Free Republic

JOHNSTOWN, PA, September 19, 2002 - Daniel R. DeVos, President and Chief Executive Officer of Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) recently announced that the Department of Defense Fuel Cell Test and Evaluation Center (FCTec) has purchased and will install and test a 5-kilowatt (kW) combined heat and power proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell system designed and manufactured by Plug Power Inc., Latham, New York. The FCTec is operated by CTC in Johnstown, Pennsylvania under the sponsorship of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center/Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC/CERL). The Plug Power natural-gas-fueled stationary 5-kW fuel cell is the first...

Stardate 20021005.2128 (On Screen): As I think many of my readers know, I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones. Qualcomm is the company which invented CDMA, and made it practical, and made it into a market success, and it now dominates the American market, where Verizon and Sprint both use it. There are two other nationwide cellular systems: AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA, which is obsolete and has no upgrade path. Cingular uses GSM, a more sophisticated form of TDMA from Europe. And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major case of schadenfreude. The...

Energy Department Cites Remarkable Advance In ‘Smart' Oil, Gas Drilling San Antonio, TX - Government and industry officials today announced a major innovation that turns an oil and gas drill pipe into a high-speed data transmission tool capable of sending data from the bottom of a well 100,000 times faster than technology in common use today. The new system, aptly named IntelliPipeTM, could revolutionize the way companies probe for oil and gas. It was developed by an engineering team of Grant Prideco, Houston, Texas; and Novatek Engineering, Provo, Utah, under a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. "The...

<p>But initially, at least, the virus was not causing major problems for computer users, because its purpose appeared to be to open communication ports on infected systems and to replicate itself, not to destroy files.</p> <p>"It appears to be designed by someone who intended to steal credit card info or other data, not necessarily destroy files," said George Stagonis, a researcher for anti-virus company Central Command.</p>

I need some advice and help. I just got slammed by a misbehaving app's installer and my WinXP box crashed hard. I've gotten everything back up, except for one vitally important item. When I started MS Outlook, it could not open my Default pst file. That, of course, has my Calendar and tons of saved email messages. The last backup I did was 9/26/02, so I've only lost 9 days, but if there's a way to restore the more current, but corrupted, pst file, I'd sure like to do it. Everytime I move that pst back to the Default location,...

IBM And MOSIS Expand Initiative To Help Emerging Companies And Universities Create Innovative Chip Designs 3 Oct 2002, 10:36am ET - - - - - Multi-Project Wafer Services To Include IBM Copper And CMOS Technologies Fabless Semiconductor Association Supplier Expo -- IBM and MOSIS today announced the expansion of an initiative to assist emerging companies and universities in developing innovative chip designs. Specifically, IBM plans to offer MOSIS access to CMOS technologies including IBM's 0.13- and 0.18-micron production processes that feature IBM's copper-wire technology, which MOSIS will integrate into its Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) services. In addition, IBM plans to...

IBM Announces New Technology Designed To Reduce Chip Production Time And Costs 3 Oct 2002, 1:23pm ET - - - - - New Technology And Tool Repairs Nanoscale Defects In Lithographic Masks IBM today announced a new technology and tool for repairing nanoscale defects in lithographic masks. This technology is designed to help increase the yield of functioning integrated circuits, reduce their time to market, and cut their cost of production. Today integrated circuits (IC) are produced by transferring a pattern on a photomask, or a quartz template containing images of integrated circuits, to a silicon wafer. Photomasks are...

University of Chicago chemists have successfully synthesized an electronic component the size of a single molecule that could prove crucial in the continuing push to miniaturize electronic devices. The component, called a molecular diode, restricts current flow to one direction between electronic devices. In the semiconductor industry these components, called p-n junctions, form half of a transistor. Man-Kit Ng, a 2002 Ph.D. in Chemistry, and Luping Yu, Professor in Chemistry, describe their diode in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie and online Sept. 12 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Other researchers have synthesized other...

Envisioned by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, backed by Bill Gates — and financed in part by their bottomless wealth — the idea of delivering high-speed Internet via a constellation of satellites seemed almost a sure thing. But after 12 years of management changes, network design revisions and most recently, telecommunications industry turmoil, the vision of an Internet-in-the-sky has come crashing down to Earth. Teledesic's board has halted work by a contractor building two satellites, effectively putting the ambitious idea into deep hibernation. "Obviously by suspending work on the contract, the board of Teledesic is saying, as we see it...

The Space Gen team participated in the Sept 9-12th 2002 UN/ESA Enhancing the Participation of Youth in Space Conference this week in Austria. At that event a number of youth delegates from around the world felt compelled to join together and speak out against the growing inertia in the US to put weapons in space. Here is their declaration: The Graz Declaration For Peace in Space (MS Word RTF format)12 September 2002 The US government is now planning to put weapons in space. This threatens the precious peace of space, and demands a response from the people of the world....

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Sept. 30, 2002 - Researchers at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory have created the first computer model of a key part of the E-coli ribosome, a cellular structure responsible for the creation of proteins, that has applications in the development of new and powerful antibiotics for use in the treatment of illnesses caused by all pathogens, including a host of bioweapons agents. The research was published Sept. 16, 2002 in the online version of Nature Structural Biology and will be published in the Oct. 2002 print edition. A ribosome's function in a biological system...

This pesky problem freezes my screen and can sure take the joy out of FReepin'. Can anyone help?

Intel's Huge Bet Turns IffyBy JOHN MARKOFF and STEVE LOHR OOGLE — the Internet's leading search engine, powered by an arsenal of computers with 15,000 microprocessors — should be a premier customer for Intel's new Itanium 2 super-chip.Itanium, a joint project of Intel and Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Valley's two largest companies, has been in the laboratory for more than a decade. Itanium is designed to excel at a sweeping array of advanced computing tasks, from solving grand scientific challenges to rendering complex graphics to slicing through vast databases. With more than 200 million transistors on each chip, it is designed...

Friday, 20 September, 2002, 08:57 GMT 09:57 UK Smart alarm clock lets you lie in A smart alarm clock that will allow you a lie-in or wake you up early depending on traffic conditions has been invented by researchers at Brunel University in southern England. The Rise alarm clock has in-built internet access and can be connected to the web via a normal telephone line. The clock retrieves relevant traffic information from across the web based on data the users have given it, such as where they live, where they need to travel to and what time they need to...

Nearly 100 years after the Wright brothers' first heavier-than-air powered flight, the US Air Force is testing an experimental plane that uses "wing warping", the steering and control technique that kept Orville Wright aloft in 1903. But this time round, it will be at supersonic speeds. Unlike conventional aircraft wings, which use movable surfaces like flaps and ailerons for control, wing warping bends the entire wing. The USAF calls it "active aeroelastic wing" technology, and is investing $41 million in the project in the hope that it will lead to lighter, more manoeuvrable supersonic planes. For the first flight test...

Microsoft Corp.'s rivals complained to the U.S. Justice Department ( news - web sites) on Wednesday that the company is reneging on some of the promises it made to settle its antitrust case last year. In a letter to the department, a trade group representing Microsoft's critics and competitors said the software giant had not lived up to a promise to make it easy to substitute non-Microsoft software for some features in the Windows operating system. Under the proposed settlement, Microsoft is required to provide a way for consumers and computer makers to enable or remove access to key...

Twenty-one years ago, the computer left the "glass house" for the desktop. Now a start-up appropriately named ClearCube wants to send it back.The Austin, Texas-based company is trying to popularize a new vision for office computing where users would still have monitors, mice and keyboards on their desks, but their superthin computers would be neatly stacked in centralized computer rooms--the descendents of yesteryear's so-called glass houses. The contemporary twist involves "blade"-style design, in which thin devices are stacked vertically in racks like books or record albums. Although the blade concept has taken the server and storage markets by storm, ClearCube's...

Your key fob could soon double as your credit card. Cheap, easy-to-make tokens of a new glass-studded epoxy resin hold encoded information in a form that's more tamper-resistant and harder to forge than the magnetic strips on swipe cards1. Developed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, the transparent tokens contain tiny glass spheres, around half a millimetre across. Like a bar code, they are read by a laser beam. And each token costs only about one cent to make. The glass spheres scatter laser light so that it falls in a speckle pattern on a surface on the...

An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology. WHEN a Greek sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny island of Antikythera in 1900, it was the statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women. The ship's cargo of luxury goods also included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC. But the most important finds proved to be...

<p>Apple Computer is looking toward a 64-bit future for the Mac -- courtesy of PowerPC partner IBM.</p> <p>According to sources, IBM Microelectronics, a division of IBM, is working with Apple on a 64-bit PowerPC processor for use in the latter's high-end desktops and servers.</p>