I.M.O.G. writes "Today AMD lifted the embargo on their most recent desktop AMD FX architecture, code named Bulldozer, whose CPU frequency record Slashdot recently covered. The fruition of 6 years of AMD R&D, this new chip architecture is the most significant news out of AMD since the Phenom II made its debut. The chips are available now in all major retail outlets, and top tier hardware sites have published the first Bulldozer reviews already." Here are reviews from a few different sites — pick your favorite: Tom's Hardware, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware, [H]ardOCP, or TechSpot. They don't agree on everything, but the consensus seems to be that the new chips aren't blowing anyone's socks off, and that they struggle to compete with Intel's comparable offerings. The architecture shows promise, but performance gains will take time to materialize, making it difficult to leapfrog Intel to any significant degree.

nightcats writes "The League Championship Series of baseball are upon us, and numerous sports media pundits, armies of fans at comment boards, and TV people are openly debating the possibility of robot umpires coming to Major League Baseball, to either replace or enhance the human umps' work on the field. Question: what kind of project are we reasonably talking about here? What would the scope and length be from planning/design to user testing/implementation (presumably in a spring training/minor league setting)? What kinds of hardware (video scanners, touch-sensitive bases/foul lines, etc.) and software would be required?" And, as long as we're on the subject — do you think it would be good for the game?

garymortimer writes with an article in sUAS News. From the article: "A Boeing chief has suggested that the company's mysterious unmanned space-plane, called X-37B, developed for the US Air Force, could be scaled up and modified to carry astronauts. The company's X-37B project chief Art Grantz revealed that at least two more versions of the 9-meter long space-plane are under investigation – one of which involves adding a crew to a much-enlarged version of the space drone, New Scientist reported. If built, the new version would give the US back its ability to shuttle people to the International Space Station."

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the Titan supercomputer. From the article: "Cray, AMD, Nvidia, and the Department of Energy have announced that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer will soon be upgraded to yet again become the fastest HPC installation in the world. The new, mighty-morphing computer will feature thousands of Cray XK6 blades, each one accommodating up to four 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 (Interlagos) chips and four Nvidia Tesla 20-series GCGPU coprocessors. The Jaguar name will be suitably inflated, too: the new behemoth will be called Titan. The exact specs of Titan haven't been revealed, but the Jaguar supercomputer currently sports 200 cabinets of Cray XT5 blades — and each cabinet, in theory, can be upgraded to hold 24 XK6 blades. That's a total of 4,800 servers, or 38,400 processors in total; 19,200 Opterons 6200s, and 19,200 Tesla GPUs. ... that's 307,200 CPU cores — and with 512 shaders in each Tesla chip that's 9,830,400 compute units. In other words, Titan should be capable of massive parallelism of more than one million concurrent operations. When the server is complete, towards the end of 2012, Titan will be capable of between 10 and 20 petaflops, and should recapture the crown of Fastest Supercomputer in the World from the Japanese 'K' computer."

awtbfb writes "Tim Hemmes, with the help of University of Pittsburgh researchers, successfully controlled a robot arm in three dimensions. He's had quadriplegia for seven years. The feat was accomplished using implanted ECoG electrodes and weeks of computer training. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 'Ever since his accident, Mr. Hemmes said, he's had the goal of hugging his daughter Jaylei.' Next up are six more 30-day participants, followed by a year-long study."

A couple weeks ago, you asked questions of Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey about what has been dubbed Koomey's Law — the idea that the energy efficiency of computing doubles every 1.5 years. Read on for Professor Koomey's answers to the questions you raised.

Lucas123 writes "When it comes to performance, power and size, external I/O interconnect Thunderbolt handily beats SuperSpeed USB, but in the one critical category — ubiquity — it has an almost impossible uphill battle. Thunderbolt has a maximum 10Gbps signaling rate to SuperSpeed USB's 6Gbps and it offers more than twice the power to devices. To date, however, Apple is the only systems manufacturer to adopt Thunderbolt, and it has done so as an additional device connectivity port, keeping SuperSpeed USB on its computers. No other systems manufacturer has committed to Thunderbolt. In contrast, SuperSpeed USB has been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware, with numbers continuing to grow."

Slate has reprinted the piece that Ron Rosenbaum wrote for Esquire in 1971, explaining to the world that there was an underground movement of people hacking the phone system. (Rosenbaum is now a columnist for Slate.) According to the article's new introduction and followup piece by Rosenbaum reflecting on its impact — and to the New York Times obituary for Steve Jobs — this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.

First time accepted submitter KowboyKrash writes "OK, a little background: I use Acronis to create custom recovery partitions for my personal computers that include all my software and drivers. I also work for a growing computer repair shop which has ventured into eBay sales of refurbished computers. We receive the machines with wiped hard drives. Since we get multiples of each model, we load everything on one then make images with Clonezilla. It would be nice to set up recovery partitions as well. Acronis is out of the question, since it would cost for a license for each machine. Do any Slashdotters know of any FOSS options?"

An anonymous reader writes "While Samsung has been accused of repeatedly borrowing everything from Apple's hardware, to packaging and accessories, it appears that all current iDevices share a port which is very similar to one found on a forty-year-old Polaroid camera. It gets more interesting when you realize that camera was the 'supreme achievement' of a man Steve Jobs idolized. Edwin Land was the creator of the Polaroid camera and, if Steve Jobs obsessed over Land's devices the way many do with iPhones, etc. today, there's a chance this similarity is not a coincidence."

Barence writes "ISPs are wildly exaggerating the cost of increased internet traffic, according to a new report. Fixed and mobile broadband providers have claimed their costs are 'ballooning' because of the expense of delivering high-bandwidth services such as video-on-demand. However, a new report from Plum Consulting claims the cost per additional gigabyte of data for fixed-line ISPs is between €0.01-0.03 per GB. The report labels claims of ballooning costs a 'myth.'"

MrSeb writes with news out of MIT about another interesting and potentially useful property of graphene. Researchers have known for several years that graphene generates electricity when exposed to sunlight, but incorrectly attributed it to the photovoltaic effect. A new paper shows that the current is actually generated from the much more unusual 'hot-carrier' response. Quoting: "The material’s electrons, which carry current, are heated by the light, but the lattice of carbon nuclei that forms graphene’s backbone remains cool. It’s this difference in temperature within the material that produces the flow of electricity. ... Such differential heating has been observed before, but only under very special circumstances: either at ultralow temperatures (measured in thousandths of a degree above absolute zero), or when materials are blasted with intense energy from a high-power laser. This response in graphene, by contrast, occurs across a broad range of temperatures all the way up to room temperature, and with light no more intense than ordinary sunlight." It will take more work to determine what new applications are reasonable from an efficiency perspective, but it does broaden graphene's already-impressive capabilities.

Spy Hunter writes "Memristors are the basis of a new memory technology being developed by HP and Hynix. At the International Electronics Forum, Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs, said, 'We're planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half. We're running hundreds of wafers through the fab, and we're way ahead of where we thought we would be at this moment in time.' They're not stopping at a flash replacement either, with Williams saying, 'In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we'll replace SRAM.' With a non-volatile replacement for DRAM and SRAM, will we soon see the end of the reboot entirely?"

angry tapir writes "HP is investigating how several TouchPads reportedly shipped to end users running Android, instead of webOS. Shortly after HP announced it would stop selling TouchPads and began offering the remaining tablets for US$99, reports surfaced from a few users who say they received TouchPads that run Android instead of HP's webOS software. At the same time, developers have been working on porting Android to the TouchPad, since it's uncertain how much support and development HP will dedicate to webOS in the future."

itwbennett writes "At the Ceatec electronics conference in Japan this week, 3M is showing film that turns windows into solar panels. Although the product only generates about 20% of the electricity of a traditional solar panel, it will cost about half as much, is much easier to install, and takes up no additional space. 'An average person could go to the store, buy some of this, and then bring it home and install it themselves,' said Yasuhiro Aoyagi, a senior manager in the company's construction markets division."

cylonlover writes "Robots are a perfect tool to give soldiers in the field 'eyes' on a potentially hazardous situation without placing themselves in harm's way. With soldiers often operating in difficult terrain or entering buildings, the easiest way to get such robots into place is usually to throw them. Currently, many units use a small tactical robot called the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle 320 which is equipped with video reconnaissance technology. However, this robot weighs a not very pack-friendly 32 pounds (14.5 kg), so the call has been put out for a lighter robot that is more easily transportable by dismounted units on the move and is able to be thrown into forward locations such as buildings and caves. To this end, the U.S. military is set to put three different types of lightweight, 'throwable' robots through a series of combat assessments in Afghanistan."

First time accepted submitter aonsquared writes "A couple of months ago I managed to scoop up a cheap (£30) robot arm with a USB interface from Maplin (I'm in the UK). Following a wrist injury which left me without the use of my right hand for 4 weeks, I decided to build it for a little hacking project. Using Linux, libusb and other freely available tools, I have enabled the robot arm to respond to my voice commands. I've posted a full tutorial and downloadable source code, as well as a demonstration video. Hopefully, open-source voice recognition as well as devices like the Kinect (which has spawned hundreds of different cool hacks) can someday revolutionise the way we interact with computers and machines."

Julie188 writes "One of the more interesting aspects of Red Hat's acquisition of virtual storage vendor Gluster on Tuesday is how it drags Red Hat into bed with its cloud competitor OpenStack. Red Hat made waves over the summer in the open source community when one of its executives threw punches at OpenStack's community, saying the community amounted to not much more than a bunch of press releases. In July, Gluster contributed its Connector for OpenStack. It enables features such as live migration of VMs, instant boot of VMs, and movement of VMs between clouds on a GlusterFS environment. While Fedora has already said that its upcoming Fedora 16 would support OpenStack, Fedora is a community distro and not beholden to Red Hat. However, Red Hat today promised that it would continue to support and maintain Gluster's contribution to OpenStack. It didn't, however, to promise to quit the smack talk."

crookedvulture writes "AMD's new Llano-powered A-series APUs have had a difficult birth on the desktop. The first chips were saddled with a 100W power rating, making them look rather unattractive next to Intel's 65W parts. Now, AMD has rolled out a 65W version of Llano that's nearly as fast as its 100W predecessor despite drawing considerably less power under load. This A8-3800 APU doesn't skimp on integrated graphics, which is key to Llano's appeal. If you're not going to be using the built-in Radeon, the value proposition of AMD's latest desktop APUs looks a little suspect."

An anonymous reader writes "Leaked screens from Amazon's internal stock monitoring and assignment system (Alaska) has revealed just how popular the Kindle Fire tablet is already. In just 5 days of being up for pre-order there have been 250,000 reserved. That's more than 50,000 per day or 2,000 sold every hour. If that continues to launch day Amazon will need to have 2.5 million ready to ship to meet demand. To put that in context, the original iPad managed to ship 1 million in its first month." The key phrase seems to be "if this level of consumer demand continues" — but given the success of the e-ink Kindle line, that might not be crazy. Do you want one, or not?