UK plans roadside wireless network

The UK government is planning to upgrade its roadside telematics system with a wireless network to give the country blanket low-cost wireless Internet access, Ziff Davis reports.

Last Mile Communications launched the patented technology the government plans to use this week at the wireless LAN conference.

Under the scheme, contractors would install about 150 000 wireless broadband transceivers in equipment such as streetlights and traffic lights that will run off the available power or even solar energy.

These units will self-configure into a network capable of passing signals from one node to another until it reaches an Internet uplink.

IParadigm recently introduced iThenticate, a commercial version of its plagiarism-detecting software.

The software makes a digital fingerprint of a document and compares it against material on the Internet and in other sources, including proprietary academic and media databases, reports Associated Press.

In a survey of 30 000 undergraduates at 34 US colleges, 37% admitted committing cut-and-paste plagiarism using the Internet, up from 10% in 1999.

Microsoft says its Office 2004 for Mac suite will ship during the third week of May. However, Macintosh users can pre-order the software from several online retailers starting this week, according to MacCentral.

Some of the new features include charting improvements in Excel 2004 and the ability to save pictures drawn in Office as separate graphics files.

Word and Excel 2004 also include smart buttons to give users improved control of automatic functions in documents.