Internet use up Down Under

A new report by the Australian government shows that the country is becoming a high-tech environment where the Internet is embraced. The report from the Australian National Office for Information Economy showed that 50 per cent of Australian adults used the Internet in the past year (a rise of 61 per cent since 1998), 65 per cent of Australians over the age of 16 had access to the Net and over 40 per cent of households had access. Australian Prime Minister John Howard told his parliament that Australia was now standing with the best in relation with the way it used information and computer technology. ...more

IBM builds servers based on PowerPC 970

Undaunted by the sabre-rattling from SCO, IBM has announced that it has built prototype servers based on its next generation Power5 chips. The company claims that the Power5 based eServer systems are expected to offer four times the system performance over the first generation Power4 based servers. The new eServer pSeries systems will be available with AIX, IBM's version of UNIX, or Linux. ...more

Oftel about face: Local Loop Unbundling a 'niche area'

In a report in today's FT, Oftel Director General Dave Edmonds said that Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) was only ever a 'niche area' that was contrived to 'produce a competitive threat' to BT to hasten its own broadband rollout. LLU is where rival operators can move their own equipment into BT's exchanges to take traffic on to their own networks. Currently, the likes of Bulldog, Energis and Tiscali all take advantage of LLU where it's available. ...more

Thunderbird 1.5 flies the Mozilla nest

Mozilla has released Thunderbird 1.5, the latest version of its email client and companion to its Firefox Web browser. The release integrates Mozilla's new software update technology, with more prominent notification of new updates and improved support for extensions. ...more

Avatars for all

You've probably already heard of avatars, a kind of digital persona. Well, Stratumsoft has given the avatar an intelligent personality, and could revolutionise online shopping and data gathering. EVAAs, or Electronic Virtual Assistants/Artistes, are the front end of a sophisticated intelligence engine that gives the avatar the ability to respond to natural language questions and intelligently search databases. ...more