BT chairman steps down

The chairman of troubled BT, Sir Iain Vallance, has succumbed to pressure to step aside. While claiming the decision was purely his own, he has revealed that only the lack of a suitable replacement stopped him leaving earlier. Christopher Bland, the current chairman of the BBC, will be his replacement, but Sir Iain has not severed his ties with BT completely. ...more

IBM outcomputes Chinese supercomputer with more Opterons

Just days following the announcement of a new Chinese supercomputer, the Dawning 4000A, IBM says it is to provide an even better one to serve as the keystone to Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. The Dawning 4000A uses 2000-odd AMD Opteron chips turning out a performance of 10Teraflops, or 10 trillion operations a second. Still, the 1,058 IBM eServer 325 systems that make up the supercomputer use 2116 Opterons and crunch through 11Tflops/sec. ...more

SCO turns on Unix licensees and waves the DMCA at Linux end-users

SCO has issued a challenge to licencees of its System V Unix platform which they will most likely fail, and lashed out at Linux end-users with notification letters of further evidence of 'bad' code in Linux, citing the DMCA. In letters sent to the some 6,000 Unix licencees, SCO is demanding that such companies provide written evidence that the software has been used strictly under the terms of the licence. Aside from showing they have not allowed Uix code to be contributed to Linux, SCO is also seeking evidence that these companies told each employee and contractor their obligations concerning the licensed code, and didn't let anyone else use the code, either - especially anyone else in terrorist harbouring nations sch as Syria, Iran, North Korea or Cuba. ...more

Intel's future is 3D

Higher processor performance, with greater power efficiency, is promised by Intel's research in transistor design. As opposed to traditional 'flat' transistors, Intel suggests a future for a 3D design. Transistors, of course, are the mini On-Off switches that are combined to build microprocessors. ...more

AOL suffers broadband slowdown

AOL has apologised for a 'slower than desirable' broadband service and assured users that it is working with BT to solve the problem. Users have been experiencing slowdown for about a week. According to The Mirror, some users were even experiencing speeds as low as 2Kb/s when using AOL's 512Kb service. ...more