Underholdning writes "With the DOJ approving Oracle's Sun buyout, the question arises what Oracle might want to do with Sun's hardware business. It's no secret that what Oracle wanted was the software part. Now The Inquirer is running a story claiming that Oracle will sell the hardware business of Sun to HP. This will give Oracle a juicy check while HP can increase its services. Larry Ellison denies that it will take place, but a source for CNN claims otherwise."

itwbennett writes "The FBI is trying to find out who is sending laptops to state governors across the US, including the governors of Wyoming and West Virginia. The West Virginia laptops were delivered to the governor's office on August 5, according to the Charleston Gazette, which first reported the story. Kyle Schafer, West Virginia's chief technology officer, says he doesn't know what's on the laptops, but he handed them over to the authorities. 'Our expectation is that this is not a gesture of good will,' he said. 'People don't just send you five laptops for no good reason.'"

Slatterz writes "We might sometimes complain about the limitations of today's technology, but there's nothing like seeing photos of a 27Kg hard drive with a capacity of 5MB to put things into perspective. PC Authority has toured the Computer History Museum in California, and has posted these fascinating photos, including monster 27Kg and 60Kg drives, and a SAGE air-defense system. Each SAGE housed an A/N FSQ-7 computer, which had around 60,000 vacuum tubes. IBM constructed the hardware, and each computer occupied a huge amount of space. From its completion in 1954 it analyzed radar data in real-time, to provide a complete picture of US Airspace during the cold war. Other interesting photos and trivia include some giant early IBM disc platters, and pics of a curvaceous Cray-1 supercomputer, built in 1972. It was the fastest machine in the world until 1977 and an icon for decades. It cost a mere $6 million, and could perform at 160MFLOPS — which your phone can now comfortably manage."

destinyland writes "A new pogo stick jumps nine feet using legs developed for running robots. (It replaces the stick's spring with a fiber-reinforced 'bow' that was developed at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics institute.) One scientist even suggests robots could use its 'BowGo' technology in the low-gravity environment of the moon. 'Hopping many meters above ground level, the robot would have an excellent view of the terrain.'"

Talinom writes "AnandTech has a writeup on how ClearQAM appears to be headed for an early death. From the article — 'At this point there's no reason to believe that cable companies won't deploy Privacy Mode across their networks, so it's a matter of 'when,' not 'if' this will happen. It goes without saying that if you're currently enjoying the use of a ClearQAM tuner to receive EB tier channels, you'll want to enjoy what time you have left, and look in to other solutions for the long-haul. At this pace, it looks like cable TV and computers will soon be divorcing.'" Update: 08/27 23:59 GMT by T : "EB" here stands for "Expanded Basic (cable service)"; Wikipedia as usual has a time-sucking, digressive, fascinating explanation about the tiers of cable TV service in the US.

carusoj writes "Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level. The earlier attack worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm."

blackbearnh writes "With the release of the 3.1 iPhone OS, application developers will finally be able to develop augmented reality (AR) apps. In other words, Terminator Vision is right around the corner. O'Reilly Media recently talked to Chetan Damani, one of the founders of Acrossair, about how they developed their new AR application, Nearest Tube, which displays the closest London Tube stations over a live video overlay on an iPhone 3GS. According to Damani, developing AR applications on the 3GS is dead easy, and the real trick will be developing good augmented reality apps. 'It's all about who's going to have the most amount of data and the most valid data. So there's the obvious types of apps which you're going to launch and those are the find me my nearest bar, find me my nearest event, find me the nearest tube stop, find me the nearest ATM. And those sorts of apps are all going to be around. But they're only going to be useful for when you're trying to look for things. So if we want to get users to use augmented reality a little bit more, we have to start introducing other bits of functionality, things like show me the offers available in a particular high street. Show me when I'm walking down a high street if there's a table available at a particular restaurant. And it's that sort of interactivity and providing that real-time data in this augmented reality view which is going to start getting people to use it a lot more rather than just for show me where the nearest area is.'"

Siliconera found patent filings from Nintendo for a football controller addon that will work with the Wii. After tucking the Wii Remote into a lateral slot on the football, you slip your hand through a strap so that your fingers touch the Remote's buttons. Then you mimic running and throwing, which is interpreted by the accelerometer. 'The pitch angle and force of the throw determines the trajectory arc of the throw. Side to side motion determines the yaw angle. Pressing buttons on the Wii remote can adjust other options.' The device is described as 'squishy,' so your TV is probably safe, but I'd try it at a friend's house first.

Agg writes "Well the slab gets poured on Wednesday so I thought I would sink 6 meters of copper pipe in the slab so that I can run my water loop through it when the house is finished. I hope to have water year round at about 16deg [about 61F]. No need for radiators or fans with chilled water coming straight out of the slab!"

angry tapir writes "At the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, Sun presented plans for a security accelerator chip that it said would reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking Web sites. The coprocessor will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls, the code name for the follow-on to Sun's multi-threaded Ultrasparc T2 processor."

Hugh Pickens writes "Foreign Policy magazine reports that a research team from the SINTEF Group, an independent Norwegian think tank, has warned oil companies worldwide that offshore oil rigs are highly vulnerable to hacking as they shift to unmanned robot platforms where vital operations — everything from data transmission to drilling to sophisticated navigation systems that maintain the platform's position over the wellhead — are controlled via wireless links to onshore facilities. 'The worst-case scenario, of course, is that a hacker will break in and take over control of the whole platform,' says Martin Gilje Jaatun, adding that it hasn't happened yet, but computer viruses have caused personnel injuries and production losses on North Sea platforms. The list of potential cyberattackers includes ecowarriors aiming to jack up an oil firms' production costs, extortionists drawn to oil firms' deep pockets, and foreign governments engaging in a strategic contest for ever-more-scarce global oil reserves, says Jeff Vail, a former counterterrorism and intelligence analyst with the US Interior Department. 'It's underappreciated how vulnerable some of these systems are,' says Vail. 'It is possible, if you really understood them, to cause catastrophic damage by causing safety systems to fail.'"

Ganty writes "I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook, and after 'downgrading' to XP and creating a dual partition, I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long-life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be very disappointing, with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours. Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed. Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the MacBooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life."

Uncle Alex writes "My niece just turned one year old and her parents have asked that, instead of the usual gifts, we each contribute something to a time capsule to be opened on her 17th birthday. Multiple members of my family want to contribute digital data — text, video, music files. They came to me (the closest thing to a geek our family has) wondering: what's the best way to save the data to ensure she'll actually be able to see it in 16 years? Software might be out of date, hardware may no longer be used... any suggestions?"

ptorrone writes "Hacker extraordinaire Ladyada (whose open source hardware projects we have discussed before) has just published a complete how-to, with design document, on making your own open source Russian vacuum fluorescent clock. The vacuum fluorescent tubes aren't as dangerous as (high-voltage) Nixie tubes, and there seem to be more of them available in the world. If you're not interested in building a clock from scratch, you can also pick up a kit version. All the schematics, source code, and files are available on the project's page."

Precision submits "Intel Corp., the largest maker of chips in the world, has outlined plans to make chips using 4nm process technology in about thirteen years. According to Intel, integration capacity of chips will increase much higher compared to fabrication process."

An anonymous reader tips a blog posting that begins "A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. ... [It] shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!"

New Scientist has an update on the so-called "gigantic jets" first discovered in 2003 — these are lightning bolts that reach from cloud tops upward into the ionosphere, as high as 90 kilometers. (There's a video at the link.) What's new is that researchers from Duke University have managed to measure the electrical discharge from a gigantic jet and confirm that they carry as much energy skyward as ordinary lightning strikes carry to the ground. According to the article, "Gigantic jets are one of a host of new atmospheric phenomena discovered in recent years. Other examples are sprites and blue jets."

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientific American reports that a new device called 'BrainPort' aims to restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue's surface to send light signals to the brain. BrainPort collects visual data through a small digital video camera and converts the signal into electrical pulses sent to the tongue via a 'lollipop' that sits directly on the tongue, where densely packed nerves receive the incoming electrical signals. White pixels yield a strong electrical pulse and the electrodes spatially correlate with the pixels, so that if the camera detects light fixtures in the middle of a dark hallway, electrical stimulations will occur along the center of the tongue. Within 15 minutes of using the device, blind people can begin interpreting spatial information. 'At first, I was amazed at what the device could do,' says research director William Seiple. 'One guy started to cry when he saw his first letter.'" There is some indication that the signals from the tongue are processed by the visual cortex. The company developing the BrainPort will submit it to the FDA for approval later this month, and it could be on sale (for around $10,000) by the end of the year.

Slatterz writes "Logitech has introduced new mice that use two lasers rather than one to work on a variety of previously unusable surfaces. The first laser picks out imperfections in the surface of a tabletop while the second laser focuses on microscopic imperfections highlighted and uses those to direct the cursor. The technique, dubbed dark field microscopy, allows mice to be used on almost any surface, including glass (as long as it is more than 4mm thick)."

Barence writes "Following his blog last week about the homemade hard disk destroyer, Bustadrive, Mike Jennings was deluged with comments from readers, both on the blog and here on Slashdot. Most seemed to like the product, but also offered up far more innovative and madcap methods of hard disk destruction, with a wide range of implements used — household and otherwise. In this follow-up post, he rounds up the best of an imaginative bunch of hard disk destruction methods."