India launches communications satellite

India has sent into orbit a rocket carrying the replacement for a communications satellite destroyed last year, raising its hopes of competing for global satellite launch business, reports Google.

The 49m rocket, carrying the Insat-4CR satellite, blasted off from the Sriharikota space station, in southern India, at 6.21pm on Sunday, after a two-hour delay due to a technical glitch.

Weighing 2 130kg, the satellite is equipped with 12 wideband channels, known as transponders, that allow digital transmission on each at the same time by several video and audio networks.

NBC Universal is trying to take on Apple in the budding video-downloading business, says WSJ.com.

NBC provides a big chunk of the TV shows sold through the iPod maker's online iTunes Store, although video downloads are still a minuscule portion of Apple's revenue.

Now the General Electric subsidiary has said it will not renew its video contract with Apple after it expires in December. This looks more like a bit of brinkmanship than the end of the relationship.

Six years after the landmark anti-trust settlement between the US and Microsoft, the Department of Justice said last week that the deal has benefited consumers by promoting competition in the middleware market, says PC Mag.

In a filing in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice stated the agreement has accomplished the goal of removing "anti-competitive exclusionary obstacles" erected by Microsoft prior to the settlement.

The Department of Justice originally charged Microsoft with unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in its PC operating systems by prohibiting consumers and computer manufacturers from removing Microsoft's middleware and cutting deals with software developers and other third parties to exclude competing middleware.

IBM researchers have studied the ability of an atom to maintain its magnetic orientation, a quality that can help determine that atom's suitability for storing data, reports Sciam.com.

The researchers announced they had made major strides in nanotechnology by studying how to build storage and other computing devices out of components no bigger than a few atoms or molecules.

Researchers at the company's research centre in California, report in Science that magnetic anisotropy could eventually be used to store information in individual atoms. This paves the way to pack as much as 150 trillion bits of data per square inch, 1 000 times more than current data storage densities.