The German government has decided to opt out of a multimillion-euro research effort to build a European search engine to compete with Google in a disagreement with France over the basic design of the project. The French participants will continue to develop the search engine (project name Quaero) with possible funding from the European Union.

Presudent Jacques Chirac of France and former German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder had unveiled the project in April 2005 as a response to US search giant, Google.

The project was to have been paid for by the French and German governments, with contributions from technology companies like Thomson and France Télécom on the west side of the Rhine, and Siemens and Deutsche Telekom to the east. The two countries had initially discussed plans to commit between $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion, over five years to Quaero.

The French participants were favoring a sophisticated search engine that could sift audio, video and other multimedia data, while German participants favored a next- generation text-based search engine.

IBM’s Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6 GHz.

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have turned to adding multiple processing cores on each slice of silicon. That’s effective when computers are running numerous tasks at the same time, but increasing the clock speed means that an individual task will run faster.

The first-generation Cell Broadband Engine chip, co-developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, has appeared in Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console and can run at 4 GHz. The second-generation chip will run at 6 GHz. Moreover, the new chip will have a dual power supply that increases memory performance.

The IBM Power6 processor for servers which is due to ship in 2007, will run between 4 and 5 GHZ. The chip consumes less than 100 watts, a power range comparable to mainstream 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips. The Power6 processor has 700 million transistors and measures 341 square millimeters. Like the second-generation Cell, Power6 is built with a manufacturing process with 65-nanometer elements.

In September, Intel showed a glimpse of a prototype chip with 80 cores that can perform a trillion mathematical calculations per second. The chip measures 275 square millimeters—smaller than the 303-square-millimeter area indicated in September—and runs at 4 GHz. The chip has 100 million transistors and dissipates 98 watts of waste heat.

In a quest to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 1,00,000 job applications that it receives each month. Google is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

The answers are fed into a series of formulae created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score from zero to 100, which meant to predict how well a person will fit into its competitive culture.

Google has doubled its employee base in each of the last three years as a result of which the company is trying to make its already rigorous recruitment process more efficient.

Even as Google tries to hire more people faster, it wants to make sure that new hires will fit into its freewheeling culture. The company boasts that only four percent of its work force leaves each year. And it works hard to retain people, with time to work on personal projects and other goodies. Stock options and grants also encourage employees to stay long enough to take advantage of the company’s surging share price.

It is too early to tell if the system is working. The surveys have been in use in about a dozen areas for several months. Indeed, there is some resistance even at Google to the idea that a machine can pick talent better than a human.

iRobot will publicly release its latest product, the iRobot Create, which is a programmable robot for entertainment and education. It comes with wheels, motors for movement, and sensors that prevent it from tumbling downstairs or getting mired in corners.

Create comes with a series of connectors that let users attach reticulating arms, cameras and other devices, which gives the customer, the ability to device their own tasks and write their own programs.

While add-ons can be purchased, the company expects that people will create their own peripherals. In India, iRobot engineers placed sand containers on the robot and programmed it so that it could create sand mandalas.

The Create costs $129.99, while an additional command module, a board that contains an 8-bit microprocessor costs $59.99.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced a 1-terabyte hard disk drive which starts shipping in the first quarter of 2007 and cost $399. The company also plans to offer a CinemaStar version of the drive, for use in DVR and set-top boxes, as well as an enterprise version with a certified mean time between failure rating. Both of those versions are expected in the second quarter of this year. Hitachi hopes to be the first to market with a 1 TB drive. The company is facing tough competition with Seagate that confirmed its intentions to ship a 1TB drive in the first half of 2007. The Deskstar 7K1000 will be a five-platter drive, each platter capable of storing 200 GB apiece. Like Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB drive, Hitachi’s 1 TB model uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to achieve its high capacity point. The 7K1000 is Hitachi’s first 3.5-inch hard drive to use PMR technology; last year, the company released 2.5-inch PMR-based hard drives.