There is growing concern that despite IBM Corp denials, its AIX Unix may not progress beyond the current 4.1 release and that the Workplace strategy of putting multiple operating system personalities onto a single kernel may not now progress beyond OS/2, OS/400 and Taligent: one school of thought has it that IBM is attempting to persuade Sun Microsystems Inc to migrate to PowerPC from Sparc over time, and that in return, IBM will adopt Sun’s Solaris Unix in place of AIX. – o – Yorkshire Water Plc is out of the cable television and local telephony business: it has sold its 10% stake in Yorkshire Cable Group Ltd in equal parts to its two partners in the business, Singapore Telecommunications Ltd and the General Cable Ltd subsidiary of Compagnie Generale des Eaux SA, receiving #10.5m cash from the former and taking shares in the latter; the two now hold 50% of the equity apiece. – o – The US will approve the alliance between Sprint Corp and the German and French state telephone companies if markets there are deregulated, the head of the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday.
NEC Corp, Motorola Inc, IPC Corp Ltd, French holding company Quadral SA and probably a consortium led by Dassault Eletronique SA’s Dassault Automatismes have each bid for a stake of at least 10% in Compagnie des Machines Bull SA, Les Echos reckons, while IBM Corp is in for a stake of less than 10%, it believes; only NEC would comment, saying it had submitted a bid for a bigger stake in Bull but would not say how much it wanted – It’s Bull that decides the final make-up of the shareholders, not us, it said. – o – Cray Research Inc has installed a Superserver 6400 at the Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. – o – Santa Clara, California-based Rational Software Corp has acquired privately-held Palladio Software Corp, a software engineering firm that provides tools and training for object-oriented development; all Palladio’s employees will join Rational; the company was the original developer of a Windows-based object-oriented analysis and design product that Rational licensed and integrated with its Rational Rose. – o – Boca Research Inc cut the price on its V.34 28.8Mbps BocaModem – the external version is now $232 and the internal model is cut to $183. – o – Rockwell International Corp has decided to hang on to its Switching Systems Division after all: as reported, six months ago, it began considering new ownership alternatives for the automatic call distribution systems business but since then, the division has entered into alliances with several major telecommunications companies including Sprint Corp and Mercury Communications Ltd, and it is now seen to hold out plenty of promise. – o – Prodigy Services Co claims to be the first on-line service to launch a connection to the World Wide Web: Web access will be available to all members with Windows software and is included in the five free hours that comes with monthly membership. – o – GTE Corp has won approval from the US District Court for eastern Virginia gave the company the go-ahead to offer video programming: the decision means that GTE can offer programming over its own video dialtone networks under development, and can operate closed cable television systems in places where it provides local phone service; GTE announced last year that it plans to build video networks in 66 markets around the US over the next 10 years, passing 7m households, spending $250m to build broadband video networks in four markets this year – Ventura County, California, St Petersburg and Clearwater Florida, Honolulu and northern Virginia. – o – Canada’s telephone companies are seeking regulatory permission to hold broadcast licences and enter the cable television market, BC Telecom Inc announced, saying that the nine-company Stentor alliance submitted its request to the Canadian Radio-television & Telecommunications Commission in Ottawa; cable companies are already permitted to offer cable, telephone and interactive services but telephone companies may off
er cable television services or hold broadcast licences.
Ameritech Corp, BellSouth Corp, SBC Communications Inc and Walt Disney Co say they expect to finalise their talks on an interactive television production joint venture within a few weeks; the shape of the venture, relative equity stakes and the investment are not yet set. – o – The Inmarsat international satellite consortium will announce sources and final level of funding for its $2,600m global satellite-based handheld phone service next Monday. – o – Eastman Kodak Co has signed a broad technology and product development agreement with Live Picture Inc, which has a new and advanced resolution -independent image viewing and editing technology, which requires less computer power and makes it easier to transmit images on networks and via ordinary telephone lines; the technology will be incorporated into Kodak’s Photo CD applications by later this year; as part of the deal, Kodak will take an equity stake in Live Picture; the Live Picture technology stores images are stored not as an array of pixels but as a sequence of multi-pixel subimages, from full resolution to low resolution, and organised into discrete tiles or segments; images can be opened and displayed in seconds and cropping, zooming, panning, and geometric transformation can be done quickly.
CompuServe Inc says it plans to develop an alternative graphics file format technology to the now-controversial .GIF, which uses a patented Unisys Corp algorithm, and the new one will be free of charge; it will co-ordinate the development of a new approach that will be available at no charge by working with software developers on technical specs for the planned standard.
Commenting on its video software being bounced at BellSouth Corp, Oracle Corp said that the Atlanta phone company would not pay a reasonable price to use its software in the trial, and had set an unrealistic deadline of May for completion. – o – NEC Corp duly unveiled a new PC-9800 series personal computer with a price tag under $1,000, 45% cheaper than the current lowest-priced model in the market-leading series: the 98Fellow PC-9801BX3/U2 comes with just two floppy disk drives.
Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd has joined the band of observers keenly watching Microsoft Corp’s interative broadband network test with Tele-Communications Inc, under the Microsoft Insight programme. – o – The earthquake in central Japan has already been given a solemn official name – it’s the 1995 southern Hyogo prefectural earthquake.
America has 5% of the world’s land mass but 65% of its lawyers, and the client-lawyer contract has become so strained, reports the Wall Street Journal, that some companies are forcing law firms to give them on-line access to billing computers so they can police theirlegal fees as they are charged – not surprising when in New York partners bill their clients $351 an hour and humble assistants collect $207 an hour; best major city for litigation? Try Dallas, where an assistant gets by on $125 an hour.
