Monday, February 26, 2001		Latest in IT world

1 million Windows 2000 sold in a year

Windows 2000 server family license sales hit the one million mark worldwide and its Indian clients include the government of Andhra Pradesh. Tata Steel, Indian Tobacco Company (ITC), Usha Martin Industries, Allahabad Bank, Mastek, Intelligroup and the Visakhapatnam Port Trust have carried out large-scale deployment of Windows 2000. As many as 85 per cent of all server operating systems being shipped by Microsoft in India today are Windows 2000. Commenting on the success of the product, Mr. Rajiv Kaul, director, marketing and e-commerce, Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd, said: "There is a critical need for businesses to be flexible and agile to exploit emerging business opportunities and technological changes. We have witnessed large-scale deployments across various verticals and are delighted at the response from our customers and industry partners in the hardware and enterprise solutions space."

Online daily to cease operations

Taiwan’s loss-making Internet newspaper Tomorrow Times (www.tTimes.com.tw) said it would be taken over by Hong Kong publishing magnate Jimmy Lai, who is best known for his clashes with the Chinese government. "I have made up mind to let Tomorrow Times return to zero, meaning an end to last year’s experiment in digital media," Jan Hung-Tze, chief executive officer of PC Home Publishing Group, which owns the online newspaper, said in a letter to employees, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. The letter did not specify a time frame, but Jan said Tomorrow Times would close and he would recommend Lai’s Hong Kong-based Internet and magazine publisher, Next Media Ltd, hire 150 of Tomorrow Times’ 280 employees. The rest would be laid off. He did not give financial details of the takeover, but employees said Next Media might establish a magazine to replace the online newspaper.

Sony in deal for games

How will teenagers play arcade video games in the future? Giggling away with friends or alone in a networked world, battling anonymous foes in foreign cities, miles away, communicating only through blinking screens? Sony Corp’s new video game alliance announced last week showed that the arcade centres of the future could very well be a combination of the traditional physical game centres of the past and a new entry point into a cyber world for a Web generation. Sony will join forces with two Japanese arcade game operators, Sega Corp and Namco Ltd, to build an advanced version of PlayStation2 to be used in game centres. The new console, however, will carry some major enhancements separating it from the PlayStation2 it rolled into living rooms last year. These include monitors and video cameras rigged up to a high-speed network to connect players in different centres.

More than half of adults in US online

More than half of all adults in the USA have access to the Internet, according to a study released, as more women, minorities and lower-income families came online in the second half of 2000. The online population more closely resembles the US population as a whole than in the first half of last year, the Pew Internet and American Life Project surveyed of 3,498 Americans found. But the "digital divide" between technological haves and have-nots persists. The study found that the number of adults with Internet access grew in the second half of the year to 104 million from 88 million, a jump to 56 per cent from 47 per cent of the adult population.

— Agencies