An anonymous reader writes "Apple has filed two patent applications that describe an approach as well as file formats and APIs to eliminate the printer driver as a requirement for users to access a printer and print documents. If the company has its way, there will be three ways to access a printer in the future: The first will be via a conventional software driver. The second will be via a cloud service and the third will be via a driverless access method that supports 'universal' printing from any type device."

itwbennett writes "Researchers at UC San Diego and Cornell University have developed software that they say can detect variations in flash behavior that are unique to each chip. The system uses 'physically unclonable functions' (PUFs), or variations in manufacturing that are unique to each element of each flash chip. Swanson described one PUF that his team has worked with, called Program Disturb. It uses a type of manufacturing flaw that doesn't affect normal operation but causes problems under test conditions." Related: from last October, another description of such error-based identity assignment.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to Hack A Day's step-by-step guide to installing Linux on a 386 laptop, which looks like a nice rainy-day project, as long as you are a stubborn hardware collector. It gets complicated, though, because 386 support has long since disappeared from most mainstream distros, which is why the writer went with Debian 1.3.1.

quarterbuck writes "The Wall Street Journal has a review of the Telikin, an all-in-one desktop, with a touch screen, that starts at $699 and comes from a small Philadelphia-area start-up called Venture 3 Systems. It is much simplified (e.g., no PowerPoint editing), and the hardware is thought through (two microphones), but the review claims that the software is still buggy." I only wish it was based on a revenue stream derived from a cancellable subscription.

An anonymous reader writes "Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral, could be used in conjunction with a laser and mini turbines to easily produce enough electricity to power a vehicle. When thorium is heated, it generates further heat surges, allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines to produce steam that can then be used to generate electricity. Combining a laser, radioactive material, and mini-turbines might sound like a complicated alternative solution to filling your gas tank, but there's one feature that sells it as a great alternative solution: 1 gram of thorium produces the equivalent energy of 7,500 gallons of gasoline."

wiredmikey writes "A recent survey which included responses from 800 engineers and developers that work on embedded devices revealed that 24% of respondents knew of security problems in their company's products that had not been disclosed to the public before the devices were shipped. But just what that means in terms of attitudes towards security may be more complex than it seems. Additionally, just 41% said their company has 'allocated sufficient time and money to secure' its device products against hacks and attacks. Despite this, 64 percent felt that when engineers call attention to potential security problems, 'those problems are addressed before the device is released.' So, what exactly does this illustrate about the state of security in the development process? The answer, some say, is a jumbled collage of business pressures, bug prioritization and varying attention to security."

baxpace writes with a link describing a way to test your own security systems for vulnerabilities using Kinect-interpreted natural gestures in tandem with the Metasploit Framework and the Blender game engine, writing: "The idea is to hack into your own systems while in a 3D, first person shooter style environment that interfaces with the Kinect sensor. The game engine was built using Blender and looks to be one of the most pleasing ways of uncovering your own systems' architectural/networking vulnerabilities."

mikejuk writes "While Google makes headlines with its driverless car and even manages to lobby Nevada to legalize driverless cars on the public road — China quietly pushes ahead on its own. A driverless car navigated 286km of expressway all on its own. Using nothing but a pair of video cameras and laser rangefinders, i.e. no GPS, it managed to arrive safely even through fog. The computer vision based approach means that at the moment it can only drive during daylight hours. Google might need to speed up ..."

crookedvulture writes "SATA-IO has devised a couple of new storage interfaces optimized for solid-state drives. To serve high-performance SSDs that are fast approaching the 6Gbps ceiling imposed by the current Serial ATA specification, the SATA Express standard will meld the Serial ATA software stack with PCI Express to offer up to 16Gbps of bandwidth. SATA Express isn't expected to be completed until the end of the year, but the new uSSD standard looks to be ready for prime time. Designed for tablets and ultraportables, uSSD sticks with current 6Gbps speeds but ditches traditional Serial ATA connectors, allowing SSD controller chips to be soldered directly to motherboards. SanDisk already has a 128GB uSSD primed for ultrabooks."

An anonymous reader writes "After quadrupling the number of government datacenters over his first three years, Obama's Administration is reversing course and closing the most recently opened datacenters. With one datacenter reportedly the size of three football fields, my question is what happens to all those recently purchased servers? Will the government hold a server fire sale? Count me in!"

fangmcgee writes "By now, with films like Iron Man, its sequel, and Avatar, Hollywood has made us thoroughly familiar with the idea of the robotic exoskeleton. Less well known, however, is that researchers are actually building robotic exoskeletons like the ones envisioned by Hollywood and the comic book visionaries from whom Hollywood pilfers its most lucrative ideas. Among the developers of real-life Iron Man suits (of which there are many, the world over) is a group called Raytheon Sarcos. And as IEEE Spectrum reports in this month's issue, its impressive second-generation exoskeleton robotics suit, dubbed the XOS 2, is nearing production."

An anonymous reader writes "At SIGGRAPH 2011, a team of researchers from MIT presented a clever method for measuring microscopic surface structure using a rubber sensor, a camera, and a set of lights. This technology could have applications to industrial inspection, dermatology, and even forensic ballistics."

MrSeb writes "Do you have a few old, dusty beige-box computers kicking around that you'd like to turn into money? Or perhaps you'd just like to get rid of them, but you lack the means to dispose of them properly? Well, if you're in the US you're in luck: Apple will now provide postage-paid packaging to allow you to recycle your old laptop or desktop PC and its monitor for free, and if it's worth anything, you'll even get an Apple Gift Card in return. In addition, your old iPhone or iPad can now be returned for an Apple Gift Card, too."

mahiskali writes "New documents pertaining to the ever-hyped and much-delayed Motorola Droid Bionic have surfaced on the FCC website. Perusing through the documents, I noticed a very interesting feature: an inductive charging coil (click 'Internal Photos'), built into the battery door housing. It seems Motorola may have some tricks up its sleeve yet--but will it be enough to beat out the competition (read: Samsung Galaxy S2, iPhone 5)?"

Blacklaw writes "The group behind the USB 3.0 specification has announced a tweak which could lead to impressive new devices, including large-format displays, printers, and even laptops that are powered entirely from a USB port."

An anonymous reader writes "Those giant touch screens used by CNN anchors look slick, but have to be several feet thick to make room for the cameras that track the touches. Perceptive Pixel, which makes the screens, has now figured out a way to use capacitive touch (like on an iPhone or tablet screen) at a larger scale, and says giant touch panels with 82-inch screens but just six inches deep will appeal to many businesses."

Fnord666 writes with a CMU press release. From the article: "Traditional motion capture techniques use cameras to meticulously record the movements of actors inside studios, enabling those movements to be translated into digital models. But by turning the cameras around — mounting almost two dozen, outward-facing cameras on the actors themselves — scientists at Disney Research Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University have shown that motion capture can occur almost anywhere — in natural environments, over large areas, and outdoors."

Stoobalou writes with an interview in Thinq with a few folks from ARM on their plans for the future of embedded graphics. From the article: "'If you're looking at the visual experience that we can deliver on a mobile, in terms of the capabilities of the devices that are on the market today, increasingly it is visually outstanding — but we need to do more maths, because we have an increasing screen resolution and we have increasing content complexity, and we have to do it all in pretty low power. So, if we look at where we were a few years ago, if you take the benchmarks of a VGA display and typical low-res content — all of a sudden, by the time you get to a 4K screen and some of the complexity of tesselated stuff you see in DX11 today, you're talking about a 500x increase in performance.' ... 'We're still maintaining that 1W power envelope within your mobile device, yet being expected to deliver 500 times the performance,' Hickman added. That's a major undertaking, but one which the next generation of Mali processors will work towards.' All of the graphics development in the embedded world is nice, but it is disheartening to see the lack of source code for all of the new mobile GPUs.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. Village Instruments already has experience with its ExpressCard-connected ViDock graphics card chassis, which provides extra GPU juice for Windows and Mac laptops, and the Thunderbolt version is expected to be the same kind of thing — but faster. The only problem is, Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop — and more importantly you need to carry around a second monitor to actually use a ViDock. So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?"

An anonymous reader writes "IBM has terminated its contract with NCSA for the petascale Blue Waters system that was expected to go online in the next year. The reason stated was that NCSA found IBM's technology 'was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.' The IT community is now wondering if NCSA will be renting out space in the new data center that is being built to house Blue Waters or if they will go with another vendor."