Techno-News Blog Ray Schroeder, editor, OTEL - University of Illinois at Springfield |
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Saturday, February 05, 2005
Intel's new mobile chips equal to high-end Pentium 4 - Tom Krazit, IDG News Service
With the release of its Sonoma technology Wednesday, notebook PCs based on the most powerful version of Intel's Centrino mobile technology now perform just as well as desktop PCs with Intel's fastest Pentium 4 processors, an Intel executive said during a press briefing. Mooly Eden, vice president and director of marketing of Intel's new Mobility Group, demonstrated a video game on a new Sonoma laptop and compared its performance to that of the same video game running on a Pentium 4 desktop PC. The Sonoma design contains the Pentium M processor, the new Alviso chipset with support for the PCI Express interconnect technology and DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory and an Intel Pro/Wireless chip. Intel brands the package as Centrino mobile technology.
Disk drives to stop shrinking - Michael Kanellos, CNET News
For hard-drive makers, getting small is becoming a passing fad. While consumers have gone bonkers for music players and other sleek devices sporting tiny hard drives, disk drive companies say there's little room, and even less desire, for further reducing the size of the drive platters--the silver disks that spin around and hold data. Since the platters constitute a substantial portion of the overall volume of the drive, this means a ceiling looms for shrinking drive sizes and potential increased competition from flash memory.
Internet Sparks Outpouring of Instant Donations - Jerry Markon and Leef Smith, Washington Post
Faced with searing images of suffering and grief in South Asia, Americans are finding an instantaneous way to reach out to tsunami victims: on their home computers. As never before, people are turning to the Internet to donate money, the latest step in a revolution that has altered everything from shopping to presidential campaigns. "This is like 1951, when television really took off,'' Paul Saffo, director of the Silicon Valley-based Institute for the Future, said yesterday. "We are in the middle of a fundamental shift from mass media to the personal media of computers and the Internet, and charitable giving is a logical progression.'' Friday, February 04, 2005
Server Outage - Blog down Feb 2-Feb 4
My sincere apologies for the loss of feeds the past three days. A catastrophic server crash required an entire re-build of the server hosting this blog. We are now back up and running. -ray Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Microsoft kicks off search effort - Stefanie Olsen, CNET News
Microsoft on Monday replaced Yahoo's search technology with its own homespun software and will kick off a huge advertising campaign to supplant Google in consumers' hearts. As expected, MSN, a unit of the software giant, has taken its Web search technology out of the laboratory, and placed it on MSN's newly redesigned home page in 25 countries. Two and a half years in the making, MSN Search will now be the focal point of the updated, lighter-weight site; and it is the subject of Microsoft's newest ad campaign, which includes television, print, Internet and outdoor promotions. MSN Search Vice President Christopher Payne would not disclose ad spending, but he estimated that 90 percent of Americans, as well as U.K. and Japanese residents, will encounter the campaign. television ads, for example, will run during the Super Bowl, the Oscars and the Grammys. "Oh, you're going to notice it," he said.
Microsoft: Slow going for desktop search in Windows - Matt Hines, CNET News
Microsoft has no immediate plans to integrate new desktop search tools into its Windows operating system, according to an executive with the software maker. Speaking on a conference panel at the Harvard Business School's 2005 Cyberposium event Saturday, Mark Kroese, general manager of information services for Microsoft's MSN portal, indicated that the software giant is watching its step with desktop search. Krouse said he believes the company could be perceived as trying to leverage its dominance in operating systems to knock out search rivals such as Google if it tried to bring desktop search to Windows.
Teaching computers to read no simple task - Michael Hill, Associated Press
Among the handiest villains in science fiction are Computers That Know Too Much. Think of the dream-weaving despots of "The Matrix" or murderous HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey." But in reality, even the most super supercomputer lacks the reasoning capacity of a child engrossed in a Dr. Seuss book. Computers can't read the way we do. They can't learn or reason like us. Narrowing that cognitive gap between humans and machines - creating a computer that can read and learn at a sophisticated level - is a big goal of artificial intelligence researchers Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Tech guru pitches $100 PC - John Markoff, CNET News
Nicholas Negroponte, the technology guru from the MIT Media Laboratory, prowled the halls of the World Economic Forum holding the holy grail for crossing the digital divide: a mock-up of a $100 laptop computer. The machine is intriguing because Negroponte has struck upon a remarkably simple solution for lowering the price of the most costly part of a laptop--the display--to $25 or less. He has been a passionate advocate of using digital technology to improve the quality of life and erase economic barriers in the developing world since the early 1980s, when he took Apple II computers to Senegal with his colleague Seymour Papert.
Cyber-Security: Is the Gov't Doing Enough? - Darryl K. Taft, eWeek
The Internet is inherently insecure, and the government is no longer providing sufficient funding to help correct the problem, so said a leading member of an Internet content delivery company at a conference here over the weekend. "The Internet is very insecure," said F. Thomson Leighton in his keynote speech at the Harvard Business School Cyberposium 2005. Leighton, co-founder and chief scientist at Akamai Technologies Inc., based here, noted that over 4,000 viruses were found last year and that 83 percent of the country's financial institutions were compromised. And the government is not doing enough to help combat the problem, Leighton said.
Government computer blunders are common - TED BRIDIS, AP TECHNOLOGY
The FBI's failure to roll out an expanded computer system that would help agents investigate criminals and terrorists is the latest in a series of costly technology blunders by government over more than a decade. Experts blame poor planning, rapid industry advances and the massive scope of some complex projects whose price tags can run into billions of dollars at U.S. agencies with tens of thousands of employees. "There are very few success stories," said Paul Brubaker, former deputy chief information officer at the Pentagon. "Failures are very common, and they've been common for a long time." The FBI said earlier this month it might shelve its custom-built, $170 million "Virtual Case File" project because it is inadequate and outdated. The system was intended to help agents, analysts and others around the world share information without using paper or time-consuming scanning of documents. Monday, January 31, 2005
Company offers 10GB of Net storage, for free - John Borland, CNET News
A company called Streamload is offering consumers a free 10 gigabyte online storage locker for multimedia files, potentially raising the stakes for larger companies such as Yahoo and America Online. Streamload typically provides online storage space for a price, making it one of the few companies to survive in that business through the dot-com shakeout. However, it is increasingly competing with larger companies that offer online homes for digital photographs, and even the huge archive space provided by Google's Gmail service.
Patients Put on Thinking Caps - Kristen Philipkoski, Wired
Any geek worthy of the moniker has dreamed of connecting his or her brain directly to a computer for blissful freedom from keyboard and mouse. For quadriplegics, that ability would give life a whole new dimension. If people with physical handicaps could control a computer by just thinking, they could also operate light switches, television, even a robotic arm -- something the 160,000 people in the United States who can't move their arms and legs would surely welcome.
A Century of Einstein - Rowan Hooper, Wired
If you think it's sometimes hard to understand how a teenager's mind works, have some sympathy for Albert Einstein's mother. When he was just a teenager, Einstein was pondering what a light wave would look like if he could observe it while moving at light speed. That's just the sort of gee-whiz anecdote that can distance normal people from Einstein's achievements (and from physics in general). But what Einstein did 100 years ago this year is neither irrelevant to everyday life nor merely arcane scientific lore. Without the revolutionary papers he wrote in 1905, we would barely recognize the world around us. Where would we be without him? Sunday, January 30, 2005
Congress proposes tax on all Net, data connections - Declan McCulagh, CNET News
An influential congressional committee has dropped a political bombshell by suggesting that a tax originally created to pay for the Spanish American War could be extended to all Internet and data connections this year. The committee, deeply involved in writing U.S. tax laws, unexpectedly said in a report Thursday that the 3 percent telecommunications tax could be revised to cover "all data communications services to end users," including broadband; dial-up; fiber; cable modems; cellular; and DSL, or digital subscriber line, links.
Search Engines Go Mobile - Matt Hicks, eWeek
Web search is cutting the computer cord as the major engines increasingly introduce new ways of retrieving search results through mobile phones and devices. Yahoo Inc. expanded its mobile search offerings Thursday with a local search feature for sending business-listing information to mobile phones. Meanwhile, Ask Jeeves Inc. has confirmed that it plans to offer wireless search capabilities later this year. Yahoo's latest offering follows its introduction in October of Yahoo Search for Mobile, a service for accessing Web, image and local search results from browser-enabled mobile devices.
Google to Branch Into Television - MICHAEL LIEDTKE, the Associated Press
Google Inc. is using its popular Internet search technology to find information and images broadcast on television, continuing a recent effort to extend its reach beyond the Web. The Mountain View-based company planned to introduce the new video search service Tuesday in an index that will be operated separately from the market-leading search engine offered on its home page. The feature pinpoints content previously aired on a variety of television networks by scanning through the closed caption text that many programmers offer. Google's index, which began storing information last month, includes programming from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN. |
