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21st March 2003 Archive

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  • BEA Systems: long term logic

    New version of its Weblogic Workshop

    Much has changed in the 12 months since BEA Systems unveiled the first version of its web services development environment WebLogic Workshop. BEA now seems to be in the second phase of what is emerging as a long-term strategy to win the backing of enterprise developers. Workshop 8.1, which was formally announced in March 2003, …

    Data Center 21 Mar 2003, 07:21

  • Hackers claim NSA breach

    Nescafé Open Up

    Hackers claim to have compromised a computer at the National Security Agency in Ft. Meade, Maryland. But their target was the least secretive organization imaginable within the massive intelligence agency: the public affairs office. And instead of scoring a cache of highly-classified documents about the NSA's global …

    Security 21 Mar 2003, 07:22

  • EC calls on member states to free up WLAN spectrum

    Lighter regulation

    The European Commission has called for member states to promote public wireless broadband services such as Wi-Fi. The Commission adopted a recommendation on Thursday that encourages EU countries to allow for the deployment of what it calls public R-LAN access networks (R as in Radio, but which we know as W-LAN and Wi-Fi) with …

    Security 21 Mar 2003, 07:22

  • PalmSource in the black as Palm Q3 slides

    Update Lining up licensees

    The seasonal hardware sales dip and the weak IT economy pulled Palm's Q3 2003 figures, announced yesterday, well below the results it posted for the same period last year. There was one positive sign, however: its PalmSource subsidiary recorded its first profitable quarter. Its net income was $1.4 million. Operating income was …

    Personal 21 Mar 2003, 08:59

  • Silicon Valley staff help paralyse SF with swarm tech

    Thousand+ arrested

    Silicon Valley techs and engineers helped paralyse the city of San Francisco in a day long series of actions and surprises, which closed off freeways and most of downtown. Over one thousand were arrested - and the final total may be much higher - creating havoc as a demonstration against the war on Baghdad. Protesters used lo- …

    Bootnotes 21 Mar 2003, 12:46

  • Govt web sites bashed by new report

    'Risk of wasting taxpayers' money' etc

    Government web sites run the risk of wasting taxpayers' money, according to yet another critical report into the public sector online. An outfit called Parallel Ltd reckons Job Centre Online and the 10 Downing Street site are among the worst offenders. Its eight-week study of 70 public sector sites found that the average …

    Media 21 Mar 2003, 12:48

  • Telcos and ISPs prepare for charity bar battle

    Pub quiz to determine who's the brainiest of the bunch

    Some of the biggest names in the telecoms industry are meeting up next week for a charity pub quiz in aid of the Samaritans. The press offices of AOL UK, Freeserve, NTL, Telewest, BT, Oftel, Hutchison, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange and O2 are among those who will suspend hostilities for a couple of hours so they can battle it out …

    Media 21 Mar 2003, 12:53

  • Is SSL safe?

    Two-thirds of servers vulnerable to new crypto attack, apparently

    Czech security researchers this week claimed to have uncovered weaknesses in SSL that might permit crackers to decypher transmissions over supposedly secure links. However, independent cryptography experts, who are studying a paper from Czech security outfit ICZ, are yet to verify the risk is real and as serious as ICZ suggests …

    Security 21 Mar 2003, 12:58

  • ATI income down, revenues up

    Got to watch those exceptional items, guys

    ATI lost $8.3 million in its last quarter, the second of its 2003 fiscal year, on revenues up to $318.5 million from the $266 million it recorded for the same period last year. Operationally, ATI did rather better than that loss suggests: before exceptional items are taken into consideration, it made a profit of $9.7 million ($ …

    Channel 21 Mar 2003, 13:36

  • Micron sheds more red

    Sales up but losses balloon

    Memory maker Micron lost $619 million ($1.02 a share) during Q2 2003, which ended on 27 February. Exceptional charges account for around half that figure - without them the company lost $386 million. Those figures are significantly higher than the $30.4 million loss Micron reported this time last year. Its Q2 2002 operating …

    Channel 21 Mar 2003, 13:55

  • PalmSource spin-off slips again

    Summer 2003 at the earliest

    Palm will now not spin off its operating system subsidiary, PalmSource, until the summer, CEO Eric Benhamou has revealed. Speaking at a teleconference held to discuss the group's Q3 results, Benhamou admitted "our schedule estimate for the final completion of the PalmSource separation has now moved out to the summer of this …

    Personal 21 Mar 2003, 14:23

  • Apple lead on 17in notebooks challenged

    HP, Acer following, apparently

    HP and Acer, to name but two, are preparing a Windows-based alternatives to Apple's 17in PowerBook. Apple is currently advertising its new notebook like crazy. Well, it's got until the third quarter to attract buyers for the world's only big-brand laptop with a 17in screen. Come Q3, and HP will launch its model, according to …

    Mac Channel 21 Mar 2003, 14:44

  • Monaghan-Iraq – the outrage continues

    Letters Reg can't tell its Iraq from its elbow

    Oh dear, oh dear. Our piece yesterday, snappily entitled US Irish in St Patrick's Day Iraqi banner outrage, has itself provoked a fair bit of reader outrage. Apparently, so great was our collective St Patrick's Day hangover that we'd failed to notice our maps of County Monaghan and Iraq were reversed, and were suggesting that …

    Bootnotes 21 Mar 2003, 15:02

  • UK.biz ready for disaster, says UK.biz

    We the prepared

    UK enterprises are ready for a major disaster. That's the conclusion of a survey by server hosting outfit TDM Group which found 79 per cent of businesses believe they would have their IT Systems "up and running within minutes in the event of a disaster". In a telephone poll of 100 enterprise IT managers, commissioned by TDM, …

    Storage 21 Mar 2003, 15:06

  • Reg Kit Watch

    Bull builds on Itanium 2

    Server Bull has announced its entry into the Itanium 2 server sphere: the NovaScale range. Based on Bull's FAME architecture - which it claims is a kind of SMP-and-then-some system - NovaScale supports Windows Server 2003, Linux and soon, Bull promises, its own GCOS operating system. Each OS can run simultaneously on the same …

    Personal 21 Mar 2003, 15:15

  • Dick Brown: Action, urgency, excellence!

    MemoWatch 'Proud to say I'm an EDSer'

    Yesterday we noted the absence of Dick Brown in the EDS ouster press release. But he did pop up, in an email missive to fellow "EDSers", as he calls himself (yuck!). So here is Brown's valediction, followed by a statement to the troops from the new guys in charge (we have reversed the order of the messages in which they appeared …

    Business 21 Mar 2003, 15:26

  • Office work is a pain in the neck

    Tell us something we don't know

    Office workers risk health problems as communications technology makes them slaves to their desks. So says research from cordless communications outfit, GN Netcom, which found that a third of workers are tied to their desks for more than seven hours a day. Two thirds of those quizzed blamed health problems on being chained to …

    Small Biz 21 Mar 2003, 15:27

  • MS takes axe to Xbox Japan

    Job cuts

    The Japanese arm of Microsoft's Xbox division is to see personnel reductions across the board, as the console continues to struggle in the Far East - but the company denies any scaling back of the Xbox operation itself in the territory. The headcount of the 200-person strong division will be cut by 34, with reductions affecting …

    Personal 21 Mar 2003, 16:03

  • The Pentagon's tactical Internet – a war too early?

    The next generation hardware is maybe still on dial-up

    The Pentagon is furiously buying up commercial satellite capacity in order to meet the bandwidth needs of a new kind of IT-driven war, reports the Washington Post. But Register sources suggest that the US military has other, rather larger problems in delivering on the digital battlespace vision. A recent Department of Defense …

    Media 21 Mar 2003, 20:45

  • XFree86 dust-up questions X11 model

    Client-server paradigm needs up-ending

    The furious row over the vital open source software project XFree86 has raised questions over what future direction the group should take. One of the project's founders, David Wexelblat (actually the fourth guy - see this good history), has suggested that the X model is anachronistic and needs a fundamental garbage-can shaped …

    Software 21 Mar 2003, 20:51

  • Norton SystemWorks heisted for terror war spam scam

    Shock and awe reaches junk mail

    Spammers/scammers have reinvented irksome unsolicited emails promoting Norton SystemWorks to hype up the terror angle. Al-Qaeda wants to root your machine so buy Norton SystemWorks from us at a knockdown price now, chirp the intrusive messages (example below). These spam messages commonly promote either pirated software or …

    Security 21 Mar 2003, 20:58

  • Birmingham council gets tough on personal email

    Clampdown

    Birmingham City Council is clamping down on staff sending personal emails while at work. It seems the council is miffed that so much of its IT resource is used up by people emailing their friends. A document seen by ICBirmingham suggests that unregulated use of email is "a drain on productivity". And it appears that it is also …

    Media 21 Mar 2003, 21:00