December 17, 2006, 8:10 PM CT

Apple Delays Filing Annual Report

Apple Computer has announced that it would delay filing an annual report to Securities and Exchange Commission due to the ongoing investigation of its pat stock option practices. The California based company has stated that a special committee constituting its board of directors has found irregularities in its stock option grants. The company further said that it would restate its historical financial statements to take notes non-cash charges for compensation cost pertaining to past option grants.

Since the company is already in determining the time period and amount of the restated results, it missed the December 14 deadline for filing Form 10-K. The company further informed that the report covering the fiscal year ending on September 30 will be filed within a month.

In October the in-house investigation committee has hinted that there is pressing need for the company to restate its finances. The investigation revealed that there are at least 15 dates between 1997 and 2000 that appeared to include grant dates in which grants were approved.

When a company backdate stock option, the options should be issued retroactively in order to correspond with the low points of the stock price that can consequently increase the profit of the beneficiary. This practice, as a matter of fact, is not illegal but it must be revealed to investors and should be accounted properly.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

December 8, 2006, 4:42 AM CT

Robotic Medical Tools Could Improve Surgery Skills

Borrowing ideas from speech recognition research, Johns Hopkins computer scientists are building mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery, including tasks such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue.

The team's long-term goal is to develop an objective way of evaluating a surgeon's work and to help doctors improve their operating room skills. Ultimately, the research also could enable robotic surgical tools to perform with greater precision.

The project, supported by a three-year National Science Foundation grant, has yielded promising early results in modeling suturing work. The researchers performed the suturing with the help of a robotic surgical device, which recorded the movements and made them available for computer analysis.

"Surgery is a skilled activity, and it has a structure that can be taught and acquired," said Gregory D. Hager, a professor of computer science in the university's Whiting School of Engineering and principal investigator on the project. "We can think of that structure as 'the language of surgery.' To develop mathematical models for this language, we're borrowing techniques from speech recognition technology and applying them to motion recognition and skills assessment".

Complicated surgical tasks, Hager said, unfold in a series of steps that resemble the way that words, sentences and paragraphs are used to convey language. "In speech recognition research, we break these down to their most basic sounds, called phonemes," he said. "Following that example, our team wants to break surgical procedures down to simple gestures that can be represented mathematically by computer software".........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

December 6, 2006, 8:37 PM CT

New Magnetic Devices Could Make Computers More Powerful

Researchers have created novel 'spintronic' devices that could point the way for the next generation of more powerful and permanent data storage chips in computers.

Physicist at the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Leeds have discovered a way to precisely control the pattern of magnetic fields in thin magnetic films, which can be used to store information.

The discovery has important consequences for the IT industry, as current technology memory storage has limited scope for develop further. The density with which information can be stored magnetically in permanent memory - hard drives - is reaching a natural limit correlation to the size of the magnetic particles used. The much faster silicon-chip based random access memory - RAM - in computers loses the information stored when the power is switched off.

The key advance of the recent research has been in developing ways to use high energy beams of gallium ions to artificially control the direction of the magnetic field in regions of cobalt films just a few atoms thick.

The direction of the field can be used to store information: in this case "up" or "down" correspond to the "1" or "0" that form the basis of binary information storage in computers.

Further, the physicists have demonstrated that the direction of these magnetic areas can be "read" by measuring their electrical resistance. This can be done much faster than the system for reading information on current hard drives. They propose that the magnetic state can be switched from "up" to "down" with a short pulse of electrical current, thereby fulfilling all the requirements for a fast magnetic memory cell.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

November 29, 2006, 9:27 PM CT

Elegant Leather-Coated Portable HDD

Prestigio Technologies Ltd. is already known for its mobile storage product line. It has added one more glorious product to its line by announcing the availability of is Data Safe II portable hard drive coated in smooth leather. The product features high capacity, additional security and easy back-up functions.

The device is available in 40, 60, 80, 100 or 120 GB capacity modifications based on 2.5" HDD. You can make a choice between the black or brown coating. The product has a provision to clone your data for back up with a one touch backup system. You can ensure the data security by assigning a password to its software-based password system. The best part is its plug and play feature, as it needs no external power supply and can power itself from a USB 2.0 port.

The masterpiece comes packed in a "fashionable box" and is available with Prestigio's local dealers across Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.........

Posted by: Ryan      Permalink         Source

November 27, 2006, 4:35 AM CT

MSI M677 - Laptop with Crystals

If the Gold USB Hub got your attention, this laptop with crystals should probably have the same effect.

On the outside the MSI Crystal M677 has 120 pieces of Austrian crystal located on the laptop lid, while on the inside there is an AMD Turion 64 x2 processor that can handle 2GB of RAM memory. The whole package includes a built-in 1.3megapixel camera, a 15.4-inch screen, a DVD burner, a GeForce Go 7600 video card, and bluetooth + Wi-Fi on the connectivity sections.

It seems like the creators aren't only worried about the outside aspect and beauty, the performance is important too. On a serious note, I find it very silly how people waste money on gadgets that have jewelry, it is not suppose to be that way but since money falls of the trees to the rich personas, they are free to do whatever they want. At least this product combines top notch specifications with luxury instead of low quality specs.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

November 22, 2006, 5:07 AM CT

Rensselaer Incubator Company Receives 2006 "Best of What's New" Award

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Incubator Program today announced that Celery LLC has been selected as one of the winners of the 2006 "Best of What's New" award by Popular Science. Each year, the editors of Popular Science review thousands of products in search of the top 100 tech innovations of the year, breakthrough products and technologies that represent a significant leap in their categories. Celery has developed a mail service device that allows users to send and receive e-mail without the use of a computer.

"Entrepreneurship is ingrained in the Rensselaer culture, and the founders of Celery have had an opportunity to nurture their technological venture as a means of commercializing discovery and innovation within an academic setting," said Michael Tentnowski, director of Rensselaer's Incubator Program. "It is very rewarding for them to receive this recognition from Popular Science as it demonstrates Rensselaer's extraordinary history of fostering discovery and innovation, moving ideas from the lab to the global marketplace. This award is the result of the company's combined vision, analytical capabilities, and entrepreneurial way of thinking to change the world for the better".

The winners were honored during an awards ceremony held in New York City on Nov. 6.........

Posted by: Ryan      Permalink         Source

November 22, 2006, 4:53 AM CT

FTC Halts Unlawful Spyware Operations

Defendants involved with operations that secretly downloaded spyware that changed settings on consumers' computers, have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that their practices violated federal law. The settlements bar secret software downloads in the future, bar the operators from exploiting security vulnerabilities to download software, and bar misrepresentations. In addition, the operators will give up a total of $50,000 in ill-gotten gains.

In October 2005, the FTC charged that Odysseus Marketing, Inc. and its principal, Walter Rines, lured consumers to their Web sites by advertising bogus free software, including a program called Kazanon that purportedly allowed consumers to engage in anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. As per the FTC, the bogus software was bundled with spyware and other unwanted software. The agency alleged that the defendants also distributed their spyware by exploiting security vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer Web browser. The FTC charged that the defendants' spyware intercepted and replaced search results provided to users who queried popular Internet search engines, and barraged consumers with pop-up and other Internet ads. The FTC also charged that the defendants' software captured consumers' personal information such as their first and last names, addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and Internet browsing and shopping histories, and transmitted that information to the defendants' Internet servers. Consumers were unable to locate or uninstall the defendants' spyware through reasonable means, as per the FTC.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

November 19, 2006, 9:12 PM CT

A Quantum Computer Step

A University of Utah physicist took a step toward developing a superfast computer based on the weird reality of quantum physics by showing it is feasible to read data stored in the form of the magnetic "spins" of phosphorus atoms.

"Our work represents a breakthrough in the search for a nanoscopic [atomic scale] mechanism that could be used for a data readout device," says Christoph Boehme, assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah. "We have demonstrated experimentally that the nuclear spin orientation of phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon can be measured by very subtle electric currents passing through the phosphorus atoms".

The study by Boehme and his colleagues in Gera number of would be reported in the recent issue of the journal Nature Physics and released online Sunday, Nov. 19.

"We have resolved a major obstacle for building a particular kind of quantum computer, the phosphorus-and-silicon quantum computer," says Boehme. "For this concept, data readout is the biggest issue, and we have shown a new way to read data".

Boehme, who joined the University of Utah faculty earlier this year, conducted the study with Klaus Lips a former colleague at the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin and with graduate students Andre Stegner and Hans Huebl and physicists Martin Stutzmann and Martin S. Brandt of the Technical University of Munich.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

November 16, 2006, 4:52 AM CT

Grid computing 'Mappa mundi'

Visitors to Supercomputing '06 in Tampa, Florida this week will be the first to see a new interactive map that shows nine of the world's largest computing Grids. The map, developed by scientists from GridPP in the UK and the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, uses Google Earth to pinpoint Grid sites on six continents, showing more than 300 sites overall. Like the medieval 'mappa mundi', which showed what was known of the world at the time, this is one of the first attempts to show the whole scientific Grid world.

Laurence Field, who works at CERN for the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, has been leading work on the map. He explains, "Today there are many production Grids being used for science, several of which have a strong regional presence. A number of of them are using different middleware, which can artificially limit scientific collaboration. The Grids shown on the map are all taking part in the Open Grid Forum's Grid Interoperation Now (GIN) group, which is trying to bridge the differences and enable seamless interoperation between the various infrastructures".

Gidon Moont from Imperial College London, developed the interface with Google Earth. It was then adapted by the GIN group, and will be shown on CERN's stand and the UK e-Science stand at Supercomputing.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source

November 14, 2006, 5:06 AM CT

SimCity for real

Social policy makers and town planners will soon be able to play 'SimCity' for real using grid computing and e-Science techniques to test the consequences of their policies on a real, but anonymous, model of the UK population. Dr Mark Birkin and his colleagues, who are in the process of developing the model at the University of Leeds, will be demonstrating its potential at the UK e-Science stand at SC06, the world's largest supercomputing conference in Florida, this week.

They are using data recorded at the 2001 census to build a model of the whole UK population, but with personal details omitted so no individual or household can be identified. Their project, Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council National Centre for e-Social Science. "We're building a core model which represents the whole of the UK at the level of (synthetic) individuals and households with a number of attributes and behaviours," says Dr Birkin.

Data about these attributes - such as car ownership, house prices and use of health, education, transport and leisure facilities - are held by different agencies in different locations and often in different formats. "Historically, people have assembled data on a single PC or workstation. E-Science provides exciting opportunities to access multiple databases from remote, virtual locations, making it possible to develop highly generic simulation models which are easy to update," says Dr Birkin.........

Posted by: Ethan      Permalink         Source