Skype users left hanging

Many Skype users were unable to make calls yesterday after a "software problem" left some callers without a service for at least 14 hours, reports ZDNet.

The company, a division of online auction company eBay, posted on its Web site that many of its users were "having problems" logging into the free service.

"Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue," according to a Skype blog posting yesterday afternoon in Europe.

It was 17 August 1982 when row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hannover, in Germany, says Australian IT News.

An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognisable as compact discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday - and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland's Royal Philips Electronics, which jointly developed the CD with Sony.

IBM is expanding the number of x86-based servers and blade systems on which it offers Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system, says Computerworld.

Under the agreement, IBM will begin distributing Solaris and offer Sun's customer service plans on its System x3650, x3755 and x3850 servers and its BladeCenter HS21 and LS41 machines. IBM already supports Sun's Unix derivative on some BladeCenter systems.

The extended support for Solaris is part of IBM's strategy to offer users a range of operating systems, and the deal gives Sun a boost in its effort to have Solaris run on a wider set of hardware. IBM will also continue to sell its own AIX version of Unix, as well as Windows and several distributions of the open source Linux operating system.

Brothers in Arms developer Gearbox Software has unveiled its new first-person shooter, Borderlands, reports Euro Gamer.

The wraps were taken off in US magazine Game Informer, which describes the game as a science fiction shooter with role-playing elements, or "Diablo meets Mad Max".

Little else is known about the game, other than it will support four-player online co-operative play.