Airlines get in-flight Internet

Japan Airlines System and Boeing signed a deal in Tokyo on Wednesday afternoon to install the latter`s "Connexion by Boeing" in-flight Internet system into some JAL aircraft from 2004, reports IDG. The deal came a day after Singapore Airlines signed a letter of intent with Boeing to install the system.

The deal with JAL, one of Japan`s two major airlines and the first Asian carrier to make a firm deal to install the system, should see the service become available on routes between Japan and London from December 2004, the carrier said. After that, the service should be expanded to other routes between Japan and Europe, and Japan and the Americas.

US regulators said yesterday they would help bring high-speed Internet connections to rural areas by expanding the spectrum of frequencies for wireless devices that do not require modems and phone jacks. Consumer groups were sceptical, reports CNet.

The Federal Communications Commission said the action would mean an 80% boost in the amount of spectrums that these wireless networks could use to connect computers and other electronic devices to the Internet.

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) will pay its law firm to represent Linus Torvalds, the Linux operating system founder and leader, who this week was subpoenaed in connection with a $3 billion suit against IBM, reports CNet.

OSDL is Torvalds` employer and a consortium set up to improve the open source operating system. Lab funders include IBM, HP, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Cisco, Computer Associates, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Nokia and many other significant computing industry companies.

IBM says it has built a supercomputer the size of a television, based on microchip technology to be used in gaming consoles due out next year.

The supercomputer, which can perform two trillion calculations per second, is a small-scale prototype of the Blue Gene/L supercomputer that it is building for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM VP of technology and strategy, said the supercomputer uses 1 000 microprocessors based on PowerPC microchip technology, used in Apple computers.

Nokia reportedly said yesterday it would cooperate with a researcher to make sure its handset batteries are safe, as the number of reported cases of exploding Nokia phones approaches 40, reports Bloomberg.

The world`s largest mobile-phone maker will work with Belgian consumer group Test-Aankoop after an earlier study by the researcher that found Nokia batteries could explode was found to be "unreliable", said Jonas Geust, who is in charge of quality at Nokia.

Intel has said that its Itanium 2 microprocessor, due in 2005 and code-named "Montecito", will have four times more storage capacity than its predecessor and will be able to run several applications at once.

Existing Itanium chips have 6MB cache and are not capable of multi-threading, in which multiple applications can be run simultaneously with no degradation to performance. The company has already said the chip will have two processors on a single piece of silicon, known as "dual core" and have 24MB of cache.