Report predicts 70in tellies will be standard in two years

With 42-inch flat-panel TVs flying off retailers' shelves this holiday season as prices dip below $1,000, brokerage house Sanford C. Bernstein said in a research note on Tuesday that 70-inch TVs could be the 'right size' in 2009. 'We decided to investigate the optimal screen size for high definition viewing,' wrote analyst Jeff Evenson in the note. ...more

Advent takes on Apple with new entertainment PC

Advent is taking on Apple in the design stakes this Christmas with the launch of its stylish T1 entertainment PC. With a design nod to the iMac G5, the T1 features a structurally elegant base unit that supports a widescreen 17in TFT monitor. The multiformat DVD writer is also slot loading rather than using a tray. ...more

Intel releases new Xeon heavyweight server processors

Sunday saw the introduction of some new Intel Xeon server processors, including a 3.2GHz Xeon and a 3GHz Xeon MP. The new top-of-the-range Xeon MP, for multi-processor systems, also doubles the amount of Level 2 cache. ...more

Headphone styles affect your health

Two separate studies have found that the quality of headphones used with portable music players can have a significant impact on potential damage to hearing from prolonged listening. In one study, Cory Portnuff at the University of Colorado and Brian Fligor at Harvard Medical School discovered that supra-aural headphones - the kind that sit over the ear - produce slightly lower loudness than in-ear and canal headphones at the same volume setting. Their research led them to produce a table of maximum listening times, based on US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) damage-risk criteria. ...more

AOL doubles bandwidth for free

AOL is to double the bandwidth for each of its broadband packages from 14 February. The line speed of the AOL Broadband Silver service costing ?17.99 a month will increase to 512Kbit. ...more