Technology

Small businesses looking for phone systems will have a new choice early next year, when Aastra Technologies Ltd. releases a new office phone running Nimcat Networks Inc.'s NimX software. The SIP phones, to retail for $325 to $375 apiece, take the PBX out of the picture.

The phones themselves, which look like typical IP screen phones, embody all the switching, auto attendant, directory, transferring and voice mail features usually run off the central PBX, whether IP or traditional TDM.

Airport employees will soon have their biometric data scanned before gaining access to restricted areas, Transport Canada and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority announced Friday.

A new restricted-area card will include either the fingerprint or iris measurement of the cardholder.

The new cards are now being tested at international airports in Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C.

Researchers at Purdue University have developed image analysis techniques that may one day help tie counterfeit money and forged documents to the printers that produced them.

In lab experiments, the researchers examined documents that came from 12 different models of printers and were able to correctly link a document to its printer 11 times. The techniques currently let forensic investigators match a document with only a specific printer model, but will be honed so that a document can be matched to a particular printer.

O.K., so I don't like asking for directions.

But I don't get lost so often that I need to spend more than $1,000 on a built-in car navigation system to plot my course with global positioning satellites.

Nor am I so directionally challenged that I'd want to spend several hundreds for a portable GPS device that I'd need to lug around every time I park my car.

And while some handheld computers have GPS capabilities, not nearly as many people carry a PDA as the legions who've adopted cell phones as a daily appendage.

Internet Light and Power says it will become one of the first ISPs to deploy Microsoft Corp.'s anticipated Sender ID technology in daily operations.

A computer crash that forced a pre-election test of electronic voting machines to be postponed was trumpeted by critics as proof of the balloting technology's unreliability.

The incident in Palm Beach County -- which is infamous for its hanging and pregnant chads during the 2000 presidential election -- did not directly involve the touch-screen terminals on which nearly one in three U.S. voters will cast ballots on Election Day.

Thanks to a quick-thinking robbery victim and his camera phone, police had a photo of the suspect and tracked him down in 10 minutes, police said.

James Robert Barker was in custody on charges of aggravated robbery after allegedly holding up limousine driver Ismael Miranda early Friday at a car wash, police said.

"I don't think camera phones were made with the intent of being crime fighting tools, but they can certainly be just that," police spokesman Don Aaron said. "There are a lot more cameras in the pockets of Americans now with camera phones."

A novel method of optical data storage could soon be used to hold a terabyte of data on a disk the size of a normal DVD, say researchers at Imperial College London, UK.

Information is encoded on a normal DVD in the form of microscopic indents on the surface of the disk. The presence or absence of an indent corresponds to a binary piece of information - a ‘1’ or a ‘0’. Indents are detected by beaming light onto a disk with a laser and measuring the amount of light that bounces back.

"Eat your spinach," Mom used to say. "It will make your muscles grow, power your laptop and recharge your cell phone... " OK. So nobody's Mom said those last two things. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have used spinach to harness a plant's ability to convert sunlight into energy for the first time, creating a device that may one day power laptops, mobile phones and more.

Thousands of miles from the rain and wind of Hurricane Ivan, a model of the storm swirls in the memory and processors of a supercomputer that predicts its likely course and strength.

Working through complex mathematical equations that describe the atmosphere's behavior across the globe, hundreds of microprocessors perform billions of calculations each second on observations collected by sensors dropped by aircraft and other monitors.