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WASHINGTON: Microsoft's new telescopic displays, boasting pixels that use a pair of mirrors to block or transmit light, may give the developers of the much in vogue liquid crystal displays or LCDs a run for their money. The telescopic pixels could lead to displays that are faster, brighter, and more power efficient than liquid crystal displays (LCDs). In fact, researchers at Microsoft Research have claimed that their design is also simpler and easier to fabricate, which should make it cheaper than the LCDs that rule the markets for TVs, cell phones, and flat-panel computer monitors. "There is nothing in LCD...

(Intel is a sponsor of SVW)Intel announced plans for a new business group manufacturing system-on-a-chip (SOC) semiconductors. SOCs are souped-up microprocessors that are tuned for specific types of devices, such as mobile internet devices, smart phones, or medical devices.Intel's SOC chips combine a microprocessor with memory, graphics, and embedded software plus specialized chip and software functions.SOCs can shrink almost an entire board of chips into just one or two chips. This makes digital products more reliable and less expensive to make.Intel predicts that within a few years there will likely be billions of digital devices connected to the Internet. Most...

Buzzword chimera the size of a paperback Start-up CherryPal is taking pre-orders today for its partly cloudy "desktop" that mashes web-hosted computing, going green, open source, and social networking into a 10 ounce box. The (self-titled) CherryPal systems are $249, and surprisingly won't require a monthly subscription despite the fact that most of its storage capacity and several of its features hosted in the cloud.Note: we still haven't seen a working unit with our own eyes. According to CherryPal, as of Friday the boxes were still being given the fine tooth courtesy of US Customs and Border Protection's best and...

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a low-power microchip which uses 30,000 times less power in sleep mode and 10 times less in active mode than similar chips now on the market. Named the Phoenix Processor, it is intended for use in cutting-edge sensor-based devices such as medical implants, environment monitors, and surveillance equipment. � Professor David Blaauw (Credit: University of Michigan) In the future, sensors may be implanted in our bodies to measure blood-glucose levels of diabetics or retinal pressure in glaucoma patients. In practical terms, the chips would have to both be very small and...

The latest round of graphics card dueling between AMD and Nvidia isn't just over high-end gamers. The vendors will also exchange blows for the hearts and wallets of your friendly neighborhood medical imagers, seismic modelers, and computational fluid dynamicists. AMD is refreshing the FireStream processor line with a new general purpose GPU (GPGPU) that boasts more than one teraflop of processing power. Instead of handling gaming or graphics operatins, GPGPUs are built to crunch hundreds of parallel calculations per clock cycle. They promise massive speed improvements over a CPU in mathematical workloads of the scientific, educational and high performance computing...

Nisshinbo Industries Inc. (TSE:3105) has worked with the Tokyo Institute of Technology to develop the technology to use carbon instead of expensive platinum as the electrode catalyst for fuel cells. The company hopes to have a practical version of the new catalyst ready in fiscal 2009, and will start by commercializing a product for the electrodes of residential fuel cells. Later, it will develop and commercialize a version for automotive fuel cells.

- 400GB drive cuts acoustic noise during data seek by 2dB*1 for near silent operation -TOKYO--Toshiba Corporation today announced a new line-up of high performance 2.5-inch HDDs, including a low-noise flagship model that boosts areal density to 477Mbit/mm2 (308Gbpsi) to achieve a capacity of 400GB on just two platters, plus five drives that bring new levels of performance and 7,200rpm rotational speeds to the company’s full range of storage capacities. Mass production of the 400GB MK4058GSX will start from September, targeting notebook PC and consumer electronic applications. Mass production of the 7,200rpm drives will start in August. The line-up includes...

One terabyte hard drives still cramping your decadent data storage lifestyle? No more tears. Seagate is rolling out 1.5TB HDDs this August. Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 will use four platters to cram the scale-tipping new raw capacity into an eleventh generation of its flagship drive. The storage firm points out its the single largest hard drive capacity bump in the last 50 years. As the name suggests, the HDD spins at 7,200RPM. The 3Gb/s SATA I interface has a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/s. 1.5TB = this image x 119,434,242 The disks are also sold in 1TB, 750GB,...

Information contained in the press release is current as of the date of announcement. It is subject to change without prior notice. July 7, 2008, Tokyo Pioneer Corporation Pioneer Succeeds in Developing World's First 16-Layer Optical Disc -Big Step toward Future Large-Capacity Archive System- July 7, 2008, Tokyo, Japan - Pioneer Corporation has succeeded in developing a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes for the first time in the world*1. Its per-layer capacity is 25 gigabytes, which is the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc (BD). This multilayer technology will also be applicable to...

AMD Expands The Ultimate Visual Experience AMD today expanded The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for North America with the ATI All-In-Wonder™ HD, combining award-winning ATI Radeon™ Premium graphics and ATI TV Wonder™ HD tuner technology card in one PCI Express® 2.0 solution. As the newest multimedia powerhouse to join the long line of All-In-Wonder offerings, ATI All-in-Wonder HD transforms the PC into a highly immersive digital video recorder for HDTV1 and analog TV, plus expands the realm of exceptional gaming with cinematic HD graphics for mainstream PCs. Blu-ray™ disc playback can be enjoyed in full HD glory (1080p) thanks to ATI...

Huntsville, Ala., and Durham, N.C., also rank high in 'Cybercities' report SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Silicon Valley, New York and Washington are still the country's top centers for high-tech employment, according to a report published Tuesday. But heavy concentrations of tech-industry workers can also be found in such cities as Boulder, Colo.; Huntsville, Ala.; and Durham, N.C., according to a report released Tuesday by the American Electronics Association. 'These are the types of jobs every city wants.' — Christopher Hansen, American Electronics Association The association's "Cybercities" report, its first since 2000, also noted that 51 of the nation's top 60...

Two of the four major browsers have undergone some big changes in the past two weeks. Firefox 3 is, of course, the big news of the week, pulling down eight million or so downloads in its first 24 hours in the wild. However, the Opera browser updated to its much-awaited version 9.5 last week. Since both of them have got game but for different reasons, let's take a look at how they match up. Empirically, the two most-cited complaints about browsers are speed and memory. Now, I'm a big fan of Firefox because it's so easy to customize, so...

In today's world of broadcasting and commercial display technologies, video resolution seems to be the name of the game as we progress from full-HD to 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixels), and now 8K (7,680 x 4,320 pixels) ultra-high-definition format. Developed by NHK, this Japanese prototype system is capable of displaying 32 megapixels' worth or 16 times more details than any consumer panel. The theater on demonstration at CommunicAsia comprises two LCoS projectors with a combined 8,000 lumens brightness and a towering 6.6m x 3.7m 300-inch projection screen. If you think that is impressive, wait till you have a go at...

The 2008 State Technology and Science Index ranks the 50 states in terms of their technology and science assets, and their ability to leverage those resources to achieve economic growth. The study offers one of the most comprehensive examinations of state technology and science assets ever compiled. View the interactive data set and full state rankings here. The index provides states with a benchmark, monitors their technology progress and can be leveraged to promote economic growth. It provides a valuable framework of measures to guide state policy makers and the public on the realities of their performance in the knowledge-based...

Armonk (NY) – IBM is prepared to deliver the Roadrunner supercomputer to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The system was development over the past 18 months and is not only the first hybrid supercomputer using Cell processors, but also the first commercial system to exceed a performance of 1 PFlops. Roadrunner is the NNSA’s third IBM-built supercomputer, adding to two IBM-built supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: BlueGene/L, completed in 2005, has 131,072 p5 processors and delivers a sustained performance of 280.6 TFlops. The 12,208 processor ASC Purple is estimated to provide a sustained performance...

AMD today announced the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3800, tripling top-of-the line graphics performance in comparison to the previous generation ATI Mobility Radeon™ GPUs1. Joining the previously announced ATI Mobility Radeon™ 3000 family, the new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 series offers notebook manufacturers the ability to deliver fast graphics performance, energy-efficient 55nm graphics processor technology, amazing video playback, and, for the first time ever, ATI CrossFireX™ technology for a mobile graphics solution. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 series coupled with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra Processors, the AMD 7-Series Chipset, and industry-leading wireless technologies like 802.11n Draft 2.0 form...

Sun Ahead of Emerging Trend: 2008 Expected to be Tipping Point Year for Solid State Disk (SSD) "Flash" Evolution From Consumer Electronics Into Enterprise IT SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA - News) today announced it is preparing to introduce new Sun solid state disks (SSD) to the market that will give customers greater application performance, massive scale and value through the integration of the Solaris(TM) Operating System (OS), Solaris ZFS(TM) and other open source technologies. Sun is already shipping Solaris ZFS software optimized for SSD technologies through the OpenSolaris(TM) community and is the first major systems vendor to add...

"Liquid Metal" at the Center of IBM Innovation to Significantly Reduce Cost of Concentrator Photovoltaic Cells ARMONK, NY, May 15, 2008 IBM today announced a research breakthrough in photovoltaics technology that could significantly reduce the cost of harnessing the Sun's power for electricity. By mimicking the antics of a child using a magnifying glass to burn a leaf or a camper to start a fire, IBM scientists are using a large lens to concentrate the Sun's power, capturing a record 230 watts onto a centimeter square solar cell, in a technology known as concentrator photovoltaics, or CPV. That energy is...

Responsible for the first consumer application of an electronic paper display module when it teamed up with Sony to release the LIBRI e-Book reader in 2004, E Ink has now announced availability of its next generation segmented display cells (SDC). The new SDCs are 40% thinner with a wider operational temperature range and increased flexibility for repetitive 3-D bends or 2-D conformable solutions. The SDC products are simple digit, icon and alpha-numeric displays, offering excellent readability in a paper-thin form factor that uses minimal battery power. The latest generation of E Ink SDCs offer three height levels, depending on backplane...

VIA EPIA PX5000EG Pico-ITX board features the 1-watt VIA Eden ULV processor for ultra low power embedded platforms Taipei, Taiwan, May 14 2008 - VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the VIA EPIA PX5000EG Pico-ITX board that features the extremely power efficient 500MHz VIA Eden ULV processor, offering embedded developers an uncompromisingly compact, highly integrated board. Building on the success of the VIA EPIA PX10000 Pico-ITX board, which took the embedded industry by storm last year as the world's smallest mass production x86 board ever, the VIA EPIA PX5000EG adds the incredible...

New BladeCenter QS22 Delivers Supercomputing Power for Everything From Financial Trading to Oil-Field Discovery ARMONK, NY, May 13, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- Driven by growing commercial need in areas such as financial services, digital media creation and medical imaging, IBM today expanded its High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities for businesses with the introduction of the IBM(R) BladeCenter(R) QS22 -- a new, economical supercomputing technology inspired by advanced scientific research facilities. The heart of the QS22 is a new processor compliant with the Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (Cell/B.E.) Architecture, originally developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to provide the computing...

An earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter Scale knocked out mobile phone service in the western Chinese city of Chengdu, although fixed-line networks remained in service, Chinese state television reported Monday afternoon.About 2,300 base stations were affected by power outages or transmission problems, China Mobile's Sichuan office told the state-run Xinhua News Agency, adding that repairs were under way. China is the nation's and world's largest mobile service provider. Service was affected in both southwestern Sichuan province, and in northwestern Shaanxi province, Xinhua reported, although those two areas do not abut. China Mobile also said that call volume had increased...

TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) -- Israel was born not only into war, carnage and controversy but also into shortage. Shorn of cash and goods, it had to ration meat, eggs and cooking oil through a coupon system that soon generated undernourishment, bread lines and a thriving black market. Worse, lacking allies, trade partners and natural resources while swamped by poor immigrants, the Israeli economy was also burdened by its leaders' rigorous socialism. Central planning initially generated growth, but Israel's protectionist duties, sclerotic financial system, high labor costs, bloated public sector and exorbitant defense spending soon proved untenable. By the 1980s the...

Toshiba’s SpursEngine Chip to Find Home in Company’s Notebooks Toshiba plans to equip some of its multimedia-oriented mobile computers with its multimedia processor that can accelerate various applications, including graphics, physics, video and so on. Toshiba did not disclose how much its customers should pay for the part. On the 8th of May Toshiba disclosed its growth strategies for investors for the year 2008, one of which was integration of the SpursEngine processor into advanced media center AV Qosmio notebooks. According to Toshiba, the Cell-derivative processor will upscale standard picture quality to high definition resolution. While the manufacturer did not...

Morgan Sparks, inventor of the first practical transistor, dies at 91 ALBUQUERQUE — Morgan Sparks, who led Sandia National Laboratories for nearly a decade and invented a device that has revolutionized almost every aspect of modern life, has died. Sparks died Saturday at his daughter's home in Fullerton, Calif., Sandia said Tuesday in a news release. He was 91. Sparks worked for 30 years at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey before taking over as director of Sandia in 1972. He served in the post until his retirement in 1981. Sandia and Bell labs officials said Sparks invented the first practical...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Chip sales rose 3.8% in the first quarter, boosted by strong consumer demand worldwide, the Semiconductor Industry Association said Thursday. The industry group said semiconductor sales totaled $63.4 billion in the first-quarter, up from $61.1 billion for the year-earlier period. The revenue figures underscored the strength of the semiconductor industry despite ongoing problems with declining average selling prices of memory chip products. In a written statement, SIA President George Scalise said: "Weakness in memory revenue as a result of rapid price erosion masks the overall strength of semiconductor sales." Excluding memory chips, he said, overall chip...

Orders party platter for platter party Seagate is celebrating the shipment of its one billionth disk drive after 29 years in biz. The storage giant reckons it will reach its second billion in less than five-years' time. Seagate said it's shipped the equivalent of 79 million terabytes of storage since the company made its first hard drive in 1979. The ST506 hard drive Its debut product, the ST506 hard drive, had a 5MB capacity, weighed about five pounds, and cost $1,500 (£757). Today, Seagate sells 1TB drives for under a third of that price. The company figures its next 1,000,000,000...

Barely three weeks ago, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins simultaneously pronounced solid state drives (SSDs) to be toys for a niche market and then threatened to start suing people if it appeared that flash-based storage might become a threat to the magnetic storage industry. That date has apparently arrived. Seagate filed suit against US-based STEC today, claiming that the SSD manufacturer is in violation of four patents covering solid-state memory storage, memory backup, and a drive's ability to scan/test itself in order to check for errors. Watkins has already issued a statement "reassuring" the public that this is simply a case...

BURLINGAME, CALIF. - Late Tuesday, in response to questions from Forbes.com, an Apple spokesman said Apple has agreed to buy a boutique microprocessor design company called PA Semi. The company, which is known for its design of sophisticated, low-power chips, could spell a new future for Apple's flagship iPhone, and possibly iPod products as well. The 150-person chip company, P.A. Semi, was founded in 2003 by Dan Dobberpuhl, who was a lead designer for the well-regarded Alpha and StrongARM microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment in the 1990s. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do...

The current buzz surrounding virtualization is palpable and the hype reminiscent of the Y2K media frenzy machine. But, where Y2K was driven by the need to fix past mistakes, virtualization is the wave of the future. It speaks to the core of the IT mantra – do it better and cheaper, while reducing the toll on resources. Virtualization promises: • Higher resource utilization via device consolidation • Cost reduction associated with infrastructure consolidation • Improved scalability and operation flexibility • Improvements in operational uptime and business continuity • Improved carbon footprint • Reduced reliance on human resources • Increased revenues Despite the promise of virtualization – many...

Next-generation 10,000 RPM, 2.5-inch, 300 GB SATA Hard Drive, WD VelociRaptor is 35 Percent Faster and Twice the Capacity of the Previous Performance King LAKE FOREST, Calif., April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- WD(R) NYSE: WDC announced today that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor(TM) hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA "Raptor" series of drives. Designed with an enterprise-class foundation, the new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is modified specifically for PC and Mac(R) enthusiasts and professional workstations. Destined to become the new high-performance favorite of these groups, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive comes packed with twice the capacity...

A semiconductor coalition led by IBM said yesterday that OEM customers can now start designing future products around the group’s jointly developed 32 nanometer (nm) microprocessor production technology, but it remained vague on the finer technology details. IBM eagerly claimed that the alliance’s latest chip pumping technology can now outstrip the rest of the industry in performance and power consumption because of the level of mastery it reckons it has perfected around 32nm chips that rely on high-k metal gate technology. A bunch of boffins from the likes of Chartered, Infineon, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Freescale, STMicroelectronics that make up the...

Hard drives could experience a massive increase in capacity next year now that a "major" HDD maker has placed an order for equipment to mass-produce 'patterned media' drives. Earlier this week, Malmö, Sweden-based fabrication-equipment maker Obducat announced it had reached an agreement with "a major player in th HDD industry" to supply the unnamed company with up to SKR66m ($11.13m) worth of lithography hardware. Obducat will provide the mystery vendor with a "production-ready" Sindre lithography machine, used to create the high data-density surfaces used by the new drive technology. More equipment orders may follow, the Swedish firm said. Fujitsu is...

By Darren Waters Technology editor, BBC News website Dr Leonid Ponomarenko shows off a device with the transistor embedded Researchers have built the world's smallest transistor - one atom thick and 10 atoms wide - out of a material that could one day replace silicon. The transistor, essentially an on/off switch, has been made using graphene, a two-dimensional material first discovered only four years ago. Graphene is a single layer of graphite, which is found in the humble pencil. The transistor is the key building block of microchips and the basis for almost all electronics. Dr Kostya Novoselov and...

We have confirmation today that this story from yesterday is in fact true. NVIDIA has confirmed to its North American contacts that they will be making graphics chipsets for VIA allowing them to focus on the company’s new CPU technology. There is a rumor floating around the internet that NVIDIA is in a deal with VIA to make graphics chipsets. According to the article, this would allow VIA to focus on its low-power processor business. VIA declined to comment and NVIDIA could not be reached for comment.

SAN JOSE, CA, Apr 10, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- Computer memory that combines the high performance and reliability of flash with the low cost and high capacity of the hard disk drive could be closer than you think, thanks to a team of IBM scientists. Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJf3z9AfiVM In two papers published in the April 11 issue of Science, IBM Fellow Stuart Parkin and colleagues at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose describe both the fundamentals of a technology dubbed "racetrack" memory as well as a milestone in that technology. This milestone could lead to...

The rest of the server world can play with their piddling 2-3GHz chips. IBM, meanwhile, is prepared to deal in the 5GHz realm. The hardware maker has unveiled a Power6-based version of its highest-end Unix server - the Power 595. The box runs on 32 dual-core 5GHz Power6 processors, making it a true performance beast. This big box completes a protracted roll out of the Power6 chip across IBM's Unix server line. Along with the big daddy, IBM revealed a new water-cooled version of the Power 575 server dubbed the Hydro-Cluster. In addition, it refreshed the existing midrange Power 570...

I've been at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, today shooting a piece for Planet Green. While I can't talk about that yet, I can show you these awesome pictures that Dr. Ray LaPierre of the Department of Engineering showed me. (This is the first time they've been online, to my knowledge.) Dr. LaPierre's group used a focus ion beam microscope (FIB) to shoot a beam of gallium ions at the surface of a human hair, carving atoms off the of the surface of the hair to etch these McMaster University logos. When not tattooing hair, they'll use the FIB...

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video...

Intel and Microsoft said Tuesday that they planned to finance two groups of university researchers to start over and design a new generation of computing systems intended to break the industry out of a technological cul-de-sac that threatens to end decades of performance increases in computers. If the research efforts succeed, this would enable the development of new kinds of portable computers and would help computer engineers tackle areas as diverse as speech recognition, image processing, health care systems and music. For example, a music professor at the University of California, Berkeley, David L. Wessel, envisions a new era of...

Atomic-Sized Graphene Double Layer Holds Nanoelectronics Promise YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY, Mar 06, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- IBM Researchers today announced a discovery that combats one of the industry's most perplexing problems in using graphite -- the same material found inside pencils -- as a material for building nanoelectonic circuits vastly smaller than those found in today's silicon based computer chips. For the first time anywhere, IBM scientists have found a way to suppress unwanted interference of electrical signals created when shrinking graphene, a two-dimensional, single-atomic layer thick form of graphite, to dimensions just a few atoms long. Scientists...

The mainframe, the aged yet surprisingly resilient survivor of computing, is getting a face-lift. A model called the I.B.M. z10, which is being introduced Tuesday, is far faster and has three times the data-juggling memory of its three-year-old predecessor, the z9. But the significance of the new machine, analysts say, is that it is a big step in a broad campaign by I.B.M. to make the mainframe computer a high-performance, energy-efficient engine for running all kinds of nonmainframe software.The goal, according to I.B.M. executives and analysts, is to recast the mainframe as a nimble supercomputer in corporate and government data...

Will the building block of life become the building block of the semiconductor industry? It's possible. Scientists at IBM are conducting research into arranging carbon nanotubes--strands of carbon atoms that can conduct electricity--into arrays with DNA molecules. Once the nanotube array is meticulously constructed, the laboratory-generated DNA molecules could be removed, leaving an orderly grid of nanotubes. The nanotube grid, conceivably, could function as a data storage device or perform calculations. "These are DNA nanostructures that are self-assembled into discrete shapes. Our goal is to use these structures as bread boards on which to assemble carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, quantum...

Seventeen piconewtons: that's the force required to move a cobalt atom over a copper surface. For more than 40 years, semiconductor companies have boosted the performance of chips, and hence computers, by steadily shrinking the size of transistors, tiny on-off switches embedded in chips. Transistors have been shrunk so much that some transistor substructures are only a few atoms thick. IBM, along with Intel and several research universities, is dedicating a significant amount of time and energy to take the final leap to learn how to make transistors or even processors and memory devices that consist of strands of molecules...

Tokyo (Japan) – Sharp has developed new 250 mW blue-violet laser diodes which promise to bring a substantial speed boost to Blu-ray writers – up from 72 Mb/s today to a maximum of 216 Mb/s. 

Round Rock (TX) – Still think that Dell is dropping AMD? Think again: TG Daily got to the bottom of the Dell/AMD rumors and discovered that Dell is far from dropping its AMD line-up. In fact, there will be a surprise in new products scheduled for a global launch next week, on February 19. Dell has developed a new line of AMD-based machines for businesses under the OptiPlex brand. At first sight, you won’t see a lot of changes from the old Dimensions C and E series, which were the first AMD system from Dell. The new features are under...

AMD's upcoming tri-core Phenom 8000-series desktop processors will appear next month, though only two of the anticipated three three-core CPUs will make it to market, it has been claimed. According to PC manufacturer sources cited by Chinese-language site HKEPC, only the 2.1GHz Phenom 8400 and the 2.3GHz Phenom 8600 will arrive in March - presumably after a CeBIT launch. Skip a month, however, and May will see the arrival of the 2.4GHz 8750, with the 2.1GHz 8450 and 2.3GHz 8650 following it in the broader May-June timeframe, the moles suggested.

NEW YORK (Map, News) - The lines that tie the globe together by carrying phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick where they lie on the ocean floor.The foundation for a connected world seems quite fragile, an impression reinforced this week when a break in two cables in the Mediterranean Sea disrupted communications across the Middle East and into India and neighboring countries.Yet the network itself is fairly resilient. In fact, cables are broken all the time, usually by fishing lines and ship anchors, and few of us notice. It takes a confluence of factors...

We had to laugh when the latest email from Aquavision landed in our email box. The company has decided that what the world apparently needs is a mammoth 57in in-wall, waterproof LCD TV. Now given the size of the average British bathroom, the mind boggles as to how most of us would actually accommodate the thing. Clearly it's aimed at premiership footballers and City slickers, not mere mortals like us. The TV can be installed in bathrooms and swimming pools (although presumably not underwater), or in the living room for the more conventionally minded. Snappily called the AVF 57-4LCD, it...

Warner Home Video's defection from the HD DVD camp may have put a damper on hardware sales (see " Warner's Blu-ray Disc move has industry buzzing"). In the week since the studio's surprise early-January announcement that after May it will support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format, sales of HD DVD players ground to a virtual halt, giving Blu-ray hardware a whopping 93% sales advantage, according to data from the NPD Group. According to raw retail data collected by NPD, consumers bought just 1,758 HD DVD players the week of January 12, down from 14,558 players the week before. In...