Power

Solar Cell Inventor Wins Millennium Prize 147

Posted by samzenpus from the fun-in-the-sun dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "The inventor of a new type of solar cell won the Finnish state and industry-funded, €800,000 ($1.07 million), Millennium Technology Prize. According to the foundation, Michael Graetzel's dye-sensitized solar cells, known as Graetzel cells, could be a significant contributor to the future energy technologies due to their excellent price-performance ratio."
Graphics

Sony To Launch First 3D PS3 Games On Friday 151

Posted by Soulskill from the how-about-games-with-a-three-dimensional-story dept.
Stoobalou writes "Sony plans to show off the first 3D PlayStation 3 games in the UK on 10 June, with a retail launch on 11 June. If you were wondering why Sony is shutting down half the PSN today for maintenance, then wonder no more. We reckon the company's simply gearing up for the launch of the PlayStation 3's first stereoscopic 3D games. Unfortunately, many game developers are seemingly indifferent to the 3D revolution at the moment. In fact, EA CEO John Riccitiello reckons that it's going to be a good three years before 3D becomes a standard gaming feature. Riccitiello explained that there's a big difference between converting a game to run in 3D mode and properly developing it to take full advantage of the extra dimension."
Advertising

Google Slams Apple Over iPhone Ad Ban 562

Posted by samzenpus from the can't-we-all-just-get-along? dept.
crimeandpunishment writes "This real-life clash of the titans could be much more interesting than the movie. Today Google fired the latest volley in its war of words with Apple over mobile advertising. In a blog posting, the head of Google's mobile ad service, Admob, had harsh words for Apple's new restrictions concerning the iPhone and iPad ... calling them a threat to competition. There's a lot of money at stake ... the US mobile ad market, which is about $600 million, is expected to more than double by 2013."
Privacy

AT&T Leaks Emails Addresses of 114,000 iPad Users 284

Posted by samzenpus from the sieve-security dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Daily Tech reports that in what is one of the biggest leaks of email addresses in recent history, a group called Goatse Security has published the personal email addresses of 114,067 iPad 3G purchasers in what appears to be a legal fashion by querying a public interface that AT&T accidentally left exposed. Apparently AT&T left a script on its public website, which when handed an ICC-ID would respond back with the email address of the subscriber. This apparently was intended for an AJAX-style response inside AT&T's web apps. Gawker reports that it's possible that confidential information about every iPad 3G owner in the US has been exposed. 'This is going to hurt the telecommunications company's already poor image with iPhone and iPad customers, and complicate its very profitable relationship with Apple,' writes Ryan Tate, adding that the leak is likely to unnerve customers thinking of buying iPads that connect to AT&T's cellular network. 'Although the security vulnerability was confined to AT&T servers, Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads.' In a statement, AT&T says that the issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and that it has essentially turned off the feature that provided the email addresses. 'We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose email addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained,' says AT&T. 'We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted.'"
NASA

NASA Astronomers To Observe Hayabusa's Fiery Homecoming 142

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-back-hotter dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA said that a group of its astronomers will have a front row seat in Australia to watch the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa's high-speed, fiery return to Earth. It is bringing with it a hunk of the asteroid Itokawa. The spacecraft is expected to land in an unpopulated area of Australia at approximately midnight locally, or 7 am PDT, on Sunday, June 13. Some 30 NASA astronomers will be flying onboard a specially equipped DC-8 with instruments that can monitor Hayabusa's reentry."
Operating Systems

Canonical Developing Ubuntu OS For Tablets 228

Posted by timothy from the wheels-spinning-all-the-time dept.
snydeq writes "Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, InfoWorld reports. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface, and tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011. The focus will be on developing an OS with a simplified user interface that provides quick access to the most-used applications. Development efforts will also focus on adding on-screen keyboard features and compatibility for multitouch drivers."
KDE

A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 122

Posted by timothy from the delicious-candy dept.
dmbkiwi writes "The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I'd download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5's got in store for us."
Cellphones

iPhone 4's "Retina Display" Claims Challenged 476

Posted by timothy from the obviously-you-need-an-i-retina dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Of the many things that buyers might need to know about the new iPhone, Raymond Soneira — president of DisplayMate Technolgies — added one more to the list. Soneira challenged Apple's claims that Apple's new iPhone contains a so-called 'retina display.' According to Soneira, the resolution of the retina is in angular measure, 50 cycles per degree, where a cycle is a line pair, which is two pixels, so the angular resolution of the eye is 0.6 arc minutes per pixel. So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes, that works out to 477 pixels per inch. At 8 inches it's 716 ppi. You have to hold iPhone 4 out about 18 inches before it falls to 318 ppi. So the iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the retina."
Education

Univ. of California Faculty May Boycott Nature Publisher 277

Posted by timothy from the what-market-will-bear-is-an-empirical-question dept.
Marian the Librarian writes "Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which publishes the prestigious journal Nature along with 67 affiliated journals, has proposed a 400% increase in the price of its license to the University of California. UC is poised to just say no to exorbitant price gouging. If UC walks, the faculty are willing to stage a boycott; they could, potentially, decline to submit papers to NPG journals, decline to review for them and resign from their editorial boards."
Amiga

Timberwolf (a.k.a. Firefox) Alpha 1 For AmigaOS 152

Posted by timothy from the because-it-was-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We're happy to announce the availability of the first alpha release of Timberwolf, the AmigaOS port of the popular Firefox browser. Timberwolf needs AmigaOS 4.1 Update 2 installed. Please read the documentation for information about usage and limitations. This is an alpha release, meaning it will have a lot of problems still, and be slower than it should be. We are releasing it as a small 'Thank you' to all those that have donated in the past to show that development is still going on. Timberwolf is available on os4depot.net. For further information and feedback, check the Timberwolf support forum on amigans.net."
Education

Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics 284

Posted by timothy from the switch-to-english-it's-easy dept.
JoshuaInNippon writes "Those who have studied Japanese know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning the language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly 10% to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and five deleted. The added characters are ones believed to be found commonly in life use, but are considered to be harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Japanese officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in Japanese has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple of presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of Japanese language learners. (If you read Japanese and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.jp has some information!)"
Software

AI Astronomer Aids Effort To Analyze Galaxies 40

Posted by timothy from the kindly-disprove-loyalty-to-alien-invaders dept.
kkleiner writes "Scientists are teaching an artificial intelligence how to classify galaxies imaged by telescopes like the Hubble. Manda Banerji at the University of Cambridge, along with researchers at University College London, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere, has succeeded in getting the program to agree with human analysis at an impressive rate of more than 90%. Banerji used data from Galaxy Zoo, a massive online project that has used more than 250,000 volunteers to analyze more than 60 million galaxies. The new automated astronomer will help with even larger analytical projects on the horizon, taking care of trivial classifications and leaving the tough cases to humans."
Government

FAA Adds a Study On Adding Drones To Commercial Aviation 215

Posted by timothy from the did-you-pack-this-drone-yourself dept.
coondoggie writes "Facing a number of technical challenges, the Federal Aviation Administration said today it added another research project designed to better understand how unmanned aircraft can be brought safely into the national airspace. The FAA set a two-year research and development agreement with Insitu (an independent subsidiary of Boeing) and the New Jersey Air National Guard that will help FAA scientists to study and better understand unmanned aircraft design, construction, and features. Researchers will also look at the differences in how an air traffic controller would manage an unmanned aircraft vs. a manned aircraft."
Medicine

Stem Cell Tourists Take Costa Rica Off the Agenda 206

Posted by timothy from the honey-let's-have-another-embryo dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Stem cell tourism is a booming and troubling industry, in which clinics in places like Mexico, China, and India offer rich tourists experimental stem-cell-based treatments, none of which have been approved by the FDA here in the US. (Check out some of these creepy sites that offer treatments for everything from autism to MS, and even the 'very common ailment called aging.') But in one positive development, Costa Rica just shut down its top stem cell clinic. Said the country's health minister, 'This isn't allowed in any serious country in the world.'"
Books

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development 75

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
RickJWagner writes "CodeIgniter is a multi-purpose, open source PHP web application framework that can dramatically reduce the amount of coding required in developing a full-featured website. This book promises to introduce the reader to the most productive APIs and demonstrate their usage with minimal code snippets. In that regard, I think the book lives up to its promise." Read on for the rest of RickJWagner's review.

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