Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted into human beings hold the promise of improving patient care, particularly in emergency settings, but only after privacy questions are addressed, according to a Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) physician who has a chip implanted in his arm.
Siemens researchers have designed an integrated single-chip fiber-optic receiver which could enable cheap 100Gbit/s Ethernet.
In tests over a 480km loop of fiber, the chip converted optical signals to error-free electronic data at 107Gbit/s. It will cut costs by replacing several optical receiving modules with just one, said Siemens project coordinator Dr Rainer Derksen.
At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shrivelled, and that make tech editors cry out, "What have I done to deserve this?"
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has banned 3G mobile phones after a complaint from his wife and her friends about receiving pornography on them.
"I have written to the Minister of Telecommunications to delay the use of certain mobile phones," Hun Sen told an assembly of Buddhist monks in Phnom Penh on Friday.
"We can wait 10 more years until we have managed to improve morality in society."
The roots of radio-frequency identification technology stretch at least as far back as World War II, when transponders helped distinguish between Axis and Allied aircraft.
Over the years the concept has been greatly miniaturized, landing RFID technology in such settings as animal tags, toll-collection devices, passports, keyless entry systems for cars and wireless credit cards.
Micron, the imaging and memory chip maker, has announced a breakthrough in enabling high-definition video and pictures on smaller, faster chips. The technology being used is CMOS - complementary metal-oxide semiconductor - which has been long associated with relatively low quality images compared to those of charge-coupled devices or CCDs preferred in digital cameras and camcorders.
But Micron said it had produced the world’s smallest 8-megapixel image sensor, capable of taking 10 pictures a second at that resolution and 30 pictures at a 2 megapixel resolution.
The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications.
Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around.
Sony Corp. said on Tuesday it would offer the world's first notebook PC equipped with a next-generation Blu-ray optical disk drive in Japan in June, a month behind Toshiba Corp.'s launch last week of laptop PCs with a rival drive.
Sony also said it would unveil in June a handheld PC that uses NAND flash memory instead of a hard disk drive as its storage, in a potential boost to NAND flash makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Toshiba.
On the face of it, the idea of running multiple copies of Windows on a single machine sounds like it has, at best, limited utility. After all, Windows Server is a multiuser, multitasking operating system, and even the Windows desktop operating systems, XP and XP Professional, multitask nicely. Why add the overhead of a virtual operating system?
Ageing and unreliable office computers are making workers unhappy and more likely to claim sick leave, a new survey shows.
A poll conducted by Tickbox.net of more 2,700 European office workers from Britain, France and Germany found that workplace dissatisfaction increased significantly with the age of computer equipment.
British and French respondents said working on outdated computers was the most irritating aspect of office life.
Almost 40 per cent of the workers surveyed in the three countries were using computers at least three years old.
