Anthony_Cargile writes "We all now know about Asus shipping illegal software cracks and confidential documents/source code on their recovery DVD (and in the system root), but this article tells exactly how it happened. It's even more careless than you think, and most likely an accident."

Ian Lamont writes "In a strange turn of events, the Wikipedia entry for Deletionpedia — an online archive of deleted Wikipedia articles — is now being considered for deletion. The entry for Deletionpedia was created shortly after the publication of an Industry Standard article and a discussion on Slashdot this week. Almost immediately, it was nominated for deletion, which has sparked a running debate about the importance of the Wikipedia entry, Deletionpedia, and the sources that reference it. For the time being, you can read the current version of the Deletionpedia entry, while the Wikipedia editors carry on the debate."

Slatterz writes "Linux publisher Mandriva has unveiled a version of its platform designed specifically for the new breed of mini laptops. Mandriva Mini features a fast boot-up, comprehensive connectivity support and multimedia codecs, and is adapted to work on key netbook platforms such as Intel's Atom. Mandriva previously offered a customised version of its 2008 Spring release for the Asus Eee PC, and was a distributor of Linux for Intel's Classmate PC initiative."

mattnyc99 writes "Earlier this summer we followed a war robot contest in England. But now, after the Russian onslaught in Georgia, this weekend's TechX Challenge in Singapore takes on a bigger meaning: can small countries keep up with military superpowers by upmodding existing robots for their own needs and then arming them? Researchers in the Far East seem to be struggling with their A.I. research right now, but this could just be the beginning of the 'little guys' fighting back. From the article: 'Chan says the agency wants to use more locally developed robots to help in homeland security and counterterrorist operations. The DSTA's goal is to improve robotic artificial intelligence so it can build machines to perform dangerous tasks — reconnaissance, surveillance and the handling of hazardous materials — that American robots already can. ... Back at Nanyang Technological University, Michael Lau acknowledges the urgency of the research but says the AI for urban warfare just isn't ready. "We don't really believe fully autonomous robots are possible yet," says the Evolution team supervisor. "How does a robot differentiate between friend and foe?"'" We've discussed similar projects from DARPA in the past. Reader coondoggie notes that enthusiasts will be able to participate in the lighter side of robot warfare next month in Texas.

MIT's Technology Review is reporting on the world's first coal-driven power plant designed to capture and store C02 emissions. "Vattenfall's small 30-megawatt plant burns the lignite in air from which nitrogen has been removed. Combustion in the resulting oxygen-rich atmosphere produces a waste stream of carbon dioxide and water vapor, three-quarters of which is recycled back into the boiler. By repeating this process, known as oxyfuel, it is possible to greatly concentrate the carbon dioxide. After particles and sulfur have been removed, and water vapor has been condensed out, the waste gas can be 98 percent carbon dioxide, according to Vattenfall. The separated carbon dioxide will be cooled down to -28 C and liquefied. Starting next year, the plan is to transport it by truck 150 miles northwest, to be injected 3,000 meters underground into a depleted inland gas field in Altmark. Ideally, in the future, the gas will be carried by pipeline to underground storage, says Vattenfall. "

Slatterz writes "Intel may be touting 45nm CPUs, but IBM says it can go much further with a strategy to produce future chips using a 22nm fabrication process. The company is adopting a technique called 'computational scaling' in order to manufacture circuits small enough to deliver more powerful and energy-efficient devices. Intel plans to introduce 32nm chips in 2009, but chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations. IBM claims to have solved this problem." Unfortunately the phrase "computational scaling" doesn't actually convey any information about how they've solved it.

nerdyH writes "Netbooks such as the Acer Aspire One and Lenovo Ideapad S9 usually ship with SSD storage and the Linux operating system in low-end configurations, or else with hard drives and Windows XP Home at the higher end of the market. Therefore, customers who want a "Windows experience" have no choice but to shell out for extra RAM and disk storage, potentially impacting battery life. Perhaps not for long. Quarta Mobile says its open-source (yes, open source) "MID-Shell for Windows Embedded CE 6.0" provides a Microsoft-based alternative to Linux for low-end devices with SSDs (solid state disks)."

Ted Samson IW writes "InfoWorld reports on an experiment in air economization, aka 'free cooling,' conducted by Intel. For 10 months, the chipmaker had 500 production servers, working at 90 percent utilization, cooled almost exclusively by outside air at a facility in New Mexico. Only when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit did they crank on some artificial air conditioning. Intel did very little to address air-born contaminants and dust, and nothing at all to deal with fluctuating humidity. The result: a slightly higher failure rate — around 0.6 percent more — among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company's main datacenter — and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year in a 10MW datacenter using free cooling over traditional cooling."

Hugh Pickens writes "12-year-old William Yuan's invention of a highly-efficient, three-dimensional nanotube solar cell for visible and ultraviolet light has won him an award and a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. 'Current solar cells are flat and can only absorb visible light'" Yuan said. 'I came up with an innovative solar cell that absorbs both visible and UV light. My project focused on finding the optimum solar cell to further increase the light absorption and efficiency and design a nanotube for light-electricity conversion efficiency.' Solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells. 'My next step is to talk to manufacturers to see if they will build a working prototype,' Yuan said. "If the design works in a real test stage, I want to find a company to manufacture and market it.""

Lucas123 writes "The average company pays from $1 million to $3 million per terabyte of data during legal e-discovery. The average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up — so a 5,000-worker company will pay out $1.25 million for five years of storage. So while you need to pay attention to retaining data for business and legal requirements, experts say you also need to be keeping less, according to a story on Computerworld. The problem is, most organizations hang on to more data than they need, for much longer than they should. 'Many people would prefer to throw technology at the problem than address it at a business level by making changes in policies and processes.'"

DeviceGuru writes "Stanford University will soon begin offering a series of 10 free, online computer science and electrical engineering courses. Initial courses will provide an introduction to computer science and an introduction to field of robotics, among other topics. The courses, offered under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), are nearly identical to standard courses offered to registered Stanford students and will comprise downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts. And get this: all the courses' materials are being released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license."

miller60 writes "What assets retain value in the midst of a financial panic? Data centers. When assets of bankrupt Lehman Brothers were sold to Barclays Tuesday for $1.75 billion, Lehman's data centers and headquarters accounted for $1.5 billion of the value in the deal. That echoes the JPMorgan-Bear Stearns fire sale, in which Bear's two data centers and HQ represented much of the sale price. Amidst financial turmoil, Wall Street's high-tech data centers become the crown jewels for buyers of distressed assets."

notthatwillsmith writes "For the last ten years, we've heard the promise of 3D shutter glasses, which when combined with the proper video card drivers and a good display, can trick your brain into thinking that your 2D monitor is creating 3D images. Unfortunately the glasses never really took off, partly because there were rendering problems with many popular 3D games but mostly because monitors didn't support high enough refresh rates to display games without giving people crushing headaches. Nvidia thinks they've solved both problems--the software works much better, and there are a surprising number of supported 120Hz-capable TVs and monitors that ameliorate the headache factor. Maximum PC has a hands-on with Nvidia's new tech, plus details about Nvidia's planned hardware solution."

Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick graphene for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitors. They believe their development shows promise that graphene could eventually double the capacity of existing ultracapacitors. 'Through such a device, electrical charge can be rapidly stored on the graphene sheets, and released from them as well for the delivery of electrical current and, thus, electrical power,' says one of the researchers. Two main methods exist to store electrical energy: in rechargeable batteries and in ultracapacitors, which are becoming increasingly commercialized but are not yet well known to the public. Some advantages of ultracapacitors over traditional energy storage devices such as batteries include: higher power capability, longer life, a wider thermal operating range, lighter, more flexible packaging and lower maintenance. Graphene has a surface area of 2,630 square meters, almost the area of a football field, per gram of material."

fetusbear writes with a ZDNet story that says "'Microsoft and Cray are set to unveil on September 16 the Cray CX1, a compact supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008. The pair is expected to tout the new offering as "the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered," with pricing starting at $25,000.' Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft."

IWonderWhatICanPutInThisFieldWithoutBeingDeleted writes "A man who once worked for Intel and then jumped ship to join AMD has been accused of stealing his erstwhile employer's chip secrets. Federal detectives allege they discovered 19 CAD designs and more than 100 pages of confidential Intel documentation."

schliz writes to tell us that a new intelligent radio technology, dubbed "cognitive radio," is being developed that adjusts operation based on input from its surroundings. Consumers wont likely see practical implementations of this tech for another five years, but it could have wide reaching applications from wireless networking to public safety devices. "Adaptive, cognitive radios could enable techniques such as dynamic frequency sharing, in which radios automatically locate unused frequencies, or share channels based on a priority system. In public safety, cognitive radios also could be used to provide interoperability between various signals and automatically adjust radio performance."

cecom writes to share that Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games and the main brain behind the Unreal engine, recently sat down at NVIDIA's NVISION con to share his thoughts on the rise and (what he says is) the impending fall of the GPU: "...a fall that he maintains will also sound the death knell for graphics APIs like Microsoft's DirectX and the venerable, SGI-authored OpenGL. Game engine writers will, Sweeney explains, be faced with a C compiler, a blank text editor, and a stifling array of possibilities for bending a new generation of general-purpose, data-parallel hardware toward the task of putting pixels on a screen."

An anonymous reader writes "Popsci.com has a writeup on 3M's new pocket projector, the 3M MPro 110, set to launch on September 30. 'In a dark room, it could project a big enough image to be the ultimate cheap-o home theater. The projector will sell for a mere $359. It doesn't have a speaker, so you'll have to get that separately. But really, how good could a microscopic speaker jammed into this thing sound, anyway?'"

jesuscash writes "It seems early adopters of the new iPod Touch are out of luck when they bring it home and attempt to connect it to their WPA/WPA2 secured network. Reading this Apple forum thread shows that many tests with different configurations show a no-go on WPA. Some of the last entries give the best clue, revealing a 'received deauthentication' error in their router logs. Apple has yet to respond."