Half of EU economic growth from ICT

Information and communications technologies are behind half of Europe's economic growth, according to a report from the European Commission (EC). The commission's annual ICT i2010 progress report shows that Europe is moving toward a knowledge-based economy, with technology driving innovation and productivity. The ICT sector is outstripping the rest of the economy, and contributed nearly 50 per cent of EU member states' productivity growth between 2000 and 2004. ...more

More details of new Aibo

Sony's latest addition to its range of robot dogs has been revealed and this time the cyberpup has a built-in camera and can imitate human voices. The second-generation Aibo, called the ERS-210, is styled on a lion cub and will be able to respond to commands given by its owner. The robo dog has a camera in its nose and will be able to snap those special occasions. ...more

Fred Anderson claims Jobs misled him over stock options

Apple's former chief financial officer Fred Anderson has claimed that Steve Jobs was aware that the company had backdated stock options and said that the Apple CEO had given his approval. Anderson's lawyer, Jerome Roth, said that his client had been told by Jobs that the options dates had been approved by the company's board. 'He was told by Mr. ...more

UPDATED: AMD to drop ATi brand

UPDATED: See AMD stays hand over ATi brand axe AMD has announced that it's going to drop the ATi brand name following its takeover of the Canadian graphics underdog. Gareth Cater from AMD told our sister publication Custom PC that 'the new company will be called AMD,' meaning that we could shortly be seeing AMD-branded Radeon graphics chips. We asked Richard Baker from AMD if this meant that the memorable Radeon name would also be biting the dust, but he replied that 'we haven't made any final decisions yet, but I'd personally be very surprised if we dropped any of those product names. ...more

PC Pro tests the brand new ATi graphics chips

ATi has announced the RADEON 9800, 9600 and 9200 chips, with the former two supporting the latest versions of the DirectX and OpenGL graphics standards. The top drawer chip is the 9800, upon which the likes of Hercules is basing its 3D Prophet 9800 Pro card. It boasts a 256-bit DDR memory interface and 8-pixel pipeline engine, along with programmable shader engines, full-speed full floating point precision and advanced filtering technologies (Anisotropic Filtering up to X16 and Full Scene Anti-Aliasing up to 6x). ...more