El reg has a nice article on why development of intelligent / multifunctional robots is still stagnated and run by hobbyists. It runs through some of the real problems of software development for robot brains.

An Israeli team has created a tiny little robot that can travel up and down your veins and arteries, being manipulated by magnetic fields. It has a diameter of 1mm and crawls along your bloodstream using little arms.

Using nanowires assembled on glass and thin films of flexible plastic built using zinc oxide or indium oxide the transistors are not visible to the human eye. The researchers hope to create HUDs and displays on windsheilds, visors, spectacles, etc. Make my car look like the inside of an F-16 please!

Tom’s Hardware is running a great tutorial how to get a DLP projector, stereoscopic glasses and go all VR by turning your wall into a huge 3D display. They tell you what hardware to get and how to install it, and have reviews of several different types of games you can play.

Are CCD sensors now a thing of the past? The Samsung 8.4 megapixel CMOS Image Sensor uses only a tenth of the power of a CCD with the same fidelity and a high SNR.

Via is releasing a tiny motherboard/chip combo – the Epia PX (10×7.2 cm), a successor to the Pico-ITX (12×12 cm). It runs at 1GHz and has a whole scale of I/O for audio/visual and USB connectors.

The VoomPC2 ruggedized little thing comes pre-prepped to fit into your car. It comes with a 1.5 Ghz processor and a whole load of connectors: VGA and S-Video output, USB 2.0, FireWire, Ethernet, PCMCIA Type I and II, a CardBus interface for hooking up to GPS or Wi-Fi systems, and a 5.1 audio support.

Nickel Cadmium batteries lose their maximum charge after a while due to dendrite growth in them. Using an external power source, you can zap the battery and clear the dendrites, giving you a revived battery.

This new type of memory is 500 – 100 times faster than flash RAM and has half the power consumption. It’s non volatile, so it doesn’t need to be powered continuously. At the heart of phase-change memory is a tiny chunk of alloy that can be changed rapidly between an ordered, crystalline phase and a Read more about Phase Change Memory[…]

Samsung has unveiled their new hybrid hard drives (HHD) composed of storage in the form of partially platter based (rotating) storage and flash memory storage. The flash memory works like a prefetch cache, but because it’s much faster than platter technology there should be significant speed increases on bootup and with writing small files. Once Read more about Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk[…]

Using tobacco virusses, you can apparently create very fast switching transistors. These guys have done it, and now need to find a way to link up all the virusses. This means your RAM may soon (the researchers think in around 4 years) be alive.

This site has instructions on how to build your own astromech – with galleries for all the different types of droids people have built untill now.

Matrox released this some time ago, but I just found it, so here it is: The Triplehead2Go is a box you connect a single VGA (analog) out from your PC to and then connect 3 monitors to through it’s own VGA (analog) outputs. It’s not a graphics card – Matrox has decided to not compete Read more about Matrox Triplehead2Go[…]

The article here claims it’s light through the chip itself, but reading it, it looks more like they’ve managed to find a way to transmit data using light between the chips themselves, which is still pretty cool and will speed up the bus no end (which is a major limiting factor in PC speeds nowadays).

In order to put a PC into your car, you need to power your computer from the car itself. You also need software and they reccomend a 7″ touch screen LCD. Full instructions to be found.

What is it with floating point operations that makes chip vendors so crap at them? Intel had the floating point operation problem when it released the Pentium processor (1+1=1.999999999 but that’s good enough). Now AMD has the Opteron and it turns out that they accidentally released a few into the wild with floating point problems Read more about AMD can’t float either[…]

We make money not art has a great set of notes on a lecture by Tom Armitage about how the game controller is basically the same everywhere, and how they have evolved for specific platforms to the point where they are no longer intuitive to the new user of console games due to the plethora Read more about Is Controller design killing creativity in video games[…]

Spirit makes RFID readers which can read a wide range of standards and come in USB or SDIO (Pocket PC / WinMobile) forms, and retail at only $99 – $199! Pretty soon they’re going to go nuts on the amount of data coming in.

Since Apple moved to intel chips, it wasn’t a surprise that someone was going to hack OS X and try to run it on a run of the mill PC. Apparently Apple put a poem in their OS asking people please to not hack OS X. But the hackers have apparently prevailed and allthough there Read more about Mac OS X on PCs[…]

So, what’s cooler than a flatpanel OLED display? A transparent OLED display – duhhhh! Ze Germans have figured out how to create transparent OLEDs which we can use in our cars and stuff – I want my whole window to be an OLED display!

Clustered 64 bit computers with up to 16 AMD Opterons in one machine: nice!

Yup, it’s on the streets now! Intel has begun shipping the eagerly anticipated pair of Pentium CPUs equipped with its ‘one processor, multiple operating systems’ Virtualisation Technology (VT). AMD to follow next year.

The clever cloggs at IBM have managed to find a way to slow down light to 1/300th its normal speed, which allows it to be manageable enough to use it to impart information inside computer chips. They still need to find a way to mass produce the opticals, and of course for these new architechtures Read more about IBM on the way to light based computing[…]

That’s fast!

Well, this is a piece I wrote up on the difference between the two words, as I’m of the opinion that it’s basically just a hyped up thing going down, but Emerce has picked up on it and is inviting discussion – Go me!