Introduction

'Eat like a bird, and shit like an Elephant' were the words used by one Microsoft executive to describe how to market a business. Well the sentiment is right even if the language is a bit rough.

Welcome to the first newsletter of Eighth Layer Limited. This newsletter brings you news on Eighth Layer Limited, as well as IT business in the South West of England, and the IT Industry in general.

Eighth Layer News

December 1st Founded Eighth Layer

December 24th Installed our last year 2000 patches

January 6th Signed up another client

January 9th Agreed on final logo design

January 12th Got our first payment

Eighth Layer was founded with the intention of developing a business in the IT security and logical aspects of computer networking (DNS, WINS) - however the majority of our current business is HP-UX and Oracle related.

I would like to thank Mike Croll (wildlife@paston.co.uk) of the Wildlife Art Agency, and David, for the new logo, and giving their time and effort when they could have been doing more fun, or profitable things.

Rumour has it that Mike is think of enhancing the Wildlife Art Agency's web site (http://www.paston.co.uk/wildlife/ ). So no doubt he will now be overwhelmed with offers.

Events

No Eighth Layer events are yet planned - although we are happy to do public presentations on a range of Internet and IT topics for free. Whose afraid of public speaking?

Events we are going to.....

February 1st: iPlanet Product Seminar - Hayes, Middlesex

Free seminar covering NAS, Directory and Security servers, and eCommerce Xpert Suites. Is it me or does the corporate image of the SUN/Netscape alliance change on an Internet like time scale?

February 17th: Windows 2000 UK Launch - Earls Court

Time to leave the 'Crush the Evil Empire' T shirt at home, and see what the next version of Windows has to offer. One talk features the Active Directory Service.

Windows 2000 requires a lot less reboots when you are configuring it compared to NT4, important for the Enterprise and Internet server market. Will this mark the end of the 'Your mouse has moved, Windows must reboot for this change to take effect' joke in the UNIX community, time will tell.

Other Business News

Eurobell about to launch new Investment Scheme

Eurobell will launch a new investment scheme in February to help startup e-businesses and related ventures. See http://www.matchco.co.uk for details.

AllVoice looking for Partners

John Mitchell (Jcmitchell@allvoice.co.uk), managing director of AllVoice Computing PLC (http://www.allvoice.co.uk) is looking for partners and investors to help turn their expertise in Voice Recognition in to products for the Call Center market.

Interestingly, as Microsoft's research into speech recognition start producing products it is hard for smaller companies to compete with, AllVoice are switching to products that build on the SAPI standard, allowing you to use the Microsoft Speech Recognition engine (or others) with almost all your applications.

Whatever happened to the Millennium Bug?

Well it's bark seems to have been worse than it's bite. However whilst in the UK the media seemed to convince itself that the bug was all but mythical, the only survey I could find said....

25% of IT support staff were affected by issues.

Of these about 25% reported at least one 'significant issue'.

Be ready for a small but irritating return on the 29th February 2000, when any programs that use a naive date windowing system will realise that 1900 was not a leap year, and skip straight to March.

Apparently some Nokia Communicators may be affected (They can be manually reset to the 29th) - although I'm not sure the date on their mobile phone is very critical for most people.

For those that haven't discovered it yet, this Millennium Bug issue should leave users of Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 alone, as both products incorrectly believe that 1900 was a leap year.

Gates steps down as Microsoft CEO

Well you can not have missed this, however we feel his decision to remain Chief Software Architect misses an ideal opportunity to go back to Harvard to study the history of Federal Government actions against monopolies.

Useful Link of the Month

The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing ( http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc
) is a journal by Jeffrey Harrow, a Senior Consulting Engineer at Compaq (I almost said Digital), available in Web, e-mail, and Audio formats.

Jeffrey (Jeff.Harrow@Compaq.com) seems to get paid to go to exhibitions, and write about the leading edge of consumer and technical IT he sees at these exhibitions. It's highly recommended, especially for the gadget freaks amongst you.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope you have enjoyed this first issue of the Eighth layer Newsletter.

Please feel free to pass it on to other people. Get them to send me their e-mail addresses if they would like future issues.

If you do not want to receive any future copies please also let me know so I can update the mailing list.

Simon Waters - Director, Eighth Layer Limited