San Jose-based Altera Corporation announced it’s restructuring some of its manufacturing operations and laying off 110 jobs, in an effort to control inventory levels.
Two senior Apple Computer Inc engineers have made the physical and cultural leap to Redmond to work for Microsoft Corp’s Internet platform and tools division. Steven Capps and Walter Smith are both veterans of the Newton effort, with Capps going all the way back to Xerox Corp in the 1970s and Apple’s Lisa, leaving in 1985 to return three years later. Smith designed the NewtonScript language and environment and Newton’s object-based data storage system. They will both work on users interfaces and other Internet stuff.
Mainframe development tool vendor Softlab GmbH has stopped reselling Platinum Technology Inc’s Paradigm Plus software engineering tool after less than glowing reports from customers, while Digital Equipment Corp, which resells Paradigm Plus as Object Plus is also understood to have its finger on the trigger.
Dallas-based banking systems specialist BancTec Inc says Amdahl Corp granted the company a five-year, $50m contract to provide network and desktop services for Amdahl’s multivendor service and support business. BancTec will provide support to Amdahl in servicing distributed computing sites with thousands of desktops nationwide. .
Southern New England Telecommunications Corp is joining the Americast venture of Ameritech Corp, Bell-South Corp, GTE Corp, SBC Communications Inc and Walt Disney Co to create video-on-demand programming. .
Meantime the rival Tele-TV joint venture of Nynex Corp, Bell Atlantic Corp and Pacific Telesis Group Inc appears to be close to collapse following the decision to cut expenditure right back (CI No 2,930). Pacific Telesis is merging with SBC Communications Corp of the other camp, and Nynex and Bell Atlantic, which also want to merge, do not appear to want to proceed alone, the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the PC Week gossip column, its on-line sister operation at Ziff-Davis Publishing Co Inc, ZD Net has been the victim of the kind of ballot-rigging that would do credit to the legendary Mayor Daley of Chicago. ZD Net conducts regular Quick Polls on topics of great moment, and when it posed the question Who will win the browser wars – Microsoft or Netscape? it appeared for the first 24 hours that honors were just about even, but then Netscape Communications Corp started powering a head in such a suspect manner that ZD investigated and found that an automated procedure for casting votes on Netscape’s behalf had been instituted – three IP addresses, each belonging to Netscape, had cast a total of 953 votes in a matter of hours, getting round the defences that are intended to prevent users from casting more than one vote per poll, the crooked votes were fairly quickly identified and removed.
