Hollywood studios pull plug on Sony Universal Media Disc

It looks as though the Universal Media Disc format on the PlayStation Portable is a dead duck as far as a media for playing movies. It is yet another blow to Sony which has seen a number of setbacks in the past year, leaving some to wonder if the electronics giant can recover its former glory. Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment have called a halt to releasing any more movies on the UMD format. ...more

Different XHTML horses for different courses

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the body that looks after Web standards - has released "Modularization of XHTML as a W3C Recommendation". Basically, it's a means of specifying agreed subsets of XHTML such that content developers can more easily target platforms such as mobile phones or interactive televisions. It's a way, for example, to help manage the display of equivalent content across different devices: a menu on a cell phone will be managed differently from making a selection on a TV-based Web browser. ...more

Xbox outsells PS2 for the first time

Microsoft grabbed a significant 51 percent market share in US console sales for the first time in April, outselling the PS2 for the very first time. Following the Xbox's price drop to $149 at the end of March, sales by volume were up 135 per cent on the same period from the previous financial year. By contrast, Sony's PlayStation 2 dropped 29 percent to a 32 percent market share, with Nintendo's GameCube also dropping five percent, to trail in a distant third on 17 percent. ...more

Linux community offers free drivers to hardware makers

The Linux community has stepped up to address one of the bigger barriers to mainstream Linux adoption: device drivers. Greg Kroah-Hartman posted in his blog earlier this week that the community will take on all comers to develop Linux drivers for products free of charge. 'You will receive a complete and working Linux driver that is added to the main Linux kernel source tree. ...more

PlusNet unveils pay as you go pricing model for services up to 8Mbps

PlusNet has announced a significant overhaul of its broadband services, offering speeds up to 8Mbps and a new usage-based payment system. The ISPs Premier customers will be able to choose the speed of their connection but will be charged purely on the basis of the amount of downstream peak-time capacity they use; broadband usage between 1am and 8am will be entirely unrestricted. Monthly charges are as follows: ?21. ...more