snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister offers five reasons why companies should re-consider concentrating their development efforts on browser-based apps. As McAllister sees it, Web apps encourage a thin-client approach to development that concentrates far too much workload in the datacenter. And while UI and tool limitations are well known, the Web as 'hostile territory' for independent developers is a possibility not yet fully understood. Sure, Web development is fast, versatile, and relatively inexpensive, but long term, the browser's weaknesses might just outweigh its strengths as an app delivery platform."

Hesham writes "Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute just released details on their "why-didn't-I-think-of-that-style" 3D video conferencing application. Considering how stale development has been in this field, this research seems like a nice solid step towards immersive telepresence. I was really disappointed with the "state-of-the-art" systems demoed at CES this year — they are all still just a flat, square, video stream. Hardly anything new. What is really cool about this project, is that researchers avoided building custom hardware no one is going to ever buy, and explored what could be done with just the generic webcams everyone already has. The result is a software-only solution, meaning all the big players (AIM, Skype, MSN, etc.) can release this as a simple software update. 'Enable 3D' checkbox anyone? YouTube video here. Behind the scenes, it relies on a clever illusory trick (motion parallax) and head-tracking (a la Johnny Lee's Wiimote stuff — same lab, HCII). It was just presented at IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia in December."

Greg Huang writes "In early January, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation laid off half its staff and shed work on the Sugar graphical interface. Now, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and president Chuck Kane for the first time detail the foundation's new plans, describe how the XO laptop will do what netbooks can't do, and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year."

arcticstoat writes "Just a few months after The Khronos Group unveiled the Open GL 3.0 spec last year, AMD has included full support for the new API in its first WHQL driver of 2009 — Catalyst 9.1. OpenGL 3.0 requires DirectX 10-level hardware, such as AMD's Radeon HD series of GPUs. However, unlike Direct3D 10, OpenGL 3.0's features can be enabled on both Windows XP and Vista, as well as Linux and Mac OS, which could be a bonus for game developers looking for a broad base of customers. The Khronos Group claims that OpenGL 3.0 has a 'rough feature parity' with Direct3D 10, and it provides Shader Model 4.0 support, including features such as the Geometry Shader. The Khronos Group also says that the new API will interoperate with the GPGPU API OpenCL, which could allow OpenGL 3.0 to compete with the Compute Shader promised in Microsoft's DirectX 11 API."

coondoggie writes "Ok, maybe this is getting a little too close to bringing Terminator-like robots to life. For starters, eco-friendly engine builder Cyclone Power this week inked a contract from Robotic Technologies, Inc. (RTI) to develop what it calls a beta biomass engine system that will be the heart of RTI's Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR). The purpose of EATR is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling — in other words it needs to 'eat.' According to researchers, the EATR system gets its energy by foraging, or what the firms describe as 'engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.'" We can only hope they don't team up with the Multi-Robot Pursuit System project to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human."

Lucas123 writes "Six of the largest disk manufacturers, along with encryption management software vendors, are backing three specifications finalized [Tuesday] that will eventually standardize the way encryption is used in firmware within hard disk drives and solid state disk drive controllers ensuring interoperability. Disk vendors are free to choose to use AES 128-bit or AES 256-bit keys depending on the level of security they want. 'This represents interoperability commitments from every disk drive maker on the planet,' said Robert Thibadeau, chief technologist at Seagate Technology."

aantn writes "I'm currently looking for a science-related summer program. I'm an 11th grade Israeli high school student interested in computer science and robotics. I have a high GPA and take afternoon classes in computer science and mathematics at Israel's Open University. I have several years of experience with C, Python, C#, and Java. I'm actively involved in several open source and freelance projects. Through a program at my school, I will be entering Trinity College's Fire Fighting Robot contest later this year. I enjoy writing and liberal arts, but I'm not interested in a "Learn to Program" or any other "Learn to ______" summer program. I'm looking for something that will be academically challenging and research-oriented. My top choice would be a university research program in either computer science or robotics, but I'm also looking at other science-oriented programs. Does anyone have suggestions for such programs? I'm mostly looking in Israel and the United States, but I'd love to hear about programs in other countries which accept international students. If it's relevant, I have a US citizenship."

An anonymous reader writes "Professional digital photographer and website publisher Rob Galbraith has performed both objective and subjective tests on laptop displays, finding that the late-2008 Macbook Pro glossy displays are 'deep into the not acceptable category' when used in ambient light environments. The Apple notebook came in dead last for color accuracy, and second to last in viewing angles (besting only the Dell Mini 9). He concludes: 'Macs are no longer at the top of the laptop display heap in our minds.'"

Frankie Modellismo writes "During MEMS 2009, a Micro Electro Mechanical Systems conference taking place in Sorrento (near Naples in Italy), the University of California, Berkeley showed a wireless system to control a live rhinoceros beetle. The researchers controlled the movement of the beetle thanks to six electrodes installed in the insect's brain. The rhinoceros beetles can carry up to 3gr, and fly carrying the control module that weighs a little more than 1 gr." The page is in Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.

Hugh Pickens writes "For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore's law, derived from an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months. The Economist reports however that in the midst of a recession, many companies would now prefer that computers get cheaper rather than more powerful, or by applying the flip side of Moore's law, do the same for less. A good example of this is virtualisation: using software to divide up a single server computer so that it can do the work of several, and is cheaper to run. Another example of 'good enough' computing is supplying 'software as a service,' via the Web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway. Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version. That could be bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade — only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."

coondoggie writes with a NetworkWorld piece that begins, "Researchers at Purdue will soon experiment with an unmanned aircraft that pretty much flies itself with little human intervention. The aircraft will use a combination of global-positioning system technology and a guidance system called AttoPilot ... to guide the aerial vehicle to predetermined points. Researchers can be stationed off-site to monitor the aircraft and control its movements remotely. AttoPilot was installed in the aircraft early this year, and testing will begin in the spring, researchers said."

theraindog writes "Intel's X25-E Extreme SSD is easily the fastest flash drive on the market, and contrary to what one might expect, it actually delivers compelling value if you're looking at performance per dollar rather than gigabytes. That, combined with a rackmount-friendly 2.5" form factor and low power consumption make the drive particularly appealing for enterprise RAID. So just how fast are four of them in a striped array hanging off a hardware RAID controller? The Tech Report finds out, with mixed but at times staggeringly impressive results."

MojoKid writes "Today Western Digital is announcing their WD20WEADS drive, otherwise known as the WD Caviar Green 2.0TB. With 32MB of onboard cache and special power management algorithms that balance spindle speed and transfer rates, the WD Caviar Green 2TB not only breaks the 2 terabyte barrier but also offers an extremely low-power profile in its standard 3.5" SATA footprint. Early testing shows it keeps pace with similar capacity drives from Seagate and Samsung."

Dampeal writes "Ok, a little while back I ran a somewhat large USB Flash Drive Comparison with 21 drives compared, today I got part two of that comparison. I've taken the 8gig and 4 gig drives, nine in total, and formatted them FAT32, NTFS and ExFAT and ran all of the tests over again for a comparison of how the file systems work on the drives." Good news — after some exhaustively graphed testing scenarios, the author comes to a nice conclusion for lazy people, writing "[I]n my opinion the all around best choice is FAT32, or the default for most all USB drives out there today, it seems to give us the best average performance overall."

billybob2 writes "CoreBoot (formerly LinuxBIOS), the free and open source BIOS replacement, can now boot Windows 7 Beta. Videos and screenshots of this demonstration, which was performed on an ASUS M2V-MX SE motherboard equipped with a 2GHz AMD Sempron CPU, can be viewed on the CoreBoot website. AMD engineers have also been submitting code to allow CoreBoot to run on the company's latest chipsets, such as the RS690 and 780G."

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has no replacement planned for the aging Geode low-power chip, creating uncertainty for its use in products like future XO laptops made by One Laptop Per Child. There won't be a Geode successor and the company has no core microarchitecture planned to replace the chip, AMD executives said. The comments end speculation about the future of Geode, an integrated chip used in netbooks like OLPC's XO laptop, ultramobile PCs and devices like set-top boxes."

Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.

Spacedonkey writes "Researchers at Intel, RTI International of North Carolina, and Arizona State University have made ultra-thin 'micro-refrigerators' for computer chips. The device uses a thermoelectric cooler made from nanostructured thin-film superlattice that can reduce the temperature by 55C when a current passes through it. In testing, it reduced the temperature on part of a chip by 15C without impairing its performance. The researchers say the component could be particularly useful for cooling hot spots that frequently occur on multi-core chips."

stefanparvu14 writes "Physicists in Switzerland and California have developed a new type of camera capable of imaging quantum correlations between pairs of photons. The details are presented in the current issue of the open-access publication New Journal of Physics. Unlike a conventional camera with a CCD imager, this camera is composed of Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) pixels implemented on a high-performance CMOS chip. One of the authors has provided more background for the non-physicist. Apparently, it could be used to verify the existence of Bose-Einstein condensates that are now starting to be produced in new ways."

James Cho writes "Through a decade of painstaking reverse engineering, trucker John Coster-Mullen built the first accurate replica of the Hiroshima bomb. His work yielded a new history of the first nukes, 'Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man,' with historian Robert Norris saying, 'Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close.' Philip Morrison, one of the physicists who helped invent the bomb, deemed it 'a remarkable job.'"