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Internet summit makes call to wire up the world
MORE than 170 countries approved an ambitious call to extend the internet and the benefits of information technology to the poorest corners of the world last Friday, but dodged some of the difficulties of doing so.
In particular, they put off a decision on whether to set up a special fund to finance the necessary infrastructure, for which African countries had lobbied hard.
The first World Summit on the Information Society wound up three days of lofty speech-making by endorsing a declaration of principles and 29-point action plan.
The declaration committed them to using telecommunications technologies, such as the Worldwide Web and cellular telephones, to boost economic growth and meet United Nations development targets for eradicating extreme hunger and poverty by 2015.
“The declaration represents a sort of constitution for the Information Society which must contain a social dimension and foster development,” said Swiss President Pascal Couchepin, whose country hosted the U.N.-sponsored gathering.
Around 90 per cent of the world population is not connected to the internet, depriving them of a 21st-century resource and digging a “digital divide” between rich and poor. But richer states, notably Japan and the European Union, which generally did not send top government officials to Geneva, resisted calls for a “Solidarity Fund” to close the gap.
As a compromise, states agreed to study the issue further and report back before the follow-up summit in Tunis in 2005.
Senior UN officials also agreed it was better to explore improved use of existing resources from the World Bank and other sources before rushing into new finances.
Also postponed was a showdown over internet management, with developing countries, such as Brazil pressing for a greater role for the United Nations or intergovernmental agencies in a business currently left to the private sector in rich states. The liberal democracies won a tough battle in the preparation stage to have press freedom and the right of access to information enshrined in the summit documents.
Smallest hard-disk drive
Toshiba has developed the world’s smallest hard-disk drive, a coin-sized device measuring 0.85 inch (about 2.1 centimeters) in diameter, a press report said.
The drive, which is small enough to be used in mobile phones, can store up to two hours of high-definition moving images and just under 60 hours of music, the business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
The Toshiba HDD is initially expected to be priced at around $280. Global HDD sales are expected to total about 220 million units in 2003, Nihon Keizai said, with most of those mainly US-made larger disk drives.
Lindows.com to change name
Judges in Finland and Sweden have given Microsoft what it has twice been denied in the US: preliminary injunctions barring Linux vendor Lindows.com from using the Lindows name.
Microsoft sued Lindows.com in the US in Dec 2001, accusing the company of infringing its Windows trademark and asking the court to bar Lindows.com from using the Lindows name.
The company lost two requests for an injunction and the matter is now for a jury to decide in a trial set to start March 1, 2004.
European courts appear to be siding with Microsoft. The company sought a preliminary injunction in Finland on Nov 28 and it was granted on Dec1, company spokesperson Stacy Drake says.
Microsoft has also filed a request for a preliminary injunction in the Netherlands and intents to do so in France, where it has already taken the first step in that process by filing a complaint with a local court, Drake says.
Lindows.com Chief Executive Officer Michael Robertson in a statement issued in response to the Swedish injunction, lashed out against Microsoft’s legal pursuit of his company, accusing Microsoft of using lawsuits “as a battering ram to smash Linux.”
Speeding up V1280 server
Sun Microsystems last week boosted the speed of its midrange Sun Fire V1280 server by swapping out earlier 900MHz UltraSparc III processors in the 12-way server and replacing them with 1.2GHz CPUs.
The rack-mounted V1280 can be configured with as many as a dozen UltraSparc III processors, or as few as four, and can be packed with up to 96GB of memory. According to Sun, the new processors boost the server’s speed by as much as 30 per cent.
Prices for the server, which runs Sun’s Solaris 8 operating system, start at $68,995 for a four-way configuration, and begin at $160,995 for the top-end twelve-way model. — Dawn ScienceDotcom Report
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