Apple's lawyers move to defend Aqua

Apple lawyers have asked Stardock, a Windows software development house, to remove desktop themes, icons and screenshots that, they argue, too closely resemble the Aqua interface of Mac OS X, thus violating Apple's intellectual property (IP). Stardock's Desktop X software allows users to create and customise their desktop interfaces, and the company encourages users to submit designs to be freely shared with others. Apple objected to one such design which, it has to be said, resembles Aqua to quite a considerable extent. ...more

Microsoft judge 'biased'

Microsoft has accused Judge Jackson of being biased towards the prosecution in the famous anti-competition trial. Representatives are claiming that, "the findings in this case are not the product of even one level of impartial decision-making." Their brief states that Jackson's statements to the press were "improper", and that interviews given after his ruling demonstrate a clear lack of objectivity. ...more

IBM trumpets new file transfer record

IBM is claiming a new world record in file transfer technology. Recently the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using Big Blue's new General Parallel File System software achieved a staggering read and write throughput of 1.2Gbytes per second to a single file of 1. ...more

LLU broadband take-up skews heavily towards London

LLU broadband take-up in the UK is skewed heavily towards London, with some areas having no access to the cheaper services and faster speeds that the technology has enabled. Forty-five per cent of LLU lines are in the capital, with the South East and North West, especially Manchester, also showing relatively high levels of penetration. That contrasts markedly with Northern Ireland, for example, where not one exchange has been unbundled. ...more

Palm signs deal with RIM

Palm has signed a deal with Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind the popular Blackberry mobile email device, to bring the BlackBerry Connect service to Palm's Treo 650 smartphone. The announcement is another development for Palm as it changes its strategy away from its traditional Palm OS roots towards one based on best-of-breed from third parties. In September the company announced that it would be developing a Treo running Windows. ...more