Technology

In November 2004, during the second battle of Fallujah, an American uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) - a robot plane - located a mortar battery that had been hampering the US operation to retake the town.The mortar's position was logged by the UAV's operator, who was sitting at his desk in Nellis Air Force base near Las Vegas, thousands of miles away. Using the internet, the operator contacted the operator of another armed UAV at a desk in central command ("Centcom") - a safe area away from the theatre of war, with centres in Kuwait, Qutar or Iraq.

Fingerprinting technology is the most reliable and cost effective biometric authentication technology but it's not being deployed on a wide scale because people still imagine that criminals are the only ones that have to surrender their fingerprints, according to Sagem.

Users are resisting the switch to fingerprint authentication technologies because they still see the process of giving a fingerprint as somehow related to being caught by the police, according to Gilles Novel, manager for secure terminals and transactions at Sagem Australasia.

It's not terribly easy to parallel park an automobile on a lake.

Now, John Giljam knows this to be as true as the highway is long, and for good reason: He's tried to park his car on a lake -- and on rivers, ponds, even the Intracoastal Waterway.

Giljam, in fact, has practiced not only parking on water; he's become quite adept at turning sharply on it. (He no longer gets drenched in a curtain of spume when cornering, he'll have you know.) And he's mastered the art of steering clear of critters -- geese, mostly, though gators have a habit of surfacing at inopportune moments.

Evolution of the global VoIP equipment market will push network support services spending to $1.27bn in 2010, industry experts predicted today.

IDC expects traditional divisions between telephony and IT to erode as network equipment vendors move from proprietary hardware and software towards software running over dedicated servers.

The analyst firm pointed out that networking vendors have traditionally experienced very little competition for support services owing to the proprietary nature of their products.

One day, a U.S. soldier entering tense situations without the assistance of an Arabic interpreter might rely on two-way translation software in mobile computers.

This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English.

Satellite-based navigation gadgets can guide motorists from high above, saving bumbling drivers countless hours and extra trips to the gas station. But directing people on a much smaller scale -- such as inside an office -- is a much greater challenge.

Locator equipment based on Global Positioning System satellites is accurate to about 10 feet -- fine for drivers searching for the next right turn but not for pedestrians seeking a front door. And the range of GPS is limited indoors, and it can't on its own differentiate between a path and a wall.

The annual trade show known as Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC), under way here this week, is the Japanese equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), except about two years more advanced. We've come here, along with some 200,000 gadget-happy Japanese consumers, to see what American consumers might expect to see at home in 2008.

Although this week's hijacking of a Turkish passenger jet ended peacefully, the incident did little for the nerves of air travelers, already shaken by August's alleged terror plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners mid-flight.

But a European Union initiative to develop on-board security technology could soon provide planes, pilots and passengers with an extra line of defense.

Intel is expected to unveil next week a second-generation chip implementing Wimax technology that could lead to low-cost wireless broadband services in UK cities.

The first-generation Rosedale1 chip supports only the 802.16d flavour of Wimax, which is intended for fixed links.

Rosedale2 draws less power (a peak 2W as against 5W) and is capable of supporting the 802.16e ?mobile? flavour of Wimax, though this will require a firmware upgrade.

Nokia has launched a new wireless standard to add to the short-range wireless mix.