The Inquirer

Microsoft mulls printing up medication

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:11:05 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 19:06:00

Inkjet junkies gather round

MICROSOFT'S VISION OF THE future involves people being able to self medicate by printing out their own pharmaceutical drugs straight from a printer, according to a top Volish exec. Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, said he thought that at some point soon, people would be able...

Gates offers free software in Asia

Mark Ballard — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:46:01 GMT

Mark Ballard the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 17:31:00

Pulls Intel trump card for digital have-nots

BILL GATES HAS OFFERED free software for a million PCs the Indonesian government is trying to acquire for students, according to the Jakarta Post today. Gates met Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, yesterday to talk about how the country was also the fourth...

Video games don't turn teenagers into psycho killers

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:10:49 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 16:54:00

Blame the parents instead

A NEW BOOK PUBLISHED by a couple of Harvard boffins reckons that video games are really not to blame if your child turns out to be a deranged and psychotic mass murderer. The Harvard Medical school husband and wife team, Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, published their study findings in...

Boffins measure hotness of chillies using nanotubes

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:17:26 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 15:50:00

Hot to trot

CHEMISTRY BOFFINS FROM OXFORD university have invented a way of gauging how hot a chili sauce is using carbon nanotubes. The Oxford uni team, led by Professor Richard Compton, had been looking into different ways to measure the amounts of capsaicinoids in chillies, which is ultimately what makes them hot....

Intel plays games with USB3.0

Charlie Demerjian — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:17:24 GMT

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 16:07:00

Comment Forks and knives

THERE IS ANOTHER power game brewing over USB3.0 and it looks like the user is going to pay the price once again. If you remember the OHCI/UHCI mess that made USB1.0 worthless, Intel is about to provoke the same thing for USB3.0....

Toshiba wants half of SSD market

Stewart Meagher — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:40:47 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 15:05:00

Solid statement

TOSHIBA'S TOP MAN Atsutoshi Nishida has told attendees at a corporate strategy meeting that the company expects to be making one in every two solid state drives by the end of the decade. The Japanese company, which has put together a totally new team to develop the up-and-coming storage technology,...

Blizzard abuses copyright law

Egan Orion — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:40:46 GMT

Egan Orion the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 15:09:00

We own your software, not you

WORLD OF WARCRAFT (WoW) proprietor Blizzard Entertainment is trying to wield copyright law like a club in its lawsuit against Michael Donnelly, the creator of the Glider robot "helper" program that plays WoW automagically for users....

Sun open sources Mac OS X virtualisation tool

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:47:05 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 14:04:00

Sun, see and open sauce

SUN MICROSYSTEMS HAS unveiled a useful little update to its xVM VirtualBox, open sauce desktop virtualisation, which now has support for both Solaris and Mac OS X. The update means that Sun is now officially the first firm to have launched open source virtualisation for those particular two operating systems....

Boffins integrate nanowire devices directly onto silicon

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:08:24 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 13:48:00

Tiddly blighters

BOFFINS claim to have come up with a novel way making nanowire photonic and electronic integrated circuits. The researchers were able to create a low cost and high volume way of getting nanowire, whose diameter is one-thousandth that of a human hair, straight onto silicon....

Apple Interweb service could threaten Exchange

Stewart Meagher — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:08:24 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 13:55:00

Dotmac rumours good for business

UNSUBSTANTIATED RUMOURS from spookily-reliable Apple watchers The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) point towards a major upgrade to the Cupertino company's Web-based .Mac service. Expected to arrive alongside the new Iphone at Apple's WWDC in June, the revamped £50-a-year service will offer (in addition to the current storage, back-up, email and...

UK pledges £1 billion tech fund

Mark Ballard — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:01:19 GMT

Mark Ballard the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 11:46:00

Like for like, like

THE UK government has set aside a £1 billion fund to seed research and development over the next three years. Innovation was the word favoured by ministers who presented the plan yesterday. They would give the money to firms that could match the funding, pound for pound....

Mafiaa demands $15 million from Pirate Bay

Egan Orion — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:01:19 GMT

Egan Orion the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 11:50:00

Pirate Bay principals scoff

THE MPAA says it will be demanding $15.4 million from Pirate Bay when its lawsuit goes to trial. The content mafiaa plans to claim damages for just four movies -- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Syriana, The Pink Panther and Walk the Line -- and 13 episodes of...

XP SP3 crashes AMD machines

Stewart Meagher — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:42:20 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 11:23:00

Here we go loop de loo

THE LONG-AWAITED and much-delayed update to Windows XP, Service Pack 3, is giving owners of machines with AMD hardware headaches aplenty it seems. The problems, which first arose just one day after the push, have been causing lots of noise on Microsoft support sites and angry user bogs....

Poisonous Apples hit bottom of eco barrel

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:23:28 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 10:45:00

Cupertino not going green enough

A NEW REPORT ranking how well companies do when it comes to going green and doing their bit to reduce their carbon footprints, shows that while many in the Tech industry have made huge strides towards eco-ness, Apple still has rotten environmental policies....

US warns China about standards war

Nick Farrell — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:23:27 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 10:55:00

Follow us or risk isolation

THE FORMER English colony of Virginia has warned the glorious People's Republic of China that it needs to follow technology standards and not impose them on the rest of the world. That's its job. US Under-Secretary of Commerce Christopher Padilla warned that if China went around creating its own technology...

GTA4 causes mass manslaughter

Wily Ferret — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:23:27 GMT

Wily Ferret the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 11:00:00

Online hotbed of car crime

GTA4 INSPIRED more than 2.3 million people to get online with their Xbox 360s over launch weekend, according to stats compiled by Volish Guru Larry Hyrb. The online console service saw 1m concurrent players at its peak, thanks to GTA's seamless built-in multiplayer experience that allows gamers to set up...

Graphzilla posts marginal losses

Wily Ferret — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:23:27 GMT

Wily Ferret the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 11:04:00

G92 yield yields cost hike

NVIDIA HAS HAD a bit of a tough time making its margins targets, according to its Chief Financial Office Marv Burkett. Burkett's comments are explored on top financial feed Barron's this morning. Hidden in the post are a few choice cuts from our man Marv, who explains that G92 is...

Asus Eee PC cheaper with Windows

Egan Orion — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:45:40 GMT

Egan Orion the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 00:39:00

For punters Down Under

WINDOWS XP pre-installed will be AU$50 cheaper than the same computer fitted with Linux on the next batch of Asus Eee ultramobile laptops to hit Australia, Information Week reports. The Linux model will have a 20GB hard drive while the Windows XP version will have just 12GB of disk space,...

Xbox Jasper 65nm chips all lined up

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:09:19 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 09:26:00

Between IBM and the Taiwanese

MICROSOFT has lined up all the chips it needs to build its upcoming Xbox revision named Jasper. Jasper is due this summer and features chippery shrunk from 90nm to 65. IBM is supplying 65nm Xenon microprocessors for the box....

Torrent Spy appeals

Nick Farrell — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:55:03 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 08:16:00

Judge ignored case

BANKRUPTED P2P SITE Torrent Spy has said it will appeal against a $110-million-dollar legal judgment after losing its case against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The MPAA spun a line that the loss of the case proved that such sites were illegal and it had every right to...

DRM alive and kicking

Nick Farrell — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:55:02 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 08:24:00

MAFIAA wants to bring it back from the dead

DESPITE BEING HATED, causing its members legal woes, and not actually working, the Recording Industry Association of America wants to bring back DRM. David Hughes, who heads up the RIAA's technology unit, said that while lots of recording companies were trying to distance themselves from DRM he thinks it will...

Firefox fights Trojan

Nick Farrell — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:55:02 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 08:31:00

Rogue code went out with language pack

THE MOZZARELLA Foundation has admitted that language packs for its Open Sauce Firefox browser shipped with a particularly nasty bit of malware. The Trojan had infected a Korean language pack and had sat on the Firebadger add-on page for months before it was spotted by a bloke called Hai-Nam Nguyen....

GPL prevails again

Egan Orion — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:20:10 GMT

Egan Orion the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 07:57:00

Skype withdraws appeal

THE GPL WON OUT again Thursday in a German courtroom as Skype withdrew its appeal of a lower court ruling saying it violated the General Public License by offering mobile phones that used a modified Linux kernel without publishing that source code....

IBM predicts the weather

Nick Farrell — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:20:10 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 08:07:00

Big Blue skies

IBM HAS SWITCHED ON a new supercomputer which will use all of its power to work out if it will be nice weather. Bluefire, which will sit at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, will help Michael Fish-type boffins create more precise models....

Gadgets kill the Internet

Nick Farrell — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:20:10 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 08:13:00

Boffin bemoans lack of tinkering

GADGETS SUCH AS Apple's iPhone, RIM'S Blackberry and Vole's Xbox are killing the creativity that created the Internet according to a top boffin. Professor Jonathan Zittrain scribbles in his new book that the latest gizmos, which are sealed, "sterile" boxes do not allow the sort of tinkering that leads to...