In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.
WebOS IMHO was the best smartphone OS there was, which never got the marketing push or hardware it deserved.
In an announcement on the HTC Facebook page, the CEO has stated that after looking at user feedback, they’re no longer going to be locking up the bootrom. This should create an explosion of creativity for Android phones – iphone will one day sooner be left in the dust!
at the Vienna University of Technology, a printing device has now been developed, which is much smaller, lighter and cheaper than ordinary 3D-printers. With this kind of printer, everyone could produce small, taylor-made 3D-objects at home, using building plans from the internet – and this could save money for expensive custom-built spare parts.
It’s also cheap to make the printer, making it a viable home unit.
via Technische Universität Wien : The World’s Smallest 3D Printer.
Scientists from Oxford University have made a significant step towards an ultrafast quantum computer by successfully generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon for the first time — entanglement is the key ingredient that promises to make quantum computers far more powerful than conventional computing devices.
via Ultrafast quantum computer closer: Ten billion bits of entanglement achieved in silicon.
The electrical signals inside Lyric’s chips represent probabilities, instead of 1s and 0s. While the transistors of conventional chips are arranged into components called digital NAND gates, which can be used to implement all possible digital logic functions, those in a probability processor make building blocks known as Bayesian NAND gates. Bayesian probability is a field of mathematics named after the eighteenth century English statistician Thomas Bayes, who developed the early ideas on which it is based.
Whereas a conventional NAND gate outputs a “1” if neither of its inputs match, the output of a Bayesian NAND gate represents the odds that the two input probabilities match. This makes it possible to perform calculations that use probabilities as their input and output.
via Technology Review: A New Kind of Microchip.
And using Crossfire, you can make that 24. It has 4GB onboard RAM and can handle full 3D over all the slots at once – make your own cave!
Powercolor hd5970 with 12 display outputs – The Inquirer.
Dupont has managed to print out a 50″ OLED screen, which tests say should be reliable for around 12 years, in 2 minutes time. This should speed up the production and implementation of OLED, as well as make it quite a bit cheaper.
Technology Review: New Inks Could Mean Cheaper OLED Screens.
The experimental graphene resistor they’ve built goes at 100 GHz, quite a bit faster than the ~40GHz of silicone resistors. They can still improve on the technology, so they’re expecting higher speeds.
Display Port allows the data for up to 4 1920 x 1200 monitors to be streamed through one cable, as well as 3D, USB and audio data.
DisplayPort 1.2 receives final VESA blessing, grows into a real standard — Engadget.
This article explores why computers can’t do floating point maths, which is what makes Excel and all those online calculators such lousy mathematicians – basically because computers are binary, they can’t calculate anything after a decimal point, so the workaround is to put the number including the decimal point in a register of a certain size (say 32 bits) and reserve a few parts of the register for the decimal. Should the number you need to calculate become too big for the register, you run into trouble with rounding errors, which can compound. It then shows how nasty compound errors can become by citing the example of why a Patriot missle battery missed a Scud attack, resulting in the deaths of 24 people.
Why computers suck at maths | News | TechRadar UK.
Using Augmented Reality goggles, powered on an Android platform, marines are able to maintain their vehicles 46% faster than using a laptop with technical manuals.
The AR system provides label names to each object, shows a 3D model of the tool you need and gives instructions for specifica tasks overlaid on the camera view of what you are looking at.
Technology Review: Faster Maintenance with Augmented Reality.
The Lausanne university in Switserland has moved from the software to the reality: they’ve managed to get robots to evolve and learn behaviours, as well as the behaviour to decieve and cooperate through communication (flashing lights) and movement. It’ s a very interesting experiment, showing that robots are getting smarter every day and are now showing some very very lifelike traits.
Darwin’s Robots | h+ Magazine.
Which goes to show – it’s the Ipod / Iphone which is floating the Apple. Nope, Macs just suck and their fanboy users are a teeny tiny minority. And the rest of the I-Have-A-Mac smug bastards are hypocrites. You wouldn’t need a PC if your Mac was so perfect, now would you, mister I’m a Mac.
85% of Mac users own a PC | News | PC Pro.
Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM)
…
Unlike conventional memory, which involves moving electrons around a chip, PCM data would literally be frozen in place, even when the machine is off. That means these devices could switch on nearly instantaneously.
via Melting memory chips in mass production : Nature News.
This thing has a 300MHz processor and has been hacked to run Linux with mouse and sound support.
$38 Zipit Wireless Messenger receives Linux injection, becomes $38 netbook.
A South African IT firm sent a carrier pigeon 50 miles with a datacard attached to it’s leg. The pigeon was faster than the internet, which after 2 hours had only completed 4% of the transfer. This was in protest at the sucky internet connection available through Telkom.
Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s Telkom – Yahoo! Canada News.
These flowcharts are very very good indeed, with a “Boot Failure Troubleshooting Poster” which encompasses all of the flowcharts in one huge poster.
MegaTux, the Dell Thunderbird with 4480 Intel processors will run 1 million copies of bots in a limited area botnet over Wine in order to create simulations of differnet botnets on a massive scale. Researchers can then stop the simulation at any point and have a look at the state of the different virtual PCs.
Researchers Try to Stalk Botnets Used by Hackers – NYTimes.com.
This thing is made up from a few pieces of PVC piping, costs around $10,- to make and works really really well.
Homemade Steadicam Costs About $24,990 Less Than The Real Thing – Steadicam – Gizmodo.
DataSlide’s Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD) does not use read-write heads moving across the recording surface of a spinning hard disk drive (HDD). Instead an ultra-thin, 2-dimensional array of 64 read-write heads, operating in parallel, is positioned above an piezo-electric-driven oscillating rectangular recording surface, and delivers 160,000 random IOPS with a 500MB/sec transfer rate.
via DataSlide reinvents hard drive • The Register.
The idea is to use cheap off-peak energy at night to freeze a tank of water or “distributed energy storage system” then use that great block of ice to cool your data centre in the daytime. Refrigerant would circulate from the tank to the Data Aire equipment eliminating the need to run the energy-intensive compressor and condenser during peak daytime hours.
Apparently this can save up to 45% on energy requirements for the cooling.
via Ice air con system aims for cool on the cheap • The Register.
as it turns out from the launcher screen of your Pre simply type in the phrase “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” — which if you parse with spacing might be more easily recognizable as the infamous Contra Konami code look it up — and up comes a hidden app called “Developer Mode Enabler.”
via The secret to Palm Pre dev mode lies in the Konami code.
It’s only been a few days since the Palm Pre was released, but one of the biggest breakthroughs for the outside-the-system developer community may have just been made.
With this, people can probably tell how the OS hooks into the hardware, which will allow them to hook in themselves – something Palm itself has been loathe to share with their userbase.
via Pre Recovery Tool Leaks Out, Including webOS Root Image(!) | PreCentral.net.