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<p>It's in the air, big changes are afoot. Yeah, tech stocks remain in the toilet, but underdog companies and technologies are beginning to make significant inroads, and the established superpowers are feeling less secure every day. Is this news? Not really, because it's been happening slowly over time, and certainly many ET readers have been closely following and even promoting these changes. Big power shifts are underway. The signs have been subtle and cumulative, but the one that put me over the top was IBM's recent national TV ad pushing their enterprise Linux solutions in a big way (more fervently than any past IBM ads I can remember).</p>

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian researchers say an air-breathing hypersonic "scramjet" engine has successfully achieved supersonic ignition in the atmosphere for the first time -- reaching 7.6 times the speed of sound. A dream of aviation researchers for decades, scramjets, or supersonic combustion ramjets, could one day allow aircraft to travel from London to Sydney in just two hours compared with more than 20 now -- making in-flight movies obsolete. Project leader Allan Paull said data analysed from the July 30 test showed the engine, which uses oxygen in the atmosphere to ignite hydrogen fuel, had reached Mach 7.6 -- a...

<p>In a move that the city's chief technology officer said will make New Orleans a "city of the future," Mayor Ray Nagin has entered a preliminary agreement with Microsoft to update computer systems for City Hall and the Police Department free of charge.</p>

Gravity control investigation raises hopes 10:20 18 August 02 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Controlling gravity will probably never help us launch a spacecraft, but that does not mean we should give up on the idea, says the European Space Agency. It is calling for missions that might one day enable us to harness gravity, however weakly, for the benefits we will reap back on Earth. ESA has never got involved in gravity-control research before. But NASA's highly theoretical Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project in Cleveland, as well as recent announcements of unusual experimental findings in major science journals, have...

News Home - Yahoo! - Help Welcome, Guest Personalize News Home Page - Sign In Yahoo! News Friday, August 16, 2002 Search for Advanced News Front Page Top Stories World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Politics Science Health Oddly Enough Op/Ed Lifestyle Local Comics News Photos Weather Most Popular Audio/Video Full Coverage Lottery Crosswords News Resources Providers Reuters AP Internet Report TechWeb USA TODAY NewsFactor MacCentral News Alerts Bertelsmann AG Napster Sony Corp Internet My Yahoo! Add Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo! Technology - Reuters Internet Report Record Labels Sue Internet Providers over Site Fri Aug 16,...

<p>After providing software for a $299 Wal-Mart PC, Lindows.com said it is on the verge of striking a deal which would push the price point down to $199. In a letter to customers posted on the Lindows.com web site, Lindows.com chief executive Michael Robertson said the company would be announcing a $199 PC "very soon". Robertson was unavailable for comment. While the deal has not been signed, an agreement with a major retailer and hardware manufacturer will be signed "in about a week, give or take a few days," according to a spokeswoman for Lindows, based in San Diego, Calif. She declined further comment.</p>

A Microsoft security PR bulletin dealing with the recent SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate hole reported by Mike Benham goes out of its way to assure Windows users that there's little to be concerned about. The recent negative talk about it hasn't been properly 'balanced' (i.e., approved by the Marketing Department), apparently. "We regret any anxiety that customers may have experienced regarding this issue. Clearly, it would have been best if a balanced assessment of the issue and its risk had been available from the start," the company's PR bunnies want you to know. Attacking the flaw, MS says, would...

LONDON (Reuters) - A robot has taught itself the principles of flying -- learning in just three hours what evolution took millions of years to achieve, according to research by Swedish scientists published on Wednesday. Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology built a robot with wings and then gave it random instructions through a computer at the rate of 20 per second. Each instruction produced a small movement -- the robot's wings could move up and down, forwards and backwards, and twist in either direction, the research published in Britain's New Scientist magazine said. The robot...

What do you get when you cross Sun Microsystems and the open source community centered on Linux? I thought the answer was lower-cost servers that run Linux, which is what Sun announced this week. But Sun CEO Scott McNealy has far grander ambitions that he hopes the open source community will help him achieve: breaking Microsoft's grip on the desktop and expanding Sun's hardware offerings. I don't think anyone can break Microsoft's desktop grip at this point, but Sun has the right idea in formulating an alternative that is more coherent than the pieces you can cobble together to create...

<p>I'M SITTING ACROSS FROM A BLIND MAN — CALL HIM PATIENT Alpha — at a long table in a windowless conference room in New York. On one end of the table there's an old television and a VCR. On the other end are a couple of laptops. They're connected by wires to a pair of homemade signal processors housed in unadorned gunmetal-gray boxes, each no bigger than a loaf of bread. In the corner stands a plastic ficus tree, and beyond that, against the far wall, a crowded bookshelf. Otherwise, the walls are white and bare. When the world's first bionic eye is turned on, this is what Patient Alpha will see.</p>

A serious flaw in SSL certificate handling reported by Mike Benham, affecting IE and Konqueror, has already been fixed by KDE's Waldo Bastian, we're pleased to mention. The fix is available only in the CVS (Concurrent Versions System) tree at the moment, but KDE reckons it will have patched binaries available for its 3.0.3 version, available early next week. A patch for KDE 2.2.x is currently in the works. As for Microsoft? According to Benham they haven't even replied to him yet. Apparently, real Trustworthy Computing takes an enormous amount of time. Conversely, the speed with which the open source...

MANHATTAN -- A unique chemical that kills deadly bacteria such as E. coli and anthrax is gaining momentum as a tool against biological terrorism. The magnesium oxide nanoparticle developed by Kenneth Klabunde, distinguished professor of chemistry at Kansas State University, is now getting a gig as a cover model. The bacteria-killing chemical will grace the cover of the Aug. 20 edition of Langmuir, the American Chemical Society's journal of surface and colloid chemistry. The journal will publish a study about the nanoparticles written by Klabunde, Peter Stoimenov, a graduate student from Bulgaria, and George Marchin, associate professor of biology at...

<p>The body is connected to a skateboard-like chassis that contains most of the vehicle's working parts.</p> <p>General Motors Corp. revealing the first pictures Wednesday of the fuel cell powered vehicle, called the Hy-wire.</p> <p>It's the first drivable version of a concept the automaker unveiled during January's North American International Auto Show in Detroit under the name Autonomy as its attempt to reinvent the automobile.</p>

Lasers now work at new wavelengths FROM a human point of view, the terahertz frequencies are a curiously barren region of the electromagnetic spectrum. They lie, unexploited, between microwaves at long wavelengths and infra-red at short. They are neglected because no one has developed a convenient source of terahertz radiation. Not yet, anyway. But a laser unveiled by Alessandro Tredicucci of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, at the recent International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors, in Edinburgh, lights the way to the future. Research into terahertz sources has been driven hard by demand from industry. Terahertz frequencies...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- There's high-speed Internet in the air. A technology originally developed to link PCs in small, wireless clusters is spurring grassroots efforts to create Internet ``clouds'' that could eventually bypass the networks of big telecommunications providers. So far, the greatest buzz over WiFi, or Wireless Fidelity, has surrounded the sharing of connectivity among neighbors, friends and strangers. But the inexpensive technology, known scientifically as 802.11b, may be destined for something much bigger. Users are expanding homegrown networks with little or no control from the local phone or cable company. ``This feels like the Internet from 1994,''...

<p>A Maryland hacker used simple Web tools like whois and traceroute -- as well as online translation software and an anti-cybersquatting service -- to take over the domain name of al-Qaida's website. And he's ready to do it again.</p> <p>Jon Messner, the Internet entrepreneur who perpetrated the recent domain hijacking, used SnapName's Snapback service to obtain ownership of the domain www.alneda.com.</p>

Dell No Longer Selling Systems w/o Microsoft OS Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday August 10, @01:17PM from the yer-bringing-me-down-man dept. Some Sys Admin sent in an email that he got from Dell which basically says Microsoft will no longer allow Dell to sell PCs without an operating system. Please note that Microsoft is not a monopoly, and does not use their monopoly power to squish competition in the market place. The message itself is attached below, and is worth a read, especially the last bit. UPDATES 1. Effective 8/26 - New Microsoft contract rules stipulate that we can no...

After years of upping the technological ante, suppliers of micro fuel cells may finally be preparing to make a bid for the $10 billion-a-year rechargeable-battery market. Their efforts reached a high-water mark this past week, as MTI MicroFuel Cells Inc. (Albany, N.Y.) unveiled a prototype fuel cell that's small enough to ride piggyback on a cell phone, while offering greater charging potential than a lithium ion battery. The technology, said to be manufacturable because it employs no pumps or water recirculation techniques, could be in production as early as 2004, the company said. MTI's 90-cubic-centimeter device, reportedly the smallest direct-methanol...

Consumer Reports has given Apple top marks among other PC makers for Technical Support, beating out Dell, Gateway, HP and Compaq. Apple also scored high marks for the number of repairs that were needed on systems during the past five years, only being beaten by Dell.

As with many rumors about Apple Computer, this one started with a single sentence uttered by Steve Jobs. The setting was an analysts meeting in July, where the Apple chief executive outlined his company's financial condition and discussed future plans. He took a question about the possibility that Apple might one day use chips from Intel instead of the Motorola chips now in its computers. The answer was classic Jobs: careful, noncommittal and just vague enough to keep people guessing. First, he said, Apple would have to complete its transition from using OS 9, its older, "classic" operating system,...