Linux bosses see no gain in meeting needs of SME businesses

Will SMEs ever get the Open Source platform they deserve? The Great Linux debate. At a panel discussion at Linuxworld Coference and Expo in London yesterday, executives from IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat and Samba argued over whether Linux was meeting business needs. While most agreed that the Open Source operating system was doing a reasonable job, many saw the future as a mixed landscape between closed and open source programs running on a Linux platform. ...more

PlusNet launches optimised low-cost broadband package

PlusNet has launched a new low-cost broadband package free of data limits and usage payments; instead it promises 'traffic shaping' during peak periods to give priority to email and surfing over high-bandwidth activities. Traffic shaping is a hardware driven solution to the problem of certain users hogging the amount of bandwidth available. During peak usage hours, traffic that uses disproportionately large amounts of bandwidth - peer-to-peer file sharing and the downloading of binaries via Usenet for example - will be deprioritised in favour of the basics such as email and Web surfing. ...more

BT Wholesale reaches broadband landmark

Half a million ADSL broadband connections have now been made in the UK, BT Wholesale has announced. The lucky recipient of ADSL connection number 500,000 was apparently a mobile phone outlet in Barking, one Future AC. Incidentally, the ISP involved was not BT Openworld. ...more

Memory industry predicts Moore's Law to lose out to the laws of physics

Hundreds of rectangles, each no bigger than a grain of rice, cover a shiny platter of silicon at a research facility belonging to memory manufacturer Micron Technology. These cells contain circuits etched at a width of 50 nanometers - 2,000 times thinner than a human hair - the leading edge in a shrinking process in which a single memory chip can now hold hours of music or hundreds of digital pictures. But makers of memory chips are looking ahead to a day, not too far off, when technology based on silicon bumps up against the laws of physics and memory can't be made any smaller, with implications for gadgets like MP3 players and digital cameras. ...more

And also today (3-May-2001), for the record...

Here, in brief, are some of the day's other stories. Dell to recall Inspiron 5000s Dell is to recall over 280,000 notebook batteries. The Inspiron 5000 and 5000(e) models are affected. ...more