In his first accepted submission, lukemartinez sends in an excerpt from a ZDNet article on continuing developments about Microsoft's UEFI secure boot requirements: "The Linux Australia community began petitioning the ACCC this week after Microsoft aired plans to mandate the enabling of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface's secure boot feature for devices bearing the 'Designed for Windows 8' logo. This means that any software or hardware that is to run on the firmware will need to be signed by Microsoft or the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to be able to execute. This would make it impossible to install alternative operating systems like Linux..." Delimeter has further information on the petititions, and Matthew Garret recently posted a follow-up to Microsoft's response to the concerns about secure boot, calling them out on their misinformation.

An anonymous reader tips news of a vulnerability discovered in the Diebold Accuvote voting system, which could be used to alter voting results without leaving evidence of tampering. Quoting Salon: "[T]he Argonne team's attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine's proprietary source code. ... The team's video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a "bad guy" virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away. ... The video shows three different types of attack, each demonstrating how the intrusion developed by the team allows them to take complete control of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine. They were able to demonstrate a similar attack on a DRE system made by Sequoia Voting Systems as well."

jfruhlinger writes "Upgrading your desktop PC's video card was once a rite of passage for many Slashdot readers — and could also be a gateway to building your own computer from the motherboard up. And more often than not, you bought the components from Newegg. But the tablets and ultrathin laptops that are today's hot sellers don't let you so much as swap in more RAM. What's a component retailer to do in world without user-serviceable components?"

eldavojohn writes "Researchers at Purdue University's Birck Nanotechnology Center have released news of a proof of concept new ferroelectric transistor random access memory or 'FeTRAM.' This new technology is nonvolatile and the researchers claim it could use up to 99% less energy than current flash memory. Unlike most FeRAM technology that uses a capacitor, FeTRAM provides nondestructive readout by storing information using a ferroelectric transistor instead. From the article: 'The new technology also is compatible with industry manufacturing processes for complementary metal oxide semiconductors, or CMOS, used to produce computer chips. It has the potential to replace conventional memory systems.' So if they get this into production, you might not have to worry about your laptop cooking your genitals. They've been published in ACS (paywalled) and the professor leading the research has many patents filed relating to transistor nanotechnology."

First time accepted submitter icensnow writes "NRG is patenting a means of returning electric power from charged but inactive electric cars to the grid, essentially turning parked electric cars into an energy storage system for the grid. I'm having a hard time deciding if this is genius or silly."

MojoKid writes "Oracle is publicly demonstrating its new T4 processor today and is shipping beta test systems to selected partners. The new T4 chip is a major departure from previous designs. The T4 offers a maximum of eight cores per physical chip and keeps the T3's eight-threads-per-core limitation. The T4 compensates for its lower maximum theoretical throughput in several ways. First, the T4 is an out-of-order processor with an enhanced branch predictor. Its maximum speed is said to be at least 3GHz, nearly double that of the 1.67GHz T3. Oracle claims the chip's single-threaded performance has been significantly boosted, and expects T4 to deliver a 2x-7x speed increase in single-threaded workloads compared to T3."

An anonymous reader writes "For years, robots have been replacing workers in factories as technology has come to grips with high-volume, unskilled labor. An article in Slate makes the case that the robot workforce is poised to move into fields that require significantly more training and education. From the article: 'In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible — they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one. Economic theory holds that as these industries are revolutionized by technology, prices for their services will decline, and society as a whole will benefit. As I conducted my research, I found this argument convincing — robotic lawyers, for instance, will bring cheap legal services to the masses who can't afford lawyers today. But there's a dark side, too: Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner — and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?'"

alphadogg writes "Researchers have been working on quantum systems for more than a decade, in the hopes of developing super-tiny, super-powerful computers. And while there is still plenty of excitement surrounding quantum computing, significant roadblocks are causing some to question whether quantum computing will ever make it out of the lab. 'Artur Ekert, professor of Quantum Physics, Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, says physicists today can only control a handful of quantum bits, which is adequate for quantum communication and quantum cryptography, but nothing more. He notes that it will take a few more domesticated qubits to produce quantum repeaters and quantum memories, and even more to protect and correct quantum data. "Add still a few more qubits, and we should be able to run quantum simulations of some quantum phenomena and so forth. But when this process arrives to 'a practical quantum computer' is very much a question of defining what 'a practical quantum computer' really is. The best outcome of our research in this field would be to discover that we cannot build a quantum computer for some very fundamental reason, then maybe we would learn something new and something profound about the laws of nature," Ekert says.'"

MrSeb writes "A bunch of tea-drinking northern Brits have set a new land speed record for a gasification-powered vehicle, fueled only by coffee beans. The car is called The Coffee Car, and it was created by the Teesdale Conservation Volunteers of Durham, England. The previous gasification-powered speed record — held by some Americans called 'Beaver Energy' — was a mere 47mph, fueled by wood pellets. The Coffee Car averaged no less than 66.5mph and was granted a Guinness World Record in return. Gasification is a process in which any organic fuel is turned into 'syngas,' a mixture of carbon dioxide/monoxide, hydrogen, and methane which can be used in conventional internal combustion engines. The Coffee Car was created with the sole intention of proving that renewable/green energy sources can power cars — and it looks like it succeeded!"

A few weeks back, we posted a story here that described Koomey's Law, which (in the spirit of Moore's Law) identifies a long-standing trend in computer technology. While Moore's prediction centers on the transistor density of microprocessors, Jonathan Koomey focuses instead on computing efficiency — in a nutshell, computing power per watt, rather than only per square nanometer. In particular, he asserts that the energy efficiency of computing doubles every 1.5 years. (He points out that calling this a "law" isn't his idea, or his doing — but it's sure a catchy turn of phrase.) Koomey has agreed to respond to your questions about his research and conclusions in the world of computing efficiency. Please observe the Slashdot interview guidelines: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment.

MojoKid writes "Although they haven't been big hits with enthusiasts, Samsung's solid state drives have been successful due to strong relationships with a number of OEMs, including Apple. With the release of their new SSD 830 Series Solid State Drives, however, Samsung appears ready to make inroads with enthusiasts as well. The SSD 830 tested here is 256GB model, with eight 32GB Samsung NAND flash memory chips, 256MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory, and a new Samsung SSD Controller. The Samsung controller features a 3-ARM core design with support for SATA III 6Gb/s interface speeds. Performance-wise, the Samsung SSD 830 Series drive offered the best Read performance of the group that was tested, even versus the latest SandForce-based SSDs, though the SSD 830 couldn't quite catch SandForce in writes."

RogerRoast writes "The anode is a critical component for storing energy in lithium-ion batteries. The Berkeley Lab (D.O.E) has designed a new kind of anode that can absorb eight times the lithium of current designs, and has maintained its greatly increased energy capacity after over a year of testing and many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles. According to the research published in Advanced Materials they used a tailored polymer that conducts electricity and binds closely to lithium-storing silicon particles, even as they expand to more than three times their volume during charging and then shrink again during discharge."

dotancohen writes "Although the telephone has the 1-2-3 key on the top row, most calculators and keyboards have 7-8-9 on the top row. Switching between the two destroys muscle- and spatial- memory. Do any slashdotters use a scientific calculator with 1-2-3 on the top row? I've already scraped and resoldered my Casio fx-82 calculator to have 1-2-3 on the top, and remapped the numpad in Kubuntu, but if there exist any calculators like this already on the market, I'd buy two."

mikejuk writes "Last year John Graham-Cumming launched a project to create a fully-functional implementation of Babbage's original design for a computer — the Analytical Engine. Now it looks as if the project is going ahead. The first phase is to digitize all of Babbage's papers and designs. These will be available to the general public in 2012. The machine to be built is no simple calculator: it is a full computer with a store for between 100 and 1000 values, each of 40 digits, and it was programmed using punched cards in a modern 'operator/address' format. There was even a plan to send the output to a printer. When this device is built it will make it clear that the computer age nearly began in the 18th century."

First time accepted submitter bingbangboom writes "Where are the ARM powered desktops? I finally see some desktop models however they are relegated to "developer" models with USD200+ price tags (trimslice, etc). Raspberry Pi seems to be the only thing that will be priced correctly, have the right amount of features, and may actually be released. Is the software side holding ARM desktops back? Everyone seems to be foaming at the mouth about anything with a touch interface, even on the Linux side. Or are manufacturers not wanting to bring the 'netbook effect' to their desktop sales? Are ARM powered desktops destined to join the mythical smartbook?"

An anonymous reader tips news that Dell, Intel, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center will be working together to build "Stampede," a supercomputer project aiming for peak performance of 10 petaflops. The National Science Foundation is providing $27.5 million in initial funding, and it's hoped that Stampede will be "a model for supporting petascale simulation-based science and data-driven science." From the announcement: "When completed, Stampede will comprise several thousand Dell 'Zeus' servers with each server having dual 8-core processors from the forthcoming Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family (formerly codenamed "Sandy Bridge-EP") and each server with 32 gigabytes of memory. ... [It also incorporates Intel 'Many Integrated Core' co-processors,] designed to process highly parallel workloads and provide the benefits of using the most popular x86 instruction set. This will greatly simplify the task of porting and optimizing applications on Stampede to utilize the performance of both the Intel Xeon processors and Intel MIC co-processors. ... Altogether, Stampede will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops, 272 terabytes of total memory, and 14 petabytes of disk storage."

sl4shd0rk writes "OCZ is coming out with Synapse Cache; an SSD cache for your hard drive. The SSD runs software that copies data into the cache from your hard drive as you work with it. The data sits on the SSD until it gets less activity and gets flushed to the hard disk. Aside from boosting your IOPS to 10k/75k (read/write), the SSD also supports AES encryption, SMART and TRIM."

RogerRoast sends this quote from the MIT News Office: "As intuitive as it seems to a human being, spontaneously planning a trajectory around obstacles in free space is a monstrously complex computation. As a consequence, most motion-planning algorithms give up on the idea of finding the most efficient path between the robot’s initial state and its goal, settling for any path that won’t introduce collisions. [Researchers at MIT] have built a new robotic motion-planning system that calculates much more efficient trajectories through free space. ... Not only do robots guided by the system move more efficiently, saving time and energy, but they also move more predictably (PDF), a crucial consideration if they're to interact with humans."

crookedvulture writes "Add chipmaker Via to the list of companies filing legal suit against Apple. Via owns a number of fundamental technology patents inherited from Centaur, and it's already forced Intel to grant an ongoing x86 license. Via also has a vested interest; CEO Wenchi Chen is married to the head of HTC, which Apple sued for patent infringement last March."

garymortimer tips this story at the Canberra Times, which starts: "Police have suggested that Canberra's new point-to-point speed cameras be linked to unmanned aerial surveillance drones and used to track vehicles of interest to authorities. The first of the cameras, which use automated number plate recognition technology to calculate a car's average speed and whether it is within the legal limit, are due to be switched on by the end of the year." I wonder how much surveillance by drone is already being done in the U.S., especially considering that even an (admittedly high-end) home-built drone is capable of hijinks that seem to parallel the cell-phone tracking activities the FBI has been shown to employ.