Oracle mulls own Linux version

Database giant Oracle is considering launching its own version of Linux according to a report in the Financial Times. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the FT that the company had considered buying Novell which now owns SUSE Linux but is now debating whether to launch its own version of the open source operating system. 'I'd like to have a complete stack,' Ellison said. ...more

Mobilexpo 2001

The mobile phone industry showed off gadgets galore at the Mobilexpo 2001 Show in Birmingham this week. Here are some of the new products that caught our eye. Despite the fact that 3G telephony has turned into a bit of a damp squib, there were plenty of GPRS phones on display. ...more

mp3PRO ready to go

Back at the CES in Las Vegas, Thomson and the Fraunhofer Institute, together with an unnamed Swedish company, unveiled an improved MP3 codec - mp3PRO - to take on the likes of WMA, which is fast gaining popularity. mp3PRO is designed to deliver the near CD-quality audio of mp3 encoded at 12Kb/sec, at only 64Kb/sec, thus allowing greater volumes of material to be stored on players as well as making broadcasting Web radio cheaper, as a smaller bandwidth is used. Martin Dietz, President of Coding Technologies, the subsidiary company formed to develop the codec, said: "The new mp3PRO format offers significantly increased performance while maintaining the well-established mp3 format. ...more

Tiscali suffers week-long email outage

Tiscali is struggling to fix a problem that has prevented some of its customers from sending emails for over a week. A mammoth 21-page thread on Tiscali's support forums reveals that dozens of unhappy customers are struggling to send outgoing messages. The complaints started on Monday May 21 when one user found that emails he'd sent the previous Friday had been returned undelivered. ...more

Bland to invest ?1m in BT

The new chairman of BT, Sir Christopher Bland, is to invest ?1m of his own money in BT shares, according to reports on the Web. Although we can't verify this, the move will be seen as a statement of faith from the new chairman. However, it won't mean Bland will be destitute if BT's stock continues to fall - he is already a millionaire several times over though investments and high-profile jobs at LWT and the BBC. ...more