Hardware and software news

Nicholas Stine writes, “Universities should make their patented biomedical innovations accessible to those in poor countries, according to a consensus statement signed by dozens of international global health leaders. Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a student group active at over 30 universities in North America, drafted the Philadelphia Consensus Statement urging universities to adopt licensing policies that would facilitate access to all university-derived medicines in developing countries. Notable signatories include 28 non-governmental organizations, four Nobel laureates, Justice Edwin Cameron of the South African Supreme Court of Appeal, Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health.”

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SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 14, 2006 - Cisco® today announced that the University of Florida High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) successfully deployed solutions from Cisco to support its campus-wide grid computing. The HPCC and campus grid serve six major areas of research: high-energy physics, chemical physics and materials science, coastal and estuarine modeling, medical physics, computational biology, and computer science and engineering. The Cisco technologies have enabled … full story

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Haruki Soma writes, “Unearthed: An A to Z guide to security — from antivirus to zero-day. The writer includes the latest on the UK’s newly updated Computer Misuse Act. She also pokes around rootkits, IM, and spyware, pens an ode to Gary McKinnon (aka the NASA hacker, in the ‘E is for Extradition’ entry), probes Google-induced Spear Phishing, and takes a look back at the Love Bug and Jaschan’s Sasser.” Security pros won’t find much new here, but the rest of us might learn a thing or two.

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PreacherTom writes, “No stranger to the tech-savvy, video bloggers are the next phenomenon to go from online to the mainstream. For example, Internet celebrity Amanda Congdon just finished broadcasting her cross-country relocation from New York to L.A. on the Web. The former host of Rocketboom, one of the most popular of the video blogs, with roughly 211,000 daily viewers, has a new gig as a contributor for ABC. She’s not alone. In fact, major movie and TV studios are increasingly looking to the Web for new talent for both on- and offline projects.”

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An anonymous reader writes, “According to silicon.com, Marks & Spencer — a department store as quintessentially British as tea & cake — is so pleased with its trial of RFID clothes-tagging that it’s planning to roll it out nationwide. Considering that the UK’s Information Commissioner recently made a lot of noise around the RFID track and trace tech, warning that Britain is ’sleepwalking into a surveillance society’, Marks & Sparks seems to be setting itself up as a tweed-clad Public Enemy Number One.”

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An anonymous reader writes, “Scientists have developed a virtual world like Second Life where real-life amputees have their limbs restored. The experience can cure patients of the perception of pain in their missing limbs. From the article: ‘The machine is designed to combat phantom limb pain (PLP) — a sensation of pain experienced by an amputee that appears to originate in the missing limb. Intriguingly, researchers have discovered that if a person’s brain can be tricked into believing they can see and move a “phantom limb,” this motion reduces the perception of pain in PLP.’ The graphics used by the computer look very crude, almost comically so, but apparently the system works.”

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1up has a piece looking at the Wii vs. the PS3, running down the particulars on graphical power, online capabilities, launch titles, and control scheme. For the most part, they’re siding with the PS3: “Traditionally, Nintendo’s never been much for online gaming (the GameCube had two online games&ever), but Wii appears poised to finally bring Mario and Co. into the multiplayer arena. Wii will use a modified version of the DS’ Wi-Fi Connection software to facilitate online matchmaking. (Most likely, you’ll only be able to play against players who give you ‘friend codes’ first, just like with the DS.) Like the PS3, the Wii will offer online gaming free of charge.”

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Doc Ruby writes, “As reported at GigaOM, ‘Infinera has bonded 10 parallel 10 Gb/s channels into one logical flow while maintaining packet ordering at the receiver,’ bridging 100-Gbps ethernet over 10 10-Gbps optical WAN links. Infinera’s press release is here. Further from GigaOM: ‘The experimental system was set up between Tampa, Florida and Houston, Texas, and back again. A 100 GbE signal was spliced into ten 10 Gb/s streams using an Infinera-proposed specification for 100GbE across multiple links. The splicing of the signal is based on a packet-reordering algorithm developed at [UC] Santa Cruz. This algorithm preserves packet order even as individual flows are striped across multiple wavelengths.’ We’re all going to want our share of these 100Gbps networks. The current network retailers, mainly cable and DSL dealers, still haven’t brought even 10Mbps to most homes, though they’re now bringing fiber to the premises to some rich/lucky customers. Are they laying fiber that will bring them to Tbps, or will that stuff clog the way to getting these speeds ourselves?” Rumors say that what runs over Verizon’s FiOS is ATM, to support their aspirations for triple-play.

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Dell has acquired a British IT services firm, with plans to offer consulting to large businesses as they upgrade to Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. full story

Earlier this month we ran an article linking Christopher Monckton’s attempt to to discredit global warming. The submitter asked plaintively, “Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?” George Monbiot has now done so. From the article: “This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong… In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist… As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was ‘the most plausible.’ As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000.” And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush’s stand on global warming, Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.

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Motorola plans to acquire Netopia, the maker of DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) user equipment, for $208 million, the companies announced on Tuesday. full story

Back in the mid-?80s, I was the No. 2 guy in a small tech-support and implementation group, working out of the headquarters of a company with offices spread across the country. Mainframes still ruled back then, and microcomputers were snotty upstarts that ?real? computer users sneered at. I found the little buggers fascinating — and I really liked DOS. Those batch files were so cool… full story

lizzyben writes, “Baseline has a major story about a major IT disaster in the UK: ‘In 2002, the English government embarked on a $12 billion effort to transform its health-care system with information technology. But the country’s oversight agency now puts that figure at $24 billion, and two Members of Parliament say the project is “sleepwalking toward disaster”… In scale, the project… (NPfIT) is overwhelming. Initiated in 2002, the NPfIT is a 10-year project to build new computer systems that would connect more than 100,000 doctors, 380,000 nurses and 50,000 other health-care professionals; allow for the electronic storage and retrieval of patient medical records; permit patients to set up appointments via their computers; and let doctors electronically transmit prescriptions to local pharmacies.’” An Infoworld article from earlier this year sketches some of the all-time greatest IT meltdowns.

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IBM will invest $100 million over the next two years in 10 potential new business opportunities after conducting a massive trawl for ideas among its staff, partners, customers, and academic institutions. full story

AMD introduced the world’s first dedicated stream processor designed to meet the specific hardware demands of high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Engineered specifically for compute-only systems such as workstations and servers, the AMD Stream Processor™ makes use of AMD’s new thin hardware interface called CTM™ to drive substantial performance gains in areas such as financial analysis, seismic migration analysis, and life sciences research, among others. The AMD Stream Processor is a PCI Express-based add-in board designed with higher memory densities than any consumer graphics card – a full 1 GB of GDDR3 memory for stream computing applications. The processor also features HPC-optimized memory performance designed to best handle unique stream computing problem sets. full story

eldavojohn writes “An announcement came Sunday that the first ten prototypes of the Linux-powered OLPC XO-1 had been completed in China. From the article, ‘Quanta, the Chinese computer maker that won the international bidding for the project earlier this year, will assemble 900 OLPC machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our development partners.’ Let’s hope that these first prototypes do not warrant any design changes and that the testing goes well so that countries that expressed interest (Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Argentina, and Thailand) can start distributing them soon.”

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Seagate today announced that its 40GB, 60GB and 80GB LD25 Series Hard Drives have started to ship to a new generation of technology appliance manufacturers. The LD25 Series drive provides an ideal combination of capacity and size for leading-edge game consoles, low-profile set-top boxes, home entertainment devices, small-form-factor computing applications, and other emerging fixed applications. Next generation gaming consoles will be the first-to-market with the new 60GB LD25 Series Hard Drive and are increasingly utilizing hard drive technology, to enable a more satisfying and exciting gaming experience. The LD25 Series hard drives also feature Seagate’s patented SoftSonic fluid dynamic bearing motors for super-quiet operation and high reliability. Seagate’s industry leading DynaPlay technology optimizes the drive for media streaming, power consumption and content security and enables smaller, simpler, and more cost-effective applications. full story

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