Diamond Age Solutions News for the IT Industry

Wed Feb 9 10:20:12 NZDT 2005

Today Index

The Japanese competitor to Microsoft Office is shut down by Matsushita, famous for their Panasonic brand. They claim infringement of a patent on the help icon:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/3BDE72837B1DD5BBCC256F9C0070E506?OpenDocument&pub=Computerworld]

Gartner reports "Firefox usage already exceeds 25 percent on some sites that target technical audiences" and says we'd better get used to a 2 browser world:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Research/index.php?p=61

Skype signs a deal with Hutchison to provide connections from their VoIP service to landlines. Possibly the start of a growing trend in VoIP deployment:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/E408523D09B12ABFCC256FA1001837EA?OpenDocument&pub=Computerworld

Google is blocking searches that look for anything ending in PHP. If one user on a corporate proxy looks for it, the whole company is blocked from Google:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2005-02-02
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.google.com/

Sony and IBM to spill the beans on the guts of the Cell CPU, and tout it for devices from handhelds to supercomputers and all stops inbetween:
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2005-02-07T082453Z_01_JON730176_RTRIDST_0_OUKIN-TECH-CELL.XML

IBM's "Millipede" storage device is now demonstrating one Terabit per square inch, though only 80% of the tips in a 1024-tip head work:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/bios.nsf/pages/millipede.html

While HP is making inroads into polymer circuitry, Intel is not and decides to close down its polymer memory research:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21123

Five people are given retinal implants to restore vision. The implant is a 5,000 pixel array of solar cells, still a far cry from normal but better than zero:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/6906

And finally. By combining infra-red flourescent particles with self-assembling artifical cells, researchers can make tumors visible even under 1cm of flesh:
http://www.primidi.com/2005/02/08.html#a1105

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.