Apple sued over JPEG patent

Apple and leading Mac software developers Adobe and Macromedia are among 31 companies that are being sued for an alleged breach of a patent on JPEG image compression technology. The lawsuit has been initiated by Compression Labs, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Forgent Networks, which said in a statement that it has sought to reach agreements on numerous occasions with all the 31 companies but none had chosen to license. Forgent has so far raised approxiamtely $90mn from licensing the patent to 30 different companies in Asia, Europe and the United States. ...more

Nildram joins SDSL trial

Nildram is the latest ISP to join BT's SDSL broadband trials, and is looking for businesses that may be interested in the service. Symmetric Digital Subscribers Line (SDSL) broadband differs from ADSL in providing equal upstream and downstream speeds. To a home user this is generally unimportant, as most of the data transfer is downstream, from the Internet to the computer. ...more

nVIDIA works up its mobile Quadro

nVIDIA claims twice the performance over predecessor. The Quadro4 700 Go GL graphics chip is aimed at the mobile graphics professional and offers a number of hardware-accelerated features for stability and performance, according to the company. It boasts optimised support for a variety of professional 3D and 2D graphics applications, with dedicated drivers for 3ds max and AutoCAD among others, using nVIDIA's backwards and forwards compatible Unified Driver Architecture. ...more

HP iPAQs - spot the difference

PC Pro reader Andrew Kennard wrote in with an interesting question, and we thought we'd share the answer rather than keeping it to ourselves. Andrew had been searching for a new iPAQ, and noticed that some hx2110 iPAQs had the model number FA296A, some FA296T. Likewise, the hx2410 was available with model numbers FA298A and FA298T. ...more

US gamers to enjoy PS2 price cuts

The PlayStation 2 games console is seeing an official 13 per cent price cut in the States, down from $149.99 to $129.99. ...more