BT plots 'systematic rollout' of broadband to rest of UK

BT is to abandon the broadband registration scheme in favour of 'systematic rollout' of ADSL to 1,128 exchanges by the summer of 2005. The company said that this will extend broadband coverage to 99.6 per cent of UK homes and businesses. ...more

Yahoo! removes Nazi hate items but leaves stamps and coins

There is another twist in the long-running tale of Yahoo! auctions and Nazi memorabilia. While Yahoo! has removed Nazi "hate items" from its online auctions, it has decided to allow bids for Nazi-era German stamps and notes and coins. The basis for the decision is that such historical items were issued by the German government of the time. ...more

Fujitsu unveils solid state laptops

Fujitsu has unveiled its first laptops to use solid state storage instead of traditional hard disk drives. The pen-enabled Lifebook P1610 and LifeBook B6210 ultra-portable notebooks will be offered to customers with an option to ditch normal hard disks for flash-based drives. As we have reported, memory firms < SanDisk and Super Talent have announced replacements for hard drives using Nand memory. ...more

IT Forum 2004: Microsoft commits to a Common Engineering Roadmap

It has not received too much attention at the IT Forum - the Windows Server group joked that Bill Gates was feeling the effects of jetlag for that part of his keynote - but Microsoft has changed the way it will present (and commit itself to) its roadmap for future Windows Server products. The Forum has seen the official launch of a Common Engineering Roadmap, from which the Common Engineering Criteria Report will be produced once a year (in the spring, ahead of the US TechEd conference). The report is not intended to specify particular feature sets for products, but rather wider environmental criteria, for example whether 64-bit versions will be available, whether a MOM pack for the product will be provided, and whether there will be hot patch technology support, scripting support for operations, etc. ...more

The Free Software Foundation tightens the GPL

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published the third draft of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), which now includes provisions to outlaw agreements similar to the patent deal agreed by Novell and Microsoft. In that agreement, Novell and Microsoft agreed to hold each others' customers harmless to any patent claims from either side. However, the open-source community saw this as a sneaky move from Microsoft to imply that Linux-based operating systems did infringe its intellectual property and a cheap way to sidestep the patent provisions of the GPL. ...more