Bush telegraph
Bush says its 21in and 28in internet TV sets have now reached the high street with prices starting at under £200. The system includes a remote control that opens up to provide a small keyboard for typing email.
A standard cordless keyboard and a colour printer are also available. Virgin Net is developing a home page and content for Bush Internet, the internet service provider.
Although some commentators have hyped the potential of TV-based internet services, most services based on television set-top boxes have flopped and Microsoft's WebTV, on sale in the US since 1996, has not been a noticeable success.
Mobile Mint
Mint Telecom promised to make it easier and cheaper to take a mobile phone abroad when it launched a pre-pay global roaming service this week. It also launched the first scratch 'n' sniff GSM system.
You buy a Mint BasicCard SIM (from www.mint-tele.com or 0800 00 33 55) and put it in your existing phone when you go abroad. After that, all calls and SMS messages to your usual number are re-routed via Mint servers to your new Mint number. This avoids roaming charges and variable call charges, because Mint charges the same price for calls from any country to any country.
Mint charges 85p per minute to make calls and £0.425p per minute to receive them. This compares with £3.43 per minute to call London from Moscow on BT Cellnet, and the 94p per minute to receive calls in Brussels. On average, Mint expects to be about a third cheaper than rivals.
But it will face competition from Deutsche Telekom's One 2 One, which plans to launch a pre-pay roaming package on July 17.
One 2 One's service will be more expensive, from 99p to £1.99 per minute to make calls and £1.50 to receive them. And it may not offer such wide coverage:it has signed up more than 160 roaming partners in 80 countries, whereas Mint covers 240 networks in 114 countries.
Guard mouse
Bannerbridge claims that the easiest way to protect your PC from passers-by is to plug in a U-Match BioLink mouse. This contains a fingerprint scanner to check each user's identity before they are allowed access to the machine. The mouse is available with serial, PS/2 and USB interfaces and works with Microsoft Windows 95B/98 and NT. See www.bannerbridge.co.uk. (JS)
IBM bombs
IBM's latest computer is anything but user-friendly. Reliability isn't great: it's expected to run for only 100 hours before breaking down. The delivery bill could well be huge - it requires several large convoys of articulated lorries to move it, and it takes two months to assemble. And don't even ask about Energy Star compliance: the thing needs enough power to fuel a small, air-conditioned town.
But the new $110m IBM ASCII White, pictured above, does go jolly fast. It is so speedy it can do in 30 days what a 1995-model Cray supercomputer would have taken 60,000 years to complete.
For those who can imagine it, the IBM machine is running at a mind-boggling 12.3 trillion operations a second.
And - the good news - if the pace of improved computer performance continues, some estimates suggest we'll have this kind of power on our desktops in less than 10 years.
For now, however, this vast machine - actually made up of 8,192 individual processors and 512 connected computers - will be busying itself with things a little less mundane than networked games of Doom. The computer, running an IBM version of Unix, will simulate nuclear weapons tests to an unprecedented level of detail. The simulations could help ease the US Congress' opposition to the comprehensive test ban treaty, which bans all real-world nuclear testing.
Even this machine isn't good enough to fully replace nuclear tests. Scientists estimate it would take a computer running eight times faster, at a trillion operations a second, to do that.
But that kind of power is on its way - for those who can afford it. David Cooper of the US president's council on computing, says: "We're still on timescale to do that by 2004." (NM)
