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Apple products used to be a synonym for the word luxury and prestige, but lately we have noticed that there is nothing better than sacrificing the identity to boost the sales, as iPhone has been seen in American Wal-Mart between the butter, pair of converse and a tuna steak, just taken off the shelf. Now iPhone landed on the shelves of UK’s leading supermarket – Tesco. Although, unlike in the US Apple has their own “Apple Point” in Tesco stores.

We still wonder why for something so simple and sometimes lame we have to pay more than for a decent notebook? I guess this is that prestige Apple is all about, the price & sales prestige.

Helsinki will have the very first natural source of heat for their city infrastructure. According to Reuters the city is close to signing contract with one of the IT companies to lend them the underground anti-bomb bunker as a Data Processing Centre, which will be one of the best places that company with a big amount of servers could ever get.

DPC will be located in a underground location, cold and really just made for this kind of equipment. The special hardware will allow to conserve the heat and direct it to the specially created pipe-shafts to heat up the city during stone-cold Finnish nights. I guess we have now our really true environmental friendly solution for the amount of energy we use with our servers.

During the last few months it seems that Microsoft stays on top of its game by letting users test its products before actually buying them. Windows 7 beta was the first step towards producing half-open applications which are available to test by wide public.

New platform is not that very new to be honest but contains upgrades and improvements that will help the end user by making the interface simpler, easier to navigate. New Office has now the image background removal tool, or advanced video processing capability.

Beta version is available in 7 languages and its final version will be deployed into 5 packages instead of 8 like it was before. I guess Microsoft has a knack for “less is more”, and we like it.

Google likes to push forward the web industry boundaries with new and fancy technologies. Nine months ago they have presented us with a new and incredibly fast web browser called Chrome. Since then Google promised us a brand new operating system that would be focused on web browsing and web applications, be super-fast and really reliable.

But it seems that Google does not have a proper plan for deploying such system. We already have a really skinny versions of Linux hat can run not only browser but also local applications, not to mention that Windows 7 for netbooks will arrive soon. Some principles of the Chrome OS are going to be nice, like fast boot, which should take about 5 seconds to become operational (like a TV – you turn it on and it’s ready to go), and store most of the users data online in the cloud.

Let’s just hope that Google will find a good niche for their system as MS has stepped up with Win7’s performance and it loads even under 30 seconds which proves to be a tough competition.

The Internet will become truly global today as ICANN, overseers of the Internet, allow domains to be registered in scripts  other than Roman. These new domains are known as International Domain Names (IDNs).

Athough the content of web pages is written in different languages and use different characters such as Cyrllic or Chinese.  To access these pages required a domain which used roman script. To people familiar with roman characters, this might not seem like a big deal but 0.75 billion people use characters other than Roman so for them it will make life easier. The new domains could be in use as early as soon as next year.

Although the change might seem like a small one, to put it into practice will require significant changes to the Domain Name System (DNS). Computers on the internet are accessible by a group of four numbers known as the IP address. When a page is requested from a website, the domain name is resolved into the IP address though a domain name server. This acts like a telephone directory, revealing the IP address for a particular domain. The biggest challenge for international scripts will be to convert the character set to an IP address.

Organic LED displays have many desirable qualities for large screen televisions of the future including they would be easy to fabricate using printing technologies, flexible, have a wide viewing angle and do not require a back light. We have already seen the commercial production of OLED screens in MP3 players and on the  Sony XEL-1  television.

Now two manufacturers have produced transparent OLED screens for an electronics fair in Japan. The LG OLED screen meausures 15″ while Samsung are demoing a 2″ screen. This is an exciting development which has many applications, including head-up displays and GPS for cars. I can also see that they would be great if combined with emergent reality, for example in sun glasses. The screens have a transmitance of around 30%.

Videos of the Samsung display  in action can be found here.

The well known gadget blog, Gizzmodo was harbouring more than just articles on the latest technology when advertising on the site was found to contain malicious code. The malicious code was added by hackers that were able to trick the site owners into thinking that they were from legitimate advertisers, Suzuki.
A similar attack occurred on the New York Times website, a month early where hackers posed as representitives from the telephone company Vonage.
The advertisments attempt to convince you that there is a virus on your computer and then try to sell you  fake virus software which steals your bank details as we reported in an earlier post. Gizzmodo have appologised for the mistake saying that they take security very seriously and that it has been fixed now.  By gaining access to trusted sites in this way the hackers are doing everything they can to exploit the good reputation of these popular sites.

Persistant filesharers can be removed as an ammendment to prevent filesharers from being disconnected by their ISPs without a court order is removed from the forthcoming EU telecoms legislation. Article 138 which was dropped states:
Any such measures liable to restrict those fundamental rights or freedoms may only be taken in exceptional circumstances…and shall be subject to adequate procedural safeguards in conformity with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights.. including effective judicial protection and due process.”

Dropping this article effectively gives european countries the power to ask ISPs to remove users that they beleive are percistantly sharing copyrighted material. While this might seem like a solution to the problem, it has been demonstrated that innocent people could find that they are cut off if the wireless network is being misused by a third party without their knowledge.

There is also a strong suggestion that having access to the internet is a human right, like access to water, gas and electricity. EU legislation has already been adopted stating that internet access is “critical for the practical exercise of a wide array of fundamental rights”.

Under the new legislation, the file-sharer would first be sent an email, then a letter and finally they would be cut-off with the approval of a judge. (That is assuming that they know what an Internet is.) In my opinion, technology moves a lot quicker than legislation and so there will always be ways to circumvent the legislation such as encrypting data or making the filesharing annonymous. The law will always be trying to catch up with technology.

It’s not everyday that a postal strike over working hours and conditions causes people to receive their copies of Windows 7 earlier than in many countries of the world, but this is what happened today. Many happy customers where surprized in a good way when their shiny new windows 7 discs arrived through the post much earlier than expected.
Windows 7 is the much anticipated replacement for Windows Vista which was a complete flop due to its bloated, processor hungry, nagging features. Windows 7 seems to be a lot better, running on older hardware.
The proposed postage strike would have meant that its official release date would have coincided with the postage strike and so in a good public relations move, Microsoft allowed some retailers such as PC World and Amazon to release their copies early.

The number of planets that are being found outside our own solar system is increasing as scientists improve techniques for detecting them. Astronomers have found that around 40% of stars have exoplanets in orbit around them.
Around 400 exo planets have been found so far using techniques such as looking for a gravitational woble of the star the planet is orbiting and detecting the tiny drop in radiated light as the planet passes through the line of sight between the Earth and the host star.

The ultimate goal of this research would be to find an exoplanet that was orbiting star at a radius in the so called Goldielocks zone, where the surface temperature is not too hot or too cold, has the conditions for life to start.