HP 'jilts Intel Itanium'

Intel's biggest customer for its Itanium processor is to stop building workstations built around the chip according to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. Hewlett Packard is rumoured to have dropped the chip in favour of concentrating on IA-64 based machines. If true, the move will be seen as a serious blow to the Itanium which has struggled for some time to gain the kind of market acceptance that was expected of it. ...more

MandrakeSoft acquires Linux support company Edge IT

MandrakeSoft is gearing up for a full scale assault on the French corporate and public sector with the acquisition of Linux support company Edge IT. Edge IT already counts OECD, the world economic organization, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, a French Political Science School, and Prisma Presse, a publishing company, among its customers. And with the French government recently talking up a renewed appetite for the cost-savings associated with open source, Mandrake is keen to be seen to have the stomach to cater for the support needed by the public sector and business. ...more

E-waste piles high in the Third World

The head of a UN environmental programme has condemned the 'growing mountains of E-waste' that the West is inflicting on developing countries. Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) was speaking in Nairobi (pictured, right) at the opening of the 8th Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention, which deals with the trans-national movement of hazardous waste. 'Consumerism is driving economies but also drives a growing mountain of E-waste not only from North to the South but South South - waste with a wide range of pollutants from heavy metals to chlorine compounds,' said Steiner. ...more

ISPs go back to the future

Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) is back in the spotlight after Trade and Industry Committee's UK Broadband Market report casts doubt on the future of DataStream. The report damned BT's DataStream product as having gained little confidence from ISPs: 'The danger is that, because of a lack of confidence rather than a lack of demand, there is insufficient uptake of DataStream and it will ultimately be allowed to wither.' In short, because, BT was forced - rather than chose - to offer DataStream to create competition, ISPs are not convinced that telecom regulator Ofcom's will ensure that BT sets its prices at a point that makes it a commercially viable for them. ...more

Extended-reach ADSL trials to be expanded

BT is planning to expand its trials of a modified version of ADSL that would bring broadband within reach of another 600,000 UK homes. The trials are investigating whether BT can increase the range from 55dB to 60dB, equating to a distance of around 6km from an exchange to the user. The maximum distance, by wire, that an ADSL user can be from the exchange is around 5km. ...more