UK notches up 2 million broadband connections

Oftel has announced that the UK now has 2 million broadband connections, a total which has doubled in just seven months. David Edmonds, Director General of Telecommunications, said, 'It took two years to reach one million connections, but only seven months to reach two million, as increased competition and lower prices have boosted connection rates.' Cable companies NTL and Telewest recently announced they had reached the 1 million mark, so the split between DSL and cable connections falls roughly equal, although Oftel does consider BT's monopolistic power to be a powerful factor in taking an increasingly larger percentage of new sign-ups. ...more

mp3 goes Pro

Today's the day that Coding Technologies, subsidiary of Thomson Multimedia and the Fraunhofer Institute, launches the big brother to mp3 - mp3PRO. It claims to be able to compress audio more than twice as efficiently as the standard mp3 codec, using two channels. It's backwards compatible to a point, although standard players will only recognise one track, and so the reproduced audio may sound worse than standard mp3 quality. ...more

The PC gets wireless gaming

Logitech has launched the world's first wire-free vibration gamepad for the PC. Operating over radio frequencies in the 2.4Ghx spectrum (incidentally the same used for 802. ...more

Printer makers sued over dotty technology

The patent dispute has brought in $400 million already. Pitney Bowes is suing a number of companies, including Apple, which it claims have infringed its '272 patent', according to Reuters. The patent - also known as the variable dot printing patent - covers the technology of 'spewing' ink dots to smooth the edges of characters. ...more

UPDATE#2: QuarkXpress 6.0 unleashed next week

Quark has announced that QuarkXPress 6.0 will be released next week, for a somewhat staggering ?1,095. In the US it will sell for the equivalent of less than ?650. ...more