7th June 2002 Archive

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BT Broadband has arrived

No frills, any thrills?

BT has started flogging its "no frills" broadband access product a couple of months ahead of major launch in the Autumn. The product slipped out quietly on BT's Web site on Wednesday without any fanfare, but was spotted by those vulture-eyed folks at ADSLGuide. BT Broadband - which is purely an access product with no ISP …

Telecoms 7 Jun 2002, 09:18
Asia will lead global chip recovery

That's what Japan Council says

After its worst ever year of recession, the global semiconductor market is now on the road to recovery, largely thanks to Asia's voracious appetite for chips, the Japan Council of the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) said yesterday. In its latest report on the state of the industry, the Japan Council said the global …

Channel 7 Jun 2002, 09:40
MS faces XP compatibility problems with Mira

Who would've thought it?

Microsoft Corp faces an embarrassing problem with the roll-out of its handheld "home companion" computer Mira, after a company executive revealed that the device will not work with computers running the Windows XP Home Edition operating system. The problem is that Microsoft has targeted the Mira devices at the home market, …

Personal 7 Jun 2002, 09:43
EMC to move downmarket, hire Dell as manufacturer

Handshake agreement

Facing increasingly stiff competition in its traditional high-end stronghold, EMC is planning a major expansion into the low-end of the storage market, where it predicts the biggest revenue opportunities will occur. The move is being made hand-in-hand with Dell Computer Corp, which is set to make a low-end variant of EMC's mid- …

Hardware 7 Jun 2002, 09:43
SAP upbeat at user conference

MySAP house

The message from SAP AG to users at this year's Sapphire conference was concise and straightforward: "Keep it simple and keep it SAP." To that end, the Walldorf, Germany-based company made a plethora of announcements around integration, and expanded its portfolio of applications down to the SME market. Victoria Furness writes …

e-Business 7 Jun 2002, 09:44
Symantec intros volume licensing

Discounts

Symantec Corp has introduced a new line in volume licensing as an incentive for organizations to make volume purchases in return for discounted prices on its Norton, pcAnywhere and WinFaxPro lines of security software. Symantec's Security License Program offers two volume license options. Its so-called Value Program is a …

Software 7 Jun 2002, 09:45
VeriSign still Slamming, Go Daddy lawsuit says

Go Daddy, Go

VeriSign Inc is still sending allegedly "deceptive" direct mail to customers of rival domain name registrars, despite being enjoined from doing so with one competitor, a "domain slamming" lawsuit filed this week by Go Daddy Software Inc claims, Kevin Murphy writes. Go Daddy sued VeriSign in Arizona, claiming the company's …

Music and Media 7 Jun 2002, 09:46
ASPs go Web native

Customers like it

The market for web native ASPs in the US is experiencing a resurgence. Having been tarred with the same brush which wrote off many of the early, non-web native ASPs, it appears that in 2002 and beyond, the web native ASP will have its day. A new study from IDC confirms a definite upturn in the market for these services, …

e-Business 7 Jun 2002, 10:43
KPNQwest network could be closed

Worrying time

The trustees for KPNQwest have said they will shut down the pan-European telco's network unless its customers cough up the money they owe by Monday. The ultimatum was issued yesterday as part of rescue deal that, if successful, would keep the network running until the end of the month. That would then buy enough time for …

Music and Media 7 Jun 2002, 10:45
Author of Mathematica proposes a new basis for science

Wolfram's Big Claim

You may not know of Stephen Wolfram — or if you do you may only know of him as the author of Mathematica, the dominant software product in the field of mathematics. Stephen Wolfram was born in the UK, educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech — from which he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the age of 20. Following a …

Software 7 Jun 2002, 11:21
Soft Europe torpedoes Intel forecasts

Sells fewer high-end CPUs than expected

Intel blamed soft demand in Europe for a revised revenue guidance for Q2. The company now expects sales of $6.2bn-$6.5bn, compared with its previous forecasts of $6.4bn-$7bn, for the Q which ends June 29. Worse, gross margins are expected to be 49 per cent (+ or - a couple of points), compared with the previous range of 53(+ or …

Channel 7 Jun 2002, 12:41
HomeRF goes big on cordless phones

Endorses 802.11a

The HomeRF Working Group today announced a revised messaging standard, reflecting a "new emphasis on voice". The shift reflected in the upcoming HomeRF 2.1 specification, directs attention to cordless phones, a market which is 10 times bigger than WLAN, according to the working group. This emphasis is a differentiator from …

Mobile 7 Jun 2002, 12:42
Nvidia, ATI boast OEM chipset wins

England 1: Argentina 0

Nvidia and ATI this week both issued press releases announcing design wins for their respective integrated graphics chipsets. At first glance, Nvidia looks the more significant of the two. NEC is to incorporate Nvidia's nForce graphics chipset in all its AMD Athlon consumer desktop PCs in Japan and Europe. Considering that NEC …

Personal 7 Jun 2002, 13:11
First Clawhammer benchmarks

TecChannel scoop

You know when a German tech site has got hold of a big story or review - it publishes an English-language version. Germany's TecChannel has got a biggie: the first benchmarks of AMD's upcoming 64-bit ClawHammer desktop CPU gained after running a prototype machine on the AMD Computex booth in Taiwan through its paces for an hour …

Channel 7 Jun 2002, 13:49
Last Call for Extreme Computing 2002

Sunday. King's Cross. £3. Be There

CONFOUND THE SUPERMAKETS AND GAIN A WHOLE NEW SHOPPING IDENTITY AT EXTREME COMPUTING 2002 Your supermarket loyalty card - it just sits there in your purse or wallet, silently recording everything you buy, occasionally rewarding you with just enough points and prizes to keep you taking it to the shops. But now it's your chance …

Bootnotes 7 Jun 2002, 14:24
Internet ‘meltdown’ threats overstated

Argentina 0 England 1

Fears that the Internet traffic could disappear into a black hole if KPNQwest pulls the plug on its network are unfounded, according to one industry expert at least. Earlier today some reports claimed that an "Internet black hole" would open up and swallow up to half of European internet traffic as the network hit meltdown. …

Music and Media 7 Jun 2002, 14:27
Dubya calls for US Gestapo

'Someone to watch over me'

US President George Dubya Bush took to the airwaves last night in an appeal for the establishment of a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, to keep us all safe and snug in our beds. "Thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us," the President warned, and added that "this terrible knowledge requires us …

Music and Media 7 Jun 2002, 14:36
MS turns up heat on warezed WinXP copies

Cut off their update supply...

The beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP has now shipped to testers and, as previously advertised, it declines to install if you're using a leaked WinXP licence key. But - again as previously advertised - it doesn't deactivate your installation, just stops you applying the service pack. But a sharp-eyed reader of Neowin.net …

Software 7 Jun 2002, 16:11
Euro players band together to promote e-ads

Go on, buy one, you know you want to

Some of Europe's biggest Internet companies are to work together to promote the merits of online advertising. AOL Europe, T-Online, Tiscali, Yahoo!, Lycos Europe and MSN are among a number of operators that have come together to form the European Interactive Advertising Association. Based in London, it will try and persuade …

e-Business 7 Jun 2002, 17:01
Dell cuts UK notebook prices

Passing on component cuts

Dell has chopped UK list prices for the Latitude Series 3 corporate notebook line by up to 17 per cent. The cuts range from £100 to £300 for the top-of-the-line 1.8GHz C840 unit and reflect recent falls in component prices, the company says. Dell's direct model means that it can make changes "without having to go through …

Personal 7 Jun 2002, 17:16
Dan Technology goes titsup

BDO moves in

Administrators from BDO Stoy Hayward took control of Dan Technology today, more than a week after news of the PC system builder's financial woes leaked into the market. Dan is understood to have looked and failed to find a buyer. But a week is a very short time to do this, especially for a system builder. The collapse of Tiny …

Channel 7 Jun 2002, 17:26
Caspar Bowden resigns from FIPR

Returning to industry

Caspar Bowden, perhaps the UK's most prominent UK Net activist, has had enough: he's resigned as director of the Foundation for Information Policy, and is returning to a job in industry. His temporary part-time replacement, Dr. Ian Brown, will run FIPR until the end of October. The press release announcing Bowden's departure …

Music and Media 7 Jun 2002, 17:44
IBM crests above 400,000 TPM with pSeries Regatta

Big benchmark

IBM Corp finally released its TPC-C benchmarks on the pSeries 690 "Regatta" server on Thursday, nine months after the machines were announced in October 2001. The 32-way pSeries 690 is definitively one of the most powerful servers of any kind in the market, right up there with IBM's biggest mainframes and iSeries machines …

Hardware 7 Jun 2002, 18:07
Sun to reprieve Solaris 9 for Intel?

Massive demand for free stuff set to sway company...

Solaris 9 for Intel could be poised to ship after all, Register spies at Sun suggest. The official line is currently that Sun is shipping Solaris 9 for Sparc, but that "Sun is deferring the productization and release of the Solaris 9 OE for Intel IA-32." In English this means that Sun has (probably) more or less finished it but …

Software 7 Jun 2002, 18:07
Intel targets Sun with Itanium 2 benchmarks

'Projected' performance

Intel Corp will begin building up a head of steam for its Itanium 2 rollout today, when it details what it says are he platform's performance advantages over rival 64 bit platforms, Joe Fay writes. The Itanium 2, formerly code-named McKinley, is not due to ship until "mid year", which could mean June or sometime in the …

Hardware 7 Jun 2002, 18:07
Sun broadens factory integration service

Pre-install, customer-ready

Last October, Sun Microsystems Inc announced a special program available to customers in the United States called Floor Tile Ready (FTR) that was founded on the idea that Sun, not its customers, should be responsible for integrating Sun's and its partners' hardware, software, and peripherals into a complete solution that …

Hardware 7 Jun 2002, 18:07
US suffers broadband inflation

Puts punters off apparently

The cost of broadband is rising in the US and could dampen demand for high-speed Internet access. The warning comes from California-based ARS after it reported that charges for cable modem and ADSL services had risen on average in the first three months of the year. Cable broadband Internet service prices rose 4 per cent in Q1 …

Telecoms 7 Jun 2002, 18:12
16 million UK homes could have ADSL

Still some that can't

Two thirds of the UK - some 16 million homes - can now hook up to ADSL, according to the latest figures. Crowing louder than a Senegal football fan, BT claims that 1,115 exchanges have now been upgraded for broadband. Which means 66 per cent of UK homes - 73 per cent of Net users - are within striking distance of a DSL-enabled …

Telecoms 7 Jun 2002, 18:12
Damn it, JANET

Academics preps for KPNQwest collapse

Administrators running the UK's academic network, JANET, are looking for an alternative carrier as concern grows that that KPNQwest is to go belly up. Last week the Dutch telco filed for bankruptcy protection after the banks pulled the plug on its credit facility. KPNQwest has yet to reach an agreement with a potential buyer, …

Data Networking 7 Jun 2002, 18:14
Server sales slump in Q1

15.2% down - Gartner

It comes as no surprise that server revenues in the first quarter of 2002 contracted by 15.2% to $10.6bn, according to Gartner Dataquest. Given the glut of processing capacity which companies have sitting around these days and the price wars that are ensuing in the market as too many vendors chase too little demand. IBM …

Hardware 7 Jun 2002, 18:16
So that's what happened to eSpeak

Starving, hysterical, naked survivors tell tales of bloat

Survivors of HP's now-deceased eSpeak middleware have crawled ashore, telling tales of gruesome horror. Or at least they're at least a bit fed up with us praising it so generously, and here's where they get to tell their side of the tale. The comments - written with the grace of an angel - also have a ring of universal truth: …

Hardware 7 Jun 2002, 18:49