PC maker fumes at Vista price hike

Leading PC manufacturer Acer has accused Microsoft of ratcheting up the cost of Windows by effectively forcing consumers to opt for the Premium version of Vista. Acer claims that the Vista Home Basic - the new entry-level Windows - is so poorly featured that consumers will simply reject it. "The new [Vista] experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," said Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president at Acer. ...more

BT falls behind targets for unbundling the local loop

BT is falling behind its targets to unbundle the local loop. The Telecommunications Adjudicator has found that delivery of working systems 'continues to lag', with only 50-60 per cent of LLU projects being delivered on time to rivals compared with the target of 75 per cent. The local loop is the copper circuit between the customer and the telco's local switch. ...more

FBI pounce on software piracy gang

Reuters reports that the FBI has indicted 19 members of an international piracy gang thought to have cracked software, games and films worth some $6.5m. 'Operation Jolly Roger', focused on the RISCISO gang, believed to number as many as 60 and led by 26-year-old Sean O'Toole of Perth, Australia. ...more

Allchin says 'buy a Mac' comments taken out of context

Jim Allchin has said that reports that he told fellow Microsoft executives that he would buy a Mac have been taken out of context. Writing on the Windows Vista blog, the co-president of Microsoft's Platform and Services Division said that the comments, taken from an email he sent to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in 2004, were a rant intended to encourage a change in the way the company was developing Windows at the time. 'This email is nearly three years old, and I was being purposefully dramatic in order to drive home a point,' he wrote. ...more

The world signs up to 100m broadband lines

Broadband connections have topped 100 million this year, according to analysts Point Topic, beating even the phenomenal growths trends shown by the mobile industry in the 1990s. The number of connections has risen from 10 million to 100 million in little more than three years, with China rapidly becoming a major contender. All the G7 countries now feature in the top ten for the numbers of lines, but Point Topic says China is already leapfrogging these and will overtake Korea, Japan and even the USA in time. ...more