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Ruperts Weekly Roundup (06/03/2000)

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News

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 14 Mar 2000 16:32 GMT

MONDAY

VHS lives! But not for long...
My old VHS recorder is starting to show its age. There are coffee stains on the front, the sticky metallic brand label is falling off, the eject mechanism is getting tired and it no longer hurls the cassette across the room when I press the eject button -- shame. And, of course, the picture quality is looking a bit jaded alongside today's DVD alternatives. So imagine my delight to read that a rewritable DVD drive is just around the corner -- by the end of this year anyway. So armed with that news, I think I'll hang on to the old antique a while longer before upgrading. But before I do part with any money, I hope the consortium promting the new technology will work out whether these things are going to be backwards compatible with other DVD players or not -- at the moment they don't seem quite sure. Take me there...

Bye bye, buy buy
As if letting loony day traders loose on their PC and phone line wasn't enough to send the world's stock markets into a terminal wibble, now we're going to let them do it on their mobile phones as well. Germany's Postbank has introduced the first WAP-phone based Internet trading service in Germany. Expect every other Internet stockbroker in Europe to be just about half an inch behind... All these newly mobilised day traders need now is voice recognition on their WAP phones. Then they'll be able to shout 'BUY!' and 'SELL!' into their phone just like the City barrow boys used to in the bad old days when mobile phones were brick sized and there still was a floor to the stock exchange... Take me there...

Newer! More features! Slower?
Bad news for all of us who are being asked to operate more and more of our business applications via Web browser front ends on a PC. Windows 2000, in laboratory tests done by IT Week recently, has shown itself to be 20 percent slower than NT 4.0 while web browsing. The word on the street is that corporate buyers should wait for the service pack release before considering upgrading. Or there's always Linux... Take me there...

Crusoe gets marooned at Cebit
Corel CEO Michael Cowpland is a technocrat who has a track record of making brave, some would say foolhardy, decisions based on fundamental technical issues rather than short term competitive ones. Its something that is not seen often enough in this industry. So, given his track record, it is a double disappointment to hear that he is giving the thumbs down to Transmeta's Crusoe chip (The new processor with a software driven instruction set at its core, and Linux pater Linus Torvalds on the software development team). One of Crusoe's big claims is how much less power it uses that equiavalent Intel designs. True enough, but Corel's Cowpland, speaking at Cebit in Hanover, has spotted that StrongARM can do most of what Crusoe can today and has even less power hungry devices coming down the line. Well, at least he took a look at the new technology... Take me there...