saccade.com writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang just posted an excellent essay, Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. He shows how the gradually slowing pace of semiconductor density actually may create many new opportunities for smaller scale innovators and entrepreneurs. It's based on a talk presented at the 2011 Open Hardware Summit. Are we entering an age of heirloom laptops and artisan engineering?"

An anonymous reader writes "After more than 30 years of unerring and yet surprising supremacy, BIOS is taking its final bows. Taking its place is UEFI, a specification that begun its life as the Intel Boot Initiative way back in 1998 when BIOS's antiquated limitations were hampering systems built with Intel's Itanium processors. UEFI, as the article explains, is a complete re-imagining of a computer boot environment, and as such it has almost no similarities to the PC BIOS that it replaces."

tekgoblin writes "Walmart today has announced that it plans to install solar panels on more than 75 percent of its stores in the state. From the article: 'When completed, Walmart’s solar commitment in California is expected to generate up to 70 million kilowatt hours of clean, renewable energy per year, which is equal to powering more than 5,400 homes. It will also avoid producing more than 21,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, which is equal to 4,100 cars off the road and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric needs.'"

cylonlover writes "Hydrogen storage, along with hydrogen production and the lack of infrastructure, remains a major stumbling block in efforts to usher in hydrogen as a replacement for hydrocarbon-based fuels in cars, trucks and even homes. But with the multiple advantages hydrogen offers, developing hydrogen storage solutions has been the focus of a great deal of research. Now an MIT-led research team has demonstrated a method that could allow hydrogen to be stored inexpensively at room temperature."

An anonymous reader writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has released their Puppet configuration in a public git repository. They describe this as the first step in a project called Wikimedia Test/Dev Labs, letting users participate in the operations of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation sites."

donberryman writes "Researchers from Penn State have shown how microbial fuel cells can produce hydrogen without the need for an external source of electricity to power the process. It uses reverse-electrodialysis to capture energy from the difference in salinity between salt water and freshwater (abstract). Study co-author Bruce Logan explained the significance of the work: 'The breakthrough here is that we do not need to use an electrical power source anymore to provide a little energy into the system. All we need to do is add some fresh water and some salt water and some membranes, and the electrical potential that is there can provide that power.'"

Blacklaw writes with an article in Thinq about the upcoming quad-core Tegra chipset. Quoting the article: "Nvidia has released a few technical details of its upcoming 'Kal-El' Tegra processor, including a secret it's done well to keep under its hat thus far: it's a five-core, not four-core, chip." The fifth core will be clocked lower and is intended to let the system use little power without having to fully suspend. A few years ago Openmoko had a vaguely similar idea to include a microcontroller for low-resource idle tasks (e.g. GPS logging), but this design is superior since it should be more or less transparent to user space programs.

First time accepted submitter Zilog writes "The end of the 3.5-inch floppy and the disappearance of associated drives showed to me the need to backup the tens of diskettes that accompanied my youth. Carefully preserved, these diskettes have proved readable for the most part — while some are approaching 20 years old. However, some diskettes have shown surface defects in areas with compressed archives (zip). Any ideas on how to recover (as much as possible) these bad sectors?"

An anonymous reader writes "The British government is examining whether it could save money by getting rid of its printers and giving civil servants free iPads instead. The head of the UK government skunkworks told silicon.com that if he got rid of all of a major government department's printers and gave staff iPads, the savings on printing costs would pay for the tablets in less than 18 months. The UK parliament has already let tablets into the debating chamber, with politicians already starting to choose to use tablets rather than bundles of papers in debates."

An anonymous reader writes "If a gadget ships with a micro-USB port, I see it as a plus because it isn't proprietary — meaning I can easily and cheaply buy replacement cables. But the micro-USB ports aren't the strongest connectors in the world, so if the gadget is expensive (a smartphone) and you accidentally bust the port, you're in trouble. And that's easily done. Japanese manufacturer SMK may have fixed the problem, though, with a new double-strong connector design. They started producing them on Friday, and at an output of 500,000 a month, hopefully they'll be shipping with most new gadgets before long."

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has conducted a 28-way Radeon graphics card comparison under Linux that illustrates the differences among the open-source and closed-source graphics drivers."

An anonymous reader writes "MIT's $1k House Project is an extraordinary challenge to provide safe and healthy homes for the world's burgeoning population. The Pinwheel House (PDF), a student project which helped serve as a catalyst for the challenge, has been completed in China by architect Ying chee Chui. Students have come up with a dozen or so designs to meet the challenge and improve living conditions for not just emerging economies but larger nations as well."

Esther Schindler writes "With the Xeon 7600 line, Intel is finally using the 'R' word: RISC. With the new chips, Intel is targeting the mission-critical market dominated by Sun SPARC and IBM Power, a first. Can the Xeon E7 processor deliver Intel's final blow to the RISC market, which includes its own Itanium? 'With the launch of the E7 earlier this year, it seemed Intel was finally ready to make its final push, calling out RISC by name. "The days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed RISC architectures for mission-critical applications are nearing an end," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, in a statement announcing the E7 line. Bold words.' Andy Patrizio interviews several experts; what do you think?"

mikejuk writes "The whole world seems to be going in ARM's direction. The latest version of Windows 8 will run on ARM processors, Raspberry Pi is a $25 ARM based machine and now the open source Arduino platform has a new member — the ARM-based Arduino Due announced at the Maker Faire in New York. The Due makes use of Atmel's SAM3U ARM-based process, which supports 32-bit instructions and runs at 96Mhz. The Due will have 256KB of Flash, 50KB of SRAM, five SPI buses, two I2C interfaces, five serial ports, 16 12-bit analog inputs and more. This is much more powerful than the current Uno or Mega. However, it's not all gain — the 3.3V operating voltage and the different I/O ports are going to create some compatibility problems. Perhaps Intel should start to worry about the lower end of the processor world."

jones_supa wrote in with a link about the future of nuclear power in Germany. The story reads: "German industrial giant Siemens is turning the page on nuclear energy, the group's CEO Peter Löscher told the weekly Der Spiegel in an interview published on Sunday. The group's decision to withdraw from the nuclear industry reflects 'the very clear stance taken by Germany's society and political leadership.' Along with abandoning nuclear power, Germany wants to boost the share of the country's power needs generated by renewable energies to 35% by 2020 from 17% at present."

kkleiner writes "Open up a cardboard tube, roll out a transparent film just millimeters thick, apply it on a flat object and *tada* you've got an interactive touch surface. Cambridge-based Visual Planet just launched its new massive-sized multitouch thin film drivers so you can create touchscreens from 30 to 167 inches in size! Their touchfoil is a transparent nanowire embedded polymer capable of sensing the touch of a finger, or even pressure from wind and translating that to a computer interface. It works on glass, wood, and other non-conductive surfaces."

An anonymous reader writes "In marking the fourth anniversary of AMD's open-source strategy for their Radeon graphics, Phoronix has published the letter that launched this open-source effort. It was a letter written by Novell SUSE X engineers and submitted to AMD management with their open-source proposal."

rallymatte writes "A team at Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has managed to create artificial blood vessels with a 3D printer that may come to be used for transplants of lab-created organs. From the article: 'To print something as small and complex as a blood vessel, the scientists combined the 3D printing technology with two-photon polymerisation — shining intense laser beams onto the material to stimulate the molecules in a very small focus point.'"

RedEaredSlider writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to push 3-D printing technology even further. Their goals: create whole working machines and perhaps even buildings. Thus far, 3D printing has been used to make shapes of plastic or metal that can be assembled later. These folks want to change that. One idea is to use concrete in a novel way: 'Not only would it be possible to create fanciful, organic-looking shapes that would be difficult or impossible using molds, but the technique could also allow the properties of the concrete itself to vary continuously, producing structures that are both lighter and stronger than conventional concrete. To illustrate this, Keating uses the example of a palm tree compared to a typical structural column. In a concrete column, the properties of the material are constant, resulting in a very heavy structure. But a palm tree’s trunk varies: denser at the outside and lighter toward the center. As part of his thesis research, he has already made sections of concrete with the same kind of variations of density.'"

An anonymous reader writes "For the IDF keynote, Intel showed an experimental processor that is solar powered (incandescent light shining on a solar panel). The whole computer itself still runs on regular power; only the processor itself is solar. From the article: 'The concept processor, code-named Claremont, can run light workloads on solar power by dropping energy consumption to under 10 milliwatts, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, during a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. That is low enough to keep a chip running on a solar cell the size of a stamp.'"