Dell to cut UK jobs

Dell to cut 275 jobs in the UK and Ireland according to reports. The PC firm, which has a manufacturing plant in County Wicklow and Dublin and an office in London, will lose 150 staff in England and 125 in the Irish Republic. Dell made 200 redundant in Limerick last month. ...more

Broadband opened up

BT has been ordered to allow broadband suppliers to make ADSL interconnections to its network, in a move designed to give a 'major boost' to broadband competition. The ruling, by industry regulator Oftel, will allow broadband suppliers to take DSL traffic from BT's network and carry it on on their own. This will enable the provision of what Oftel calls, 'a much wider range of broadband services in competition with BT. ...more

SCO keeps the litigious hat with Novell

In a teleconference on Friday, SCO refuted Novell's claimed ownership of Unix copyrights and patents, with CEO Darl McBride saying: 'We'll be settling these issues in court'. Novell's assertion that the 1995 sale of Unix to SCO did not include the transfer of copyrights and patents is wrong, claimed McBride - a former executive at Novell. He described Novell's actions as 'a desperate measure to curry favour with the Linux fraternity', and that its statement was deliberately timed to tarnish SCO's quarterly results announcements. ...more

Talks tabled to put protected CDs on iPods

Record labels are in talks with Apple to find a way of making copy-protected CDs compatible with iTunes and iPods. Major labels have recently released albums from a number of high-profile artists that include software to prevent them being ripped on a PC. As a result it has come in for scathing criticism from iPod owning fans of the Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews among others. ...more

PalmSource splits directions for smartphones and featurephones

PalmSource is changing direction, creating two new operating systems for smartphones and featurephones. The move is clearly an engagement with market movements - Palm devices such as the Treo 600 and 650 are the growth products, while the humble plain old PDA is a fairly stagnant space. But what has made it possible is PalmSource's acquisition of ChinaMobileSoft (CMS). ...more