European anti-trust case against Microsoft falters

The judge hearing the Microsoft appeal against this year's anti-trust ruling has taken the unusual step of calling a meeting of the parties involved. The European Court of First Instance's President Bo Vesterof is said to want to discuss the implications of the withdrawal from the case by two of Microsoft's most intractable opponents, the industry trade body the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and Novell. Microsoft is appealing against a ruling by the European Commission that it acted improperly by using its monopoly of the Windows desktop operating system to force other companies from related markets in server operating systems and media players. ...more

Apple merges the iPod and iPod photo line-ups

Apple has merged the iPod and iPod photo line-ups into a single range, all with colour displays for viewing album artwork and photos, and playing slideshows. The iPod photo name has been dropped. The simplified iPod lineup features a 20GB model, for ?209 and a 60GB model for ?299, ?10 cheaper than before. ...more

HP backs Debian

Hewlett Packard is expanding its support for Linux distributions by adding Debian GNU/Linux to its list. The company says that the software is now enabled across HP's range of ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. HP already offers support for a range of Linux distros including ones from Red Hat, Novell Suse and the Asianux foundation of Miracle, Red Flag and Haansoft. ...more

Intel Q&A: Homework for motherboard makers

Sunil Kumar, Intel's director of chipset marketing, discusses Intel's latest desktop platform advances and current trends in PC technology Dual-core: chipset arbitration is necessary Q: Dual-core processing is probably the most anticipated technology in the IT industry now. How do you plan to support it with chipsets? Will new dual-core supporting Intel chipsets incorporate any arbitration functions? A: This quarter, we're going to introduce the 945 and 955X chipsets to support the first generation of our dual-core desktop processors, codenamed Smithfield. Yes, there are some arbitration mechanisms in the chipsets, but, of course, there are some others in the processors themselves. ...more

mp3PRO ready to go

Back at the CES in Las Vegas, Thomson and the Fraunhofer Institute, together with an unnamed Swedish company, unveiled an improved MP3 codec - mp3PRO - to take on the likes of WMA, which is fast gaining popularity. mp3PRO is designed to deliver the near CD-quality audio of mp3 encoded at 12Kb/sec, at only 64Kb/sec, thus allowing greater volumes of material to be stored on players as well as making broadcasting Web radio cheaper, as a smaller bandwidth is used. Martin Dietz, President of Coding Technologies, the subsidiary company formed to develop the codec, said: "The new mp3PRO format offers significantly increased performance while maintaining the well-established mp3 format. ...more