The Australian and New Zealand governments have reported that China has been trying to infiltrate their classified records in order to gather military secrets.

The Howard government would neither confirm or deny that China has tried to steal the classified information. ” However, a senior government source told The Australian that there had been several attempts to steal confidential information.”

I personally have always felt that there are agendas behind most of the news today, so personally I don’t know what to think about the information given. A more informative article can be found on the ninemsn news site. It is interesting to see espionage in the media though.

Sony has released a world’s first OLED TV, called the XEL-1. OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode, and is the front runner in energy efficient, high quality TV. The OLED display also allows for an ultra thin screen, (3mm at it’s thinnest point), however still maintains a high quality screen quality. The screen “realizes advantages such as high contrast, high peak brightness, color reproduction, rapid response time, all of which combine to deliver unparalleled image quality.” Right now the TV is only 11 inches, however in the future they will be larger.

The features as stated on their press release: Read more

Western Digital has “the hard drive industry’s highest demonstrated density to date using continuous media.” It has reached the 520 Gb/in² areal density, which to you and me means nothing, however in the terms of hard drives, it means they will be able to support hard drive capacities of up to 3 terabytes. Well that’s all good and dandy, however the only setback is that this technology isn’t going to be available to the consumer until 2010. Either way we’re still  bounding forward.

Read the Western Digital press release for more information.

Another technology that I think has been left behind is the multi touch displays. For those of you who haven’t the faintest idea what that is, is a touch screen display, which allows you to act on it with more than one point. In other words, instead of just using a single point, like a mouse arrow, you can use more than one point, like two fingers, to manipulate and interact with the screen. The video below shows us a couple of the ways that we’d be able to interact with a computer, however do take note that this technology isn’t coming any time soon, but who knows. Last year I remember seeing Apple’s prototype, and hadn’t seen or heard any development further than that. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never personally owned a tablet pc, but have always been curious as to how they dealt with fingerprints. My PDA  could be a nightmare at times, and I was terrified to use it had I just had a meal. And having worked in a restaurant where they had touch screen registers, I saw that they weren’t too bad, but then again, my hands were always clean. Please do enjoy the vid!

[youtube v_MAtjOlRqE]

I found this article through google before and was dying to get the video, (below). The state of wearable computers is actually getting far better than I had ever imagined, from the glove ipod remote, to the actual worn computer at the end of the video, it really does instil my faith in progression of technology to a practical state. Most people would think it’s ridiculous to have wearable computers. I for one, was one of these cynics, however I have seen the practicality for a wearable computer purely by this video alone. Most would say it would be pointless to have an ipod remote glove, after all, how hard is it to use an ipod? Well if it was all in your hand, it would be far safer to change tracks while driving than it would to find the ipod, hold it in your hand, and change the song, (in fact here it would most likely be illegal, as it could pass for a mobile phone and we aren’t allowed to touch a mobile phone while the car is in motion.)

The actual wearable computer, shows it’s practicality as the man explains how he had great difficulty typing, (yes this computer actually allows you to type), due to dyslexia, he would be very tense, and so he found that writing while walking didn’t allow him to become tense. Do watch the video, it is incredibly interesting.

[youtube 9DNXLAogM7Q]

Now as everyone knows there is a war going on out there, not a war between nations, but a war between the formats. Today I take a look at what’s out there and what’s happening in the way of the next format for watching movies. Now everyone seems to hear about the issues that are happening at the moment stuck in the middle of this “war”. Playstation takes blu-ray however Paramount/Dreamworks is staying HD-DVD exclusive. What does this mean to me and you? That means if you got a PS3 so that instead of spending the money on a blu-ray player you spend a couple hundred more and get a gaming console too, it means that you can’t watch films such as Shrek and Transformers as they wont be released on blu-ray(yet anyway). (This in effect has rumoured that Michael Bay will refuse to make Transformers 2, read post here.) Read more

Google has added Presentations to the Google docs family. It’s quite good for people like me who are gmail users and sometimes can’t be bothered loading up a separate application for the slide show, and just have it load up in another tab. Basically Presentations is an online application that allows you to view Powerpoint files as a web page, which is quite handy particularly if you tend to check your mail on the go, and I know it’s rare, but not every computer has powerpoint.

Personally I think it’s great that we’ve finally moved to an online suite that allows us to do our work online. It allows us to be able to do any work we like anywhere in the world. Running on servers that are more reliable than our home computer, which decreases the chances of data loss, and allows you to have it backed up in a reliable place, and also allows you to back up on to your local computer or to a flash drive. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve been caught in a situation where my computers drives malfunction and I have a document to print and am unable to print it because it is stuck on a computer with no way of getting it off. This was prior to the Internet days I know, but it is good knowing that there is a good chance I’ll never have to worry about that again.

We have finally been given more space on gmail. Having to delete all my emails was getting quite painful.

As of the writing of this post I was at 3464 MB.

Link: Gmail Blog

Finally ICANN, (that’s the people who run domain name registrations), have realised they need international domain names, only a mere 15 years of the birth of the modern day Internet. It really is ridiculous isn’t it? For them to take so long and to exclude so many people in the world. Well I’m just a touch curious how they expect me to be entering arabic characters or Chinese, or any of the other languages they’re currently thinking of using, (Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.)

More info can be found on the official news post here .

Well if there wasn’t enough reasons for me to not use the iPhone, (funnily enough maddox has a good bunch of reasons here), we now find out that the iPhone is full of hazardous chemical also.

“The environmental advocacy group Greenpeace says Apple’s new iPhone contains a number of hazardous chemicals that could become significant pollutants.”

So now when these mac-hippies are telling me to go the holier-than-thou mac path, I”ll just tell them I have respect for my environment.

Link: itwire