Thursday 20 September 2007

HE LAST CAUGHT

Late at night
under the stars

everything was dark
except the thought
that i had
of the last CAUGHT

picturing you in the sky
we play around, run n fly
.
...
.....

wondering now, to meet again
to capture u once again


hours spent in your thought
but, now it were the rays.. that i caught
striking the eyes woke me up
breaking the thought that i BROUGHT

nishi...

Irish firm launches 'global' mobile phone

Irish firm Cubic Telecom has launched the first 'truly global' mobile phone at a major industry exhibition in California.

The 'Cubic Mobile' phone was launched Monday at the prestigious TechCrunch 40 trade show in San Francisco, where Cubic was the only Irish exhibitor of the 40 companies in attendance. The new phone is a dual-band GSM/Wi-Fi device that includes several features the company says will help reduce the cost of long-distance calling.

It uses the 'MAXroam' SIM card, claimed to be the world's first universal SIM card, which offers favourable country-to-country phone rates anywhere in the world. Cubic says the card is the result of years of negotiations with GSM carriers around the world. The phone also offers full PBX functionality, allowing users to create up to 50 permanent local phone numbers for themselves. Cubic is also offering free Voice over IP (VoIP) calls within its network.

Cubic says the new phone is aimed at three key sectors of the mobile market: Emigres who buy pre-paid calling cards to call friends and family overseas, travellers looking to reduce the costs associated with roaming, and globally distributed teams from commercial, not-for-profit or governmental organisations.

Two versions of the handset will be available from 1 October: A basic version priced at EUR99.95 and a Windows Mobile version selling for EUR159.95. Both devices come with the MAXroam SIM card pre-installed. The card can also be purchased separately for use in any unlocked GSM phone, priced at EUR29.99.

The launch of the Cubic Mobile comes after the company secured EUR5 million of funding for the development of new products in August of this year. Cubic has offices in Canada and Portugal as well as headquarters in Cork and offers its services in 160 countries. The firm currently employs 10 people worldwide but says it is aiming to double its headcount by the end of the year.

Tuesday 18 September 2007

Apples iPod classic released

The iPod Classic has a metal face, not a plastic one. The shiny, curved chrome-like backplate is still there, but now it's attached to an anodised aluminium sheet that curves gently forward before forming a flat space in which the display and click wheel are mounted.

The casing - its the same material used in last year's iPod Nano update - is tactile and has a satin sheen quite unlike the patent gloss of old. That's good for the black Classic, which is now far more resistant to fingerprints than its predecessor was and probably more resistant to scratches, though only time will tell for sure. The back of the player however, is just as susceptible to scrapes and scratches as it always was, as we discovered when we were a little reckless in docking the device.

Tuesday 11 September 2007

Banner Ad Trojan Served on MySpace, Photobucket

"Yahoo feeds Trojan-laced ads to MySpace and PhotoBucket users. Several banner ads containing Trojan horse programs that can compromise a user's computer have been running on some high-traffic Web sites for the past several weeks, including MySpace.com and Photobucket.com, Security Fix has learned.

According to Web security company ScanSafe it first spotted the tainted banner ads on Aug. 8, and estimates that the hostile ads ran several million times for the next three weeks. Other sites that ran the ads included Bebo.com, TheSun.co.uk, and UltimateGuitar.com, officials at ScanSafe said. All a visitor to one of these sites needed to do to infect their machines was to browse a page that featured the ads with a version of Internet Explorer that was not equipped with the latest security updates from Microsoft.

The banner ads in question were traced back to an ad network exchange run by a company called RightMedia, which was recently acquired by Yahoo!. The ads were being delivered to RightMedia's network from a third-party ad server. According to ScanSafe, those third-party servers included in their rotation several malicious ads that used Macromedia Flash files to load an invisible "iFrame" (used to insert content from another Web site into the current Web page).

The malicious iFrame in turn pulled down code that leveraged a security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser (a flaw Microsoft patched in February) to install a generic Trojan horse program.

Tools like the "noscript" add-on for Firefox can help users block powerful programming languages like Flash and Javascript from running automatically when a user visits a Web site. However, noscript may do little to prevent these types of attacks if the visitor has previously instructed "noscript" to trust the site permanently.

Another key takeaway here is the importance of Windows users keeping their systems up to date with the latest security patches, particularly those issued by Microsoft to plug holes in IE and other vital system components."
source: washington post

Monday 10 September 2007

First 40Gbps Silicon Laser Modulator

Intel silicon photonics researchers achieve another breakthrough with the world’s first silicon laser modulator to encode optical data at 40 billion bits per-second. With a speed matching the fastest modulators deployed today, these low cost, low power devices could one day bring terabit/s optical I/O to PCs and servers.

Check out the blog for more information from Ansheng Liu, Principal Engineer in the Photonics Technology Lab and Lead Architect of the 40G Silicon Laser Modulator.

http://blogs.intel.com/research/2007/07/40g_modulator.html

source: intel

Sunday 9 September 2007

Tiny Storage device

Seagate announced nine new products on the eve of its annual analyst meeting, scheduled to take place later this week.


Seagate's DAVE 3.5 x 4.7 x .47-inch form factor into which you can cram 20GB ~ 60GB and cost less than $200 (digital audio video experience) platform, for instance, is geared toward people who want to use their phone as an MP3 player, movie player or video recorder.

The unit, which contains a 60GB 1.8-inch drive, can connect to a phone via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or a USB cable, and it can fit inside a coat pocket. Most phones come with a few gigabytes of capacity, at best, so a DAVE would significantly increase the amount of remote storage.

Some companies are also testing out the DAVE as a vehicle for renting movies. In this scenario, customers would walk up to a kiosk and select the movies they wanted. The kiosk would then beam them into the DAVE unit. The movies would contain copyright protection to prevent piracy, Watkins added.

In a twist, Seagate doesn't plan to market the DAVE as a product under its own name. Instead, it will make the DAVE for cellular companies and let them brand it.

At the other end of the Seagate spectrum is a drive optimized for security cameras. The drive, which offers up to 1 terabyte of storage, contains firmware that enables it to accept video streams from several sources.

The product launch also included a 1-terabyte desktop drive, a 250GB notebook drive, and backup drives from the Maxtor line. Seagate acquired Maxtor last year and continues to use the brand for its "value" (i.e. cheaper and less fancy) line of products.

The desktop Maxtor backup drives sport up to 750GB of storage space and cost about $270 each. In 2004, Sony showed off a 1-terabyte home server in Japan that cost about $5,000, so the price of storage continues to plummet.

Seagate also announced new drives for the first quarter of 2008, with enhanced error correction for digital-video recorders, including a 1TB model. In Japan, consumers are already asking for 2TB drives for their DVRs.

Seagate has also said it plans to move into the market for flash-based hard drives. The company now sells only hard drives that store data on magnetic platters.

Samsung Electronics and SanDisk have already released flash drives for notebooks and blade servers. By coming out with its own flash drives, Seagate can participate in what Watkins claims will be a corner of the storage market.

Flash memory is more reliable and consumes less energy, but it costs more, in terms of cents per gigabyte.
source: cnet

Monday 3 September 2007

Breakthrough drug for schizophrenia

The first new class of drugs in more than a decade for treating schizophrenia worked at least as well in a clinical trial as standard medications, a study released on Sunday showed.

Unlike current anti-psychotic drugs, which block the uptake of a naturally occurring chemical called dopamine, the new drug acts on a different neurotransmitter, glutamate.

The new treatment also reduced certain undesirable side-effects, according to the study, published in the British journal Nature Science.

Imbalances in the brain of these chemicals are largely responsible for schizophrenia's disabling symptoms, which range from hallucinations and delusions to a severely impaired ability to express emotion. Environmental factors are thought to play a role too.

Until now, the only drugs able to keep the most severe symptoms in check without debilitating side-effects acted on dopamine receptors.

Dopamine is the chemical messenger in the brain mainly involved with thinking, emotions, behaviour and perception.

In a double blind clinical trial, a team led by Sandeep Patil, a researcher at Eli Lilly, which funded the study, administered the new drug -- known as LY2140023 -- to 97 patients alongside smaller groups given placebos or olanzipine, a commonly prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

LY2140023 matched the effectiveness of olanzipine for both "positive" symptoms such as hallucinations as well as "negative" ones, including withdrawal.

As important, it avoided some of the adverse effects associated with dopamine-targeting drugs: weight gain, increases in blood fat called triglycerides, periodontitis, and inflammation of the gums.
source: Agence France-Presse, Paris