NEC Corp says it plans to hire more than 20% fewer new employees for the coming fiscal year than it hires this year: it will aim to hire 500 new graduates in the spring of 1996, down 23% from the 650 it hired this fiscal; it says it will also take on only 400 new research and engineering personnel next year, compared with 500 this year.
Pakistani computer users could have direct access to the Internet by December, Abdul Hafeez, a senior scientist at the state-owned National Institute of Electronics told Reuters in Islamabad yesterday: the government has approved plans to set up a single node to link universities and institutions in northern Pakistan to the Internet by year-end, with Lahore and Karachi to get connected sometime in 1996.
Binariang Sdn Bhd, Kuala Lumpur has signed a memorandum of understanding with Thailand’s Shinawatra Satellite Public Co Ltd to co-operate in satellite services in areas such as exchanging access to transponders for back-up purposes or on short-term leases; Binariang will be the owner and operator of Malaysia’s first satellite, the Malaysia East Asia Satellite, which is scheduled to be launched in December.
Promises to lead to endless confusion with the new style chosen by MCI Communications Corp for its value-added services: Minneapolis-based MTI Group Inc, which calls itself a professional network services firm, has changed its name to NetforceMTI, saying the change was made necessary by the company’s growing business activities and associated registrations across the US; the company sets out to design, implement and manage data networks using Frame Relay, ISDN and Asynchronous Transfer Mode technologies.
Siemens AG reports an order for packet switches from Taiwan’s Telecom group to enable it to expand its data network to 6,000 subscribers; it gave no value for the order but the network provides domestic and international data communications services to financial institutions and industrial companies.
Vietnam’s State Committee for Co-operation & Investment has now awarded the licence to provide the country’s first national mobile telephone network, reports the Vietnam Investment Review: the $300m project will be undertaken by a joint venture between Swedish company Comvik International AB and its parent company AB Kinnevik, in partnership with the Vietnam Mobile Telephone Co; cellular telephone services are currently available only in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which is better known as Saigon.
The verb ‘to frag’ acquired horrific connotations in the Vietnam War, particularly for uppity officers that lost the respect and won the loathing of their men, so perhaps it is appropriate that defragging can be seen as a life-saver for Windows NT users whose systems are grinding to a halt: that’s what Glendale, California-based Executive Software Inc , developer of the Diskeeper on-line defragmenter for NT reckons – the company asserts that there is a major performance advantage to be gained in keeping the New Technology File System defragmented, with throughput gains of two-to-one and higher being reported after highly-fragmented volumes have been straightened out; it cites one customer commenting suddenly you notice your loading time exceeds your coffee break allowance – on our systems, which are used fairly robustly, in six months you lose 50% of the performance – at which point you’re losing half your production, and the only way we could handle it was to strip everything off a machine and rebuild it, which takes about a half man-day, at a cost of around $400 in manpower; Diskeeper for Windows NT and Windows NT Workstation is $200; the Windows NT Server version is $400.
Internet-Way SA, a provider of Internet access in France, has cut tariffs for individual users by 20%: Single-Way, which provides electronic mail, file exchange and Web connection, now costs about $191.14 per month, including tax – a completely outrageous charge when y ou’d pay about $20 in the US; the fee includes 10 hours of free connection; extra hou
rs are billed at approximately $4.75 per hour; by comparison, CompuServe Inc in France charges about $15 a month, which includes three free hours’ access to the Internet and thereafter charges about $2.50 an hour.
Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA has signed a worldwide technology, support and marketing agreement with BMC Software Inc to provide customers with integrated products and support: BMC will put its Patrol open systems application management software on Olivetti’s servers, and Olivetti can resell, promote, market, support and advertise Patrol software.
Computer Systems Advisers Inc, Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, is putting its Silverrun business process and data modelling workbench up under Solaris 2.4 with Motif.
Unison Software Inc, in process of making an initial public offering, has released Version 2.1 of its RoadRunner for Unix back-up software that now supports any combination of Solaris, HP-UX and AIX networks: management can be distributed around a network or located centrally; prices for it go from $4,000 for the master copy, $2,000 for the server and $300 per client.
In light of recent reports about how Hewlett-Packard Co appears to be reversing into Intel Corp’s microprocessor architecture, Sun Microsystems Inc boss Scott McNealy now dubs the HP Precision Architecture RISC Posthumous Architecture.
