Are you getting the freebie Bee Gees?

On Thursday, you will be able to download some of the latest tunes from the catalogues of 50 recording labels, including EMI and Bertelsmann's BMG. The pan-European offer marks a change in the way music labels are pursuing customers for paid-for online music services. As well as trying to shut down Napster-eque peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as Morpheus, they are now trying woo them in equal measure with free music. ...more

O'Reilly to resell Mandrake Linux

Linux vendor Mandrake has signed a deal with publisher O'Reilly to ship its product in the US and Canada. The deal is significant for Paris-based Mandrake - well respected both for being one of the easiest to use and one of the quickest to market with the latest Linux technologies - as it gives the distro a leg up to compete with Linux giants Red Hat and Novell on their home turf. (Although Novell's Linux is SUSE, which is based in Germany). ...more

Sony launch baby PDA

Sony has announced three new Cli? PDAs, including its smallest ever model. Aimed at the low to mid level markets, the SL10 weighs only 103g and is only 16.5mm thick. ...more

P2P software authors fight movie studios appeal

StreamCast Networks, the publishers of the Morpheus P2P software, has formally lodged its opposition to attempts by the movie and music industries to have peer to peer software declared illegal. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had claimed that P2P software from StreamCast and Grokster violated copyright law by facilitating illegal downloading of copyrighted material. In August of this year three judges in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco ruled unanimously that P2P software has legitimate uses and its authors cannot be held responsible for the way in which it is used. ...more

Back to the future

.Net may conjure up futuristic images of Web services, but COBOL calls up a more mainframe way of computing. The two now come together with Fujitsu's NetCOBOL. Fujitsu has announced a new version of its NetCOBOL programming language (which was previously known as Fujitsu COBOL). ...more