Super!
Cray Inc, the supercomputer manufacturer, plans to produce a commercial version of Red Storm, the massively parallel supercomputer it is building for America's Sandia National Laboratories. Red Storm will do 40 trillion calculations per second. The commercial systems, which will be announced next year, will also be based on thousands of 64-bit AMD Opteron processors running Linux. www.cray.com/news/0310/rsproduct.html
Mini PC
Antelope Technologies is releasing a complete Windows XP Professional PC about the size of a PDA. The basic Modular Computing Core (MCC) has no output or input devices. To access standard keyboards and monitors or LCD screens, the MCC fits into various shells to change its function from a pen-based handheld PC to a desktop or a portable computer. The basic unit weighs 280g, measures 7.6 x 12.7cm and is 1.9cm thick. When slotted into the handheld shell with an LCD screen, the weight increases to 740g and the dimensions double in size. The MCC will cost £2,340 with a desktop cradle, foldable keyboard, handheld sleeve and carrying case. www.antelopetech.com
Pin money
Retailers have increased their IT spending by 27% to £1.8bn over the past year. A survey of the top 100 outlets by Retail Knowledge Bank shows an increase from 1.1% of annual sales being spent on technology to 1.4%. Most of the money is believed to be in preparation for Chip and Pin payment systems. This promises to reduce credit card fraud by requiring customers to key in Pin codes when paying for goods. The report also says there's an increased use of space management software to optimise store design. www.itinretail.com
Stinger
Microsoft is holding a Professional Developers' Conference in Los Angeles this week, and IBM is showing an early version of Stinger, the next release of its DB2 database, running on Windows Server 2003. The aim is to show how it can be used to develop Windows.Net applications using updated compatibility with Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) and other features of Visual Studio. Stinger is expected to be ready around the same time as Yukon, the next release of Microsoft's SQL Server. IBM has made Stinger available on its DeveloperWorks web site. www7b.software.ibm.com
Upwardly mobile
The European mobile device market is booming with sales of PDAs (personal digital assistants) up by 26% and "converged devices" based on mobile phone technology up by 36% in the latest quarter. Figures released by IDC, a market research company, show that Europe is bucking the worldwide trend, which showed marginal growth of 1.1%. Hewlett-Packard boosted its share of the European market with its iPaq/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile handhelds and it has overtaken Palm, but trails behind Nokia's 44% dominant market share. Sales of Nokia phones have made Symbian the market-leading operating system, with just over half of the market, but Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system for Smartphone and Pocket PC grew by 73%. www.idc.com/getdoc
Census database
National Statistics, the government's statistical office, last week proposed an "integrated population statistics system", linking data from several government sources to track everyone in England and Wales, from early 2013. The database would be based on the 2011 census, along with administrative, survey and address data and a proposed national population register. It would primarily be used for statistical and policy research, such as deciding on government spending for different areas. The proposal notes that the legality of linking personal data, along with political and public acceptability, are potential risks to the plan. National Statistics has asked for comments by November 28.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/ipss.pdf
Fair repair
If you need your house repairing, you should be able to call up a web page that shows diagrams of various rooms, labelled with common problems. Click on a problem to request a repair, and say when you will be at home. That's the idea of the repair reporting system that the London borough of Brent has developed to help tenants of Brent Housing Partnership, the council's social housing unit. Brent says 50 repairs have been ordered through the system since it went live in May. The service, available only in English, will soon be provided in six other languages.
www.brent.gov.uk/bhp.nsf
