Communications Technology

Japan’s Sony on Wednesday issued a warning to customers worldwide that a system glitch affecting more than half a million of its VAIO laptop computers may cause overheating and possible burns.

The electronics giant said a heat-monitoring chip in some of its VAIO F and C series models that were launched in January this year could be defective, leading to possible overheating, a company statement said.

Although the defect has not been known to cause personal injuries, the firm said it received a total of 39 complaints from overseas customers saying that the shape of their computers became distorted from overheating.

The glitch affects a total of 535,000 laptops worldwide, of which nearly half is in the United States and the remainder in Japan, Europe and China.

In Washington, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a voluntary recall of the 233,000 computers in the United States.

Sony said it is offering consumers a software application download with which to correct the malfunction.

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The Nightkey system being tested, patrons wishing to enter the Coogee Bay Hotel after 9pm are allowed in only if they submit photo identification, which includes their address, for scanning. A video of the patron is recorded and a ”finger pin” scan taken.

Coogee Bay Hotel general manager Tony Williams said the scan was not of a fingerprint but only key identifying points on a finger.

All that information is relayed by computer on the spot to the Perth database of the developers of Nightkey, who say the information cannot then be sold to marketing companies.

Mr Williams said the pin-print system allowed the hotel to identify and refuse entry to anyone who may previously have been ejected for bad behaviour. He said he had introduced the Nightkey system at the hotel three weeks ago, even though the establishment was no longer on the first tier of the list of the state’s most violent licensed premises.

”Four years ago, we were the second on the list. Since then we have worked hard to ensure no acts of violence occur, so that the majority of patrons feel safe from, unfortunately, a minority of people,” Mr Williams said. ”We are now 63 on the third tier of hotels and clubs [cited for alcohol-related violence in NSW] through other preventative strategies we undertook such as plastic glasses and voluntary lockouts of people wanting to get in after a certain time in addition to our own door security.

”We decided to trial this system even though we have taken these other steps and in the three weeks since we introduced it, we have had no problems.”

Mr Williams said he had witnessed the Nightkey’s effectiveness himself.

”People either agree to go with it or walk away,” he said. ”One night I saw a taxi-load of undesirables rock up. They took one look at the system and jumped back in another taxi.

”My motivation is to keep my staff and patrons safe through preventative measures. I want anyone coming into our hotel to think twice about acting up on licensed premises.”

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An Italian priest has developed an application that will let priests celebrate Mass with an iPad on the altar instead of the regular Roman missal.

The Reverend Paolo Padrini, a consultant with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said on Friday the free application will be launched in July in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin.

Two years ago, Padrini developed the iBreviary, an application that brought the book of daily prayers used by priests onto iPhones. So far some 200,000 people have downloaded the application, he said.

The iPad application is similar but also contains the complete missal - containing all that is said and sung during Mass throughout the liturgical year. Upgrades are expected to feature audio as well as commentaries and suggestions for homilies as well as musical accompaniment, he said.

”Paper books will never disappear,” he said in a phone interview from his home parish in Tortona, in Italy’s northern Piemonte region.

But at the same time ”we shouldn’t be scandalised that on altars there are these instruments in support of prayer”.

Padrini, 36, said he expected priests who have to travel a lot for work would find the application most useful, noting that he recently had to celebrate Mass in a small parish where the missal was ”a small book, a bit dirty, old”.

”If I had had my iPad with me, it would’ve been better than this old, tiny book,” he said.

Pope Benedict, a classical music lover who was reportedly given an iPod in 2006, has sought to reach out to young people through new media: the Vatican has a regularly updated presence on YouTube and Facebook. Based on the success of the iBreviary, Padrini was recruited by the Vatican to oversee its youth outreach program in the new media, www.pope2you.net.

He stressed that the iPad application, like the iBreviary, was launched at his own instigation and with his own money and is not an official Vatican initiative. Vatican officials have previously praised the iBreviary as a novel way of evangelising.

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