

Europe turning to NTT DoCoMo

French mobile operator Bouygues Telecom SA has signed up to become the fifth European licensee of the i-mode mobile internet technology owned by Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo Inc. The two companies announced that Bouygues will launch the service in France within 12 months. This underlies the increasing popularity of …

Mobile 19 Apr 2002, 09:21
Symantec touts security in a box

Appliance

Symantec Corp is to ship a hardware appliance intended to provide security defenses on five fronts from a single box. The Symantec Gateway Security 5000 series will provide combined firewall, gateway-level anti-virus software, intrusion detection, content filtering and VPN (virtual private networking) capabilities. The …

Security 19 Apr 2002, 09:22
Heartbeat detected in US PC market

Rest of world flatter than flat pancake

US PC shipments grew for the first time for a year in Q1, 2002, according to Gartner Dataquest's number crunchers. But worldwide, PC sales were flat. Worldwide PC shipment were 32.7m units in Q1, with the US accounting for 11.1m units. This was 2.3 per cent up on Q1, last year, which everyone at the time thought was a bad …

Personal 19 Apr 2002, 11:25
Reg Recruitment: your feedback

Word CVs, direct posting, search etc.

Reg Recruitment, our UK job board, has been running for three whole months now. It's generating 150K-200K page imps a month, more than 15K job searches a month, and hundreds of CV uploads. Not bad for a start - now we're considering how - with our technology partner CWJobs - to make it better. So here is some FAQs/observations …

Site News 19 Apr 2002, 11:44
UK suffers ADSL glitch

Thousands at risk

Thousands of new ADSL users in the UK could have their services disrupted thanks to a glitch in BT's broadband network. The intermittent problem concerns compatibility issues with the first and second generation Fujitsu line cards that connect each user’s ADSL line to BT’s network at their local telephone exchange. According …

Telecoms 19 Apr 2002, 12:06
Nortel reports narrowed losses

Sheds 3,000 more jobs

Nortel yesterday reported narrowed Q1 losses of $841m, compared to $2.58bn a year ago, on declining sales of $2.91bn, a little over half the $5.75bn it recorded in Q1 2001. Revenues fell for the fifth quarter in a row, forcing Nortel to announce it would shed 3,000 more jobs as part of its ongoing restructuring. The latest cuts …

Business 19 Apr 2002, 12:26
TMP buys Jobs.com URL for $800K

Trademark thrown in

TMP Worldwide, the owner of Monster.com, has bought the domain name and trademark of Jobs.com, a struggling competitor operating under bankruptcy protection. It just goes to show that there is life yet in the domain names market - but a top bid of 800K for Jobs.com is a far cry from what such a generic URL would have got in the …

Music and Media 19 Apr 2002, 13:08
TMP buys Jobs.com URL for $800K

Trademark thrown in

TMP Worldwide, the owner of Monster.com, has bought the domain name and trademark of Jobs.com, a struggling competitor operating under bankruptcy protection. It just goes to show that there is life yet in the domain names market - but a top bid of 800K for Jobs.com is a far cry from what such a generic URL would have got in the …

Music and Media 19 Apr 2002, 13:11
NTL hacked?

Update: Nope, says NTL

There appears to be trouble at NTL. The corporate musings on the cableco's ntl.co.uk Web site appear to have been replaced by a simple message: "Whoops!" NTL are looking into it, we're told. ® Latest: Just had a peep at the site and it appears that NTL has sorted it out. Latest latest: Received this from NTL explaining that …

Security 19 Apr 2002, 13:35
MicronPC looks to channel / SMEs for growth

Claims stability

MicronPC, the USA's third biggest direct PC vendor, this week proclaimed that it posted its second profitable quarter in a row. As it's privately held, it hasn't released any sales figures. Owned until July, 2001 by Micron, the DRAM manufacturer, and now owned by Gores Technology Group, a financial group from LA, the company …

Channel 19 Apr 2002, 14:09
US govt evaluates Microsoft Passport for services

Test start Sept.

The US Government is evaluating Microsoft Corp's Passport to verify the identity of American citizens, federal employees and businesses who access planned online services, a move that could herald the system's largest single rollout. Federal officials will begin testing web sites in September that allow businesses to pay …

e-Business 19 Apr 2002, 14:16
Man charged with laptop auction fraud

QXL, EBay

A man has been charged with five counts of theft related to the allegedly fraudulent sale of HP laptops through online auction sites QXL and eBay. Robert James Knight, 31, of the Erdington area of Birmingham, was charged with theft by Avon and Somerset police on Wednesday, and released on conditional bail. Knight is due to …

Channel 19 Apr 2002, 14:36
Microsoft misses targets, digs into pocket

Enterprise sluggish

Microsoft Corp blamed slowing sales in its enterprise business and continued softness in PC sales for missing the third quarter profits targets, announced yesterday. Executives also restated guidance for fiscal 2003 against a background of continued economic uncertainty and increased investment in staffing and products …

Business 19 Apr 2002, 14:40
Bring me the head of Alfredo Ballmer?

Not yet, not this time, but...

The analysts aren't exactly calling for Steve "Uncle Fester" Ballmer's head yet, but an interesting piece by Dina Bass that went up on Bloomberg yesterday evening may give the Microsoft Prez some idea of the fate that awaits him should the stumble turn into a nosedive. Microsoft yesterday did not "beat the street," coming in …

Software 19 Apr 2002, 14:49
Gateway claws back market share

Loses buckets

Gateway lost a heap of money in Q1 and US shipments were down 30 per cent from the same period last year to 645,000 units. But the PC maker finds some things to cheer about a quarter which saw it make a net loss of $123m from sales of $992m. First up, the net loss was $61m, once you strip out the special charges; second, the …

Personal 19 Apr 2002, 15:27
What is DIS ting called box?

The MS key to the UK Government Gateway, perchance?

What, friends, is a DIS box? The answer to this question is clearly of some considerable importance to the partners, government departments and local government bodies who'll be putting their services online via the UK's Government Gateway, because as you can see here, step 12 in the first steps in getting online with the …

Software 19 Apr 2002, 15:34
Waging peace on the Internet

Thoughts on Hacktivism from the cDc

Hacking is a contact sport. The more people who have contact with one another, the better. -- Shaolin Punk, Proxy Boss, Hacktivismo There's an international book burning in progress; the surveillance cameras are rolling; and the water canons are drowning freedom of assembly. But it's not occurring anywhere that television …

Security 19 Apr 2002, 15:56
Brit music indies want copy-protected CDs

CD ripping is 'plague of locusts'

A trade body for UK independent record labels has begun an investigation into putting copy protection technology onto music CDs. The Association of Independent Music, whose members account for a quarter of the record market in Britain, is concerned about losses aused by fans illegally making copies of music CDs. Figures from …

Music and Media 19 Apr 2002, 16:25
Ashcroft, Ellison win ‘Big Brother’ awards

Electronic privacy advocates honor foes

Last December, US Attorney General John Ashcroft, testifying at a Senate hearing, accused privacy advocates and civil libertarians of aiding terrorists by scaring "peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty." On Thursday, a large US gathering of those critics responded in their own way: by giving Ashcroft the "Worst …

Music and Media 19 Apr 2002, 18:49
Ex-Apple staff debut palm-sized PC

WinXP in the hand?

OQO, the start-up that debuted the 7oz "Ultra-Personal" at WinHEC this week is keeping plenty of details under wraps. But we did catch Executive Vice President Colin Hunter this morning, and he dealt with some questions unanswered by OQO's Flash-heavy website. Hunter co-founded Transmeta, serving both as CFO while the company …

Personal 19 Apr 2002, 22:48