Science and technology news blog

AdventNet is certainly bent on giving Google a run for its money. Its Zoho line of online apps—which includes a word processor (Zoho Writer), spreadsheet (Zoho Sheet), wiki (Zoho Wiki), and presentation package (Zoho Show)—is one of the few free office suites that has the potential to give apps such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets any competition. The latest addition, Zoho Notebook, a collaboration and note-taking tool, could go beyond Google and challenge Microsoft’s OneNote.

Zoho Notebook is described online as letting you “create, aggregate, and collaborate on multiple types of content online.” The idea is to give users one place to assemble a variety of information: text, line drawings, images, Web pages, video, RSS feeds, and other media. It’s Microsoft OneNote on an Ajax diet.

Notebook has a lot of potential for people who like working online and especially those who want to share. You could, for example, create an online notebook that contains a spreadsheet with your project budget, the text of your latest report, an image of your sample product with some flaws circled, and a video of your engineer explaining what went wrong.

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Apples new Core 2 Duo is receiving rave reviews, with the unit outperforming the older Core Duo models. But if youre a serious gamer or want to run Vista at the same time, youll need the MacBook Pro.

Seduced by the thought of getting a brand new portable Mac so you can run Mac OS X and Windows Vista at the same time? Then dont get a MacBook, get a MacBook Pro.

Thats a shame, because the MacBook is a beautiful machine. But thanks to a 2Gb memory limit, and the use of an integrated graphics system, AKA the Intel GMA 950, serious computer users wanting maximum performance will find a MacBook Pro is better suited to their needs.

This is because the MacBook Pro has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics chip with far more graphical grunt than Intels integrated solution. They also have their own dedicated memory, rather than sharing the 2Gb of memory the MacBook can handle.

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THE first 10 of millions of the $US100 laptops destined for children in Third World countries have been shipped from the Taiwan manufacturer.

The One Laptop Per Child project – run by IT guru and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte – tested the laptops at the US State Department this week.

News Corporation, publisher of The Australian, is putting $US500,000 ($652,000) a year into the project, which has drawn support from big technology brands such as Google.

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Sony is gearing up to introduce in December what some are already hailing as the world’s lightest notebook PC.According to news reports, the Type G Vaio laptop will feature a 12.1-inch display and be considerably lighter, at 1.9 pounds, than its laptop competitors, which typically weigh between four and eight pounds.

The laptop will sell initially in Japan, with a basic model starting at about $1,880.

As of yet, Sony has not announced plans to sell the laptop in any other country. The company expects that the Type G Vaio will be most popular among business customers.

Pacific Difference

Sony’s focus on Japan as the primary market for the ultralight laptop is indicative of the difference between technology that is popular in the U.S. versus what sells in Japan.

In the U.S., consumers tend to favor low-cost machines even if they are slightly heavier than other models, noted Douglas Krone, chief executive of Dynamism.com, a company that sells imported technology. Those in the U.S. are driven by business needs, he said, and tight budgets tend to favor inexpensive, but more weighty, laptops.

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The company employing two security specialists who caused a sensation in early August at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas when they demonstrated how to hack an Apple MacBook wirelessly has been forced to eat humble pie. It turns out that the two hackers did not use the native MacBook wireless driver in their hacking demonstration.

Although the hackers, David Maynor and Jon Ellch, from Atlanta based security company SecureWorks, did not say they were using a third party wireless device driver in their demonstration, they did say that vulnerability was not a Mac problem but a weakness with wireless device drivers in general.

No doubt, however, the folks at Cupertino would have been wanting to know from SecureWorks where the weakness was in the Apple MacBook wireless device driver.

The folks in Atlanta have given Apple its answer on the home page of the SecureWorks website. In its introduction to a video recording of the hacking presentation that was given at Black Hat a SecureWorks statement reads:

“This video presentation at Black Hat demonstrates vulnerabilities found in wireless device drivers. Although an Apple MacBook was used as the demo platform, it was exploited through a third-party wireless device driver – not the original wireless device driver that ships with the MacBook. As part of a responsible disclosure policy, we are not disclosing the name of the third-party wireless device driver until a patch is available.”

In another literally explosive issue for number one PC manaufacturer Dell, the company has issued a global recall for more than 4 million notebook computer batteries which are chief suspects in the cause of notebook computers catching fire.

In June, a minor sensation erupted when a Dell notebook spontaneously burst into flames at a conference in Osaka Japan. A photo of the flaming notebook was circulated around the web. Since then, further incidents of flaming Dell notebooks have been reported to the company.

Dell has had more than its share of problems in past months, with just this week consumers in China launching legal action against laptops supplied with the wrong processor chips.

The Dell notebook batteries being recalled are installed in Inspiron, Latitude and Precision models purchased between April 2004 and July 2006. The batteries are made by Sony and are used in other notebook computers including those made by Apple, which earlier this month issued its own battery recall for MacBook Pro computers. However, the Apple recall was reportedly not for heating issues but performance problems.

Batteries have become a source of headaches for a number of notebook manufacturers recently. Number two PC manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has issued three separate battery recalls since October 2005, when it recalled 130,000 Chinese batteries used in HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario notebook computers.