The Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs will receive an award tomorrow for its work in addressing Year 2000 problems. The Smithsonian Institute will present the award at its annual Computerworld ceremony in Washington. Compaq nominated the department for the honour for being one of the first large organisations in Ireland to recognise and address problems arising from Y2K. According to the citation, the department displayed a commendable approach and its early recognition and assessment of the problem led to increased awareness of the issue among other government departments.
DELL SELLS WELL: Dell, which employs about 4,000 people in Limerick and Bray, expects no change in demand for its PCs and hopes to post sequential revenue growth for the first three months of 1999. Executives at the company have predicted computer industry growth of around 15 per cent in 1999.
WELL DONE: The online magazine Salon has acquired The Well, the online community founded in 1985, and plans to operate it as a separate entity. The Well has built up a unique collection of writers, technologists, thinkers and quirky pundits to exchange information and opinions on topics ranging from jazz to Java and gardening to grunge.
FALSE GAINS: PairGain Technologies shares rose 31 per cent last week after a bogus report on the Net said the phone-equipment maker was to be acquired by Israel's ECI Telecom. The source of false report on Angelfire.Com remains unknown.
WEB WORRIES: Incompatible browsers are causing the Web to become increasingly unreliable, according to a report by the Web Standards Project. Recommendations by the W3C standards body are incompletely implemented, the report finds, forcing developers to choose between excluding part of their potential audience or create costly alternatives. Almost two-thirds of the top 100 websites are presented in multiple versions, adding at least 25 per cent to development costs.
GRINDS TO A HALT? Examination grinds could become a thing of the past thanks to www.topstudy.com, a new site which promises students curriculum-based information and free access to online educational tools.
CISCO ACQUISITIONS: Cisco Systems has acquired network service providers Fibex Systems and Sentient Networks in an effort to enable its ISP clients to ease the transition from circuit-based technology to asynchronous transfer mode.
IN BRIEF...Microsoft has postponed indefinitely its plans to merge its Windows 95/98 operating systems with Windows NT and instead plans to release a new version based on the former. . . Bill Gates is now worth $100 billion, making him richer than Ireland. . . Oracle has announced the availability of Discoverer Viewer for the Web. . . Linux Online has chosen Seagate to supply new high-performance drives for its online environment. . . Yahoo has reported higher first-quarter profit of $16 million. . . Hewlett-Packard is to funnel $100 million into software maker BEA Systems over three years. . . From May, IBM plans to allow customers to buy its entire line of PCs and small computer servers online to help cut costs at its money-losing PC unit. . .