Moving closer to the Digital Home

Intel kicks off its Developer Forum with an announcement of an Extended Wireless PC Initiative and a demo of a 3GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading. The processor giant describes the initiative as the first step in delivering on its Digital Home strategy. The idea is to help developers - via reference designs and toolkits - to distribute digital media around the TVs and stereos in a home. ...more

Microsoft employees call for Ballmer to go

Microsoft employees are arguing among themselves over who is to blame for the delay in the launch of Windows Vista. One disgruntled insider named Who da'Punk voiced his feelings in a blog posting under the heading 'Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!'. ...more

Apple back in profit

Apple has announced a net profit of $40m for the latest financial quarter, far in excess of expectations. The impressive results, based on revenues of $1.43 billion, reflect the success of a number of the new products introduced this year, particularly the titanium PowerBook. ...more

ISO welcomes Open Document Format

The International Standards Organisation (ISO) has approved the Open Document Format (ODF) - a decision welcomed by those supporting open standards, including the EU. The ODF was approved as a standard by ballot, with no negative votes and a handful of abstentions and now merely faces a few formalities before it is officially christened ISO/IEC 26300. Microsoft, too, is rushing to have its formats accepted as an international standard, fast-tracking its Open XML specifications used with its Office 12 suite through the ECMA approval system, which will subsequently escalate to the ISO offices. ...more

IDF, Fall 2005: Intel looks to multi-core future

It's the type of change that doesn't cause headlines, but on the opening day of IDF Intel announced a fundamental new approach to its business: for the first time, it is basing its mobile, desktop and server chips on the same micro-architecture. And while previous desktop architectures have focused on increasing power with little heed to power consumption, Intel's new vision is based on performance-per-Watt. Intel has already had great success in reducing the power consumption of its notebooks, and it's now bringing those skills to the desktop and server business. ...more