TechReflex - Technology News

China Scraps Plans for Extension of Magnetic Levitation Railway

2004-01-19T22:19:00.000-05:00

China has scrapped plans for a high-speed magnetic levitation railway between Shanghai and Beijing, just two weeks after inaugurating a similar system within the city of Shanghai.

The announcement of the cancellation appeared Friday in state-run newspapers. The reports quoted Chinese transportation officials as saying the government would instead seek to modernize China's overextended rail system using more conventional, less-expensive, high speed wheel-track technology, such as that currently used in Japan and France.

The news came as the busy Lunar New Year holiday travel season is approaching. Officials estimate 800 million people will travel to their home provinces in China over the next few days, most of them by train.

At Beijing's main railway station, hundreds lined up Friday in freezing temperatures, hoping to secure tickets for home. With the New Year festival less than a week away, most of the cheaper class fares are already sold out.

Chu Yanyan, a Beijing resident in her 30's, says she is trying to book a seat to Nanjing, but doubts she will find anything she can afford. Everyone, she says, wants the cheaper seats. She says China's decision to abandon plans for the mag-lev railway to Shanghai was not necessarily bad news.

She says, people who travel by train are workers who usually do not have much money, so they would not be able to afford anything like mag-lev tickets. Ms. Chu, says the high speed train might be good for some, but most people fight to get the cheapest tickets.

It was estimated that the Shanghai-to-Beijing railway would have cost China $14 billion to build.

Some people say the government was jumping ahead of itself by proposing such an expensive system at a time when China is still a developing country, with a per capita income of around $1,000.

German companies have spent billions to develop the mag-lev technology, but have had difficulty selling it due - in large part - to its set-up cost.

Two weeks ago, China became the first nation to operate a mag-lev railway commercially, when officials inaugurated a 30-kilometer-long line between downtown Shanghai and the city's airport.

SGI announces low-cost Linux supercluster machine

2004-01-12T11:44:00.000-05:00

SGI today announced a new, low-cost Itanium 2-based Linux server, the Altix 350. The new $12,199 machine will dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of shared-memory superclusters -- supercomputers that run a single Linux system image spanning many processors.

An advantage of the Altix architecture is the single Linux system image -- typically a stock 2.4.x kernel with open source high-performance computing patches applied. Applications can be installed and run as if on an ordinary Linux workstation.

SGI is targeting what it says is a $2.6 billion market for midrange servers for scientists, design engineers, researchers, and other technical computing users, a segment that is currently dominated by mid-range machines from Sun, IBM, and HP running proprietary versions of Unix.

The Altix 350 borrows its design from SGI's high-end Altix 3000 series, a high performance computing architecture used for tasks like planetary weather modelling. Since its January 2003 introduction, SGI says it has shipped 10,000 processors to 150 Altix 3000 customers, including a 512-processor machine used by NASA Ames Research Center.

Space station leak located in lab

2004-01-12T11:41:00.000-05:00

A leaky hose in a window of the laboratory module Destiny has been blamed for the International Space Station's three-week drop in air pressure.

The hose, used to equalise pressure and eliminate fog between two of the window's six clear panes, has been capped according to NASA. The hose has yet to be unequivocally confirmed as the source of the leak, but the station's air pressure does seem to have now stabilised.

US astronaut Michael Foale and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri have been searching for the leak since they were told about it on 5 January. On 9 January they ruled out a Russian air purifier, and over the weekend they checked airlocks on the US and Russian station segments, as well as the docked Russian Soyuz lifeboat - all of which appeared airtight.

Toshiba Readies Truly Tiny Hard Drive

2004-01-08T14:37:00.000-05:00

Toshiba has unveiled a prototype hard drive that's smaller than any currently on the market. The drive could start appearing in devices such as cellular telephones and digital music players before the end of this year.

The drive is the same length and width as an SD memory card and is 1 millimeter thicker, says Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing at Toshiba's U.S. storage media division.

A prototype on display at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week has a data storage capacity of 2GB. Toshiba is also planning to produce a sample drive with 4GB capacity around the middle of this year, Brzeski says.

The device itself is a miniaturized version of the kind of drive found inside a personal computer. It features a recording platter, the media part of the hard drive on which data is stored, that measures 0.85 inches in diameter.

Most current desktop computers use drives with a 3.5-inch-diameter platter, while notebook computers usually use 2.5-inch drives. Even smaller drives are used in digital music players--Apple Computer's IPod and IPod mini use 1.8-inch and 1.0-inch drives, respectively--but until now no company has unveiled a smaller device.

In search of a slice of life

2004-01-03T00:14:00.000-05:00

While U.S. astronomers anxiously await tomorrow's scheduled arrival of their latest probe to search for life on Mars, a study by Australian scientists is casting new light on where to look for advanced life elsewhere in our galaxy.

Their analysis argues that a slice of the Milky Way, including the region around Earth, is a "Goldilocks zone" for life to evolve. "That is, it is not too hot and not too cold; it is just right," jokes Charles Lineweaver, lead author of the study, which appears today in the journal Science.

If the analysis is correct, life in many places could have been evolving for a billion years longer than on Earth.

What the Australian astronomers and physicists did is to look for four physical features they believe are necessary for advanced life to evolve:

There must be enough heavy elements -- notably carbon, oxygen and nitrogen -- to build Earth-like life forms.

Conversely, there cannot be too much of these heavy elements, because they would produce a large number of Jupiter-sized planets. Recent analysis of extraterrestrial planetary systems suggests that the movements of these giant bodies toward their suns would obliterate all Earth-type planets in their path.

Apple-Watchers Mull Reports of Low-Cost iPods

2004-01-02T23:44:00.000-05:00

Continuing a Macworld Expo tradition, speculation grew this week in the Mac community about Apple Computer Inc.'s forthcoming announcements at next week's show in San Francisco. While Apple-centric IT professionals hope for news of an updated Xserve platform, consumers and resellers expect a low-cost iPod media player is in the works.

On the consumer front, industry insiders wondered what the introduction of a smaller, less-expensive iPod line would mean for the marketplace, consumers and Apple's bottom line. Although Apple declined to confirm the rumors, some Apple watchers predicted another success for the Cupertino, Calif., company, as others feared that a less-expensive music player could take sales away from Apple's current offerings, which range in price from $300 to $500.

Apple users threaten to sue over iBook, iPod

2003-12-31T21:22:00.000-05:00

Can a few bad apples -- like product quality complaints and potential lawsuits -- spoil the bunch for loyal fans of Apple Computer Inc. ahead of their biggest party of the year?

As enthusiasts devoted to Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people) prepare to descend on San Francisco next week for the annual Macworld conference, at least two online petitions have collected hundreds of signatures from potential plaintiffs seeking to file lawsuits over claims of defects in the iBook laptop.

Another growing source of complaints surrounds Apple's wildly-popular iPod line of digital music players, which many enthusiasts believe will get an upgrade at Macworld with the introduction of smaller, less-expensive models and a range of case colors.

Queen to knight early Web innovator

2003-12-31T21:19:00.000-05:00

Does this mean the Web is his castle? Tim Berners-Lee, the technologist who added hyperlinking capabilities to the Internet to create the World Wide Web in 1990, is being knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth.

Buckingham Palace said this week that Berners-Lee, 48, a British citizen who lives in the United States, got the honor because of his "services to the global development of the Internet."

In a statement released by the World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet group he directs, Berners-Lee said he considered knighthood an honor that "applies to the whole Web development community."

Online Sales Reach Record High

2003-12-30T21:37:00.000-05:00

Consumers pumped the Internet during the holiday season, pushing online sales to record highs.

From November 1 to December 12, online shoppers forked over more than $13 billion, excluding travel sales. This is a 46 percent jump over last year's total, and the revenue sum is sure to surge even higher after the last two weeks of December are counted. Some of the top sellers on the Web are clothing, videos/DVDs, consumer electronics, toys/video games and books, according to an "eSpending" survey from Goldman, Sachs & Co., Harris Interactive, and Nielsen/NetRatings. (You would think three analyst firms could pool their talents and come up with a better survey name but no such luck.)

While the music industry appears intent on shutting down online sales, its movie industry cohorts should be cheering on the Web. Video and DVD sales surged 89 percent year-on-year to account for $1.2 billion. Clothing makes up the bulk of Internet sales with $2.5 billion in revenue this year - a 35 percent jump from 2002. Toys and video games pulled in $1.6 billion, consumer electronics accounted for $1.4 billion and books brought in an even $1 billion. All categories enjoyed a healthy increase in sales this year.

The future is now

2003-12-30T21:35:00.000-05:00

The ubiquity of the iPod, the return of the Mac, and the simplicity of the portable memory stick are just some of the developments that could change our lives in 2004. Charles Arthur offers his predictions for a year of innovation

There's a gleam in technology enthusiasts' eyes when they look forward to 2004. Since the computer industry started plummeting, around the beginning of 2001, there has been much innovation yet nobody has been able to persuade consumers or business to buy anything in large enough volumes to turn things around.

That's ready to change. The pace of innovation is still dramatic; but now people and companies are ready to take it on board. So here's your look forward to what's going to happen, and not happen, in 2004 - followed by my advice on what to do and what not to do.

Microsoft aims to make spammers pay

2003-12-26T23:04:00.000-05:00

Despite efforts to stem the billions of spam e-mails flooding inboxes, unwanted messages are still turning e-mail into a quagmire of misery.

Spammers send out tens of millions of e-mails to unsuspecting computer users every day, employing a myriad of methods to ensure their pills, loans and "requests for our lord" pleas fox e-mail filters.

Some are even turning to prose and poetry to fool the technological safeguards people put in place.

But a group of researchers at Microsoft think they may have come up with a solution that could, at least, slow down and deter the spammers.

The development has been called the Penny Black project, because it works on the idea that revolutionised the British postage system in the 1830s - that senders of mail should have to pay for it, not whoever is on the receiving end.

Toshiba begins shipping XDR DRAM sample chips

2003-12-26T23:02:00.000-05:00

Toshiba Corp. began producing sample memory chips based on Rambus Inc.'s next-generation XDR (extreme data rate) memory technology on Thursday, the Japanese company said the same day.

XDR, which was formerly known by its Yellowstone development code-name, is targeted at high-performance applications such as digital consumer electronics, network systems, game consoles and graphics applications. It runs at a speed of 3.2GHz, which is significantly faster than any memory technology in use today.

Toshiba's first samples are 512M bit DRAM (dynamic RAM) chips and come slightly ahead of schedule. When Rambus announced XDR in July this year it said it expected sample chips to begin rolling off fabrication lines at Toshiba during 2004.

2004 shaping into a very Martian new year

2003-12-26T22:57:00.000-05:00

With the arrival of Europe's first interplanetary probe at Mars and two more U.S. spacecraft on the way, the red planet will be under intense scrutiny for months as scientists attempt to figure out why a world flecked with evidence of an Earth-like past appears dead and dry.

An even more compelling question is whether indigenous life ever took root on Mars, as many suspect but cannot prove.

"If you look at the surface of Mars today, it's a desolate place. It's dry. It's cold. It's barren," said Cornell University astronomer Steven Squyres, who heads the science teams for two NASA rovers scheduled to land on Mars beginning next month. "It's not an inviting environment for life, and yet we see these tantalizing clues," he said.

The unprecedented barrage of spacecraft is due partly to the relatively close distance between Earth and Mars, an alignment that occurs every two years. This year's lineup is particularly favorable, with Earth and Mars about 35 million miles apart -- as close as they have been in more than 60,000 years. At that distance, spacecraft can be dispatched from Earth using less powerful and less expensive boosters.

No one expects everything to go perfectly, however.

"Mars has been a most daunting destination," said NASA's associate administrator for space science Ed Weiler. "Some -- including me -- have called it 'The Death Planet.'"

Four Spacecraft to Reach Mars Over Next Month

2003-12-20T14:04:00.000-05:00

The prospect of life on Mars has charged the public imagination for more than a century, ever since astronomers first spied what they thought were canals dug to irrigate the planet's ruddy surface.

But after spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes began taking a closer look at the planet, evidence of the canals — and the Martians who presumably created them — quickly vanished.

Instead, the scrutiny showed Mars to be a dusty, frigid world, shrouded by an atmosphere too thin to breathe, bombarded with radiation and largely dry beyond the ice that caps its poles. It seemed altogether hostile to life as we know it.

But ongoing scientific spadework continues to turn up evidence that suggests that long ago Mars was a wetter, if not warmer, world where rivers large enough to carve canyons the size of the United States flowed across its surface. Life, even if just tiny microbes, could have thrived in such a place.

Science's Breakthrough Of The Year: Illumination Of The Dark, Expanding Universe

2003-12-19T22:01:00.000-05:00

In 2003, new evidence cemented the bizarre idea that the universe is made mostly of mysterious "dark matter," being stretched apart by an unknown force called "dark energy." This set of discoveries claims top honors as the Breakthrough of the Year, named by Science and its publisher, AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

These insights into our "dark" universe plus nine other research advances make up Science's top ten scientific developments in 2003, chosen for their profound implications for society and the advancement of science. The Top Ten list appears in the journal's 19 December issue.

This year, information from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescopes confirmed some of cosmologists' strangest proposals about the fate of the universe.

"The implications of these discoveries about the universe are truly stunning. Cosmologists have been trying for years to confirm the hypothesis of a dark universe. Science is glad to recognize their success in this effort as the Breakthrough of the Year for 2003," said Don Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science.

Swedish firm to offer 100Mbit/s broadband

2003-12-19T13:32:00.000-05:00

A SWEDISH SUPPLIER will introduce an amazing 100Mbit/sec broadband connection for 895 kroner in April next year.

That's about £70 a month, and that speed is in both directions.

Bredbandsbolaget will cap downloads to 300GB as part of the service it's offering.

Right now, Bredbandsbolaget is offering bi-directional 10MB connections for 330 kroner a month without limits on the download

Nanotubes break semiconducting record

2003-12-19T13:29:00.000-05:00

Semiconducting carbon nanotubes are significantly better at conducting electricity at room temperature than any other known material, according to recent tests at the University of Maryland.

The findings are the latest evidence that nanotubes could form the basis for future generations of powerful electronics.

The electrical conductivity properties of nanotubes--a synthetic material with the potential to revolutionize industries from plastics to computer chips--have been well known for some time. But the results from the university's Center for Superconductivity Research indicate that carbon nanotubes may make even better semiconductors than previously thought.

A team of researchers, led by Michael Fuhrer, head of the university's Nanoelectronics Research Group, were able to fabricate a semiconducting nanotube transistor with mobility almost 25 percent higher than any previous semiconducting material, and more than 70 times higher than the mobility of computer chip silicon, the university said. Mobility is a measurement of how well a semiconductor conducts electricity.

AMD introduces budget Athlon 64

2003-12-18T17:40:00.000-05:00

Advanced Micro Devices has quietly trotted out a version of its Athlon 64 chip that provides a little less performance than earlier models but only costs about half as much.

The new Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 2GHz, the same as the existing Athlon 64 3200+, but it only comes with a 512KB secondary cache, according to an AMD spokesman. The 3200+ features a 1MB cache. A cache is a pool of memory integrated into the processor for rapid data access. In general, large caches lead to better performance.

AMD, however, prices the Athlon 64 3000+ at $218 in quantities of 1,000 while the 3200+ sells for $418. At AMD, the new chip is known as the "A-Rod," a reference to baseball player Alex Rodriguez. The chip was released earlier this week.

'Running' Robot Gets Off Ground

2003-12-18T17:36:00.000-05:00

Sony's walking robot already knows a few hip dance steps and can kick a miniature soccer ball. Now, it can jog -- a new trick that developers say is ingenious because it requires the machine to jump off the ground, if only for a fraction of a second.

The new skills of the humanoid, developed by the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant's robot unit that makes the dog-like Aibo, were demonstrated to reporters at a Tokyo hall Thursday.

When an upgrade of the 23-inch-tall, 15-pound robot was introduced last year, Sony executive Toshitada Doi said it might go on sale for the price of an expensive car. But now Sony has no plans to sell Qrio, which is short for "quest for curiosity."

Intel gets into digital TV market

2003-12-17T17:16:00.000-05:00

JOHN MARKOFF at the New York Times is predicting that when Paul Otellini, Intel's president, takes the floor at the forthcoming Consumer Electronics Show, he will stagger the world by announcing its first digital TV chip.

According to Markoff, Otellini will show off a chip marrying liquid crystal to silicon. Intel is going head to head against the US titan Texas Instruments.

He writes that the Chipzilla approach is to make "vast arrays of tiny electronic shutters" which change the characteristics of reflected light. The chips will be used to make huge TVs using back end technology much cheaper than plasma or ordinary LCD screens, Markoff writes,

Silicon based fuel cell

2003-12-17T17:14:00.000-05:00

A UNIVERSITY in Tokyo is claiming that it has made a fuel cell based on silicon, according to the Nikkei Business Daily.

The newspaper reports that the invention, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, uses very thin silicon layers interleaved with an electrolye film, with a unit measuring a quarter of a millimetre.

Each sheet of silicon has, according to the report, trenches which act as conduits for oxygen, methanol and hydrogen, and plated by platinum and ruthenium, which act as catalytic agents.

The cell can generate 50mw, which ain't going to power your notebook for long, but the paper said the units can be stacked to throw out more juice.

Shell Shows Web-Controlled Home

2003-12-17T17:11:00.000-05:00

Shell Oil wants to help control your home's heating--and not by lowering the price of oil. The company will be at next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to demonstrate its upcoming Web-based home automation system, hoping to carve out a business with a type of service that has so far been slow to catch on.

Called Shell HomeGenie, the service will let customers adjust their central heating, switch small appliances on and off, and monitor their homes with a wireless security camera, all while on the road. Customers control the home equipment through a PC browser or a cell phone with Internet access.

A residential gateway acts as a central control for the system and hooks up to the Internet through a home PC broadband connection. The system includes a programmable thermostat that Shell says works with most heating systems and power switches that connect to home appliances, and can be turned on and off wirelessly. The thermostat, power switches, and security cameras hook up to the gateway using a radio frequency wireless module.

Sun fuels cosmic research

2003-12-17T17:09:00.000-05:00

Sun Microsystems has agreed to fund the next generation of SETI@Home, the University of California's distributed computing project that lets computer users donate unused processor cycles to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Since 1999, SETI@Home has allowed computer users to download a screensaver that can automatically download, analyze and resend data units collected from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

The SETI@Home project has so far cost $500,000, but on a daily basis it provides the equivalent of 15 teraflops--more raw computing power than the $110 million IBM ASCI White system, rated at 12 teraflops. A teraflop is a measure of a computer's speed, which can be expressed as1 trillion floating point operations per second.

Open Source Is Not Limited to Software

2003-12-17T17:05:00.000-05:00

Speaking before a group of 30 representatives from the hardware industry Monday night at the Freedom Technology Center in Mountain View, California, Lampret unveiled the organization's most recent development: a functional system-on-chip microprocessor, developed entirely from freely available open-source blueprints.

The announcement, Lampret claims, marks the first time an organization has bypassed patented technology to manufacture a complete system-on-chip. Such microprocessors are desirable because they contain multiple control units and enable manufacturers to build computers with fewer separate components.

Lampret believes the open-source innovation could lead the hardware industry to develop cheaper and more cutting-edge devices in coming years.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) System

2003-12-16T22:46:00.000-05:00

Philips announced that they are six months away from a launching a system against illegal copying that will allow consumers to play digital video and music on any digital media player.

"Consumers want an open system, and the electronics industry wants it too," Ruud Peters, chief executive of Philips's intellectual property and standards unit, told Reuters.