15908084
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Barence writes:
This week's IFA show has seen a flurry of Android-based alternatives to the iPad emerge from leading manufacturers. The Samsung Galaxy Tab made a strong first impression on PC Pro's reviewer. The 7in tablet's TFT screen "beams forth with rich, saturated colours and wide, wide viewing angles", the device is capable of Full HD playback and the TouchWiz UI is "clearly intended to draw customers away from the iFamily". Elsewhere, ViewSonic has launched a pair of 7in and 10in tablets, the larger of which dual boots into either Android or Windows 7. "Our first moments with Windows 7 were surprisingly painless, too: we expected the Atom processor and 1GB of memory to be horrendously sluggish, but it wasn’t the case," PC Pro reports. Finally, Toshiba's 10.1in Folio 100 marries Android 2.2 with Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform to deliver "mighty graphics crunching power". The build quality left a little to desire, though. "The 14mm thick chassis feels lightweight, and even relatively gentle twisting motions left the Folio’s plastic body creaking under the stress."
15906010
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destinyland writes:
In the Central African Republic, broadband internet service costs 3891% of the average monthly income. "Put another way, a month’s broadband service costs more than three years’ average wages in the country," notes one technology blog, "compared with less than two hours’ earnings in Macau." A United Nations' technology group released the figures in a new report in advance of a September 19 summit on the digital divide in developing countries. ("We are trying to avoid a broadband divide,” said Dr. Hamadoun Toure, the secretary general of the UN's International Telecommunications Union.) Their agency noted that the rate for broadband penetration is below 1% in many poor countries, with monthly costs higher than the average monthly income. "By contrast," notes the BBC, "in the world's most developed economies, around 30% of people have access to broadband at a cost of less than 1% of their income." And the report also estimates that there are 5 billion cellphones in the world — though some people may own more than one.
15901308
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An anonymous reader writes:
One of the big, unsolved problems in explaining how life arose on Earth is a chicken-and-egg paradox: How could the basic biochemicals—such as amino acids and nucleotides—have arisen before the biological catalysts (proteins or ribozymes) existed to carry out their formation? In a paper appearing in the current issue of The Biological Bulletin, scientists propose that a third type of catalyst could have jumpstarted metabolism and life itself, deep in hydrothermal ocean vents.
15898936
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pickens writes:
The LA Times reports that 84-year-old Cuban ex-President Fidel Castro consumes 200 to 300 news items a day on the World Wide Web and in a recent interview called web communication "the most powerful weapon that has existed" and extolled its power to break a stranglehold on the media by "the empire" and "ambitious private groups that have abused it" adding that the Internet "has put an end to secrets.... We are seeing a high level of investigative journalism, as the New York Times calls it, that is within reach of the whole world." Well, not the whole world. Cuba has the lowest level of Internet penetration in the Western Hemisphere (lower than Haiti), plus severe government restrictions and censorship affecting those who do have access. In addition Cuban law bans using the Internet to spread information that is against what the government considers to be the social interest, norms of good behavior, the integrity of the people or national security. Most Cubans who do have computers have access only to a Cuban intranet, a national e-mail system with approved websites and journals while on the World Wide Web, Cubans encounter filters and blocks on any information coming or going that might be construed as unfriendly to the Cuban government.
