ID card scheme stumbles towards rollout date

Delays to the UK's ID card scheme have prompted calls for it to be scrapped in its entirety, as costs and problems mount up. Tenders for contracts to supply the Home Office with systems for the multi-billion pound project have been set back until at least the end of the year, while the mounting complexities have forced the department to compromise on a scaled back version in order to meet the published 2008 rollout. As such the first versions to make it out of passport offices may carry just a digital image or fingerprint data from only a couple of digits, although the Government still wants all ten fingerprints, digital images, iris scans and other biometric and personal data stored on its central servers. ...more

iPod sales top 10 million

Apple has now sold more than 10 million iPods, CEO Steve Jobs announced yesterday. Four and a half million of those were shifted in the last three months, more than doubling the figure for the previous quarter. The iPod, iPod mini and iPod photo are estimated by market analysts NPD Group to account for more 90 per cent of all hard disk players sold and around 65 per cent of the combined total for HD-based and flash memory players. ...more

Nikon extends digicam range

Nikon has unveiled two new digital cameras, the D100, the latest addition to its professional range, and the Coolpix 2500 for the consumer market. At 700g, Nikon claimed the D100 is the world's lightest digital SLR camera and it is smaller and more compact than cameras in Nikon's high-end D1 series. It has a 6. ...more

SiS completes its Athlon 64 support

Chip producer Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) has announced the release of the SiS755FX chipset, which is claimed to be the first chipset with full support for the 939pin AMD Athlon 64 FX CPU and its 1GHz HyperTransport interface. Coupled with the SiS South Bridge Chipset SiS964, SiS755FX completes an entire system for the Athlon 64. Built around SiS's HyperStreaming and integrated with the AMD 1GHz HyperTransport technology as well as 8/16-bits connection technology, SiS says it can transmit up to 8GB/sec to the Front Side Bus (FSB). ...more

IBM integrates Google Desktop into its own enterprise search

IBM today announced a new plug-in for its enterprise search technology that will allow it to integrate with Google Desktop for Enterprise, so that corporate employees can search for a wider range of information on their computer. IBM is to integrate the Google Desktop tool with its WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition. The announcement means that corporate users will be able to use the Google Desktop for Enterprise tool to seamlessly search and retrieve various types of content held on their personal computer. ...more