Tim Berners-Lee pursues Semantic Web at Southampton University

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, is to spread his talents beyond the MIT by taking on a professorship at Southampton University. Berners-Lee will use the position to concentrate on his work on the next generation of the web, known as the Semantic Web: a way of using meta data to give added layers of meaning to online information. It is seen as the long-term solution for making the vast amount of data on the Internet more manageable. ...more

Adobe optimises Photoshop for the P4

Owners of systems based on Intel's P4 chip can download a plug-in from Adobe to optimise Photoshop for the processor. The plug-in will improve the speed at which the P4 deals with many Photoshop 6.0 tasks by as much as 70 per cent. ...more

bCentral users get free FrontPage tool to add e-commerce

Microsoft has announced an add-in tool, aimed at SMEs, that gives e-commerce functionality to FrontPage-based sites. bCentral's Commerce Manager Add-in includes templates for product catalogues, category pages and detail pages plus order management, shopping cart and order-processing (including credit card) features. Marcus Schmidt, lead product manager for bCentral Commerce Manager, said: "It's a total entry-level solution for small businesses wanting to build and sell things on a Web site. ...more

Broadband distances extend today

Changes in the range of broadband ADSL services from BT Wholesale come into effect today - BT abolishes 6km limit on 512K broadband. Properties that were previously beyond the 6km scope of 512Kbps connections will now be able to get broadband, although in some cases this may require a visit from an engineer, free of charge. The range of 1Mbps connections extends from 4. ...more

Developer cracks iTunes encoding format

Apple may have kept details of the lossless encoding format introduced in recent versions of iTunes to itself, but that hasn't stopped one developer from reverse engineering an encoded file, to compile his own decoder. David Hammerton's project is at an early stage; it can currently decode only mono and stereo ALAC files although the format allows for up to eight channels. And as yet there is no encoder. ...more