Real-time language translation, medical monitoring via the mobile Web and nanotechnology to purify water are some of the innovations IBM Labs thinks will be on the market within five years.

But sorry, still no jet packs, according to IBM's global business services manager George Pohle.

Supermarket chain Asda is gunning for a chunk of the UK electrical market with the announcement late last week that the store is to start selling DVD players for £9.

Java architecture includes some rich functionality that has made it attractive for the development of large enterprise application suites. Conversely, its object oriented (OO) format and characteristics mean heavily-used applications do not achieve great performance. But is that really Java's fault? Not if you believe Azul Systems.

The actual performance problem, according to Peter Holditch, senior systems engineer for appliance-maker Azul Systems, stems primarily from the way conventional server systems are architected. Despite advances, the basic design goes back to the days when single-threaded Cobol TP systems were the norm.

"Is software reliability important? Ask your grandma," says operating system guru Dr Andrew Tanenbaum.

Forget what your spouse looks like? Having trouble remembering you're married? There might be a good reason for that: 65 percent of PC users spend more time in front of their monitors than interfacing with their spouses.

Silicon Graphics plans to offer Microsoft's high-performance computing (HPC) cluster software on systems that have until now been primarily focused on meeting the needs of HPC Linux users.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies on Jan. 5 unveiled what it says is the industry's first 1TB hard drive.

Honing in on browser incompatibility issues in Web development, Adobe Systems is launching CSS Advisor , a Web site that documents these problems and offers solutions.

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) has confessed it hired a marketing company to create a fake blog to drum up Christmas support for its PlayStation Portable (PSP).

Dell announced Dec. 11 that its XPS M1710 consumer notebook will now feature Blu-ray Disc technology, offering users more storage space and an array of DVD features.

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