Diamond Age Solutions News for the IT Industry

Sat Apr 30 12:45:34 NZST 2005

Today Index

The cross-platform Firefox web browser hits 50 million downloads, not counting upgrades. Link below includes live counter:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/fifty.html

Microsoft may be heading for additional fines in the EU, as the commission expresses concern that Microsoft has not done enough to open up its OS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4489805.stm

Microsoft fails to come up with any real specifications for the hardware requirements of the forthcoming Longhorn OS other than 256MiB of RAM mimimum:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1790776,00.asp

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to use TurboLinux throughout. The bank handles 1/5th of Chinese banking assets with 390,000 employees in 20,000 banks:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22868

Cambridge UK researchers working for Toshiba demonstrate a quantum key server:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4496893.stm

Northwestern University research comes up with a fountain pen capable of drawing 40nm features with a variety of molecular "inks":
http://clifton.mech.northwestern.edu/~espinosa/research/NFAP.htm

Nuclear fusion created on the desktop. Not exactly large scale, but it does actually work. A good thing perhaps:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7315

And finally. Using satellites, data from buoys and computer models, NASA has confirmed the Earth's suspected energy imbalance at 0.85 watts per metre:
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=33915

News collated from various sources by Vik Olliver for Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. The views presented in this document are the personal opinion of the collator, and should not be taken as any more than that.