Ofcom gives phone marketers the silent treatment

UK communications regulator Ofcom has warned call centres to stop causing people unnecessary anxiety at home with 'silent' calls. The regulatory body found that silent or abandoned calls made by call centres are causing significant anxiety and annoyance among recipients. The nuisance calls occur when automated calling systems, used for telemarketing and market research, generate more calls than the available call centre agents can deal with. ...more

IBM details 160 Gbits optical chipset

A new era of data sharing, including instant movie downloads, is the promise of IBM's latest research into optical chipsets. The company is attempting to integrate the speed of optical signal processing within standard CMOS high-volume chip manufacturing techniques. The result, it claims, could be an integrated package that makes optical connectivity viable for widespread computing use. ...more

Song lyrics heading for track information

The company that provides instant CD track information for applications including Apple's iTunes and Napster has obtained licences to add song lyrics to that information. Gracenote, whose database is accessed every time a CD is ripped in any of dozens of subscriber applications, announced that it has obtained the rights to words of more than one million songs from major publishers including BMG, Universal and Sony/ATV. 'When we first approached the publishers with this, they were excited,' Ross Blanchard, Gracenote's vice president of business development told Reuters. ...more

Wheels in motion for GNU General Public License v3

The wheels have been set in motion for the first rewriting of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in more than 15 years, with the release of a document specifying the process and guidelines of the historic revision. The most important licence for free and open source software, the GPL underpins nearly three quarters of free software programs. The first draft up for discussion will be presented at the International Public Conference for GPL v3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 16 and 17 January 2006. ...more

Dell signals new direction with rethink of direct sales

Michael Dell has revealed that he is considering moving away from the direct sales model, which made the company that bears his name the world's biggest supplier of computer systems. It is the first time anyone at Dell has publicly admitted to doubts about the company's business model, which relies on building and shipping each PC to order. 'The direct model has been a revolution, but is not a religion,' Dell, who founded the company in 1984 and recently returned to the position of chief executive, wrote in an email to the company's 80,000 employees. ...more