Robotics

A Robotic Cable Inspection System 65

Posted by Zonk from the amazing-voyage-only-without-guts dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "In a short article, Popular Science reports that researchers at the University of Washington have built a robotic cable inspection system. This system should help utility companies to maintain their networks of subterranean cables. The robot, dubbed Cruiser, is about 4-feet-long and is designed like a snake. When it detects an anomaly on an underground cable, it sends a message to a human operator via Wi-Fi. The first field tests took place in New Orleans in December 2006. But a commercial version should not be available before 2012."
Data Storage

The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed 495

Posted by Zonk from the that-is-a-lot-of-dvd-rips dept.
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies. 'One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive. Directory information and formatting data always take up some space. Second, the hard drive industry's definition of a megabyte differs from the rest of the PC business. One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB, as measured by the OS. That's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition.'" Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article.
Intel

Intel's PowerTOP Extends Linux Battery Life 113

Posted by kdawson from the using-the-hooks dept.
DuracellFan writes "Intel recently released its PowerTOP utility, which builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. The PowerTOP website also hosts patches for several Linux apps and the kernel. In the Linux.com article, lead PowerTOP developer Arjan van de Ven of Intel says that PowerTOP could soon show which applications keep the disk busy." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
Input Devices

Making Fingers Work With Touch Screens 111

Posted by kdawson from the seeing-the-spot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A paper was recently published about Shift at the Computer Human Interaction Conference earlier this month. The authors (Daniel Vogel, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto and Patrick Baudisch, a research scientist at Microsoft Research) developed the technology to solve several problems with mobile-phone touch screens. Most such screens are designed to be operated with a stylus; when touched with a finger the UI doesn't work so well. They also created a short video with a demonstration of how Shift works. Shift builds on an existing technology known as Offset Cursor, which displays a cursor just above the spot a user touches on the screen. That allows a user to place their finger below the item they wish to choose so that they can see the item, rather than hiding it with their finger."
Power

Simple Chemical Trick To Boost Battery Efficiency 149

Posted by samzenpus from the power-up dept.
space_mongoose writes "Hitachi thinks that a simple chemical additive could significantly improve battery life. Alkaline batteries have a positive electrode of manganese oxide and a negative electrode of finely powdered zinc, but zinc oxide forms around these grains of zinc. Hitachi's solution is to replace the zinc with a fine powder of zinc-aluminum alloy, displacing the zinc within the zinc oxide layer making it a much better conductor."
Businesses

New York Sues Dell for Poor Customer Service 295

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the reaping-what-you-sell dept.
Phanatic1a writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is suing Dell, alleging bait and switch financing tactics, false advertising, and 'numerous other deceptive business practices relating to their technical support services, promotional financing, rebate offers, and billing and collection activity.' According to Cuomo himself, 'At Dell, customer service means no service at all.'"
Data Storage

'Racetrack' Memory Could Replace Hard Drives? 149

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sure-why-not dept.
Galactic_grub writes "An experimental new type of memory that uses nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire could dramatically boost the capacity, speed and reliability of storage devices. Magnetic domains are moved along a wire by pulses of polarized current, and their location is read by fixed sensors arranged along the wire. Previous experiments have been disappointing, but now researchers have found that super-fast pulses of electricity prevent the domains from being obstructed by imperfections in the crystal."
Power

Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020 619

Posted by kdawson from the barring-Mr.-Fusion dept.
autofan1 writes "Toyota's vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, has said cost cutting on the electric motor, battery and inverter were all showing positive results in reducing the costs of hybrid technology and that by the time Toyota's sales goal of one million hybrids annually is reached, it 'expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars.' Takimoto also made the bold claim that by 2020, hybrids will be the standard drivetrain and account for '100 percent' of Toyota's cars as they would be no more expensive to produce than a conventional vehicle."
AMD

AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT Reviewed 126

Posted by kdawson
J. Dzhugashvili writes "The folks at The Tech Report have whipped up a detailed expose of the new AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card's architecture and features, with plenty of benchmarks. While the card dazzles with 320 stream processors, a 512-bit memory bus, and oodles of memory bandwidth, its performance and power consumption seem disappointing in the face of Nvidia's six-month-old GeForce 8800 graphics cards."
Power

SHPEGS — DIY Solar/Geothermal Electricity 78

Posted by kdawson from the taking-back-the-power dept.
rohar writes "SHPEGS is an open design not-for-profit project to design and prototype a base-load renewable electrical generation system suitable for moderate climates and built from common materials. The design centers around creating a local geothermal source with an efficient solar thermal water heater system and can be scaled from single residence to mega-scale. The heliostat system used in Europe's first solar thermal plant could be used in a scaled-down SHPEGS system with Practical Solar's small scale heliostats."
Portables

A "Bill of Lights" to Restrict LEDs on Gadgets? 729

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the palm-flower dept.
PetManimal writes "Mike Elgan has had it with useless lights on gadgets and computers. He singles out the Palm Treo and the Dell XPS gaming laptops as being particularly bad with the use of unnecessary lights, and also cites the plethora of LEDs on desktop PCs and peripherals. 'My PC and other computing equipment make my office look like a jet cockpit. I have two LCD monitors, each of which has two indicator lights that flash even when the PC is turned off. The attached sound control has a light on it. My keyboard has multiple lights. The power cord has lights, the printer has lights, and the power button is illuminated. My cable modem and Linksys router flash like crazy all the time. Together, these useless lights create a visual cacophony of blinking, multicolored lights that make me feel like I'm taking part in a NASA stress test for astronaut candidates.' Elgan calls on manufacturers to respect his 'Gadget Bill of Lights' to restrict the use of nag lights and allow users to turn them off. He also says the industry should pay more attention to industrial design when creating new products."
Power

Hybrid Cars to Get New Mileage Ratings 781

Posted by samzenpus from the creative-math dept.
Skidge writes "Wired is running a piece showing the drastically reduced mileage ratings for hybrids after the upcoming changes in gas mileage calculations by the EPA. While the cars themselves aren't changing, plugging these new numbers in to the equation makes a hybrid much less cost effective: "The two top-selling hybrid vehicles, the Prius and Honda's Civic Hybrid, will lose 12 and 11 miles per gallon respectively from their city driving estimates." The new values come from more realistic testing; the old, over-inflated ratings were higher in part because the cars idled a lot, allowing the hybrids to completely turn off their engines. The new ratings should be more in line with what hybrid drivers are actually seeing."
AMD

Inside AMD's Phenom Architecture 191

Posted by samzenpus from the behind-the-curtain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek has uncovered some documentation which provides some details amid today's hype for AMD's announcement of its upcoming Phenom quad-core (previously code-named Agena). AMD's 10h architecture will be used in both the desktop Phenom and the Barcelona (Opteron) quads. The architecture supports wider floating-point units, can fully retire three long instructions per cycle, and has virtual machine optimizations. While the design is solid, Intel will still be first to market with 45nm quads (the first AMD's will be 65nm). Do you think this architecture will help AMD regain the lead in its multicore battle with Intel?"
Displays

LG.Philips Develops World's First Color E-Paper 188

Posted by Zonk from the i'd-love-me-some-of-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes "LG.Philips LCD has announced it has developed the world's first 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper display, equivalent in size to an A4 sheet of paper. The 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper uses electronic ink from E-Ink Corp. to produce a maximum of 4,096 colors. It can be viewed from a full 180 degrees, so that images always appear crisp, even when the display is bent."
AMD

First R600 Review - The Radeon HD 2900XT 157

Posted by Zonk from the tech-drool dept.
mrneutron2004 writes "Tweaktown seems to have the first review out of the gate on AMD's flagship R600 core. 'Our focus today is solely on the HD 2900 XT 512MB GDDR-3 graphics card – it is the first GPU with a fast 512-bit memory interface but what does this mean for performance? ... After taking a look at the GPU and the card from PowerColor as well as some new Ruby DX10 screenshots, we will move onto the benchmarks and compare the red hot flaming Radeon monster against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX along with the former ATI GPU king, the Radeon X1950 XTX."
Technology

Blame Your Mistakes on Technology 419

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pebkac-errors dept.
Techdirt has an quick look at how it is becoming much more common for people to blame their mistakes on technology. "There are people driving off cliffs and through flooded roads and taking detours that span half of England, apparently at the behest of their navigation units. Things got so bad in one place that authorities even had to put up "ignore your sat nav" signs. Now, a woman's car got hit by a train, and for some reason, she's blaming a GPS navigation unit."
Space

Skynet Means More Bandwidth for British 66

Posted by Zonk from the please-don't-become-sentient dept.
pcnetworx1 writes "A new £3.6bn project to upgrade the space communications network for British forces including the Army, Royal Navy, and RAF has gone underway. The first craft, Skynet 5A was launched from Kourou in French Guiana on 11 March 2007. There will be a constellation of three satellites in total. This system is also not an exclusive project for the armed forces, it is actually outsourced to a company called Paradigm Secure Communications. They work with NATO, France, Germany, Canada, Portugal and the Netherlands. They are also seeking new business in the US, Australia, and the Middle East."
Communications

State Bans Texting While Driving 329

Posted by CowboyNeal from the safr-4-u dept.
netbuzz writes "The state of Washington yesterday became the first in the nation to ban text-messaging while driving. The law could use sharper teeth, but it's a natural and necessary progression of the movement to clamp down on those who find the need to constantly communicate more important than the safety of their fellow travelers."
Wireless Networking

Cambridge's Streetlamp-Powered Wireless Network 75

Posted by Zonk from the streetlamps-for-science dept.
Serpentegena writes "A joint research project by scientists at Harvard University and BBn Technologies may have spawned a new breed of Metronet. The wireless network, code-named CitySense, which will consist of 100 streetlamp-mounted nodes by 2011, will draw power off the Cambridge, Mass. public grid and be used at first for weather and pollution monitoring. The intention is to also allow 'academic researchers worldwide [...] to submit their own research programs to run on the network.' Sounds remarkably similar to the beginning of the ARPANET, except the network hosts will be running Linux."
Data Storage

Microsoft & SanDisk To Provide Desktop on Thumb Drive 233

Posted by Zonk from the desktop-in-your-pants-huh-we-get-that-a-lot dept.
Jesus Christ writes "An Information Week article reports that Microsoft is teaming up with SanDisk to provide users a complete image of their desktops in their pockets, allowing them access not only to their data...but also their applications and user interface setup while on the go. 'The companies plan to add a security layer to the offering using SanDisk's TrustedFlash security and digital rights management technology. The effort will elevate "simple flash storage to a whole new level of customer benefit," said Will Poole, corporate VP for Microsoft's Market Expansion Group. Microsoft also plans to seek out third party-hardware developers to support the initiative, the company said. As part of the plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology, which adds some smart features to USB devices. Independent software developers that have created U3-compatible applications will be offered help migrating their products to the new technology, which has yet to be named.'"

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