Technology News Blog

SiC Devices Are a Long Time Coming

According to a report released today from Yole Développement, the power electronics industry is still waiting for silicon carbide-based transistors. Today, the total accessible market for SiC devices is $2.6B, part of the overall $12B silicon-based power discrete business in 2008. The substrate market is dominated by Cree, followed by II-VI and SiCrystal.

According to a report released today from Yole Développement, the power electronics industry is still waiting for impact from silicon carbide-based transistors. Today, the total accessible market for SiC devices is $2.6B, part of the overall $12B silicon-based power discrete business in 2008. The largest applications in this space are in power supply power factor controllers (PFCs), uninterrupted power supplies and motor AC drives. In the future, promising applications include electric vehicle and hybrid electric vehicles (EVs/HEVs) and inverters for PV installations, markets that are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rates of roughly 15% per year. (more…)

Cities can gain much from green roofs

Cities in the United States could learn a great deal from European cities. In particular, US cities could learn the value of green roofs. That value lies in less storm runoff, pollution, and in longer roof life. As the above picture of a green roof in Amsterdam points out, green roofs are also better looking.

Michigan State University has a green roof research program that looks not only at the advantages of a green roof, but the different variables of green roofs that give the greatest viability and longevity. The research program was begun in 2000 as a collaboration with Ford Motor Company. Ford wanted to determine the best way to install a green roof on its 10.4 acre assembly plant in Dearborn, Michigan. From there MSU began research projects into the best “plant species, propagation and establishment methods, plant succession, carbon sequestration potential, water and nutrient requirements, water quality and quantity of stormwater runoff, and energy consumption”. Michigan State has been growing plants on the top of University buildings ever since. (more…)

Seagate Tech begins shipping Barracuda hard drive

SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY on Wednesday, September 23, began worldwide shipments of the Barracuda XT desktop hard drive, a 7200 RPM product featuring two TB of storage capacity and a blazing fast serial ATA (SATA) sixc Gb per second interface. The 3.5 inch desktop drive is the first to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface and meets the demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage hungry desktop computing applications, while delivering a high performance.

The introduction of the the drive marks the shift to the next generation of desktop computing speed, as Seagate doubles the storage bandwidth of current computers.

“Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office,” said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. (more…)

Malaria drugs may get new lease of life

Australian researchers have pinpointed how the malaria parasite resists the otherwise effective and cheap drug chloroquine.

Biochemist, Dr Rowena Martin and colleagues at the Australian National University in Canberra report their findings today in the journal Science.

“Chloroquine is called ‘the wonder drug’,” says Martin. “It really changed malaria treatment and it’s estimated to have saved more lives than any other drug in history.” (more…)

Is Criticism Of Google’s Outages Unfair?

Give Google a break: Statistics show its reliability to actually be very good. It’s the media that makes a big deal of Gmail and Gnews outages, not users.

That is what several readers told me in response to yesterday’s post concerning recent problems with the two services. Their authors have a point: The actual amount of downtime is pretty small.

And a news service outage isn’t the same as losing access to your hosted e-mail. As one reader put it, “Can’t you find Reuters.com?” (more…)

KOLKATA: State transport corporations will operate buses bought under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) if private
operators do not replace their old polluting vehicles with the new ones.

Under JNNURM, Bengal acquired 1,300 buses 1,200 for Kolkata and 100 for Asansol-Durgapur. The transport department hoped the private sector would pick up 1,030 buses, leaving only 270 for the state-owned corporations. Of these, CSTC and CTC were to operate 100 each, SBSTC and WBSTC 25 each and WB Hidco 20.

While WBSTC has entered into joint venture agreements with private firms for 300 ultra-low floor AC buses, the state has found few takers for the 730 semi-low floor buses. (more…)

Plan afoot to power state with green energy

BANGALORE: The World Institute of Sustainable Energy (WISE) with funding from the British High Commission has created a draft renewable energy
plan for Karnataka, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. The plan aims to develop capacity building to implement renewable technologies for climate mitigation.

The Karnataka Renewable Energy Development Limited has already produced a draft renewable energy policy. It will be finalized and sent to the cabinet next month. (more…)

Yahoo Brands Flickr; Users Retaliate

It appears that a few days ago there was a slight change to Flickr’s logo: an addition of a small Yahoo logo to the right side so it reads “Flickr from Yahoo.” In response, many Flickr users have taken to the photo-sharing site’s forums to express their horror at Yahoo’s branding on Flickr.

The underlying fact is that Flickr users, many of whom are techy hipsters, just don’t mix well with “middle America Yahoo” as Bartz put it a few days ago at the unveiling of Yahoo’s $100 million marketing campaign about “Y!ou.” Bartz said to a roomful of journalists and bloggers:

???When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo. I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys?. Go be cynical about frickin??? Google. You got me pissed off.??? (more…)

Google Outages Raise Questions About Online Services

Two recent disruptions in Google (NSDQ:GOOG)’s Gmail service and a disruption in the Google News site, as well as outages in other online-based services could either mean a bust in the nascent cloud computing industry or a boom for other service providers looking to develop cloud-based services.

Google’s Gmail Web-based e-mail service was down for about two hours on Thursday, blocking users from accessing their e-mail accounts, contact lists, and related functions.

The outage followed a one-hour disruption to Gmail that occurred on September 1. (more…)

Discovery of water on moon boosts prospects for permanent lunar bas
Nasa’s long-term goal of establishing a permanent, crewed base on the moon has been bolstered by the revelation there are large quantities of water locked in its soil

Nasa’s plans to establish a human outpost on the moon have received a surprise boost following the discovery of large amounts of water on its surface.

Three spacecraft detected a thin sheen of water locked up in the first few millimetres of lunar soil that could be extracted and used to sustain astronauts on expeditions to our nearest celestial neighbour.

Instruments aboard the spacecraft suggest that a cubic metre of soil on the lunar surface could hold around a litre of water. (more…)

ISROs trusted workhorse PSLV-C14 repeatedly proved its reliability

During Sep. 1993 – Apr. 2009 period, PSLV had fifteen launches of which fourteen were consecutively successful. Recently, PSLV had successfully launched RISAT-2 and ANUSAT spacecrafts on April 20, 2009 including which it has given fifteen consecutive successes of launching satellites. Now yesterday ISROs PSLV-C14 repeatedly proved its reliability by launching Oceansat-2 and six nano European satellites on board a rocket that blasted off from from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota at 11:51 A.m on Wednesday, September 23rd 2009.

India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C14, in its 16th Mission launched 958 kg Oceansat-2 and six nano-satellites into a 720 km. intended Sun Synchronous Polar Orbit (SSPO) yesterday. PSLV is a four-stage launch vehicle employing both solid and liquid propulsion stages. PSLV is the trusted workhorse launch Vehicle of ISRO. (more…)

India’s caste system descended from two tribes ‘not colonialism’

Genetic profiling shows that the structure of Indian society today reflects early social groupings, not just colonialism India’s caste system is not a relic of colonialism but has existed in some form for thousands of years, the most comprehensive study yet of the genetic diversity of the sub-continent has suggested.

The genetic profiles typical of modern castes are indistinguishable from those of much older tribal groups, Indian and American scientists have found. This suggests that they emerged from populations of shared ancestry who have married among themselves for many generations.

The researchers wrote in the journal Nature: “Some historians have argued that caste in modern India is an ‘invention’ of colonialism, in the sense that it became more rigid under colonial rule. However, our results indicate that many current distinctions among groups are ancient and that strong endogamy [marriage within a group] must have shaped marriage patterns in India for thousands of years.” (more…)

Register your domains with Times Internet Ltd

Domain business in India is growing at 35% yearly and the internet business by 30% despite most technology vendors witnessing a sharp
decline in their revenue due to recession. SMEs will play a major role in this domain business as they would reap the benefits of the current growth trend.

Times Internet Limited is now a domain registrar. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers) has appointed TIL as an accredited domain registrar for the following domains – .com, .net, .info and .org. More information is available on www.domains.indiatimes.com

With this new offering, TIL graduates from being a prominent domain reseller to joining a handful of Indian organizations that have attained the prestigious status of being full fledged registrars. TIL has been in the business of enabling SME & SOHOs in their online business since many years. (more…)

Dot Hill starts Software RAID

Disk array subsystem supplier Dot Hill is selling a software RAID product to run on multi-core processors.

In keeping with its selling of disk array products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) Dot Hill is supplying its Virtual RAID Adapter (VRA) software in its RAIDCore line to OEMs as well. In fact, AMD has signed up for it, with the VRA software available for AMD’s newest SP5100 Southbridge chipset.

Dot Hill’s notion is to help volume server OEMs or ODMs (original design manufacturers) offer built-in RAID functionality without the expense of a dedicated RAID-on-chip acceleration device. They can just use a spare core in the multi-core CPU instead.

Rorke Data announced a similar product in April.

Dot Hill acquired some assets from Ciprico in September 2008, which included exclusive rights to license RAIDCore technology from Broadcom Corporation. Dot Hill says: “The acquisition was part of a strategic initiative to offer software-only products for the enterprise server data protection market, as a complementary offering to its existing external hardware RAID array business.” (more…)

Tarang Software launches Mobile Wallet

City-based Tarang Software Technologies (Tarang) a leading provider of payment solutions to banks, on Monday launched the `Mobile Wallet’.

Mobile Wallet allows a customer access their entire financial portfolio via their mobile phones securely, while the bank takes their gamut of offerings one step further and enhances their repertoire of Mobile Banking Solutions with effortless ease, witho ut compromising quality or security, a press release said here today.

Mobile Wallet is designed to meet the demands and growing trend of mobility in banking. It is an account aggregation solution delivered on mobile phones, which seamlessly fits into a banking institution’s existing Mobile Banking Solution, the release said. (more…)

Portrait Software set for return to profit

Portrait Software says its expects to swing back into profit for the first half with revenue ahead of last year.

The customer interaction software provider says its proportion of high-margin licence revenue is expected to have doubled.

Benefits of last year’s cost-efficiency programme are flowing through as intended, says chairman Paul Hewitt in his AGM statement, ‘which combined with our top-line growth means we expect to report a profitable first half in comparison to a loss in the first half of the previous year’.

Hewitt adds, ‘The growth in licence deals has been generated primarily from growing demand for our portfolio of customer marketing applications, with our US region and global partner channel sales performing strongly. (more…)

World’s first Superspeed HD video camera: USB 3.0 is blazing fast

At Intel’s Developer Forum, companies Point Grey and Fresco Logic are showing off the world’s first USB 3.0 streaming HD video camera.

The unit streams 1920 x 1080 video at 60 frames per second and streams uncompressed from the Point Grey camera to the Fresco Logic controller. Clearly, USB 3.0 is fast.

Voice feature for Twitter goes into beta today

A new service designed to let Twitter users make short, tweet-like phone calls to one another begins its beta testing period today.

Jajah, , an IP communications company based in the US., launched the free service, called Jajah@call today. It’s set up to allow Twitter users to launch two-minute, two-way voice chats with any other Twitter user – even without knowing the other person’s phone number.

To use the new service, people have to be users of both Twitter and Jajah, the person receiving the call has to be a Twitter follower of the person making the call. In a statement, Jajah said the system should work on any Twitter platform — from a computer to a mobile phone.
(more…)

ARM attacks Atom with 2GHz A9; can servers be far behind?

ARM took a major step this week in bringing the netbook fight back to Intel by boosting its Cortex A9 processor up into Atom territory. One of the engineers behind Amazon Web Services is even talking up the part as potential datacenter web server material.

Intel hasn’t been shy about its plans to challenge ARM in the low-power embedded space, and the world’s largest chipmaker is gearing up for the debut of the 32nm process that will enable it to reach new levels of x86 power efficiency. But ARM isn’t sitting still, and the British IP company took a major step last week in bringing the fight back to Intel by boosting its Cortex A9 processor up into Atom territory. One of the engineers behind Amazon Web Services is even eyeing the part as potential datacenter web server material.

On Wednesday, ARM announced the availability of IP for a 2GHz dual-core A9 processor on TSMC’s 40nm process, which the company claims will offer massively more performance than Atom within a smaller power envelope. You’ll recall that Cortex A9 is an out-of-order processor, so, unlike the in-order Atom, the A9 should have much better performance per clock on standard integer code. So while some of ARM’s claims about the performance delta between its 2GHz A9 and Atom may be overblown, the part at 40nm should therefore be more than competitive with a 32nm Atom in performance per watt. (more…)

Is Microsoft Pushing the Zune HD Towards Yet Another Fail?

The Zune HD is the greatest Zune till date! The gorgeous screen, the HD radio, the works. It’s all there on the new Zune. So why do I think that Microsoft is pushing it towards failure? Because it is not giving buyers and users enough incentive to buy it, use it and recommend it to other people.

The Zune is a media player that is largely eclipsed by the iPod. Being in the same league as the Apple PMP is reason enough for it to need to some serious effort behind capturing market share. However, instead of doing that Microsoft is now concentrating on a sure-to-backfire model for content distributions and third-party action.

So what is the third-party support on the Zune like right now? The answer is simple – there is no third-party support in the sense that Redmond has surrounded its Zune castle with a deep and wide moat. Microsoft has not opened up the Zune to potential developers. Instead they are making their own apps and giving them away for free to the public. (more…)