MP3 players could replace stethoscopes: researchers

Stockholm (ANTARA News) - MP3 players/recorders detect some respiratory sounds better than traditional stethoscopes and could prove handy replacements in the future, two researchers told an international conference on respiratory diseases.

With better quality sound from MP3 players/recorders, some clinical sounds can be better heard and even recorded, stored on computers and fileshared, according to Neil Skjodt of the department of medicine at the University of Alberta and his audiologist colleague Bill Hodgetts.

By pressing a microphone directly to the chest, the researchers were able to record a whole range of respiratory sounds with different patterns.

"The quality, clarity and purity of the loud sounds were better than I have ever heard with a stethoscope," Skjodt was quoted by AFP as saying Monday in a statement issued by the European Respiratory Society's (ERS) annual congress in Stockholm.

"The MP3 files were later transferred to a computer and converted into frequency curves. Computer analysis of the stored sounds showed that each had a a distinct signature," the statement said.

"The computer -- like the human ear -- did, however, sometimes have difficulty in processing complex or quiet breathing sounds," it added.

Researchers decided to conduct the experiment after several studies showed that health care staff "generally had mediocre auditory faculties, especially when using stethoscopes."

One of the studies showed that medical students sometimes had to listen to certain clinical sounds up to 500 times before they could recognise them accurately.

Skjodt said that in addition to providing better quality sound, the use of MP3s also enabled doctors to reproduce or store the sounds heard during a medical consultation or even transmit them to a databank so other doctors could refer to them.

Stethoscopes date back almost 200 years. Even modern, digital stethoscopes are outperformed by MP3s, the researchers said.

According to the ERS, respiratory diseases are the main cause of death in the world. In Europe, respiratory diseases cost society more than 100 billion euros (140 billion dollars) a year.

A total of 15,000 clinical doctors, researchers, physiotherapists and medical and pharmaceutical industry workers from more than 100 countries are attending the congress in Stockholm, which concludes on Wednesday.

Microsoft suffers decisive EU antitrust defeat

Monday September 17, 10:37 am ET

By David Lawsky and Sabina Zawadzki

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Microsoft suffered a decisive antitrust defeat on Monday when a European Union court upheld a landmark ruling that the world's largest software maker had abused its dominant market position to crush rivals.

The second-highest EU court dismissed the company's appeal on all key points against the 2004 European Commission ruling and upheld a record 497 million euro ($689.9 million) fine.

A jubilant EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said the ruling should lead to a "significant drop" in Microsoft's 95 percent market share. While Microsoft's top lawyer said it would affect the way the company markets its products in future.

Shares in the U.S. software giant were down 1 percent in early New York trade after the Luxembourg-based court's ruling, suggesting investors were not overly concerned about the implications for Microsoft's successful business model.

"Its clearly a major defeat for Microsoft. There is no doubt it will spur the Commission on to regulate Microsoft much more significantly," said Chris Bright, a British competition lawyer.

The court said Microsoft was unjustified in tying new applications to its Windows operating system in a way that squeezed out rivals and harmed consumer choice.

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Readers Endorse Switch to Apple

Former Windows Users Offer Tales of Why They Switched to a Mac

Jason Fry, The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2007

Last week's column on pondering a new PC, and the possibility of throwing over Windows for Apple, brought in a tidal wave of forum posts and email -- and more evidence that the consumer-PC market is turning in Apple's favor.

Email after email came from people who had recently switched from Windows to Macs, or were planning to do so once OS X 10.5 -- alias Leopard -- comes out next month. (By the way, why not stick with the working names for operating systems? They're always cooler.)

And many of those emails came from people who were longtime, dedicated Windows users, including engineering types who had resisted what they saw as Apple hype. (Another theme that emerged from my correspondence: Vista was the final straw for a number of Windows users. Microsoft has a problem on its hands there.)

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MS to Users: You Can't Handle the Truth

One might think that turning off the feature that allows Windows Update to automatically download and execute new patches would, in fact, disable automatic updates. Apparently, one would be wrong. This behind-the-back updating, said Microsoft, is necessary in order to avoid misleading customers. Some users found it rude, and others said it could even potentially upset criminal cases.

By Chris Maxcer, TechNewsWorld, 09/14/07 1:26 PM PT

Users of Microsoft's may be surprised to learn that Microsoft has been secretly updating their PCs even after they've activated a feature that seemingly prevents automatic updates.

So far, discovery that Microsoft is changing code on users' PCs without their knowledge is limited to a single program -- the Windows Update program that goes online to check for, and initiate the download of, other Windows updates.

"The upshot is that a longstanding procedure in Windows Update requires it to self-update before it is able to recognize that new updates are available," noted Nick White, a Microsoft product manager, on the Microsoft Windows Vista Blog.

"This self-updating is done regardless of whether the user has enabled automatic checking, download and/or installation of updates. It does so in an effort to avoid WU misleading the user to think s/he is up-to-date simply because s/he was not receiving notification that updates are available," he wrote.

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Week in review: Vista, virtualization, vendettas

By Steven Musil, News.com

Published on ZDNet News: Sep 14, 2007 9:23:00 AM

Microsoft is making changes to Windows Vista in response to objections from Google, but Microsoft has some criticism of its own for the search company.

In an effort to satisfy antitrust concerns, the software giant plans to make changes to the desktop search feature in Vista. Microsoft agreed in June to make alterations to the way desktop search operates in response to concerns from Google.

The primary impact of the change is giving Vista users who choose a non-Microsoft option for desktop search more outlets to see those search results, as opposed to the results generated by Vista's built-in desktop search engine.

The changes are coming with the first service pack to Windows Vista. Microsoft is launching a beta version of the update in the next couple of weeks, with a final version expected early next year.

As CNET News.com readers debated the value and origins of desktop search, one reader raised the issue of what would motivate Google to challenge Microsoft on the issue.

"What makes me a little more nervous than Windows knowing the content of files on my system is the fact that an advertising company wants to know the content of our files," wrote one reader to the News.com TalkBack forum.

"What makes me a little more nervous than Windows knowing the content of files on my system, is the fact that an advertising company wants to know the content of our files."

In other Vista news, sales of boxed copies of the operating system continue to significantly trail those of Windows XP during its early days, according to a soon-to-be-released report. Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent, compared with Windows XP, during each product's first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group.

Microsoft also agreed that an analysis of boxed-copy sales is not representative of Vista's momentum, noting that the trend of people getting a new operating system with a new PC has further accelerated with Vista.

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Google Proposes International Privacy Standard

The world's largest Internet search company wants to create new ways to help keep Internet users safe

Michael Hoffman, DailyTech.com (Blog) - September 14, 2007 4:25 AM

Google today proposed that governments and technology companies need to work together to create an international method that details how the personal information of users should be handled on the Internet. Google's Peter Fleischer, chief privacy officer, challenged members of the United Nations to help make sure user privacy remains safe.

"People look to us to show some leadership and be constructive," Fleischer said before speaking before the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. "By supporting global privacy standards, there will be a debate and part of that debate will be what our motives are."

A large problem is that privacy standards can vary greatly among countries, something that can cause issues for companies that operate in many countries. Along with not having a federal privacy law to protect consumers, laws in the United States often vary state-by-state: another roadblock that will likely need to be fixed.

Another problem facing companies such as Google is that many of the laws are extremely out of date when compared to how the Internet has progressed. An Internet law created by lawmakers just 10 years ago cannot fairly be used today.

“Privacy laws have not kept up with the reality of the internet and technology, where we have vast amounts of information and every time a credit card is used online, the data on it can move across six or seven countries in a matter of minutes,” Fleischer said.

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Virtualisation - a CIO's best friend?

Next-gen chips driving consolidation, consolidation, consolidation...

By Natasha Lomas, Silicon.com, Friday 14 September 2007

Chip-makers reckon their next generation of processors are stepping up to the challenges CIOs face: growing volumes of data, increasing demands on that data and rising energy costs.

But the technology poised to play the most significant role in tackling all these challenges is virtualisation, according to senior industry figures.

Virtualisation enables hardware to run multiple virtual machines, offering benefits such as the ability to run different operating systems on one server and to increase flexibility, availability and speed of deployment of computing resources.

"There is no better means today to improve energy efficiency than by the use of virtualisation"

Chris Ingle, consulting and research director for IDC's European systems group, said the next generation of server hardware needs to perform like never before - fulfilling increasingly complex business needs, without costing the earth.

Speaking at the launch of AMD's new Opteron quad-core server processor in Barcelona - which is touted by the chip-maker as very virtualisation-friendly by enabling more virtual machines to be run per server - Ingle said: "This is all about data. Businesses are dealing with more data, they're trying to get data out to more places in the organisation and to do that they need high performance systems and we continue to see performance improvement in all kinds of systems - what we need to see is improvement in virtualisation, in management and in efficiency."

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German government to appoint a national CIO

Cornelia Wels-Maug, Ovum

The German government plans to appoint a national Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the first time. More details about the appointment will be forthcoming on the second national IT Summit in Hannover in December.

Comment Ovum: This latest initiative is a response to the fact that Germany is still lacking behind the international community when it comes to the adoption of information and Communication Technology (ICT) for the purposes of public administration (on federal and state level alike) and the range of available e-government offerings to its citizens. Furthermore, the exchange of information is often hampered by the fact that not all ICT technologies used on federal as well as state levels are intra-compatible. It will be the responsibility of the newly appointed CIO to coordinate the federal IT activities, including e-government offerings.

There is not much time left between now and 10 December, the date of the second IT Summit, to clearly define the role. Moreover, if the CIO is not equipped with adequate authority, she/he will hardly be able to bring about the required changes. Furthermore, any changes made cannot be confined to just the federal level, and this again highlights the underlying conflict between the federal and state authority. The accomplishment of the long awaited federalism reform will also help in this respect. For now, the CIO, as an additional element of the role, will work to gain the cooperation between those two camps.

To help with the process of formulating the role of the CIO and finding its place in the government - it has yet to be established whether the CIO will be part of the chancellery or of one of the ministry (possibly the Ministry of the Interior) - the government has looked for a usable blueprint. To get a better understanding of the multiple aspects the role might involve, the government consulted several renowned IT management consultants on the role of CIOs in the industry last week.

But the idea of a national CIO is not new. National CIOs, for instance, can be found in Canada, Australia, Austria and the UK. The UK's current CIO, John Suffolk, to take a European neighbour which has a very advanced public sector when it comes to the adoption of IT, might be used as a role model: one of his key responsibilities is deciding upon which elements of a common infrastructure for the public sector should be developed and how those common elements should be managed. This is embedded into the execution of a long-term vision in how public services can be shaped in order to provide efficient, effective services designed around the needs of citizens and businesses.

It looks like the German government is not as advanced in formulating such a long-term vision, but the actual creation of a CIO is a step towards this.

Getting Inside Google's gPhone

The search giant's mobile offensive, like the iPhone, may force new cracks in the way the wireless industry operates

by Olga Kharif, Businessweek, Technology

Still coming to terms with Apple's iPhone invasion, the cellular industry now finds itself bracing for yet another intrusion by a mighty outsider bent on altering the way wireless does business. This time it's Google.

New signals and speculation about Google's (GOOG) mobile initiatives emerge daily, but with no clear proclamations as yet from the Web search leader. One day there's buzz that Google will follow Apple's (AAPL) lead by introducing its own mobile device, the gPhone. Next comes word the company has developed its own mobile operating system or Web browser. Against this uncertain backdrop, providers of wireless service, handsets, and software have been left to guess anxiously at Google's true intentions, not unlike children gathered about a campfire, scanning for monsters in the shadowy forest.

Google Platform?

So what's really lurking behind those trees? A source familiar with the situation tells BusinessWeek.com that Google may be preparing a new mobile platform, a would-be rival to the Nokia-dominated (NOK) Symbian OS, Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile, mobile Linux, Palm (PALM), and other operating systems.

The new operating system, which may be named gPhone, was developed in part with know-how Google acquired with a startup named Android in 2005. The platform is designed to enable lower-priced "smartphones" featuring more robust Web browsing and multimedia applications. Most importantly for Google, it will work hand in glove with the company's mobile search engine and other Google applications that are already popular on personal computers. And it would allow Google to bring new applications to the wireless market faster. Google declined to confirm or deny this information.

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Apple Unveils Wi-Fi iPod Touch, new iPod Nano, Slashes iPhone Price Tag

By Eric Southworth on Sep 5th, 2007, ScienceMode

Apple has revitalized its iPod lineup with the unveiling of a new slightly smaller iPod nano and its addition of a new touch-screen-music player called, “iPod Touch”, an entirely new addition to the iPod family with a Wi-Fi wireless networking feature.

The new music player lineup promises to bring video playback, an enhanced user interface featuring Cover Flow, and an incredible new design to the world’s most popular music player.

Like the iPhone, the new iPod touch is a touch-screen user interface, which enables users to control, and sort through their music library on a widescreen display with just the touch of a finger.

The iPod touch also includes Wi-Fi wireless networking feature, the first on any iPod, pre-loaded with Apple’s latest mobile applications, which utilizes its Wi-Fi capability.

Starting with Safari, a mobile browser which works on any mobile device, lets users wirelessly view web pages just as they look on their computer, and features Google Search or Yahoo! oneSearch.

Moreover, Apple’s YouTube application lets iPod touch or iPhone users to wirelessly watch over 10 million free videos from the Internet’s most popular video website.

To conclude, the new iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store application lets both iPod touch and iPhone users to wirelessly browse, preview and buy songs and albums from Apple’s online music store.

The iPod touch is 8 mm thin, and is scheduled to be available later this month. The 8GB iPod touch model is $299 (US) and the 16GB model is $399 (US).

Meanwhile, the new iPod nano features a larger two-inch display with 204 pixels per inch, which lets users watch their favorite movies, TV shows and music videos in the same resolution they currently enjoy on the video iPod. iPod nano also includes three fun games, and additional games can be purchased from the online iTunes Store.

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