BT Wholesale in conjunction with the service providers has been testing an up to 8Mbps ADSL service for what seems forever. Today sees BT Wholesale announce the product.
From 31st March 2006 the product will go live on a national basis. The service should be available on around 5300 exchanges, which will cover around 99.6% of homes and businesses in the UK. The key component to the Max services is that they are rate adaptive (i.e. will run at the highest speed they can) in both the downstream and upstream directions, which should see the vast majority of lines running a lot faster than under the existing planning rules used by BT Wholesale.
The potential line speeds are 160kbps to 8192kbps downstream, with upstream from 160kbps to 448kbps on Max, and 832kbps on Max Premium. 78% of BT lines are expected to manage 4Mbps or faster, 6Mbps to around 42%. It should be pointed out that even if you get the full 8192kbps, this is actually 3.6 times faster than an existing 2Mbps line. This is because a 2Mbps line runs at 2272kbps so that with the network overheads people will see close to 2Mbps under ideal conditions, so an 8192kbps line speed will provide around 7.1 to 7.3Mbps of potential data speed.
First it was 512k, then 1Mbps, now 2Mbps, and soon to be 4Mbps or more. 
Source [ADSL Guide]
It's hard to imagine using a higher resolution display than my notebook's 1920×1200 WUXGA screen, but there are Q-WUXGA 3840×2400 displays available. Images and text are so sharp on my TFT, that I couldn't imagine using a resolution that high on a panel less than 60″. It's four times the resolution of HDTV!
Source [The Inquirer]
So I got my new Laptop, a Dell Inspiron 9400. Expect a review by the end of the week. 
I've been using TrueLaunchBar for years, and never used the battery monitor plug-in for it. The skin that comes with it looks too Win98-ish, so I created a better one using UVAcav47's icons. All credit for the icons goes to him, I just compiled them together into a skin.
Download @ deviantART
The United States Army is testing lasers on the battlefield. Ionatron, Inc. of Tucson has developed a weapon called a femtosecond laser, which creates light pulses that last less than 10 trillionths of a second. These pulses carve a channel of ionized oxygen in the air which can conduct electricity. Then, the weapon blasts lightning bolts through these 30-foot channels of conductivity. This is said to be especially good at neutralizing bombs. Ionatron's CEO says his company will be sending 12 of these units to Iraq, the first one by the end of July.
Source [Defensetech]
Google has updated it's maps of the UK to a high enough resolution to make out some pretty small details. I can't quite see my blue Peugeot on the drive, but it's a big improvement on the resolution they previously had.
Google Maps
Tissue engineers like Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina, and Thomas Boland of Clemson University, have been printing biomaterials with modified ink-jet printers.
The cartridges are washed out and refilled with suspensions of living cells; the software that controls the characteristics of the ink is reprogrammed and you're good to go. Boland and Mironov use layers of “thermo-reversable” gel to build up three-dimensional structures like tubes‚ capillaries, to use the medical term. When the tiny droplets, or clumps, of cells came together closely, they fused; the gel can be easily removed, leaving a tube of tissue.
Now, it seems to me that a tube or complex living organ is a pretty complicated structure. Why not practice with a simpler, more two-dimensional form of muscle tissuelike bacon, for instance? Nothing like fresh bacon.
I don't know how this would taste, but it would probably be like soya, with no vitamins or nutrients.
Source [LiveScience]
A danish baby whose parents wanted to call him Namenlos (German: nameless) has been given the name 'Christian' by the state. Why anyone would want 'Namenlos' on their passport is anyone's guess…
Source: Tagesschau
HoloPhonic.ch has a spatial MP3 file which makes you feel like there's a guy shaking a matchbox standing behind you. You have to use headphones to feel it properly, speakers work, but not as well. There were a few times that I seriously expected someone to tap me on the shoulder. 
Source [HoloPhonic.ch]
The Optimus keyboard has hundreds of tiny OLEDs embedded in the keys, making the whole keyboard a sort of dynamic display. You can change what's displayed on the keys, meaning you can switch between keyboard layouts instantly. The Optimus keyboard also lets you display pictures in some apps, instead of using the toolbar, you can press the key on your keyboard!
No word on price yet, but I'd expect this to sell for at least $200 when it's released. The designer's website also has some weird designs, including an arrow shaped mouse which is apparently 'in stores now'.
What is OLED technology?
Optimus keyboard website
The names planned for the next generation, post Pentium processors from Intel have been published on Wikipedia and Reuters. The Pentium name was first used in 1993 as a sucessor for the 486. Intel didn't want to use 80586, so they instead used Penta (Greek: 5). It seems they're planning on eventually releasing an eight core desktop CPU.
Wikipedia
Reuters
