Canadian abandons copy tax on digital music players

Canada's Supreme Court has upheld a lower court's ruling that a levy on digital music players may no longer be collected. The levy, which ranged from $2 for small devices to $25 for players with a capacity of 10GB or more, was collected by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), on behalf of musicians and record labels. It was designed to compensate them for monies allegedly lost due to unauthorised file sharing. ...more

UK games chart: FIFA 06 stays top of the league

EA's multi-format football game FIFA 06 stays at number one in this week's ELSPA UK games chart. The new challengers include EA's multi-format Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, which goes straight in at two. There's also EA's Black and White sequel, which is for the PC and lands at number six. ...more

Rambus revamps memory controller interfaces for DDR-based system

Chip developer Rambus has announced a new range of memory controller interfaces for DDR-based memory solutions. It claims that its new series of controllers are 'drop-in' designs making developer's lives easier and improving times to market. The company says that its DDR memory controller interfaces are complete interface cells instead of technology building blocks, such as I/O pads and delay lock loops (DLLs) that development teams would normally attempt to build from scratch. ...more

BT plans raft of new broadband services for 2004

BT is to begin trialling flexible bandwidth technology that will enable broadband users to instantly increase the speed of their connections. Users of uncapped services will be able to temporarily accelerate their line to a maximum of 2Mbit/sec at the click of a mouse, while BT Broadband Basic customers who consistently exceed the 1GB monthly limit will be able to instantly upgrade to a higher-capacity service. The trial is due to start next month and is one of four broadband initiatives which BT announced today. ...more

HP racks up 100,000 Linux server sales in UK

HP has sold its 100,000th Linux-based server in the UK. The company has also shipped over 1,500,000 Linux servers worldwide, it has announced. The company pointed to figures from IDC that showed 32. ...more