1sockchuck writes "Data centers are designed to house servers, not people. This has often meant trade-offs for data center staffers, who brave 100-degree hot aisles and perform their work at laptop carts. But some data center developers are rethinking this approach and designing people-friendly data centers with Class-A offices and amenities for staff and visitors. Is this the future of data center design?"

itwbennett writes "Taiwan's Asus has a novel idea to cut down on shipping waste: What if the shipping container became the PC case? That's the idea behind a box the company will begin using to ship one of its Mini ATX motherboards. It holds the motherboard snug for shipping and is constructed so additional components required to make a PC can be added, said Debby Lee, a spokeswoman for the Taipei-based company. An example of the box is showing at this week's Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany."

DeviceGuru writes "Boxee, maker of the free Boxee multimedia-player software platform for PCs and Macs, and the smarts behind D-Link's recently introduced Boxee Box, has just received $16.5 million more funding. Following several significant firmware updates and the addition of new apps for Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and other content sources, all pushed automatically out to users' devices, the $199 D-Link Boxee Box is finally stating to feel more like a finished product than a beta-test device. What's next for Boxee? The D-Link device will soon be joined by two more Boxee-powered devices: a Boxee NAS device from Iomega and a ViewSonic TV running Boxee, and one of the main uses of the company's new funding will be to 'sign up more device and distribution partners,' says Boxee CEO Avner Ronen."

rifles only writes "Firmware built into many solid state drives (SSDs) to improve their storage efficiency could be making forensic analysis at a later date by police forces and intelligence agencies almost impossible to carry out to legally safe standards, Australian researchers have discovered. They found that SSDs start wiping themselves within minutes after a quick format (or a file delete or full format) and can even do so when disconnected from a PC and rigged up to a hardware blocker." So either SSDs are really hard to erase, or really hard to recover. I'm so confused.

siliconbits writes "Microsoft is rumoured to be one of their partners; maybe they'll built it in the next Kinect. 'Computer manufacturer Lenovo has partnered with Swedish startup Tobii Technology to launch the world's first eye-controlled laptop, which will be on display as from today at CeBIT in Hannover.'"

cylonlover writes "For decades, chipmakers strove to develop the fastest and most powerful chips possible and damn the amount of electricity needed to power them, but these days raw grunt isn't the only consideration. As more and more devices go mobile and these devices become more and more powerful, chipmakers must also take the energy efficiency into account. Harvard graduate student Wonyoung Kim has developed and demonstrated an on-chip, multi-core voltage regulator (MCVR) that he says could allow the creation of 'smarter' smartphones, slimmer laptops and more energy efficient data centers by more closely matching the power supply to the demand of the chip."

CWmike writes "Intel announced a new line of solid-state drives (SSDs) on Monday that are based on the serial ATA (SATA) 3.0 specification, which doubles I/O throughput compared to previous generation SSDs. Using the SATA 3.0 specs, Intel's new 510 Series gets 6Gbit/sec. performance and thus can take full advantage of the company's transition to higher speed 'Thunderbolt' SATA bus interfaces on the recently introduced second generation Intel Core processor platforms. Supporting data transfers of up to 500MB/sec, the Intel SSD 510 doubles the sequential read speeds and more than triples the sequential write speeds of Intel's SATA 2.0 SSDs. The drives offer sequential write speeds of up to 315MB/sec."

adeelarshad82 writes "As fate would have it, an Intel chipset glitch delayed shipments of almost every laptop manufacturer, save one. Apple, which has typically been last in transitioning to new technology, is now among the first to launch laptops with Sandy Bridge. The Apple MacBook Pro (Thunderbolt) is the fastest laptop out there. Powered with a Quad-core Core i7 processor and AMD Radeon HD 6750M, the MacBook Pro has a lot of fire power to offer. Unfortunately though it is still a bit expensive and there is a lack of Thunderbolt devices to take advantage of the new interface."

intellitech writes "The Austrian research group led by physicist Rainer Blatt suggests a fundamentally novel architecture for quantum computation. They have experimentally demonstrated quantum antennae, which enable the exchange of quantum information between two separate memory cells located on a computer chip. This offers new opportunities to build practical quantum computers."

MojoKid writes "Though D-Link actually started shipping the Boxee Box media player back in Q4 of last year, it was obvious that it needed a bit more polish to offer a reasonably satisfying experience. Since that time, Boxee has released a number of firmware and platform updates that enhance the device and bring new services, like full 1080p movie content from Vudu and what could be considered critical mass in mainstream movie rentals, Netflix. The Boxee Box has had time to mature and this full walk-through of the system shows it's actually an interesting alternative to competitive products in this class of device, like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku. There's still lots of work to be done in fleshing out services and content but the Boxee platform has a bit more polish behind it now."

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has open sourced X-Video Bitstream Acceleration, their API by which they expose the Universal Video Decoder 2 GPU under Linux." They may be a little late with this move, and not everything you could wish is now open source, but it's better than nothing.

gregg writes "Five knee-high androids have crossed the starting line in the world's first marathon for two-legged robots.The contestants are expected to take four days to complete the course, which involves 423 laps of an indoor track." The live robot marathon video feed will make you realize that not all robots are worthy of fear. Or even worth watching for more than a few minutes.

crookedvulture writes "When AMD unveiled the Bobcat CPU architecture behind its first Fusion APUs, the company claimed its Atom-killer would achieve 90% of the performance of mainstream desktop processors. But does it? This article compares the AMD E-350's performance to more than 20 desktop CPUs between $87 and $999 to find out, and the results aren't particularly encouraging. Although Fusion offers much better integrated graphics than Intel's latest Atom, neither stands much chance of keeping up with even low-end desktop CPUs. The E-350 does offer very low power consumption and impressive platform integration, making it a good choice for home-theater PCs and mobile systems. Desktop users are better off waiting for Llano, a Fusion iteration due out this spring."

An anonymous reader writes "European researchers at Imec recently announced the development of the world's first flexible organic microprocessor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco CA. 'The 4000-transistor, 8-bit logic circuit has the processing power of only a 1970s-era silicon model, but it has a key advantage—it can bend. The device’s designers say the chip could lead the way to cheaper flexible displays and sensors. Wrapped around pipes, for example, sheets of sensors with these processors could record average water pressure, and wrapped around food and pharmaceuticals, they might indicate that your tuna is rancid or that you forgot to take your pills.'"

ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine takes a look at Sony's history of suing makers, hackers and innovators. Over the last decade Sony has been targeting legitimate innovation, hobbyists, and competition. From picking on people who want to program their robot dogs to dance to suing people who want to run their own software on something they bought. Sony has made so many mistakes with technology choices (Memory Stick, Magic Gate, UMD!), perhaps they'll end themselves soon enough, but until then MAKE is keeping score for Sony's all-out war on tinkerers."

Josh Triplett writes "Intel announced the release of a BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS), a bootable pre-OS environment based on GNU GRUB2 that tests how well (or how badly) your BIOS has configured your platform hardware. BITS also includes Intel's official power management reference code, so you can override your BIOS's initialization with a known-good configuration. 'In addition to those changes to GRUB2 itself, BITS includes configuration files which build a menu exposing the various BITS functionality, including the test suites, hardware configuration, and exploratory tools. These scripts detect your system's CPU, and provide menu entries for all the available functionality on your hardware platform. You can also access all of the new commands we've added directly via the command line.'"

CWmike writes "Researchers at the University of Michigan announced Wednesday that they have created the first prototype for a millimeter-scale computing system that can hold up to a week's worth of data when implanted in something as small as a human eye. The computer, called the Phoenix chip, is just over one cubic millimeter in size and was designed to monitor eye pressure in glaucoma patients. 'This is the first true millimeter-scale complete computing system,' said Dennis Sylvester, a professor at the school and one of the researchers on the project. Within the computer is an ultra low-power microprocessor, a pressure sensor, memory, a thin-film battery, a solar cell and a wireless radio with an antenna that can transmit data to an external reader device held near the eye."

gabbo529 writes "After 38 trips, 352 days in orbit and more than 5,600 trips around the Earth, the space shuttle Discovery is preparing for its final launch. Since its creation, it has flown to orbit more than any other craft. It has set a number of precedents including first craft to feature a female shuttle pilot and female shuttle commander (Eileen Collins), the first African American spacewalker (Bernard Harris) and the first sitting member of congress to fly in space (Jake Garn). In its final foray into space, the Discovery will set another precedent when it flies the first humanoid robot to fly in space, Robonaut2."

Stoobalou updates us on the various Apple rumors, saying, "Snaps of Apple's imminent update to the MacBook Pro range have been leaked, confirming most of the rumors doing the rounds." Light Peak looks like it will be called Thunderbolt. The 13" will feature 2.3ghz Dual Core i5s and 4 gigs of RAM. In addition to the MacBook Pro rumors, the iPad update rumors have been confirmed, with invitations going out to the formal announcement on March 2.

unassimilatible writes "Artist Hye Yeon Nam has put her video game where her mouth is — literally — with the creation of a new bowling game that's controlled only by passionate (and awkward) French kissing. The Kiss Controller, as it's called, has two components: a headset that functions as a sensor receiver and a magnet that provides the sensor input, Time reports. Could this be the first example of technology that Slashdotters will be unable to use, as they likely won't be able to get a controller?"