Palm on a laptop

When is a laptop not a laptop? When it's the new Dana, a hybrid laptop and handheld PDA. The idea behind the Dana is to combine the, 'convenience and affordability of a hand-held device with the ergonomic benefits of a lightweight, notebook computer,' say the developers, AlphaSmart. So you get a full-sized keyboard on a device running the Palm OS on a mono screen 560 pixels wide and 160 pixels deep, which compares favourably to the standard 160x160 display of a PDA. ...more

US court agrees Sony DRM settlement

Users who bought Sony BMG CDs containing the controversial 'spyware' copy protection mechanism can enjoy a download bonanza. A US court has now agreed a settlement which, Sony hopes, will put an end to the legal action brought by dozens of disgruntled music fans. Sony was hit with a storm of lawsuits after it emerged that the company's CDs had secretly installed 'rootkit' technology known as XCP and MediaMax on PCs which made it impossible for Windows to view it. ...more

IDF, Fall 2005: AMD invites Intel to dual-core duel

As he enjoyed his breakfast coffee on the opening day of IDF, the last thing Intel's CEO wanted to see was the name of competitor AMD. But it was worse than that: AMD had cheekily bought a full-page advert in a San Francisco newspaper inviting its rival to a duel: a dual-core duel, pitting the Pentium D against the Athlon 64 X2 in a benchmark shoot-out. For some reason, Paul Otellini chose to ignore this fact during his keynote address to the thousands of IDF attendees, but in the following question-and-answer session the advert was inevitably brought up by one of the attending journalists. ...more

Stallman: On SCO, GNU and Linux

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, which maintains the GPL, under which the GNU/Linux operating system is licensed, has asked us to publish his article clarifying that SCO's legal actions touch only the kernel of the platform, not the operating system as a whole... ...more

Tim Berners-Lee is Greatest Briton 2004

The inventor of the World Wide Web has already been been honoured with a knighthood, and last year banked a cheque for a cool €1mn by winning the Millennium Technology Prize. Sir Tim's financial gain was more prosaic this time around, with the trophy for Greatest Briton backed up by ?25,000 at a ceremony in the Royal Courts of Justice. Berners-Lee scooped the prize not just in the Science category but also topped the podium overall, against the likes of Kelly Holmes, fashion designer, Sir Paul Smith, author Philip Pullman, architect Lord Norman Foster, Jane Tomlinson fundraiser and campaigner and journalist Lord Bill Deedes, still UK ambassador for Unicef at the age of 91. ...more