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26th November 2004 Archive

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  • AMD roadmap drops Athlon XP

    Greater focus on Sempron, 90nm

    AMD has updated its public roadmap. The biggest change: the death of its Athlon XP brand. AMD has fully committed itself to Sempron, and adds a couple of new 90nm processors to the line-up. Indeed, there's a clear shift toward 90nm over 130nm across the roadmap. Previous roadmaps have continues to list Athlon XP parts running …

    PCs 26 Nov 2004, 09:15

  • DWP kills 60k+ PCs in Windows XP upgrade lash-up

    Updated Down for four days and counting...

    Most of the desktop computers in the UK's Department for Work and Pensions were paralysed for four days on Monday, when a failed upgrade took them offline. The outage, covering 75-80 per cent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs, is one of the largest in the UK Government's not entirely impressive IT history. And possibly one of the most …

    Operating Systems 26 Nov 2004, 09:30

  • Final bids in for MoD's £4bn IT project

    Winner announced in March

    Today, two groups will submit final bids for the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII), a £4bn Ministry of Defence (MoD) IT programme. Atlas, a consortium headed by EDS and Fujitsu, will go head to head with Radii, made up of BT, CSC and Thales. The contract, worth £4bn , will be awarded in three stages. Both consortiums …

    Public Sector 26 Nov 2004, 09:54

  • IT boss barred from directorship for eight years

    Failure to pay taxes

    The director of three London IT service firms which collapsed owing £2m, has been barred from holding directorships in any company for eight years. The High Court of Justice heard that William Hall, 51, of Hallam Street, London W1, had displayed unfit conduct by paying himself an excessive salary, while failing to meet his …

    Channel Register 26 Nov 2004, 10:41

  • BT flogs Eutelsat stake for £363m

    To pay for Danon's leaving party?

    BT is to flog its minority stake in satellite operator Eutelsat for £363m in cash. GS Capital Partners 2000, an investment partnership affiliated with Goldman Sachs, is to buy BT's 15.8 per cent stake, the telco said today. The deal is expected to be completed by the end of the financial year. A spokesman said the money would …

    Telecoms 26 Nov 2004, 10:43

  • India pioneers the webcast cremation

    Distance grieving via the net

    An Indian crematorium is planning to give grieving but time-strapped relatives the chance to send their dear departed into the next world via live webcast. The funeral establishment in Baroda hopes to offer the new service by next June. It will allow friends and family to watch cremations from the comfort of their own homes, …

    Music and Media 26 Nov 2004, 10:51

  • Magirus reports strong trading

    Surging oil prices come in handy

    Magirus, the European mid-range systems distie, yesterday issued upbeat trading figures for the half year to September end. The mid-range systems distie said sales were up 16.6 per cent to €256m on last year, producing an operating profit up 30.1 per cent to &euro. Sales were flat in Germany, its home country, but the Middle …

    Channel Register 26 Nov 2004, 11:11

  • Families fight over PCs shock

    At least it can't get lost down the back of the sofa...

    Computers have become such an integral part of family life that they are causing rows over who gets to use them. Ninety per cent of British families with computers experience arguments over who gets to use the household computer and for how long, according to a survey of UK children and their parents' use of computers and the …

    Personal 26 Nov 2004, 11:19

  • Bat bite 'miracle' girl survives rabies

    No vaccination, but prayer prevails

    A US teenage girl has survivied full-blown rabies she contracted from a bat - the first human ever to do so without vaccination, TechNewsWorld reports. Jeanna Giese was bitten by the infected flying mammal while in church on 12 September. Despite the assault, she did not report to a doctor who would have vaccinated her as a …

    Science 26 Nov 2004, 11:27

  • Customs and tax merger to cost £75m

    Most of spend will be on IT

    Merging Customs and Excise with the Inland Revenue will cost at least £75m, Her Majesty's Treasury announced yesterday. Most of the cost will be due to integrating the two department's IT systems. The Treasury's Regulatory Impact Assessment (pdf) warns that the full cost could rise higher, if there are areas where the …

    Public Sector 26 Nov 2004, 11:28

  • NSW police email child abuse pics to school heads

    Picture cropping goes awry

    New South Wales police have apologised after accidentally sending images of child abuse to school heads in the Australian state. Pictures of three girls believed to be at risk were emailed to 1,800 state schools but "software used to crop images left the full pictures embedded in the file", AP reports. Eighty per cent of school …

    Music and Media 26 Nov 2004, 11:29

  • Woman blows $950k on Amex card

    Then sues company for letting her

    A New York woman who ran up debts of $951,000 on her Amex account is sueing the company for $2m for allowing her to hammer the plastic, Newsday reports. Antoinette Millard, 40, says American Express should have realised she was mentally incompetent when she opened the sky's-the-limit Centurion account. Her court filing states …

    Security 26 Nov 2004, 11:41

  • Baltimore cleans house, plans de-listing

    Cost cutting

    Baltimore Technologies has embarked on a series of housekeeping exercises, but the former security firm has given no indication of its plans for the future. The company has organised a general meeting of shareholders for mid-December, to approve a plan to consolidate its share structure. The company currently has 40,000 …

    Financial News 26 Nov 2004, 11:50

  • Microsoft excluded from DoCoMo's ecosystem

    Linux and Symbian support

    Perhaps the greatest disadvantage that Microsoft has in trying to become a major force in the mobile world is that one of the key concepts of that market, the 'ecosystem', is alien to it. Windows thrives on being a dictatorship, while the dominant mobile players sit at the center of huge webs of mutually dependent partnerships, …

    Mobile 26 Nov 2004, 11:51

  • NPfIT must win medical hearts and minds

    'Implementation' director appointed

    The Health minister John Hutton, has appointed the head of a health authority to oversee the service implementation of the NHS's National Programme for IT. Alan Burns, currently chief executive of Trent Strategic Health Authority, will take of the role of Director of Service Implementation for three days a week over the next …

    Public Sector 26 Nov 2004, 12:18

  • Social engineering - where the user is the weakest link

    Human nature causes security holes

    Anyone who has been hit by a computer virus will be doubly wary of unexpected emails in the future that may contain viruses. So why do people still keep clicking on attachments? However much security technology a company deploys, human nature will always be the weakest link in the chain. With the problem of spam growing daily, …

    Enterprise Security 26 Nov 2004, 12:19

  • IBM, Moore's Law and the POWER 5 chip

    The benchmark to end all benchmarks

    IBM's recent pSeries benchmark ought to raise a good number of eyebrows. Unix server benchmarks had previously been a game of leapfrog between IBM and HP, with IBM looking increasingly strong in the last round (in 2003) when its p690 server with 32 processors demonstrated a slightly higher transaction rate than HP's 64 processor …

    Servers 26 Nov 2004, 13:15

  • BT broadens £1-a-month Wi-Fi trial

    BT Mobile customer get a look-in too

    BT has added BT Mobile business subscribers to the list of customers to whom it is offering Wi-Fi access for a pound a month. There's a catch, of course: it's a marketing promotion aimed at attracting businesses to BT Mobile. The deal applies only to companies signing up before 31 December 2004, and only lasts for three months …

    Mobile 26 Nov 2004, 13:26

  • Phishers tapping botnets to automate attacks

    Is your PC hosting a bank fraud site?

    Computer criminals are making phishing more potent by automating attacks. Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) analysts reckon fraudsters are using automated tools and botnets to ramp up attacks. It estimates attacks grew by an average of 36 per cent a month between July and October. Scam emails that form the basis of phishing …

    Spam 26 Nov 2004, 13:55

  • Digital music a long way from displacing CDs

    But consumers will favour downloads over subs

    It's going to be a long time before digital music downloads challenge CD sales, even in the online world. That's the conclusion of a report by market watcher Informa Media Group (IMG), published this week. Come 2010, IMG says, global online music sales will exceed $6bn. An impressive number, but still only 15.2 per cent of …

    Music and Media 26 Nov 2004, 14:00

  • WLAN switch makers fight for survival

    Battlelines drawn

    The past two years have seen a host of start-ups taking the gamble that Wi-Fi switches would become a major enterprise networking technology. Now that shipments in something approaching volume are materialising, it's time to separate the winners from the losers. There are far too many players in the sector, and since the once- …

    Data Networking 26 Nov 2004, 14:09

  • Napster UK song sheet passes 1m mark

    Where's iTunes?

    Napster today claimed its UK digital music store offers over 1m tracks - the first time a company has said it has reached that milestone in this country. Napster UK launched in May this year with a catalogue of around 500,000 songs. The UK incarnation of Apple's iTunes Music Store launched the following month with a 700,000- …

    Financial News 26 Nov 2004, 14:43

  • UK CD album shipments break Q3 record

    Downloads soar too

    Some 1.75m songs were downloaded from the UK's legal online music services during Q3, enough to turn the singles market from a 12 per cent decline year on year to a nine per cent increase over the same periods, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade body said today. Some 7.3m physical singles were sold in the UK during …

    Music and Media 26 Nov 2004, 14:50

  • Sapphire Hybrid X700 Pro graphics card

    Review Stuck between rock, hard place?

    The Sapphire Hybrid X700 Pro has a certain elegance, sporting a small blue heatsink on the ATI Radeon X700 Pro GPU and a total of eight heatsinks on the GDDR 3 memory chips. It's a mid-sized card with no need for an extra power connector and the PCI Express x16 connector is still novel enough to excite a certain amount of …

    System Builder 26 Nov 2004, 15:20

  • Hydrogen Solar nabs $400k R&D grant

    Get thee to sunny Vegas

    A UK research company that uses solar power to generate hydrogen has won a $400,000 US Department of Energy award to test its technology in Las Vegas. The grant has been issued via The University of Nevada's Las Vegas Research Foundation. Hydrogen Solar will work with the research foundation for the first year of a three year …

    Science 26 Nov 2004, 15:40

  • Gimme clean bandwidth

    ISPs (but not big telcos) to offer bandwidth filtering

    The rise in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is creating a market for ISPs that offer that offer a 'clean feed' to clients. Hosting companies and ISPs might be able to charge a premium of between 20 and 50 per cent for bandwidth filtered to remove hostile traffic, according to security appliance firm Top Layer. Paul …

    Enterprise Security 26 Nov 2004, 15:43

  • Lycos screensaver to blitz spam servers

    When is a DDos attack not a DDoS attack?

    Lycos Europe has started to distribute a special screensaver in a controversial bid to battle spam. The program - titled Make Love Not Spam, and available for Windows and the Mac OS - sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam web page becomes …

    Spam 26 Nov 2004, 16:31

  • Oracle plots PeopleSoft board takeover

    PeopleSoft likes board just the way it is

    Oracle has put forth a list of four directors it will try and have nominated to PeopleSoft's board, as part of its ongoing bid to acquire the software maker. With a majority of PeopleSoft investors tendering their shares to Oracle in favor of the acquisition, Oracle is now looking to put even more pressure on its target. The …

    Applications 26 Nov 2004, 21:58

  • Telcos could block free wireless in Philly

    Not so much brotherly love

    Major telcos are all for free, citywide wireless networks in US cities just so long as the networks aren't free or citywide. That's the word in Philadelphia where Verizon appears to be on the verge of quashing one of the most ambitious free wireless network plans to date. Telco lobbyists are pushing hard to restrict the rollout …

    Mobile 26 Nov 2004, 22:23