Indian govt facilitates tech partnerships

The Indian Union Ministry of Science and Technology and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to promote technology partnerships between Indian industry and institutes and those abroad, reports The Hindu.

Titled "Global Innovation and Technology Alliance", the MOU provides for facilitating technology partnerships through all possible means, including joint ventures and collaborations, technology transfers and licensing and joint technology development programmes.

As part of the MOU, the ministry and the CII will organise missions, seminars and workshops to provide exposures to Indian industry and the institutes and those abroad to each other's developments.

Japanese researchers at the University of Tokyo have built a multi-core chip, which they say contains 512 cores and is capable of performing 512 billion floating-point operations every second, reports The Channel Register.

The Grape DR chip is a mathematics co-processor that is designed to sit on a PCI-X add-in card and provide backup for the host system's CPU.

Each core is designed to handle a single, specific mathematical instruction, such as a floating-point addition or multiplication. The chip also contains a shared memory cache.

Malicious hackers have turned to Wikipedia to try to help them catch out PC users, says BBC News.

The virus writers created a page on the German Wikipedia that linked to a fake fix for a new version of an old malicious Windows worm. However, instead of curing a bug, those installing the fix would be infected by a new Windows virus.

The booby-trapped page on the German version of the online encyclopedia has now been removed.

A Harris Interactive survey says US consumers are fumbling through thick manuals, holding on customer-support phone lines, and losing patience, sleep and tempers, reports USAToday.

Of the 2 551 Americans that were polled, 85% said they have become so flustered, they have ended up swearing, shouting, experiencing chest pains, crying or smashing things when trying to get customer service after purchasing gadgets.

Slightly more than half said not being able to get a live person on the phone was their greatest frustration, while seven out of 10 people polled said customer service representatives are not trained adequately.

Trading Technologies has suffered a setback in its long-running effort to enforce patents on trading technology used by much of the global derivatives sector, reports Financial Times.

The Chicago-based group's claim of patent infringement was partially rejected by a US district court in a move that would allow eSpeed, the electronic bond trading unit of Cantor Fitzgerald, to offer its software without the risk of its clients being exposed to legal action.

Trading Technologies has sued more than a dozen futures brokers, alleging they used trading systems for their clients that infringed a patent the company secured in 2004, and was expected to pursue alleged infringement against the large banks that dominate futures trading.