Weekly Roundup: Stephen Hawking snubs title and Bill Gates's last day at the office

Stephen Hawking has revealed that he refused the offer of British knighthood over 10 years ago. He is said to have turned down the honour because of his apparent distaste for titles and his anger at the way in which the British government has handled scientific funding over the years.

Internode installed its own DSLAM equipmentin over 100 telephone exchanges to place itself as one of the biggest Aussie ISP players. Though Internode said some of the deployment had been slowed by Telstra’s uncooperative attitude, it has another 50 exchanges planned for its ADSL2+ rollout schedule.

A new study claimed that 1 in 3 IT staff use administrative passwords to gain access to confidential information, including salary details, personal emails and board-meeting minutes. Only 30 percent admitted to regularly changing their passwords, while nine percent admitted to never changing them, which gives ex-IT personnel access to other confidential information.

Vodafone, Cisco, and Research in Motion (RIM) have joined together to provide communication solutions to small to medium businesses, including including BlackBerry Smartphones and Enterprise Solution, a Cisco router, Cisco Wi-Fi for Blackberrys and laptops, and Cisco IP office phones. The service will be available nationwide by the end of the year.

A new report from Jupiter research claims that one quarter of the world will be online by 2012. It expects to see the number of web users to climb to 1.8 billion within the next four years. Jupiter says it sees the most online user growth in China, India, and Brazil.

An Australian man has put his entire life up for sale on eBay, including his house, furniture, friends, and job as a carpet store assistant. The bidding has already reached $390,000. The man said he made the decision to sale his current life after his wife of 12 years left him.

3 Mobile is urging its customers to sign an online petition to convince Apple to allow the mobile company to carry the iPhone when it hits Australia on July 11. 3 hopes to join Optus, Vodaphone, and Telstra in carrying the much-anticipated 3G device. The petition has so far attracted over 700 signatures.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates turned in his time card on Friday, retiring from the company he helped build over 30 years ago. Gates will remain chairman and work with Microsoft on special projects, but wants to devote his time to philanthropic work with his wife.

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