On August 5th Hewlett-Packard Co will introduce a 600 dpi, 40 page per minute printer for use with its HP 9000 and 3000 servers that it claims will retail at half the price of competitive solutions. Paging companies TeleTouch Communications Inc of Tyler, Texas and ProNet Inc have decided by mutual consent to call the […]
On August 5th Hewlett-Packard Co will introduce a 600 dpi, 40 page per minute printer for use with its HP 9000 and 3000 servers that it claims will retail at half the price of competitive solutions.
Paging companies TeleTouch Communications Inc of Tyler, Texas and ProNet Inc have decided by mutual consent to call the whole thing off and put an end to their engagement.
There will be some mixed feelings but Psion Plc ain’t going to buy Amstrad Plc this time around. It said on Friday it had ended talks with Amstrad about making an offer for the latter as no agreement could be reached on a bid price. The news sliced 35 pence off the Amstrad share price at 154 pence.
Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd and NEC Corp say they will work together to develop a common system to secure commercial transactions on networks such as the Internet. It will use secure electronic transaction standards established by Microsoft Corp and ma jor credit-card issuers.
Mitsubishi Electric Corp plans to use more discount home appliance chains to boost personal computer sales, and aims to ship 250,000 machines to the Japanese market this fiscal year, a 50,000 rise on its initial estimate of 200,000.
Pier Carlo Falotti, executive vice-president for international operations at AT&T Corp resigned effective September 1 to accept a senior position in Europe with another company. John Petrillo, 47, executive vice-president for strategy and service innovation will assume responsibility for international operations.
Panda Project Inc, Boca Raton, Florida processor-independent server builder and chip packaging designer cut its workforce by 25 employees as part of a streamlining program.
So what is the problem with IBM Corp’s results dissemination system at the Olympics? Seems nobody had thought to ask the question until Tim Prickett of Technology News of America did late Thursday, and the answer turns out to be a slightly over-ambitious promise made by IBM and some rather unenlightened news organizations. IBM is committed to providing results feeds from the DB2 databases on the mainframes to 12 major news organizations and the results Web site, and it promised to deliver the feeds in whatever format the news organization requested. Problem has been that once the feed has been converted on the fly to the Reuter format and the Agence France Presse format and the Dow Jones & Co format, the results are coming in so fast that data starts to back up, and whoever is last on the list starts to suffer long delays. This was compounded by the fact that most of the news organizations refused to upgrade their modems from 9,600bps until IBM had to offer to give them faster ones. The fix is that news organizations now all get the same format – but still needed to learn to use it.
Two sidebars that have added to the perception of non-performance by IBM Corp in Atlanta is that instead of posting the results as soon as the event finishes and the ThinkPad handlers have sent their messages, and putting a P for provisional against them, IBM decided to post them only after they had been ratified – which can be 15 minutes or more after the end of the event and makes its system look late. The company failed to realize that at times, the volume of information flowing into the system would be so enormous that important information would get backed up behind a stream of trivia. Only when it saw this did it start prioritizing the data.
