That’s a really fat pipe!

Do you remeber the Virgin 40Gb trial? On the back of this success Virgin have announced the launch of a 50Gbps network service.

The test, using Juniper’s routers and Nortel’s Adaptive Optical Engine, was the first of its kind in the UK. No date has bee announced for the launch of the new service but Virgin have stated that there will be four levels of service with corresponding speeds: 2Gbps, 10Gbps, 20Gbps and 50Gbps.

Virgin meda now has about 3.5 million customers with the number growing at about 80,000 - 90,000 per month.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tech giant in the making.

HP has announced that it’s interested in buying EDS. Now there’s a headline. The acquistion would create a technology company of epic proportions. The deal is expected to cost HP between $12 - $13 billion and would see HP pick up a huge number of outsourced projects that EDS currently has on the books.

The talks are ‘advanced’. This isn’t the biggest buyout for HP - the company paid $20 billion to acquire Compaq back in 2002 but would certainly prove very profitable. Take the UK as an example; EDS has a huge number of projects running for the government.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Cyborg drones stack shelves!

Well, not quite. You know what it’s like, you had a hard weekend. That long mountain bike ride through the forest and over the hills was a killer. Or maybe you had a backlog of 3 months work to do on the garden? So, come Monday morning, you wake up feeling like you’ve been hit by a train. Easy, have the day off or go into work a little later. Just call up your pal and ask him to clock on for you. Now have the rest of the day in bed relaxing.

Not so fast.

Those days may be coming to and end. Budgens have announced the introduction of biometric based clocking systems. Finger print checking software is to be trialled in six stores extending to a furhter 20 franchised outlets. The system, provided by Nivid, is expected to save the first two trial shops around £10,000 per year.

Oh well, there’s no avoiding the work now unless…are you prepared to lose a finger for a day off work?

Popularity: 2% [?]

And I don’t mean 1,000 squats!

It’s a new form of hardware threat. Basically, it means a chip is built to be evil! It’s not a theory. The potential threat has been proven using Leon 3 - an open source chip design. Anyone with the know how can modify the code leading to an undetectable attack method. The University of Illinois has produced a PoC in which around 1,300 logic gates were modified allowing complete access to, and password harvesting from, any compromised machine.

As the attack method lives in hardware land it’s virtually impossible to detect by traditional Anti Virus scans - like having a fifth column in your chassis! Just imagine the havoc if a major chip vendor were compromised - bye, bye bank account!

Popularity: 2% [?]

What did you expect?

There seem to political hot potatoes doing the rounds: cost of the London Olympics and the UK ID card system. Admittedly, they aren’t always front page tending to bubble to the surface from time to time. Guess what? Yes, ID cards are back in the news (you already know that, right?).

In the past 6 months the cost of the ID card system implementation has risen by 37%. Don’t worry - the government claims that overall costs are begin driven down - I wonder how the two sums are actually adding up? Given that the governments track record of IT systems delivery isn’t great there will no doubt be some surprises along the way. No problem, the taxpayers can pick up the bill!

By outsourcing some of the system components the government has projected savings of around half a billion pounds. A report stated: “In order to enrol fingerprint and photograph biometrics in the most convenient and cost-effective way, we now plan to provide this through the open market,”  In effect, private contractors will collect biometric data for the ID cards. Hmm. Does anyone remember a series of reports from last year that showed private companies intimidating and threatening individuals for parking ‘offences’? I don’t think I need to say anymore.

What does that mean to you? For a start there’s the data protection aspect. How will companies be audited and held responsible for breaches? Given the governments inhouse track record, could you trust them? Then there’s the cost: you’re looking at about £300 for an ID card, if full costs are passed on - what do you think the government will do in a time economic uncertainty?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Even more goodies for the Mac.

On Wednesday, Sun announced the release of the first OOo3 beta. The launch sees OOo using the default Aqua interface rather than the standard X11 - good news. I love Open Office but X11 is soooo slow. That said, the current release on my Ubuntu distro, 2.4, is so much faster than 2.3. Another very nice feature is support of Visual Basic Apps on the Mac (nice for anyone that wants to put MS software on a beautiful Mac. There must be a big market otherwise Sun wouldn’t have built these features in).

Do you use the Mac-compatible version of Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008? No problem, OOo3 will be able to read the document format. This is really great news. I have no end of documents sent using Microsofts docx format and I’m tired of booting a Windows machine just to read them. Support for read/write functions in older versions of MS Office will remain. According to Sun, improvements have been made to Writer -  display multiple pages while editing and enhancing the notes feature, Sun said. The Calc and Chart also benefit from improvements

Good news for fans of Open Office but be warned, the software is not suitable for production use. Available Linux, Windows, OS X and Solaris or here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

…by text message!

Not a day goes by without innovative ideas popping. Get this: even the Vatican has time  to text the religious masses. Pope Benedict XVI will be sending “inspirational messages” to mobile phones during Catholic World Youth day in Australia. The event is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and organisers have decided to reach young people “in their social space”.

Daily inspirational messages will be sent  to pilgrims, in Australia, by the Pope. In a further attempt to woo tech savvy believers, a series of catechesis (religious instruction in the form of questions and answers) will be broadcast on the web. Godcasts are go!

In addition, WYD will provide pilgrims with an online social networking site and digital prayer walls.

The Pope is due to arrive in Australia on July 13 and should spend three days on holiday a before the official welcoming ceremony in Sydney July 17. He is planning to depart for Rome on 21st July.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Down but not out.

During the dot com boom it looked like Sun was going to rule the tech world. Times have changed. The company has just posted a net loss of $34 million. That’s not pocket money by anyones standards. Jonathon Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, laid the blame on economic conditions, “The US economy presented Sun with significant challenges in the third quarter,”. Equally, it could be said that most companies are going through the same experiences. Even Microsoft share price has taken a hit recently - around 11%.

Will the Sun rise again?

Sun is by no means out of the game. Total revenue for the year ending 30th March came to $3.27 billion. Now add in the recent acquisition of MySQL in February. This provides two additional revenue streams - the database Enterprise licence and hardware sales (the hope is that customers will start buying more server and storage hardware from Sun for MySQL installations).

Popularity: 4% [?]

David aims ad-loaded rock at Goliath.

It seems to be fashionable to bash Britain. Apparently, we’re supposed to be ashamed of much of our history. Yes, it would appear that bringing peace, stability and deomcracy  to the world through Imperial power is bad. Or so I’m told. Many savvy individuals are moving abroad, not just in the tech industry but across the board. The government doesn’t seem overly concerned about protecting and investing in some prized assets just take the sale of Qinnetiq. It would appear that we’re doomed! Or maybe not, read on…

Pixsta, a UK based advertising company, is set to challenge Google in the web search market. A recent announcement suggests they can enable full image-to-image search based on contextual image retrieval techniques. This is an evolutionary step up from contextual text to text and text to image search currently in use by most other search engines. The technology allows users to click on an image which will, in turn, return more associated images i.e. click on an image of car and images of a similar car by make, model of colour is shown.

According to Pixsta, the technology is advanced enough to allow its use in facial recognition technologies as well as standalone image search.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Wise move.

Small businesses just got a boost from IBM. The software giant has announced a new initiative and software that should take ease the cost and pain that IT puts on small businesses. Basically, IBM are launching fast and easy to setup software with the first stage being Lotus Foundation Start aimed at companies of up to 500 users. This gives you e-mail, backup, recovery and security nicely wrapped up in a bundle.

IBM have also announced the release of a new Application Integration Toolkit and a Global Application Marketplace. The application toolkit allows users to easily install new apps and manage their systems and online services.

GAM will allow business users to access business applications and services as well as business solutions advisors.

Expect to see IBM announce release dates soon.

Popularity: 4% [?]