Glasgow tops the bandwidth charts

Glasgow has superseded London as the UK's leading city when it comes to broadband bandwidth provision. An average 2,395Kbps are available to each Internet user in the Scottish city, a figure that is significantly higher than the average 1,943Kbps on offer in London. The figures, gathered by Dutch research firm iPing, show that despite an overall 23 per cent increase in bandwidth, the average available download speed per subscriber in the largest conglomerations is steadily decreasing. ...more

Comment: Microsoft's vision of the future: A Newton

Since he abandoned the Microsoft CEO job in favour of a role as chief software architect, Bill Gates has obviously been thinking hard about the future, and what people will expect from the PC over the next few decades. And he thinks he's found the answer. A truly personal computer Gates used his influential keynote speech at Comdex in Las Vegas yesterday to demonstrate a prototype of the Tablet PC, a machine, running the next version of Windows, that's about the size of an A4 pad, and that forsakes a keyboard in favour of doing everything through pen and voice recognition. ...more

Happy 25th birthday, ZX Spectrum

The machine that whetted our appetites for personal computers and got developers developing - the Sinclair ZX Spectrum - marks its 25th birthday this week. Even today, many gamers still spend hours playing games like Chuckie Egg, Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner on their old machines or using emulators. Back in 1982, users could get their hands on the device with 16KB of RAM for ?125 or 48 KB for an extra ?50. ...more

IBM spreads grid computing to WebSphere

The latest version of WebSphere Application Server is to include grid computing facilities, IBM has announced. WebSphere Application Server V5.0. ...more

EU, e-business and consumer bodies agree on e-commerce

A breakthrough agreement has been made that could lead to a common standard for conducting business on the Internet in Europe. The EU, European consumer organisation BEUC and the Union of Industrial and Employers Confederations of Europe (UNICE) have agreed common standards covering commercial communications and fair marketing practices, pre-contractual information, confirming and acknowledging orders, payment and security, data protection, handling complaints and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. Also to be implemented is an effective monitoring and approval system including neutral third-party assessment of trustmark schemes to ensure that commitments to these standards are met in practice. ...more