NEC fuel-cell battery 'lasts 40 hours`
Japanese chips-to-computers giant NEC says it has developed a small fuel cell, which will dramatically improve the battery life of notebook computers. The company aims to test it on the market within two years.
Reuters reports that the fuel cell will allow notebooks to operate for 40 consecutive hours, or around 10 times the life of regular lithium-ion batteries.
Fuel cells, which take in hydrogen and oxygen and turn them into electricity, do not need recharging like regular batteries. They require a refill of fuel such as hydrogen gas or liquid methanol in order to keep operating.
Tools to build Linux PDAs
US-based Metrowerks has announced a new platform and tools for building Linux-based applications for computing devices. Eweek reports that the company`s Metrowerks OpenPDA platform consists of a Linux operating system (OS) environment, Java software, development tools, integration services and training.
OpenPDA applications will be portable to various leading semiconductor architectures. The platform supports ARM and MIPS Technologies silicon architectures, and the company plans to announce support for additional architectures in the coming weeks, company officials said.
The platform includes the Trolltech user interface, Esmertec`s Java virtual machine and Opera`s browser, as well as the embedded Linux OS source code and CodeWarrior tools from Metrowerks.
eBay chooses MicroStrategy for enterprise BI
eBay, the world`s most successful online auction facility, has chosen the MicroStrategy business intelligence (BI) platform to analyse the ongoing performance of the many categories of products and services for sale on its Web sites.
On any given day, there are more than 16 million items listed on eBay across 27 000 categories. In 2002, eBay users transacted $14.87 billion in gross merchandise sales.
"We chose MicroStrategy because of its exceptional user scalability and its ability to support advanced reporting and analysis," says eBay CIO Brad Peterson. "MicroStrategy also provides excellent query performance with our rapidly growing multi-Terabyte data warehouse."
Share