General: July 2004 Archives
Dermot Ahern Announces First Towns For Group Broadband Scheme
Kinnegad, Kilbeggan and Gweedore Sign Up Dublin, Tuesday 20 July 2004
Dermot Ahern T.D., Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources today announced the first three locations to benefit from the Governments €25 million Group Broadband Scheme to deliver high-speed broadband into our smaller communities over three years.
The first locations to sign-up are Kilbeggan and Kinnegad, Co Westmeath and Gweedore in Co Donegal. Representatives from the three towns met with the Minister in Dublin today where details were released on the grant-aid and technology which will be used. Both Kinnegad and Kilbeggan will access broadband via wireless technology while Gweedore will utilise a combination of satellite and wireless.
The Minister said further small towns and villages with populations of less than 1,500 will be announced in the coming weeks. Applications are currently being processed by his Departments staff.
I have added a new category titled "Simulation and Design" to reflect the direction and content of this site.
At Tipperary Institutes we have several advocates of .NET, it is good to see that there is an open source alternative to this.
Version 1.0 of the Mono Project, an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET platform sponsored by Novell has now been released.
The software tool can be used to create rich client, Web services and server-side applications. In beta tests since May 4, the project has undergone a prolonged development cycle since its launch in 2001 by Ximian co-founder Miguel de Icaza.
The winner of Network World's inaugural "Who Wants to be an Entrepreneur?" contest says if all goes well his idea could lead to routers and other network devices costing much less and coming in smaller sizes.
Joe Pereira, a former design manager for pre-IPO semiconductor company NetLogic Microsystems, beat out 60 entrants with his concept for a content and database engine designed to take up two to 10 times less space and handle more chores than current specialty processors. His prize: $30,000 split between cash and services paid-in-kind, such as legal advice, plus exposure to a panel of judges including three venture capitalists.
Pereira, who moved from India to the U.S. in 1999 and now lives in California, says the technology he has under development would be sold as a subsystem, card or chip. The processor he has in mind "stores databases including routing tables and security rules (spam, intrusion-detection system, virus), and applies them at high wire rates," he wrote in his application. Pereira describes his vision as "improving performance and reducing cost for router, security, cache and database systems."
He says that his content and database engine, by supporting a range of processing duties, would be a cost-effective alternative to silicon designed specifically for each niche, such as processing XML data.
He estimates it would take about two months to define a processor for any particular customer and eight months to build it. He says he plans to build "a mathematically complete solution rather than [another one of] today's heuristics-based solutions."
