MojoKid writes "A new partnership between Toshiba and Tokyo's Keio University has led to the creation of a new technology that could allow SSDs up to 1TB in size to be made 'with a footprint no larger than a postage stamp.' The report states that the two have been able to integrate 128GB NAND Flash chips and a single controller into a stamp-sized form factor. They've even made it operational with a transfer rates of 2Gbps (or about 250MB/sec) with data transfer that relies on radio communication."

jacob1984 writes "A few years ago there was a question about which e-reader was the best. Since then, the market has been flooded with new additions, many of them more open than others. Have you bought one yet? If so, which one did you find best and why?"

Coldeagle writes "Astronauts ran into trouble while trying to connect up the new Tranquility module onto the ISS. A critical insulating cover didn't fit quite right: 'The fabric, multilayered cover is supposed to go between Tranquility and its observation deck, but the metal bars are not locking down properly because of interference from a hand rail or some other structure at the hatch.' One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu."

TinFinger writes "The genome of a 5,000-year-old man from Greenland has been sequenced from scalp hair remains. He belonged to the now-extinct Saqqaq, who are genetically more closely related to east Asians than to contemporary Native North Americans. Although both contemporary Inuit and the extinct Saqqaq migrated from Siberia across the Bering Straits, the Saqqaq migration was a much later one (5,000-10,000 years ago, compared with 20,000 for the Inuit). All that is left of the Saqqaq today are a few archaeological sites in Greenland. Genetic analysis revealed that 'Inuk' was stocky, possibly with a receding hairline, had a cold-adapted metabolism, A+ blood type, and possibly a rather bad haircut. The hair sample from which the DNA was sequenced was excavated in 1986 and was archived at the National Museum of Denmark. It was only recently rediscovered by a research team who spent a fruitless three months at Saqqaq sites looking for hair samples for genome analysis."

theodp writes "Kevin Smith is not a happy Southwest customer. The director was thrown off a flight from Oakland to Burbank, after being deemed too fat to fly. He later wound up on another Southwest flight, but has declared It's On and taken his rants to Twitter. 'Dear @SouthwestAir — I know I'm fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?' he began. He also let the airline know he'd made it to his destination. 'Hey @SouthwestAir! I've landed in Burbank. Don't worry: wall of the plane was opened & I was airlifted out while Richard Simmons supervised.'"

AnotherUsername writes "Recently, many [Google-hosted] music blogs were deleted for hosting mp3s of songs by various artists. The problem? The music blogs in question had been given permission to host the songs, and often, the older links to mp3s were often broken intentionally by the bloggers in order to save bandwidth. From the article: 'You're reading this right: Five years of Lipold's labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasn't even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.'"

Theovon writes "We've seen a few stories recently about the new Western Digital Green drives. According to WD, their new 4096-byte sector drives are problematic for Windows XP users but not Linux or most other OSes. Linux users should not be complacent about this, because not all the Linux tools like fdisk have caught up. The result is a reduction in write throughput by a factor of 3.3 across the board (a 230% overhead) when 4096-byte clusters are misaligned to 4096-byte physical sectors by one or more 512-byte logical sectors. The author does some benchmarks to demonstrate this. Also, from the comments on the article, it appears that even parted is not ready, since by default it aligns to 'cylinder' boundaries, which are not physical cylinder boundaries and are multiples of 63."

hackingbear writes "Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country. And the company is still unwilling to confirm or deny if the alleged attacks were carried out by the Chinese government. 'I don't actually think the question of whether [the attacks were performed by] the Chinese government is that important,' Brin said. (That's the difference between state-sponsor vs. individual hacking. Why is that not important?) In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled as proved by this Chinese search query on June 4, despite the lack of any concrete actions by the Chinese government, which has so far made only useless general and standard statements on the matter."

derrida writes "Microsoft is the largest, most profitable software company in the world. In case you had any doubts about where Microsoft's profit comes from, there's nothing better than a graph to make all those numbers clear. As you may have guessed, the desktop division is quite profitable, while the online division is a money pit."

theodp writes "In an eye-candy filled presentation that earned him a standing-O at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. In his eight minute spiel, an extension of a shorter tech preview video, the Bing Maps architect shows how geo-tagged Flickr images can be precisely incorporated into streetside views, demonstrates indoor panoramas at Pike Place Market complete with live video overlays, and even takes the audience into space with Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope. " This is a really exciting video and worth your 8 minutes.

Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that toward the end of the summer of 1977, NASA launched two Voyager spacecraft that each included a golden record containing, among other things, the sound of a kiss, a mother's first words to her newborn child, music from all over the world, and greetings in 59 different languages. The records on board were meant to survive for a billion years, in the hope that some day, against enormous odds, they might cross paths with an alien civilization. The record was a special project of Carl Sagan with the help of Ann Druyan, creative director of the project. For Druyan, though, the summer of 1977 and the Voyager project carry a deeply personal meaning because it was during the Voyager project that she and Sagan fell in love. Then Druyan had an idea for the record: They could measure the electrical impulses of a human brain and nervous system, turn it into sound, and put it on the record so that maybe, 1,000 million years from now, some alien civilization might be able to turn that data back into thoughts." (More, below.)

nfarrell writes "Last week, an Australian Judge ruled that copyright laws do not apply to collections of facts, regardless of the amount of effort that was spent collecting them. In this case, the case surrounded the reproduction of entries from the White and Yellow Pages, but the ruling referred to a previous case involving IceTV, which republishes TV guides. Does this mean that other databases of facts, such as financial data, are also legally able to be copied and redistributed?" Here are analyses from a former legal adviser to the directory publisher which prevailed as the defendant in this case, and from Smart Company.

ptresset writes "A low-cost robotic arm has been sketching faces at the Kinetica2010 art fair in London. Created by the Aikon project research team, the system drew faces non-stop, its creator having to take the role of an automata to repeatedly change the paper. The Aikon project is based at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The main objective of the Aikon project is to implement a computational system capable of simulating the various important processes involved in face sketching by artists. The ensemble of processes to be simulated include the visual perception the subject and the sketch, the drawing gestures, the cognitive activity, reasoning, the influence of the years of training, etc. It is evident that due to knowledge and technological limitations the implementation of each process will remain coarse and approximate. The system implemented is expected to draw in its own style."

quaith writes "The New Scientist reports on a simulation just published in the American Journal of Physics that shows how the sky would appear in the vicinity of a black hole — if an observer could actually get near one. Using real positions of around 118,000 stars, the simulation shows how the bending of light, the frequency shift, and the magnification caused by gravitational lensing and aberration in the vicinity of the black hole affect the sky's appearance. The simulation is interactive and allows the user to explore the stellar sky around the black hole. The simulation offers a couple of modes: 'quasi static' or 'freely falling' and the sample videos are quite spectacular. The New Scientist has a writeup, with an embedded video . The original article citation is here (abstract only). The simulation, which runs on Linux or Windows, as well as sample videos, can be downloaded from the University of Stuttgart website."