Internet boosts social life - report

Net-savvy users value their online community as much as real-world friends and family, according to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California. Around 43 per cent of some 2,000 US Internet users said that they felt 'as strongly' about their digital friends as their flesh and blood contacts. 'More than a decade after the portals of the Worldwide Web opened to the public, we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become,' said Jeffrey I. ...more

Dell distances itself from desktop Linux claims

Dell has moved quickly to distance itself from the from the suggestion made yesterday that it was sanctioning the loading of a version of desktop Linux for sale throughout Europe. Yesterday, Italian reseller Questar announced that it would be selling entry level Dell Optiplex machines preloaded with a desktop version of Linux, Linspire 4.5 at rock bottom prices. ...more

LaCie debuts 48 speed CD drive

LaCie has announced a new CD drive capable of 48-speed (48x) reading and burning. At this new top speed, LaCie claims the 48x12x48x drive can rip or burn a 60-minute CD-R in about two minutes and rewrite CD-RW disks at 1.8Mb/sec (12x). ...more

ReplayTV ditches staff and customers

ReplayTV, the US's biggest rival to TiVo in the personal video recorder market is leaving the sharp end of the sector with the loss of almost half its staff to concentrate on licensing its technology to cable and other providers. This is bad news for the emerging UK market, as ReplayTV's service was free and only charged users for its premium packages. TiVo, on the other hand, levies a monthly fee for its service. ...more

Berners-Lee makes the Royal Society

It's official, the inventor of the Internet is a jolly good fellow. At least according to the Royal Society, which has awarded him a fellowship (among 43 others, including Sir Patrick Moore) for his work with the Internet. It's a great paragraph to anyone's biography: "in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web. ...more