Technology

Technologically, Beijing is a city at a crossroads. It is the capital of the world's largest mobile phone and Internet user markets, and its universities, especially Tsinghua University, produce some of the world's top technology minds. At the same time, Beijing cannot compare to its Asian neighbors, namely Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong for Internet and telecom services, such as 3G (third-generation telephony).

Solid-state disk, once considered a niche technology for ruggedized, industrial and military applications, is on its way to the mainstream. This is partly because of SSD benefits, which include performance, power efficiency, ruggedness and a lightweight, compact size. But other developments have also come into play, including technology and market developments that have begun to help this technology overcome its pitfalls -- namely capacity, reliability and price.

Toss aside your typical idea of a robot -- all metal, jerky movements and a stiff-legged walk.

With summer finally upon us, the sunshine's (sort of) beating down. The weather's getting (a bit) hotter, and so are the gadgets. Here's our top nine products announces in Japan this month.

Welcome to the petaflop generation. That was the message as the new most powerful supercomputer in the world IBM's $100,000 million Roadrunner system installed at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory was officially named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world.

Who's your daddy?

Scooping up soil samples and searching for elements that could support life on Mars isn't just an adventure for the Mars Lander and the robotic arm doing the scooping.

A long-term battle is brewing between two emerging high-speed wireless technologies, WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE). Each would more than quadruple existing wireless wide-area access speeds for users.

When it comes to backing up virtual servers, IT administrators have a lot of choices. But increasingly, they're finding one method of backup isn't enough to satisfy all the demands of a virtual environment.

Go to the Start menu, click on Run and type "convert C:\windows mac_OS" and wait for 10 minutes and restart. This hidden command will convert your regular Windows PC into a Macintosh with Leopard. You didn't really believe this, did you? For the record, that is just plain impossible. But then, there are several myths floating around about PCs and gadgets that actually seem plausible. Some are just bad practical jokes (like e-mails saying Microsoft or AOL would donate money for every forward sent) while some are distorted facts. Even for a techie, it sometimes becomes difficult to tell fact from fiction -- so here is a collection of some popular misconceptions and our explanations to help clear the air.

Aaron Martin likes to plan ahead. One year ago, the IT manager at Loro Piano, an Italian luxury goods manufacturer with US operations in New York, plunked down US$30,000 for a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet storage array from Nimbus Data Systems. At the time, it was one of the only iSCSI-based storage systems available that took advantage of 10G bit/sec Ethernet speeds, with most systems supporting 1Gbit/sec Ethernet.

One of the biggest selling points in last year's release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was the inclusion of Time Machine, a nifty new app aimed at making that most onerous of tasks -- backing up data -- not only easy to do, but fun.

The members of the Microsoft Robotics Group are betting that the robotics industry is about to take off.

Last month, SonicWall rolled out its next-generation unified threat management firewall appliance geared for the enterprise. In our exclusive test of the Network Security Appliance E7500, results show that SonicWall has, indeed, crashed through the speed barrier.

Woz, Word and War Games