Zothecula writes "Russian aircraft company MiG is best known for its fighter planes which have been used by the USSR, China, North Korea and North Vietnam since the beginning of WWII. These days, the former Government-owned RAC MiG is a publicly traded entity and competes on the open market with its technologies, having more than 1600 of its MiG-29 fighters in operation in 25 countries. Now MiG is claiming a major first in military aviation with the launch of a 3D flight simulator at the Dubai Air Show, providing volumetric visualization of beyond-the-cockpit space for trainee top guns. The simulator comes complete with the MiG-29's cockpit and actual control systems."

harrymcc writes "On November 15th 1971, Intel introduced the 4004 — the first single-chip microprocessor. Its offspring, needless to say, went on to change the world. But first, Intel tried using the 4004 in a bunch of products that were interesting but often unsuccessful — like a pinball machine, an electronic vote-counting machine, and Wang's first word processor. Technologizer's Benj Edwards is celebrating the anniversary with an illustrated look back at this landmark chip." Here's another nostalgic look back at V3.co.uk, and one at The Inquirer. And an anonymous reader points out another at ExtremeTech, from which comes this snippet: "Designed by the fantastically-forenamed Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor, the 4004 was a 4-bit, 16-pin microprocessor that operated at a mighty 740KHz — and at roughly eight clock cycles per instruction cycle (fetch, decode, execute), that means the chip was capable of executing up to 92,600 instructions per second. We can’t find the original list price, but one source indicates that it cost around $5 to manufacture, or $26 in today’s money."

RulerOf writes "A few years ago, my girlfriend's grandfather was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration. Ever since, he has had progressively more trouble with daily activities. While his wife and family are able to help him with most things, at the age of 88 and without many living friends left, he dearly misses the ability to read printed text. He was able to get by for some time with magnifying glasses and other basic aids but now even those do not help. Recently, a local clinic which specializes in treatment for low-sight and blind individuals made him aware of and showed him several assistive reading devices that successfully allowed him to read. He mentioned this to his family members, and when I was told about it, I thought that these devices sounded like they were not much more than a camera attached to an LCD monitor or television with a little bit of special software thrown into the mix." (Read on below for more.)

primesuspect writes "Coming in close to the 10th anniversary of the format and billed as a 'motherboard for digital home media DIY enthusiasts,' VIA have paired their Nano X2 1.4ghz dual-core CPU with their VX900 chipset to produce an intriguing addition to their mini-ITX lineup." Mini-ITX, to my pleasure, has never gone completely away: witness the (slow, but not stopped) flow of news at Mini-ITX.com.

angry tapir writes "After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices has announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today. The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 per cent to 30 per cent faster than their predecessors, the 12-core Opteron 6100 chips, according to AMD."

MrSeb writes "Ahead of tomorrow's full-scale launch of Amazon's new wunderkind, panacea, and lynch-pin of its continuing distribution domination, initial reviews of the Kindle Fire are starting to trickle in... and they're not as fantastic as we had hoped. Unsurprisingly, not a single review is denying that the bright screen, solid construction, and $200 price point make for a perfect holiday season outing — but to actually win the hearts of consumers, to steal those throbbing, Cupertino-captivated organs away from the iPad, the Kindle Fire has to be amazing... and it isn't. Throughout almost every review, one particularly telling observation rears its ugly head: the Kindle Fire can be sluggish. Page turns can lag. Menus can be slow to load. Screen touches can be unresponsive. For a device that is entirely about media consumption, the Fire will live or die depending on its perceived alacrity. If an E Ink Kindle or Nook is better for reading books, and a smartphone or iPad is better for watching movies or listening to music, what space is there for the Fire?"

wiredmikey writes "Supercomputer maker Cray today said that the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) awarded the company a contract to build a supercomputer for the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. The supercomputer will be powered by new 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors (formerly code-named 'Interlagos') a next-generation GPU from NVIDIA, called 'Kepler,' and a new integrated storage solution from Cray. IBM was originally selected to build the supercomputer in 2007, but terminated the contract in August 2011, saying the project was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support beyond its original expectations. Once fully deployed, the system is expected to have a sustained performance of more than one petaflops on demanding scientific applications."

MojoKid writes "Today marks the release of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processor family and its companion X79 Express chipset. The first processor to arrive is the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, a six-core chip manufactured using Intel's 32nm process node that features roughly 2.27 billion transistors. The initial batch of Sandy Bridge-E CPUs will feature 6 active execution cores that can each process two threads simultaneously via Intel Hyper-Threading technology. Although, the chip's die actually has eight cores on board (two inactive), due to power and yield constraints, only six are active at this time. These processors will support up to 15MB of shared L3 Intel Smart Cache and feature integrated quad-channel memory controllers with official support for DDR3 memory at speeds up to 1600MHz, as well as 40 integrated PCI Express 3.0 compatible lanes. Performance-wise, Sandy Bridge-E pretty much crushes anything on the desktop currently, including AMD's pseudo 8-core FX-8150 processor."

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports on Harvest Automation, a Massachusetts company developing small robots that can perform basic agricultural labor. The ones currently being tested in greenhouses and plant nurseries are 'knee-high, wheeled machines.' 'Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what's around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Key to making the robots flexible and cost-effective is designing them to work only with information provided by their sensors. They don't construct a global map of their environment, and they don't use GPS. The robots have sensors that detect boundary markers, a laser range finder to detect objects in front of them, and a gyroscope for navigating by dead reckoning. The robots determine how far they've traveled by keeping track of wheel rotations.'"

Three weeks after undergoing a crash test, a Chevy Volt caught fire. The car's battery was determined as the cause of the fire, though GM said its protocols for deactivating the battery following a crash would have prevented it. Either way, the National Highway Traffic Safety Association is now on the case. They're planning additional testing of the batteries, though they were quick to say, "Based on the available data, N.H.T.S.A. does not believe the Volt or other electric vehicles are at a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered vehicles. In fact, all vehicles — both electric and gasoline-powered — have some risk of fire in the event of a serious crash." According to the president of an engineering firm, "If a lithium battery is pierced by steel, a chemical reaction will take place that starts raising the temperature and can result in a fire... If the piercing is small, that reaction can take days or weeks to occur."

mikejuk writes with this excerpt: "Meet Wu and Kong — the latest in ping pong playing robots. They may not achieve exciting matches at the moment, but the fact that they can do the job at all is an indication of how fast things are moving. Unlike many other game-playing robots these two players are humanoid and are kitted out in old style Chinese jackets. They are about 1.6 meters tall and weigh in at 55 kilos. They track the ball with video cameras situated in their heads and then play a variety of strokes. They were developed by Zhejiang University and are currently turning up on the Chinese media as a novelty item. ... The current record for a rally is 144 rounds between robots. Humans can compete against them, but the robots lack the variety of shots that makes table tennis a game of strategy as well as accuracy."

First time accepted submitter paysonwelch writes "I am a developer and entrepreneur and I am considering developing a very graphically rich and custom interface for my latest application which does charting and analysis of large data sets. The application would feature lots of gauges, knobs and levers. As I was thinking about this I said to myself, why not hook up physical knobs and levers to my computer to control my application instead of designing them in 2D bitmaps? This could potentially save screen space and provide tactile feedback, and a new way of interacting digitally with one's application and data. So my question is whether or not anyone out there has advice for building a custom solution, perhaps starting with a mixing board, or if there are any pre-fab kits / controllers for achieving this?"

An anonymous reader writes "This article has an interesting round-up of how chipmakers are handling the dwindling returns of pursuing Moore's Law. Intel's about four years ahead of the rest of the semiconductor industry with its new 3D transistors. But not everyone's convinced 3D is the answer. 'There's a simple reason everyone's contemplating a redesign: The smaller you make a CMOS transistor, the more current it leaks when it's switched off. This leakage arises from the device's geometry. A standard CMOS transistor has four parts: a source, a drain, a channel that connects the two, and a gate on top to control the channel. When the gate is turned on, it creates a conductive path that allows electrons or holes to move from the source to the drain. When the gate is switched off, this conductive path is supposed to disappear. But as engineers have shrunk the distance between the source and drain, the gate's control over the transistor channel has gotten weaker. Current sneaks through the part of the channel that's farthest from the gate and also through the underlying silicon substrate. The only way to cut down on leaks is to find a way to remove all that excess silicon.'"

theshowmecanuck writes "The Telegraph has an article talking about the 60th anniversary of The Lyons Electronic Office I (LEO I), complete with an old video from the mid '50s about LEO II. The LEO I was the first major computer business system. It was installed at a large catering company in the U.K. named J. Lyons and Co. that operated a chain of tea shops among other business interests. So, blame them or praise them, November 17, 2011 will mark 60 years since the day in 1951 that the Brits started the age of business computing. All hail our tea- and biscuit-powered computer overlords."

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux kernel power bug that caused high power usage for many Intel Linux systems has finally been addressed. Matthew Garrett of Red Hat has devised a solution for the ASPM Linux power problem by mimicking Microsoft Windows' power behavior in the Linux kernel. A patch is on LKML for this solution to finally restore the battery life under Linux."

l_bratch writes, quoting from the BBC, "'British computer chip designer ARM has unveiled its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) for mobile devices. The Mali-T658 offers up to ten times the performance of its predecessor." ARM claims that its latest GPU, which will be ready in around two years, will have graphics performance akin to the PlayStation 3. If this has acceptable power consumption for a mobile device, could we be seeing ultra-low power hardware in high-end PCs and consoles soon?"

taweili writes "According to a tweet from Shanghai Morning Newspaper's Weibo account, the Shanghai Government Technology committee has issued a call for a proposal to build 100 community hackerspaces with government funding for equipment and a community managing the spaces. Hackerspaces have been growing rapidly in China since the first one, XinCheJian, was started in Shanghai last November as reported here by CNN Go. Currently there are three hackerspaces in China, with XinCheJian in Shanghai, Maxpace in Beijing and Chaihuo in Shenzhen. It looks like the governments are paying attention to the trend and are getting into supporting (or 'regulating') the movement."

MojoKid writes with an article in Hot Hardware about the fancy new Asus tablet/laptop hybrid. Quoting the article: "Asus and nVidia have collectively taken the wraps off the next-generation version of Asus's well-received Transformer tablet line. The new system aims to carve out a slice of the premium tablet market that Apple's iPad has dominated for so long. On paper and in pictures, the Prime impresses. The Transformer Prime incorporates NVIDIA's new Kal-El (Tegra 3) processor and is one of NVIDIA Tegra 3's upper-end launch systems. The new ARM-based CPU contains a fifth 'companion core' to reduce and manage idle power consumption and contains 12 GPU cores, up from the eight GPUs in Tegra 2. NVIDIA claims that Tegra 3's GPU is up to 3x faster than Tegra 2, thanks to additional architectural enhancements. Asus is also rolling out a new LCD they're calling 'Super IPS+.' The display's normal brightness tops out at ~500 nits, but the Prime offers an alternate Super IPS mode that pushes display brightness up to 600 nits for use in bright outdoor environments."

MrSeb writes "Long before Facebook and Twitpic, photos were shared by simply handing someone a print. No camera made this easier than the once-ubiquitous Polaroid. Nothing represented instant gratification better in the film era than having a print develop before your eyes, ready to hand out in a minute. Unfortunately for Polaroid, the advent of digital photography sounded the death knell for its iconic instant print cameras. A brief reprieve in the form of inexpensive sticker-printing versions was ended by the cellphone camera revolution. Now, after a decade in remission, Polaroid has returned with a full-up digital camera that incorporates instant printing technology. The Polaroid Z340 is a 14MP digital with an integrated Zink-enabled (Zero Ink) printer. In a nostalgic touch, the new camera prints 3×4-inch images, the same size as the original Polaroid film cameras. Remarkably, all this fits in a one-pound, seven-ounce package, about the same weight as a mid-range DSLR."

An anonymous reader writes "Honda has just unveiled a new, upgraded version of its famous humanoid robot, Asimo. Its appearance didn't change much, but the new robot is lighter, faster, and stronger. It can walk on uneven surfaces, run backwards, and even jump on one foot. The new Asimo also has more dexterous hands and better image and voice recognition to interact with people. Honda's big push is clearly in the direction of making Asimo more autonomous, and useful, in human environments."