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Google

Submission + - The Google Phone is a Reality.

MrCrassic writes: "It appears that Google is initiating talks with well-known PDA/smartphone manufacturer HTC to make the Google phone a reality. With impressive tech specs and an already impressive concept underway , could Google be the next company to make a mark in the wireless device industry? From the main article:

However, a recent report by CrunchGear states that its own sources at mobile handset provider HTC have tipped the site off to multiple gPhone handsets being prepped for launch in the first quarter of 2008 and that the handsets will be coming out of Taiwan. There will supposedly be over 20 different handsets to choose from — some with GPS — and they will carry special versions of Google Maps, Google Calendar, Gmail, and VoIP-enabled Google Talk. Speaking of software, Google is rumored to be developing its own operating system for the gPhone. According to reports by Engadget, the OS has been in development since 2005 after Google's acquisition of a mobile software company called Android. The Android team has since developed a Linux-based mobile OS while at Google — a detail that is corroborated by the CrunchGear report — which of course comes with tight Google integration. Both sites appear to agree that their sources indicate Google isn't currently looking to develop the hardware... for now.
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Sci-Fi

Simon Pegg to Play Scotty 233

In response to yesterday's casting news about Chris Pine possibly taking the captain's chair for the new Star Trek movie, apparently Simon Pegg will be playing the role of Scotty. Simon Pegg is known for his role as Shaun in Shaun of the Dead and more recently for his leading role in Hot Fuzz. "Pegg joins Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, John Cho as Sulu and Zachary Quinto as Spock in the film which reportedly, and logically, 'chronicles the early days of the Enterprise crew.' Leonard Nimoy will also put in an appearance, while Eric Bana signed up this week as the movie's villain, Nero."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Confronting pseudoscience in advertising

The Scientist reports that UK group Sense About Science is confronting advertisers about pseudoscientific claims in health products such as "Aerobic Oxygen," "Salt Lamps," and "Activ8." They called the advertisers' customer service numbers and grilled the unfortunates on the other end of the phone about their misuse of scientific language to sell products. The project,

Comment Re:It's much worse than the article made it sound (Score 1) 334

This comment is way over the top. It's also wrong.

Whoever you are, you read the first page, skimmed the rest, then posted a rant at slashdot. How typical.

At any rate, Nate most certainly did go into the layer 7 stuff--opening up the payload and using that capability to reassemble individual email messages and so on. You just missed it because you were skimming in anticipation of composing that great smack-down post where you display your glorious knowledge of DPI for all of slashdot.

At any rate, instead of giving out reading suggestions, why don't you go back and actually RTFA, chief.
Intel

Submission + - Power consumption and the future of computing (arstechnica.com)

mrdirkdiggler writes: ArsTechnica's Hannibal takes a look at how the power concerns that currently plague datacenters are shaping next-generation computing technologies at the levels of the microchip, the board-level interconnect, and the datacenter. In a nutshell, engineers are now willing to take on a lot more hardware overhead in their designs (thermal sensors, transistors that put components into sleep states, buffers and filters at the ends of links, etc.) in order to get maximum power efficiency. The article, which has lots of nice graphics to illustrate the main points, mostly focuses on the specific technologies that Intel has in the pipeline to address these issues.

Comment Re:You forgot some big ones on the list... (Score 1) 37

If you look at the list, there are a LOT of composers there who aren't linked to Nintendo games. Yuzo Koshiro, of ActRaiser and Streets of Rage? Does that mean we can play as Axel Stone in the game?

Note that pretty much all the composers on the list have done a lot more work then just what is listed. Yuzo Koshiro could be in for the work he did on the 8-bit Sonic games, or Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. But most likely it's because, as Wikipedia says, "Yuzo Koshiro arranged music from New Super Mario Bros. for the Fifth Symphonic Game Music Concert in Leipzig, Germany on August 22 2007"

Also, Akihiro Honda is clearly in to do music for Snake, so it makes sense to think at least one or two others are there to do music from one of their games.
Intel

Submission + - Intel Releases Information on Penryn, Nehalem

Justin Wheeler writes: "Intel has been slowly trickling information on their new Penryn cores (the next release after Merom/Conroe), as well as their upcoming Nehalem cores. From the articles: "At a press meeting today, Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, "we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture." What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments.""
Intel

Submission + - Intel talks Penryn, Nehalem

CafreeDC writes: Intel's Pat Gelsinger revealed all sorts of information about the upcoming Penryn today. The 45nm processor family will support SSE4 and offer better virtualization performance:

Right now, a lot of folks who're testing out VT have been disappointed that its performance isn't much better than existing, non-VT-based virtualization solutions like VMware. Specifically, VMware products use a binary translation engine that ingests regular x86 OS code and produces a "safe" subset; VMware claims that this binary translation approach is as fast as, or faster, than VT-based approaches because the OS doesn't have to do costly VM transitions in order to execute privileged instructions. (These claims are debated; I'm merely reporting the fact that they are made.)

A major decrease in VM transition times will help the performance of VT-based solutions like Xen, and it would make the "which virtualization package to use?" debate even more about managment and less about relative performance than it already is.
At the same conference, Gelsinger also talked about the 45nm Nehalem core, Penryn's successor. Among the disclosures came the fact that Nehalem will sport an on-die memory controller, as well as integrated graphics processor.

Reading between the lines on this comment and others, I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty Intel will almost certainly be using its packaging skills to put a GPU in the same package as a Nehalem CPU. Furthermore, this is going to help out with mobile products, small-form-factor devices (*cough* Apple), and anywhere else that power and cooling are more critical than raw performance. I'd expect that such CPU/GPU devices will cut down on the number of on-die cores that you can put on the CPU die (for power dissipation reasons).
AMD

Submission + - AMD CEO talks about earnings, future of x86

Jeff Pierce writes: "AMD's CEO, Hector Ruiz, explained today why AMD's revenues won't meet expectations this quarter. According to Ruiz, this is because the company couldn't produce enough chips to meet growing OEM demand. (Funny he didn't mention the price war with Intel.) Also covered in the presentation is Ruiz's vision of what you might call "x86 everywhere." Ruiz thinks that the x86 processor market is by no means "mature," and that x86 will expand into home entertainment devices, appliances, education, and lots of other places where we don't even currently use microprocessors. AMD intends to have a big slice of that growing pie."
Space

Submission + - Scientists Break Speed of Light

PreacherTom writes: Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that shoots about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum, to the point where the pulse seemed to exit the chamber before even entering it. Apparently, Uncle Albert is still resting comfortably: relativity only states that an object with mass cannot travel faster than light. Still, the results are sufficient to merit publication in the prestigious journal, Nature.
United States

Submission + - FAIR USE Act the death toll for copyright reform?

Peacemaker writes: Response to Rep. Boucher's FAIR USE Act from around the web has been mostly positive, but the bill may become the biggest roadblock in the quest for meaningful copyright reform. 'Why would Boucher, traditionally a staunch supporter of real DMCA reform, choose to put it on the back burner this session in favor of reforming secondary liability rules? It's a pretty good guess that Boucher's allies in the consumer electronics industry had a big influence on his decision. Indeed, the legislation appears to be an attempt by the consumer electronics industry to make a separate peace with copyright interests, leaving the broader movement for balanced copyright policies to soldier on without its support.' While the bill would solve some real problems, 'Boucher should defend that proposal on the merits instead of pretending that his legislation would reform the DMCA or shore up fair use.'
Debian

Journal Journal: So, About Dapper . . . 24

For the last year or so, I've been happily using Debian, with a mixture of sources so I was stable, but current, just like nearly everyone who uses Debian.

Then I tried to upgrade or something insane like that, using aptitude, and the whole thing went tits up on me. No amount of cussing, kicking things, or actual tinkering with the software could save my machine.

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