Sun`s chief scientist resigns

Sun Microsystems chief scientist and co-founder Bill Joy has resigned. Joy says he`s considering teaming up with venture capitalist John Doerr to start his own company. Joy started Sun in 1982 after creating a version of Unix at the University of California at Berkeley.

IBM is to boost transistor performance by about 50% in the next three to five years by combining two semiconductor manufacturing techniques.

The strained silicon and silicon on insulator techniques have been brought together. IBM has also developed another way to increase transistor performance by combining different substrates on a single wafer.

Cisco Systems has launched its first-ever VOIP telephone with a colour touch-screen.

The company says the new features are aimed at making voice over Internet Protocol phones much easier to use, with colour touch-screens set to become a regular features in Cisco`s Internet telephony product offering.

IOL reports that the Walt Disney Company is to test an experimental type of DVD that self-destructs 48 hours later.

Disney aims to find out whether consumers will buy limited-life DVDs rather than having to return a retail copy. They say the advantage to the disposable DVD format - known as EZ-D - is that such discs can be sold anywhere and never need to be returned.

Cnet news reports that American Pioneer Electronics has announced an external DVD/CD writer that enables users to write a wide variety of files to DVD for storage or playback on other DVD devices.

The company says the DVR-S606 was developed in response to consumer demand that DVD writers should handle various formats. The drive supports discs using DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW formats.

Pioneer says the drive has the same high-capacity, optical-storage system as its internal recordable drive.