Slashdot

rcastro0 writes "Hamilton Sundstrand, a division of United Technologies, announced today that it will start to commercialize a new type of solar power plant. A new company called SolarReserve will be created to provide heat-resistant pumps and other equipment, as well as the expertise in handling and storing salt that has been heated to more than 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit. According to venture capitalist Vinod Khosla 'Three percent of the land area of Morocco could support all of the electricity for Western Europe.' Molten Salt storage is already used in Nevada's Solar One power plant. Is this the post-hydrocarbon world finally knocking?"

A solar tree recently passed a key test and went on display on a busy street — the Ringstrasse — in Vienna, Austria providing light during the night-time even when the sun had been covered by clouds for four days in a row. The branches of the solar tree were decorated with 10 solar lamps, each one powered by 36 solar cells.and the tree included rechargeable batteries and electronic systems to measure the amount of light in the atmosphere and trigger the solar lamps to go on. "Not just trees but other objects could be decorated with solar cells and so keep streets well lit at night time," said Christina Werner from Cultural Project Management. Google uses a similar concept to light their parking lots with 3,000 solar panels that provide 10 percent of the Googleplex's power demand.

Wired is reporting that information overload is being predicted by some analysts as the problem of the year for 2008. "'It's too much information. It's too many interruptions. It's too much lost time,' Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. 'It's always too much of a good thing.' Information overload isn't exactly new, but Spira said the problem has grown as technology increases societal expectations for instantaneous response. And more information available, he said, also means more time wasted looking for the right information, whether in an old e-mail or through a search engine."

DeviceGuru writes "Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus."

PJ1216 writes to mention that vinyl seems poised to make a comeback in the music industry. Some are even predicting that this comeback coupled with the surge in digital music sales could possibly close the door on CDs. "Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs. Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound. Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."

Well known anti-gaming lawyer Jack Thompson is following up on his clever sting operations against Best Buy. He's filed suit against the consumer electronics retailer for allegedly selling M-rated games to underage gamers. He has also included the ESRB in that suit. GamePolitics reports: "As we reported, the claim against Best Buy suit looks as if it will be going nowhere. Thompson has also apparently named the ESRB in the suit. That looks like a non-starter as well. His explanation: 'The ESRB has been sued by Thompson because it is well known that it a) is owned and operated by the video game industry, b) does not even play the games it rates to conclusion, c) routinely mislabels games as to age appropriateness, per testimony before the U.S. Congress, and is engaged in representations to American parents that the age label are accurate and are keeping "Mature" games out of the hands of kids.'"

TJ_Phazerhacki writes "A new high tech weapon system demonstrated one of the prime concerns circling smarter and smarter methods of defense last week — an Oerlikon GDF-005 cannon went wildly out of control during live fire test exercises in South Africa, killing 9. Scarily enough, this is far from the first instance of a smart weapon 'turning' on its handlers. 'Electronics engineer and defence company CEO Richard Young says he can't believe the incident was purely a mechanical fault. He says his company, C2I2, in the mid 1990s, was involved in two air defence artillery upgrade programmes, dubbed Projects Catchy and Dart. During the shooting trials at Armscor's Alkantpan shooting range, "I personally saw a gun go out of control several times," Young says. "They made a temporary rig consisting of two steel poles on each side of the weapon, with a rope in between to keep the weapon from swinging. The weapon eventually knocked the pol[e]s down."' The biggest concern seems to be finding the glitches in the system instead of reconsidering automated arms altogether."

Brikus writes "And you thought your car had gadgets. In this story from Wired magazine, we hear about Alex Roy and his quest to break the record time for a cross-USA road trip. One of the biggest roadblocks to breaking the record: highway patrol officers, about 31,000 along the way. So Roy decked out his E39 BMW M5 with a thermal camera, radar/laser detectors, GPS devices, police scanners, and other high-tech gadgets and toys."

An anonymous reader writes "With over 3000 visitors one of the biggest computer festivals, the Assembly 2007, just closed doors. The event saw the release of some of the best demoscene productions of this year. Among them the first good demos for the XBOX 360, but also for platforms as obscure as the Atari VCS2600 from 1976. The main demo competition was won by Lifeforce, one of the most acclaimed demoscene demos ever. Other releases can be found here."
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=31571

The underground hacker team "web-Hack" from Russia released a whitepaper with results of iPhone firmware research where they reverse-engineered embedded functions. They claim discovery of a built-in function which sends all data from an iPhone to a specified web-server. Contacts from a phonebook, SMS, recent calls, history of Safari browser - all your personal information - can be stolen. Researchers assume that this function either a debug feature or a built-in backdoor module for some government agencies. The reported function can be used by a trojan-developers or activated by AT&T. Remember, AT&T has already backdoored all Internet traffic traversing their infrastructure for the NSA.

Kris_J writes "As anyone with half a brain could have predicted, the Perpetual Energy Machine previously discussed on /. (sigh) has run into technical difficulties. The official website currently says

"We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting."

Bad news for the tropics, I guess."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/04/1628259

theraindog writes "With Nvidia's GeForce 8800 series doubling the performance of the previous generation's fastest graphics cards, one has to wonder whether there's any point to teaming a pair of 8800s in SLI. Somewhat surprisingly, there is. When combined with a 30" display, the latest games, and high levels of image quality enhancing antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, GeForce 8800 SLI makes an interesting case for $1200 graphics subsystems. Unfortunately, high-end multi-GPU configurations like GeForce 8800 SLI are still at the mercy of immature drivers and dodgy application support, proving there's plenty of baggage to go along with breathtaking performance."

Kris_J writes "Rising Phoenix Design's BlackBack theory says that since white costs more power to display than black on a CRT, web pages should be light text on a dark background. One idea then is that since Google is the most popular website on the planet, would there be a significant global power usage reduction if they changed their design to white text on a black background? At the very least, I reckon they should try it for three days and find out."

From the horses mouth (the "Windows Vista Team Blog") comes confirmation of every horrible charge leveled at Vista by Gutmann. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html/

Windows Vista Content Protection - Twenty Questions (and Answers) http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/arc hive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-t wenty-questions-and-answers.aspx/

Over the holidays, a paper was distributed that raised questions about the content protection features in Windows Vista. The paper draws sharp conclusions about the implications of those features for our customers. As one of the Lead Program Managers for the technologies in question, I would like to share our views on these questions.

Here are some examples of the Microsoft Lawyer version of Q & A.

Will echo cancellation work less well for premium content?

We believe that Windows Vista provides applications with access to sufficient information to successfully build high quality echo cancellation functionality.

Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality. Windows Vista's content protection features were developed to carefully balance the need to provide robust protection from commercial content while still enabling great new experiences such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

What is revocation and where is it used?

Renewal and revocation mechanisms are an important part of providing robust protection for commercial audiovisual content. In the rare event that a revocation is required, Microsoft will work with the affected IHV to ensure that a new driver is made available, ideally in advance of the actual revocation. Revocation only impacts a graphics driver's ability to receive certain commercial audiovisual content; otherwise, the revoked driver will continue to function normally.

Nice...

Here is a good quote from the Inquirer article about this "Blog" entry: http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=37091/

"Microsoft confirms just about every point in the Gutmann pieceand tries to spin it as good. It is one of the most amazing piece of PR weaselwork I have seen for years. Try this one on for size."

Ezza writes "eBay Australia is forcing new sellers "to offer at least one preferred safe payment method of either PayPal or merchant credit card facilities". Given that it is almost impossible (not to mention expensive) for a private individual to have merchant facilities, this means that most new sellers will be forced to have a PayPal account to sell on ebay. See the announcement here — http://www2.ebay.com/aw/au/200701.shtml#2007-01-23 102815
Not only that, but the changes are retrospective — the announcement made on the 23rd Jan will affect sellers who registered after the 17th.
A previous announcement (on the 18th) — while failing to mention the 'safe payment method' change — also banned cross-border trading for sellers who aren't PayPal verified. ie you can't sell on ebay.com if you are registered on ebay.com.au — again mandating the seller have paypal.
I didn't see the word "monopoly" anywhere in the announcements, I guess they forgot.
(Paypal is of course owned by ebay)."