Technology

In 1971, the UNIX Time Sharing system, First Edition was released. This simple operating system allowed multiple users to use a single, low-end minicomputer. It became popular, largely due to the fact that the source code was available for free to universities, which produced a generation of graduates who grew up learning UNIX.

Rather than developing their own operating systems, a lot of companies licensed the UNIX source code and produced their own derivatives to run on their hardware. Eventually, UNIX replaced most commercial operating systems.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM unveiled the Blue Gene/L supercomputer on Thursday and announced it's broken its own record again for the world's fastest supercomputer. The 65,536-processor machine can sustain 280.6 trillion calculations per second, called 280.6 teraflops, IBM said on Thursday. That's more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraflops, set when only half the machine was installed, and the top end of the range IBM forecast.

This December, the State Department will start issuing RFID-tagged passports. The embedded tags will contain the person's name, nationality, sex, birth date, place of birth, issuing office and a digital photograph. Government officials promise that this will increase accuracy and speed travelers through immigration procedures.

We wield remote controls to turn things on and off, make them advance, make them halt. Ground-bound pilots use remotes to fly drone airplanes, soldiers to maneuver battlefield robots.

But manipulating humans?

Prepare to be remotely controlled.

Just imagine being rendered the rough equivalent of a radio-controlled toy car.

Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic.

They walk up to an ATM and press their thumbs on the screen. Out spits the cash.

New York? No. Chicago? No. The mountains and jungles of Colombia.

It's one of the few places in the world where banks are using fingerprint biometrics, which verify people's identities based on their unique physical characteristics.

Japanese mobile operator DoCoMo showed the fruits of some of its research into mobiles with its Ubi-Wa, a ring that turns your finger into a phone receiver.

Ubi-Wa has two meanings in Japanese - "Finger ring" and "Speak by finger" - which is exactly what it lets you do.

In noisy places where you cannot hear who you are calling, you simply place the Ubi-Wa bearing finger in the ear.

The ring converts speech sounds to vibrations. These travel down the bone and into the ear canal, which obligingly turns them back into intelligible speech.

This desert pitstop with a handful of casinos was supposed to be the finish line for a robot race sponsored by the Pentagon last year to spur development of unmanned vehicles for warfare.

Problem was, none of the self-driving entries made it this far.

On Saturday, 23 more robot racers will assemble here at the relocated starting line in a sequel to see if any can crisscross at least 145 miles of rough desert and mountain trails without a human driver or remote control.

In the early 80s we had the home video wars, and 2005 is shaping up to be the year of the DVD format wars. If electronic giants like Sony and Toshiba get their way, by this Christmas regular DVDs will begin to be replaced by a superior technology. Just which technology depends on who wins the battle.

Forget voice calls. They're oh so retro. That cell phone in your pocket is well on its way to becoming a remote control for your life.

"Smart" handsets are already being used by busy executives to retrieve important documents from office computers halfway across the globe. They're handling e-mail, programming set-top boxes and keeping an eye on the home surveillance system.

A few thousand years ago, a Greek philosopher, as he snacked on dates on a bench in downtown Athens, may have wondered if the written language folks were starting to use was allowing them to avoid thinking for themselves.