Dial-up access to Internet increasing once again

The Office of National Statistics has published its latest monthly report on UK Internet connectivity, covering the month of January 2003. The headline figure is that the total number of subscriptions to the Internet has increased 4.5 per cent between January 2002 and January 2003. ...more

IT economic downturn continues

To save you a drip drip of unhappy economic news from the IT sector, here's a roundup up of some recent financial reports from hi-tech giants. It's that time of the quarter when financial results come thick and fast. Following on from Motorola and Yahoo! come results from Philips and profit warnings from Cisco Systems (Intel and IBM's quarterly results are imminent, too). ...more

Californians set Internet speed record

Californian scientists have set a new record for data transfer speed over a standard TCP Internet connection, achieving a speed of 8,609Mbps. The scientists from Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, achieved the record speeds using a new data transfer protocol, Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol, or FAST. They succeeded not only in setting a new speed record but also managed to sustain it over an extended period on shared networks in the presence of background traffic, making it adaptable for deployment on the world's high-speed production networks In recent years Internet speeds have doubled each year, but the improvements have been based on an algorithm designed in 1988. ...more

Kenwood's Keg shrinks music collection to 79g

If you like your gadgets small, take note of the matchbox-sized Media Keg HD10GB7, which is claimed to be the world's smallest disk-drive-based MP3 player. Kenwood's 10GB hard drive, which is being sold for ?399, measures (h x w x d) 44 mm x 62 mm x 17 mm. (Compare and contrast with Apple's flash memory-based iPod shuffle, which measures 27mm x 41 x 10. ...more

IBM takes rigorous approach with new ThinkPad laptop

IBM has unveiled a new model in ThinkPad range of laptops - the ThinkPad R50, featuring IBM's automatic hard drive protection system and longer battery life. Aimed at SMBs, the R50 is available with 14 or 15in displays and runs on a 1.4GHz Intel Pentium M processor. ...more