Birmingham to connect high-speed city-wide network

Birmingham City Council has announced plans to connect 450 schools, 60 libraries and 240 council-related offices to its custom built IP network, providing IP telephony and multimedia streaming among other services. The council hopes that the new network will help meet its objective of saving ?1 billion of local government costs over 10 years, through the implementation of technologies such as IP telephony. Deployment of part of the converged IP network has already saved ?350,000 a year, it says, through improved communications and by reducing network management costs by 40 per cent. ...more

Google offers Video Store

As strongly expected, Google is to go up against Apple in creating a commercial pay-per-download video service. During his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week founder Larry Page announced that he had signed up CBS to provide recent and classic shows, news from ITN, music videos from Sony BMG, cartoons and coverage of games from the US National Basketball Association. There will be no fixed price for the content. ...more

It's Official, a new Linux system from Mandrake

Mandrake has released its first product since emerging from bankruptcy. Mandrakelinux 10 Official is also the first 'Official' product released through Mandrake's new development processes. Following the initial completion of a product, the company now opens it to testing by thousands of Linux developers as a 'Community' release, to iron out any bugs for two months before the final 'Official' release. ...more

RIAA hands out awards for most popular downloads

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) - better known these days for pursuing digital music swappers - honoured sales of digital music last night with an awards ceremony. The digital market is only a tiny percentage of the massive revenues generated from the sales of CDs. But the burgeoning market in paid-for downloads, led by Apple's iTunes, is fast gaining momentum and is seen as a lifeline to a music industry that feels it's under threat from the file swappers. ...more

IBM powers world's fastest chip

New Power6 chip offers environmentally-friendly computing with reduced power consumption. IBM claims it is not only the world's fastest microprocessor but one also able to help cut electricity consumption of datacentres, which makes them more environmentally friendly. The new Power6 processor clocks in at 4. ...more