Part-time Intel PR hits back at INQuirer

A MAN WHO DESCRIBED THE INQUIRER and our old organ the Rogister for being a "rumor board" returned for more corporal punishment yesterday.

Alex Johnson, who has now admitted he works at Intel but claims he uses his university address to "avoid spam", seems to believe that Compaq posts its internal memoranda on Usenet in his latest attack on British journalism.

In the most recent post in comp.sys.intel, Alex maintains we are still a "rumor board" but agrees that some "reputable press" appear to have picked up on our story about an Itanium erratum too.

Says Alex: "It was kind of funny and kind of disturbing at the same time. Where did they pick my post out of the void? It should be obvious. If the Inquirer is a rumor board (which I still claim) then they must monitor comp.sys.intel vigorously. I mean, what better source of rumors than usenet?? :-)

"I do correct myself. There has been reputable press (in my opinion)... INQ supplied the rest after a weakly veiled page of accusations. The links were useful. I don't deny I work at intel, but over 80,000 people do and you should read the last sentence of this post. In fact I never denied it, nor attempted to cover that fact. (My email address is my old college one because I don't want spam at work.)"

Alex does not say whether he works in Intel's PR department, but if he does, we've never come across him. He might be a a new recruit to the spinning department, as he certainly has a view on what constitutes a PR disaster. If so, we lok forward to making his acquaintance.

He says: "To rebut their Notes. 1) It's only a PR nightmare because INQ/REG try to make it so. In the real world nobody knows and even fewer people care. 2) Predictions can come true if you make enough of them. How many of the stories didn't pan out? BTW, anyone with one eye could have seen PC133/DDR memory coming a mile away. Don't try to claim that one. "

In fact, Alex doesn't work on the Itanium IA-64 project and has nothing do with it. He says:

"3) Thank you for the convenient links. :-) 4) Wow. Follow all the links on their page and you won't find any referring to "T6 bug". Not one of the "reputable" carriers mentions "T6" and absolutely no one describes the effect of the bug, including Inquirer. T6 isn't even an intel-style bug code (it might be Compaq). If that isn't enough, not everybody is in on the conspiracy and we don't all work on every project intel has. I personally don't know anything about the sighting we are discussing and have nothing to do with the Itanium chip of which all this fuss is over."

See the post in Usenet. µ