VirginDigital.com opens doors on Friday

Virgin Digital is the latest entrant to the seriously crowded UK music downloads market. The company's Digital.com store will begin selling WMAs to Windows users from Friday (2 September), having launched in this guise in the US a year ago. ...more

Mandrakesoft makes Linux at home on 40GB LaCie USB device

French Linux vendor Mandrakesoft has taken the idea of portable computing a step further with a 40GB USB device that contains an entire operating system, applications and acres of space in which to store files. The Globetrotter is based on the increasingly popular LiveCD idea, where the operating system is stored on a CD that can be booted from on any machine. However, with Globetrotter, you don't need to carry a separate USB memory stick on which to store your files - your entire system is contained within the FA Porsche-designed 40GB hard drive from LaCie. ...more

IBM claims breakthrough in chip manufacture

IBM has announced that it has successfully developed a commercial technique for etching ever smaller circuits onto wafers. The claim means that etching techniques such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) could be replaced by a process known as immersion lithography down to 45nm and below. Immersion lithography means the gap between the lens and the wafer is filled with a liquid, thus exposing photographic images through liquid rather than air. ...more

Panasonic calls back 6,000 laptop batteries

Panasonic has joined Apple and Dell in recalling laptop batteries, amid concerns that they may overheat. Unlike the worldwide recalls affecting several million batteries that Apple and Dell announced, Panasonic's recall covers just 6,000 lithium-ion batteries installed in Let's Note CF-W4G laptop sold in Japan in April and May 2005. Akira Kadota, a spokesman for Matsushita, Panasonic's parent company, said that the problem is caused by the battery covers which could work loose because of a fault in the design of the latch. ...more

Sonic Solutions backs Sony's Blu-ray format

Sonic Solutions has announced support for Sony's new high-capacity optical disc format, Blu-ray. The company said that future applications in both its Sonic-branded PC range and Roxio-branded Mac range, including Toast, will support both BD-R (Blu-ray recordable) and BD-RE (Blu-ray rewritable) discs by the summer of 2005. 'With the capacity to store four to five times the content of a standard DVD, Blu-ray Disc can satisfy the requirements of a whole new range of data-hungry applications, including high-definition video recording and playback, data backup, and personal media archival,' said Jim Taylor, general manager of Sonic's Advanced Technology Group. ...more