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12th February 2003 Archive

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  • Despair. Alienation. Error Message

    Waiting for GOTO

    For those of us who nurse dreams of Billie Whitelaw reading out computer error messages, here's more material for a performance. The actress who made her name reading Samuel Beckett's existentialist monologues of alienation and despair is a natural choice. Here's another candidate, entry 325331 in this Microsoft Knowledge Base …

    Bootnotes 12 Feb 2003, 08:40

  • Billg on Xbox 2

    Next

    Bill Gates has let slip some more details about Xbox 2 and the assault of the Microsoft next-gen games console into the living room, in an interview with Les Echos, the French financial newspaper. The next-generation Xbox (which many people speculate will be called "Xbox Next", based on recent domain name registrations by …

    Personal 12 Feb 2003, 08:40

  • Demoralised workers hurt bottom line

    Tell that to the meatpackers

    Employees at some of America's biggest tech companies are increasingly negative about work, which is damaging the businesses they work for. A study of workers at several large US high-tech firms found that more than half of their emotions about work are negative and a third are intensively negative. Most of this negativity is …

    Business 12 Feb 2003, 08:47

  • Spammers break law with covert tracking

    They couldn't care less

    Many spammers are ignoring laws forbidding them to insert covert tracking codes in their messages, according to a survey by out-law.com, the IT and ecommerce legal service arm of law firm Masons, and network security outfit iomart. The survey highlights how spam messages often contain covert tracking codes which enable senders …

    Security 12 Feb 2003, 08:54

  • Open and closed security are roughly equivalent

    The devil's in the detail, says Cambridge don

    Open and closed approaches to security are basically equivalent, with opening a system up to inspection helping attackers and defenders alike. That's the surprising conclusion drawn by Cambridge don Ross Anderson during a well-received talk to a Linux User Group at London's City University last night. Anderson has stepped into …

    Security 12 Feb 2003, 10:05

  • Unisys claims £300m R&SA win

    10-year outsourcing deal

    Royal & Sun Alliance is to outsource its UK life operations to Unisys in a 10-year deal estimated at £300m. There's nothing particularly techie, or, except for its size, interesting about the deal for an IT audience - unless you have your pension with R&SA, or Unisys shares. Unisys will manage the processing and administration …

    Hardware 12 Feb 2003, 10:23

  • Freeserve for sale? – report

    Goodness...

    Freeserve could be put up for sale in a bid to raise cash for its heavily indebted grandparent France Telecom. That's according to a report by French newspaper, Le Figaro by way of Bloomberg, quoting union sources. News that Wanadoo is considering flogging its Internet operations in the UK and Spain follows confirmation last …

    Music and Media 12 Feb 2003, 10:26

  • The J2EE v .NET ‘split’ is nothing to do with Web services

    Don't spread it around, but this is where practically the whole industry agrees...

    The biggest single problem with Web services has been confusion and misunderstanding. So I was unhappy to read your recent article Industry split over web services platform. While containing lots of good information, it seemed to be based on a fundamentally mistaken view of what Web services is all about. The headline neatly …

    Hardware 12 Feb 2003, 10:34

  • Movie outfit slammed for ‘menacing’ voicemail

    Heavy breathers

    The advertising watchdog has slammed movie giant Twentieth Century Fox for a "menacing" voicemail ad that contained heavy breathing and screaming. The ad was publicising the Tom Cruise film Minority Report but only seemed to scare some people absolutely witless. The message started with a man drawing breath before saying …

    Music and Media 12 Feb 2003, 15:21

  • Police recover disk at centre of ID theft flap

    ISM Canada worker faces nicked goods charge

    A hard drive that contained confidential details about hundreds of thousands of insurance company clients has been recovered by Canadian police. The paperback-sized 30-gigabyte (Western Digital Caviar 307AA) drive, which went missing from the supposedly secure facility of ISM Canada, an IBM subsidiary on January 16, was found …

    Music and Media 12 Feb 2003, 15:37

  • Gulf War 2 – The Flash movie

    US triumphant, Middle East in ruins

    Those readers who are concerned about the possible repercussions of a war against Iraq need look no further than LA-based Irishman Dermot O'Connor for enlightenment. O'Connor has created Gulf War 2, which is a projection of the most likely outcome of a new war in the Gulf. O'Connor used sophisticated temporal algorithms and …

    Bootnotes 12 Feb 2003, 15:53

  • BT! and! Yahoo! hold! hands!

    Marketing stuff

    BT and Yahoo! are best buddies today after announcing a joint marketing deal. In the next couple of weeks or so the top yodelling Internet company will begin offering its Yahoo! UK Plus service - which includes a spam blocker, instant messaging, email, parental controls, digital photo storage, anti-virus software etc - to the …

    Music and Media 12 Feb 2003, 15:53

  • BT tests water with rural ADSL project

    Releases 'indicative pricing'

    BT is to confirm next month whether it will proceed with a scheme that could bring ADSL to areas currently deemed not commercially viable for investment in broadband. Last autumn the telco began a trial of a community broadband project, which makes it financially possible to convert an exchange to ADSL with just 16 customers. …

    Telecoms 12 Feb 2003, 18:31

  • Gates holds forth on the ‘pervasive Linux’ threat

    And he's all over the shop, as usual...

    Bill Gates is taking Linux very seriously - but apparently, still not seriously enough to actually understand it. Speaking to the Microsoft MVP Summit on Tuesday he bracketed Linux with other 'kill the company' threats to Microsoft, giving OS/2 as a prime example. Or at least, that's what Peter Galli of eWeek tells us he said. …

    Software 12 Feb 2003, 20:49

  • Back to the video future for ATM

    Internetworking

    Industry groups are looking to retrofit existing technologies through standards developments to make them more suited to the delivery of broadband telco services. At a recent California conference, organised by the ATM Forum, strategies were mapped out for the development of standards for delivering streaming media and the like …

    Hardware 12 Feb 2003, 20:50