Ofcom to press ahead with radio spectrum liberalisation

Ofcom is to press ahead with its proposed liberalisation of the radio spectrum. The industry watchdog says it plans to go ahead with the first phase within the next few months. Traditionally the radio spectrum has been tightly controlled in the UK. ...more

W3C publishes CSS3 Module working draft

W3C has published a first working draft of a CSS3 Module for designing websites with features often used in printed publications, plus proposed edited recommendations for core XML specifications. In particular, this specification describes how CSS style sheets can express named strings, leaders, cross-references, footnotes, endnotes, running headers and footers, named flows, ad hoc counter styles, paged-based floats, hyphenation, change bars, named page lists, and generated lists. Along with two other CSS3 modules - multicolumn layout and paged media - this module is designed to provide a way of presenting structured documents on paged media. ...more

Director 8.5 - first review

A few years ago Macromedia Director looked like it was down and out. Its sassy young sibling Flash was stealing all the Web work, just as the CD-ROM and presentation business it had excelled at was going over to the Internet. Then a strange thing happened: Macromedia sensibly rewrote the Shockwave player so it was small and fast, and Director took off as the best way to provide funky games for idle Web users. ...more

Microsoft extends product lifecycle

Microsoft moves to provide 'predictable and consistent' guidelines on product support. Microsoft has unveiled a Support Lifecycle Policy. This contains official guidelines for product support availability at the time of product release. ...more

Scorpion robot wars

The US military is currently developing solar-powered robots based on the humble scorpion. A report on the Virtual New York Web site, tells how research funded by the US Navy is producing these tiny robots that will hopefully in the future be used in military reconnaissance. This research is part of a new scientific field called biomimetics, an area where scientists use animals as a blueprint to build better robots. ...more