Comment Clash (Score 1) 315
If [you do] there will be trouble
An' if [you don't] it will be double
LED Lighting As Cheap As CFLs Invented 553
mcgrew writes "New Scientist reports that a British team has overcome the obstacles to cheap LED lighting, and that LED lamps as cheap as CFLs will be on the market in five years. Quoting: 'Gallium nitride cannot be grown on silicon like other solid-state electronic components because it shrinks at twice the rate of silicon as it cools. Crystals of GaN must be grown at 1000C, so by the time a new LED made on silicon has cooled, it has already cracked, rendering the devices unusable. One solution is to grow the LEDs on sapphire, which shrinks and cools at much the same rate as GaN. But the expense is too great to be commercially competitive. Now Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem. They included layers of aluminium gallium nitride in their LED design... These LEDs can be grown on silicon as so many other electronics components are. ... A 15-centimetre silicon wafer costs just $15 and can accommodate 150,000 LEDs making the cost per unit tiny.'"
End of the Road For AMD's Geode Chip 123
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."
Comment Re:But does it run Linux? (Score 2, Informative) 444
Chrome has a status bar. It doesnt show unless there is status though. It shows as a blue background box in the lower left of the browser.
There is a stop button. It shows up when a page is loading. It is located on the far right of the address bar. It replaces the "play" or "go" button that is there when you already have a page loaded. This makes a little more sense than Operas way of doing it, which is to show the stop button in place of the refresh button... however both make sense in their own way.
Software Holds Cell Phone Calls While Driving 452
An anonymous reader writes "Canadian company Aegis Mobility has developed software that detects if a cell phone is moving at 'car' speeds. If so, the software, DriveAssistT, will alert the cellular network, telling it to hold calls and text messages until the drive is over. Calls are not blocked entirely; callers will be notified that the person appears to be driving, but they can still leave an emergency voice mail, which will be sent through immediately."
Saving the Street Fighter Franchise 76
Gamasutra did an in-depth interview with Yoshi Ono, producer of Street Fighter IV, about trying to bring the series back to the quality and popularity of the '90s. Ono also talks about broadening the market to include casual players, who were slowly driven away from the game by the increased focus on competitive play. Quoting:
"If you think about chess for instance, a kid and a grandfather can play the same game, with the same ruleset, and understand what's going on. I think through our competitive spirit back then; we were always out to out-complicate each other, and make our systems deeper and deeper. It was ok then because there was a wide player base who understood how to play these games, but that's not true anymore. What we're trying to do with Street Fighter IV is bring them back in. There's not a whole lot of other fighting games out there to compare it to, but hopefully, if we play our cards right and get people back in to the genre, we can blossom the genre itself again and spread things out and get it back to the way it was."
Internet Filtering Lobby Forms 140
mbone writes "Wired's David Kravets reports on a new lobbying effort to support the filtering of internet traffic called Arts & Labs. Coverage is available at PC World as well. The lobby's members include AT&T, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America. Their web site says, 'network operators must have the flexibility to manage and expand their networks to defend against net pollution and illegal file-trafficking which threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers.' Does it seem that this is an attempt to categorize P2P with spam and malware, or is it just me?"
New BigDog Robot Video 193
John860 writes "The US company Boston Dynamics has released an amazing new video of its quadruped robot BigDog. The highlight of the video (at 1:24) shows how the robot starts slipping on ice, almost falls several times, but finally regains its balance and continues walking. The video also shows the robot's ability to cope with different types of terrains, climb and descend steep slopes, and jump. Two years ago, the older version of BigDog was already able to climb slopes, keep its balance after a strong kick, and walk on rough terrain like stones, mud, and snow. The new version weighs 235 lbs and can carry a payload of up to 340 lbs, a factor of 4 better than its predecessor."
GE Announces OLED Manufacturing Breakthrough 192
bughunter writes "Today GE announced the successful demonstration of the world's first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices (press release). This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high-performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today. The green crowd is thrilled as well. Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I'm dreading the animated cereal boxes." Now can I get my Optimus Keyboard for less than $1,299?
Ancient Bones of Small Humans Discovered In Palau 129
seattle-pk writes to let us know about the discovery in the Pacific island nation of Palau of thousands of human bones, some quite diminutive. The find is likely to rekindle the debate about how to classify the remains found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. "Some of the bones are ancient and indicate inhabitants of particularly small size, scientists announced today. The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old and align with Homo sapiens, according to a paper on the discovery. However, the older bones are tiny and exhibit several traits considered primitive, or archaic, for the human lineage."
Yahoo Sued for Spurning Microsoft 284
tuxgeek writes "In the continuing saga of Yahoo resisting a Microsoft buy out, Yahoo is now being sued by its shareholders. 'Two Detroit pension funds have sued Yahoo Inc. and its board of directors, saying they breached their duties to shareholders in trying to thwart a takeover by Microsoft Corp. The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Chancery Court on Thursday by lawyers representing Detroit's police and fire retirement system and general retirement system, as well as 'all other similarly situated public shareholders.'"
Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes 525
Dak RIT writes "In a blog post this week, Microsoft's IE Platform Architect, Chris Wilson, confirmed that IE8 will use three distinct modes to render web pages. The first two modes will render pages the same as IE7, depending on whether or not a DOCTYPE is provided ('Quirks Mode' and 'Standards Mode'). However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here."
NSI Registers Every Domain Checked 668
An anonymous reader writes "In a developing story, registrar Network Solutions has been caught front-running domain names. Any domain names searched via NSI's whois are being immediately purchased by the registrar, thereby preventing a registrant from purchasing the domain at any other registrar. There are multiple reports of this practice over at DomainState.com." Update: 01/09 01:58 GMT by KD : shashib writes to let us know that NSI has issued a response to the accusations of front running.
Submission + - Is China Hijacking Google,Microsoft,Yahoo'sTraffic (techluver.com)
Tech.Luver writes: "TheRegister is reporting via TechCrunch, on Chinese internet providers China Netcom, China Telecom bowing to pressure from Chinese Government Authorities and hi-jacking Google, Microsoft and Yahoo's search traffic to re-route / re-direct it to Baidu.
When TheRegister contacted Google, "the company confirmed that the Chinese are up to their old tricks. "We've had numerous reports that Google.cn and other search engines have been blocked in China and traffic redirected to other sites," said a company spokesman. " While Microsoft said "it was looking into the matter."
( http://techluver.com/2007/10/18/is-china-hijacking-google-microsoft-and-yahoos-traffic/ )"
Submission + - China hijacks Google, Yahoo, Microsoft searches
circletimessquare writes: "There is resentment in the West at the exploits of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in China in the last few years. Namely, the cooperation of these businesses with censorship and with snooping on Chinese citzens. But critics of a hardline approach to Chinese Internet limitations dismiss pandering to the Chinese government as simply the price a large company must pay for doing business in China. Well one wonders then if the ultimate price to pay for doing business in China is to have your business taken by China. The redirection of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft searches to Baidu happens swiftly on the heels of the American President meeting with the Dalai Lama. To China's credit then it is apparently ideologically uniform in its hostility towards freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press. When you dance with the devil..."
