NEC tests translator

Travelers at Tokyo’s Narita international airport had a recent opportunity to try out a portable translator for the English and Japanese languages.

NEC Corp.’s experimental device, which resembles a personal digital assistant and is slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes, uses the Japanese electronics maker’s voice-recognition technology. Its vocabulary was limited to those used in travel such as, “Where is the nearest Japanese restaurant?” or “Which way to the escalators?”

NEC spokesman Yoshibumi Yashiro said the voice-recognition capabilities still need work.

Survey

Successful CEOs tended to be young ‘bookworms’

Successful chief executives apparently had some bookish childhoods.

In a query of 208 Fortune 1000 CEOs, 84 percent described themselves as voracious readers when they were growing up. Less than a fifth said they were couch potatoes, watching television to pass their time.

They weren’t the cool children in school, either: Only 4 percent said they were very popular. The most, 59 percent, described themselves as unpopular.

As for motivation, almost half (43 percent) cited fear, followed by power, for 22 percent. Only 7 percent of the CEOs said they were motivated by money.

The survey was conducted for New York-based Jericho Communications, which is publishing a book from the findings, “Leaderships Secrets of the World’s Most Successful CEOs.”

Software

Intel touts rating system

Intel Corp. has a new numbering system for its Pentium and Celeron microprocessors to highlight features beyond speed.

Clock speed had been Intel’s primary method of distinguishing its chips, but by June, Intel will incorporate such factors as how much cache memory is onboard and how quickly data moves outside the chip.

“The sum of all those features is greater than just gigahertz alone,” said Intel spokesman Bill Calder.

Other companies, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., IBM Corp. and Apple Computer Inc., also have moved away from rating chips based solely on their frequency, measured in cycles per second.

Apple has long complained that a chip’s megahertz number is not representative of overall performance.