UNU-MERIT: I&T Weekly

	Search \| Sitemap \| Intranet \| PhD Intranet

Subscribe to I&T Weekly A free e-zine about Innovation & Technology developments

text html Please type the above code:
	RSS feed

Previous Issues I&T Weekly

>> back to archive

Previous issues of I&T Weekly:

2013: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]

2012: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37]

2011: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44]

2010: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42]

2009: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42]

2008: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41]

2007: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40]

2006: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44]

2005: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40]

2004: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43]

2003: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47]

2002: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47]

2001: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]

Issue no. 31, 2004 Published: Sep 17, 2004
Chipmaker Infineon admits price fixing
Groups push on for TV on cell phones
Internet Explorer loses more market share
Microsoft's spam plan rejected
Jan Baan launches web services firm
Nokia develops mobile P2P
Internet 'overlay' could boost performance
Nickel 'nanodots' could mean tiny hard drives
Mars laser will beam super-fast data
Software bug raises spectre of 'JPEG of death'
Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink
Lens does away with blurry snaps
'Nouse' replaces mouse to surf web
Combating seven deadly e-mail sins

Chipmaker Infineon admits price fixing
German computer chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG has agreed to plead guilty to price fixing and will pay a $160 million fine, the US Justice Department announced Wednesday. The fine is the third-largest imposed in a criminal case by the Justice Department's antitrust division. In a plea agreement filed in US District Court in San Francisco, Infineon acknowledged conspiring with other companies to fix prices of widely used computer memory products between July 1999 and June 2002. The conspiracy drove up the prices for electronic products for businesses and millions of consumers. The victims included some of the world's largest computer companies - Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway. The agreement, which a federal judge must approve, calls for Infineon to plead guilty to one felony count of price fixing and to cooperate with the investigation of other producers of computer memory products. Infineon will pay the $160 million in instalments through 2009 with money set aside from its third-quarter profits.
SiliconValley / AP Sep 15, 2004	back to top

Groups push on for TV on cell phones
Europeans came a step closer to having television on their mobile phones last Friday when two groups of companies announced plans to push forward with consumer trials and establish a standard for the technology. British wireless carrier O2 and TV broadcast technology company NTL said they would start a consumer trial in Oxford, England, early next year, using multimedia handsets made by Nokia. An alliance of major mobile phone makers, including Nokia, NEC, Motorola, Siemens and Sony Ericsson said in a separate announcement they would cooperate to build a standard allowing TV to be watched on several types of device.
Reuters Sep 10, 2004	back to top

Internet Explorer loses more market share
Microsoft Internet Explorer is continuing to lose share in the browser market, as its much-smaller competitors chisel at its dominant position, new website visitor data shows. Microsoft's browser has dropped by 1.8 percentage points over the past three months to 93.7 percent of the market, according to data provided Wednesday by Web analytics vendor WebSideStory. The latest data comes after IE's market share fell a percentage point between June and July in the wake of a series of high-profile security issues - the first time WebSideStory had recorded an IE drop. The benefactors of Microsoft's slight, but sustained, decline since June have included the open-source browsers from the Mozilla Foundation and a commercial competitor from Opera Software ASA.
e-week.com Sep 15, 2004	back to top

Microsoft's spam plan rejected
Attempts to fight spam by identifying e-mails have hit problems over Microsoft's involvement in the process. The Internet Engineering Task Force, an international standards body, has rejected Microsoft's contribution to the so-called Sender ID proposal. The proposal, which would identify where e-mail has come from, could lead to better filters to siphon out spam. But Microsoft's decision to impose restrictions on the use of the system has angered some. The working group charged by the IETF with looking at the standard has decided that Microsoft's decision to keep a possible patent application secret was unacceptable. It was also concerned with possible incompatibilities with open source software. However, this does not necessarily mean the end of Sender ID or Microsoft's involvement. Microsoft could continue to push for its system to become the de facto standard or it could make its system available to the open source community.
BBC News Sep 14, 2004	back to top

Jan Baan launches web services firm
Jan Baan, best known as the driving force behind business software maker Baan, has shifted his attention to web services with the launch of a new company, Cordys. The software maker, based in the Netherlands, started up on Thursday with the introduction of its first product line, a web services package that aims to serve as a 'unified architecture' for enterprise applications. The software will also bear the name Cordys. Baan, who in the 1970s founded the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software maker that still bears his name, will serve as chief executive at Cordys. Cordys has been operating in 'stealth mode' since Jan Baan began working on its development in 2001. At the core of the start-up are people that Baan has been working with for more than 15 years. The unified architecture approach is what marks Cordys out from other Web services companies, according to Cordys. Rather than offer individual web services products for portal applications, application servers or integration brokers, the company sells a framework to meld all of those technologies.
ZDNet Sep 16, 2004	back to top

Nokia develops mobile P2P
Music, videos and games could soon be swapped on a mobile phone file-sharing network developed by Nokia. Nokia researchers adapted the peer-to-peer schemes used by internet users to share files and tested them on 6600 model phones. Popular internet P2P networks such as Gnutella and Kazaa allow users to search one another's hard drives for music or video files and then download them directly. The prototype network developed by Nokia can currently be used to share images and text. But future versions should go further. Nokia says developing the ability to share digital music, compressed in formats such as MP3, is also a priority. Nokia's system works on phones that connect to GPRS networks which make it cheap to stay online. Users are charged for the data they receive and send rather than the length of time they are connected.
Ananova Sep 15, 2004	back to top

Internet 'overlay' could boost performance
The internet could be made more secure, reliable and powerful by overlaying new networking technology on top of the existing backbone, according to the world's leading microchip maker, Intel. Intel's chief technology officer, Pat Gelsinger, warned that the internet needs a radical overhaul to address growing demand for access, bandwidth and more advanced internet programs. Gelsinger recommended building a new network layer on top of the existing internet infrastructure. This would mimic the way the internet's fundamental protocols were built on top of phone line infrastructure 30 years ago. Such a network overlay, constructed from new software and hardware, could allow the internet to detect and warn of worm attacks, dynamically re-route network traffic to avoid delays and improve video webcasting. In June 2003, Intel and HP helped found an experimental global overlay network called PlanetLab. The projects currently being tested on PlanetLab include networks that can automatically avoid internet traffic jams and throttle computer worms as soon as they start to spread.
New Scientist Sep 10, 2004	back to top

Nickel 'nanodots' could mean tiny hard drives
Nanoscopic dots of nickel that could be used to store terabytes of data in a computer chip just a few centimetres wide have been created by US researchers at North Carolina State University. Each 'nanodot' consists of a discrete ball of several hundred nickel atoms and can have one of two magnetic states. This allows them hold a single bit of information, as a '1' or a '0'. The researchers have created nickel nanodots measuring about 5 nanometres in diameter - about 10 times smaller than those previously produced. In a conventional hard drive, information is stored on a disk coated with a magnetic material, and bits must be far enough apart not to interfere with each other. Nanodots should allow bits to be packed closer together as the dots are discrete units that are not structurally linked.
New Scientist / Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Sep 07, 2004	back to top

Mars laser will beam super-fast data
A laser that can beam data from Mars to Earth at 10 times the rate of current radio links will be flown to the Red Planet in 2009, say NASA scientists. The laser will be the first test of such technology in deep space and may usher in a new era of space communication. NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft currently boasts the highest data transmission rate at 128,000 bits per second. The new laser will beam back between one million and 30 million bits per second, depending on the distance between Mars and Earth. That leap in capacity is due to the different wavelengths of light carrying the data. The laser will use infrared light with a wavelength of 1.06 microns, which is thousands of times shorter than radio waves. Since all light travels at the same speed through space, shorter wavelengths carry more information in the same time.
New Scientist Sep 16, 2004	back to top

Software bug raises spectre of 'JPEG of death'
Flawed software code used by numerous Microsoft applications to render images mean that a specially constructed image file could hijack a computer or spread a virus. Some experts blame the new threat on shoddy programming. Ten years ago the idea of an image infecting a computer was the subject of a hoax email. But what was once a myth is now a genuine threat after Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed a flaw in the image processing code used in a range of its software programs, including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Office XP, as well as many smaller applications. The affected code has a so-called 'buffer overrun' flaw. The buffer is a protected part of the computer memory, but flaws can mean that excessive input data can overrun into unprotected parts of a memory. A crafty programmer can use such a flaw to execute unauthorised code on a computer. Microsoft has released downloadable fixes for affected software.
New Scientist Sep 15, 2004	back to top

Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink
Robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity. The downside? The robot will most likely have to attract the hapless flies by using a stinking lure concocted from human excrement. Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make 'release and forget' robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations. Sensors on the robot feed a data logger that periodically radios the results back to a base station. The robot's energy source is the sugar in the polysaccharide called chitin that makes up a fly's exoskeleton. EcoBot II digests the flies in an array of eight microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which use bacteria from sewage to break down the sugars, releasing electrons that drive an electric current. In its present form, EcoBot II still has to be manually fed, but the ultimate aim of the team is to make the droid predatory, using sewage as a bait to catch the flies.
New Scientist Sep 09, 2004	back to top

Lens does away with blurry snaps
A specially shaped camera lens and processing method to ensure images are always in focus has been developed by researchers at Heriot Watt University and QinetiQ, UK. Developed primarily for military night vision cameras, the technology could find its way into camera phones. The quality of picture phone images is fast improving, with more models now capable of 1.3 mega pixels per image. Depth of field and ensuring the foreground and background are sharp is an issue for many types of imaging systems. Blurred images happen when information in the processing of the image is lost. The team has developed an optical encoder lens for thermal cameras. Using wavefront coding, the system encodes the image so it always looks the same without losing any information. The lens has a specially shaped and coated surface, but uses industry standard algorithms to encode and decode the image information. The lens is covered with a microscale coating of germanium, a semi-conducting material commonly used in transistors and photodetectors.
BBC News Sep 13, 2004	back to top

'Nouse' replaces mouse to surf web
Dmitry Gorodnichy, an inventor from the Institute of Information Technology in Ottawa, has developed a computer navigation system that relies on the movements of a user's nose to direct a cursor. Moreover, a simple blink of the right or left eye corresponds to the right or left click of a mouse button. The inventor expects the nose-steered mouse, or 'nouse', will make using a computer easier for people with disabilities or for video game enthusiasts. The technology works in conjunction with a single webcam plugged into a computer's USB port. From the onset of a session, the nouse's webcam takes a snapshot of the user's face, focussing in on the tip of the nose as the guide point. The technology matches the cursor's movements to the path of the nose as the head moves side to side. Motion detection software, meanwhile, is used to pinpoint the blink of a user's eye. A double blink switches the nouse on.
Yahoo / Reuters / New Scientist Sep 15, 2004	back to top

Combating seven deadly e-mail sins
E-mail can hurt relationships and slow down business, a survey has warned - and one psychologist says a lack of e-mail etiquette is to blame. The survey, commissioned by handheld and 'smartphone' maker palmOne, shows that 61 per cent of workers say a lack of e-mail responses are delaying business decisions. Communications expert Dr. Peter Collett said e-mail lacks the established niceties of letter-writing, chatting on the phone or a personal meeting. The poll of 750 office workers across Europe identified seven deadly sins of e-mail, including blitzing, tactlessness, sloppiness, ignoring e-mails and lying about them. Collett, working with palmOne, developed seven techniques for combating e-mail sins - including always acknowledging receipt of an e-mail.
CNN Sep 15, 2004	back to top