Roland Piquepaille notes the hype surrounding what the University of Texas at Austin is calling the world's most powerful laser. During a tenth of a femtosecond this laser is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the US, and is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the Sun. On his own blog Roland points out that UT's is not the first petawatt laser; that distinction belongs to a system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1996.

HighWizard notes the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.

EconolineCrush writes "Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its X-Fi audio processor for more than two and a half years. Now the SoundBlaster has a new challenger in the form of Asus' $90 Xonar DX, which delivers much better sound quality than the X-Fi, PCI Express connectivity, and support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding. The Xonar can even emulate the latest EAX positional audio effects, providing the most complete competition to the X-Fi available on the market."

Lxy writes "After Xiotech purchased Seagate's Advanced Storage Architecture division, rumors circulated around what they were planning to do with their next-generation SAN. Today at Storage Network World, Xiotech answered the question. The result is quite impressive, a SAN that can practically heal itself, as well as prevent common failures. There's already hype in the media, with much more to come. The official announcement is on Xiotech's site."

Ryan writes "HP had unveiled their version of a miniaturized laptop for school kids. The tiny device boasts speeds up to 1.6 gigahertz. They haven't yet decided on a name, but 'netbooks' is one possibility. They will be used for surfing the Internet and doing other basic tasks like word processing. The company plans to have 50 million units available in the marketplace by 2011. Optical drives have been left out to prevent kids from playing 'unauthorized games.' Weighing less than 3 pounds with a tiny 8.9 inch screen, the machines start below $500 for a Linux-based model. Prices are expected to be higher for Windows Vista models."

Rob O'Neill writes "A Kiwi open source developer is working on a self-replicating 3D printer, RepRap, to be made available under the GNU license. 'The 3D printer works by building components up in layers of plastic, mainly polylactic acid (PLA), which is a bio-degradable polymer made from lactic acid. The technology already exists, but commercial machines are very expensive. They also can't copy themselves, and they can't be manipulated by users, says Vik Olliver. RepRap has a different idea. The team, which is spread over New Zealand, the UK and the US, develops and gives away the designs for its much cheaper machine, which also has self-copying capabilities. It wants to make the machine available to anybody — including small communities in the developing world, as well as people in the developed world, says Olliver. Accordingly, the RepRap machine is distributed, at no cost, under the GNU (General Public License).'"

TechDirt is reporting that the New Jersey e-voting troubles are even worse than originally thought. Apparently the "minor bug" which was supposed to be fixed is still not corrected, suggesting that Sequoia still doesn't know what is going on. "Ed Felten has received a bunch of 'summary tapes' from the last election in New Jersey, and while many of them do have the vote totals matching up correctly at the end at least two of the summary tapes simply don't add up, meaning that Sequoia's explanation of what went wrong is incorrect. Given how often the company has denied or hidden errors in its machines, despite a ton of evidence, we shouldn't be surprised that it was inaccurate in explaining away this latest problem as well. However, we should be outraged that the company refuses to allow third party researchers to investigate these machines. It's a travesty that any government would use them when they've been shown to have so many problems and the company is unwilling to allow an independent investigation."

LiveFreeOrDieInTheGo writes "Dell intends to scale back its build-to-order service model, while increasing sales of prepackaged systems. The goal: $3B USD savings by 2011. The downside: customers expect Dell to build-to-order. The deeper downside: Dell will outsource more production and assembly."

Lucas123 writes "Using mean time between failure rates suggest that disks can last from 1 million to 1.5 million hours, or 114 to 170 years, but study after study shows that those metrics are inaccurate for determining hard drive life. One study found that some disk drive replacement rates were greater than one in 10. This is nearly 15 times what vendors claim, and all of these studies show failure rates grow steadily with the age of the hardware. One former EMC employee turned consultant said, 'I don't think [disk array manufacturers are] going to be forthright with giving people that data because it would reduce the opportunity for them to add value by 'interpreting' the numbers.'"

eldavojohn writes "Now that Verizon has beaten Google in the 'block C' spectrum auction, what are they going to do with it? Well, as of today they've revealed their plans for world domination: they plan to speed up wireless internet connections. It may come as no surprise that they'll also be making this available for other manufacturer's devices. AT&T plans to do the same with their auction winnings, 'AT&T was second to Verizon, winning $6 billion in spectrum licenses, which it also plans to use for high-speed Internet service. But its executives said they didn't bid for the portion subject to the open-access rules. The parts it did land cost AT&T nearly three times as much per unit of spectrum than the portion Verizon bought.'"

webarnold writes "A new concept computer is being designed to look like a tea cup. Using holographic projectors, view your data inside the cup, 'spilled' onto the table, or transfer it to other Cup PC users by pouring data into their cup." Acceptance of something like this seems a bit far-fetched given current tech, but no nomad-space comparisons are being made.

Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft says it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs by several years, but it's not in response to the SaveXP petition. Microsoft is supposedly making the move in part to ensure that Linux doesn't dominate the market for certain types of 'ultra-low-cost' laptops. XP will be available for OEMs until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, whichever date comes later. This greatly extends the earlier XP deadline of June 30 of this year (which was an extension itself), and means XP will potentially be installed on new computers nearly a decade after its original release. The author of the article suggests that the post-June 2008 release of Atom-based laptops encouraged Microsoft to extend XP, even though Intel says Atom can support Vista. Intel also claims that 'Moblin' Linux will be available on Atom-equipped mobile devices starting this summer."

An anonymous reader writes "You may have heard about Intel's and Microsoft's efforts to finally get multi-core programming into gear so that there actually will be a developer who can program all those fancy new multicore processors, which may have dozens of core on one chip within a few years. TG Daily has an interesting article about the project, written by one of the researchers. It looks like there is a lot of excitement around the opportunity to create a new generation of development tools. Let's hope that we will soon see software that can exploit those 16+core babies. 'The problem of multi-core programming is staring at us right now. I am not sure what Intel's and Microsoft's expectations are, but it is quite possible that they are in fact looking at fundamental results from the academic centers to leverage their large work force to polish and realize the ideas that come forth. It calls for a much closer collaboration between the centers and the companies than it appears at first sight.'"

GovTechGuy writes "The Census Bureau will tell a House panel today that it will drop plans to use handheld computers to help count Americans for the 2010 census, increasing the cost for the decennial census by as much as $3 billion, according to testimony the Commerce Department secretary plans to give this afternoon."

Trintech points us to an AppleInsider article about another class-action lawsuit directed against Apple Inc. This one claims that the displays on new 20" iMacs are only capable of 6-bit-per-pixel color, 98% fewer colors than Apple advertises. Rather than the 8-bit, in-plane switching (IPS) screens used in 24" iMacs and earlier 20" models, "[t]he new 20-inch iMac features a 6-bit twisted nematic film (TN) LCD screen," according to the article, "which the [law] firm claims is the 'least expensive of its type,' sporting a narrower viewing angle than the display of the 24-inch model, less color depth, less color accuracy, and greater susceptibility to washout." Apple recently settled a very similar class-action suit about the displays on MacBook and MacBook Pro models.

Blowfishie writes "Rambus has won a major case they've been fighting since the late 90's. Rambus worked its technology into the standards for SDRAM and DDR data transfer, then waited for the major players (Hynix, Micron and Nanya) to be heavily committed before revealing that it had patents on the technology. 'At issue is whether the developer of a speedy new memory technology deserved to be paid for its inventions, or whether the company misled memory chip makers. "I think they (the jurors) misapprehended what the standards-setting organizations are about and the absolute need for good faith," said Jared Bobrow, an outside attorney for Micron. Wednesday's verdict comes after a judgment against Hynix in 2006 that resulted in a $133 million award to Rambus, Lavelle said, and potentially clears the way for Rambus to collect on that verdict.'"

bibekpaudel brings news that researchers from Cornell University have developed a very small silicon microresonator that vibrates at the highest frequency ever recorded for such a device: 4.51 GHz. Typical quartz-crystal oscillators, commonly used in electronics as clock signals, are about a millimeter wide and operate in the KHz - MHz range. The newly developed microresonator measures 8.5 micrometers long and 40 micrometers wide, making it ideal for use in smaller circuits and microprocessing. Quoting: "One of the advantages of silicon microresonators is that they can be integrated directly into microchips using conventional manufacturing techniques, making them cheaper to produce and easier to fabricate small. Also, multiple resonators of different frequencies could be put on the same chip, says Ville Kaajakari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Louisiana Tech University. In a cell phone, for example, high-frequency resonators could filter out interference from other sources of radio signals."

call-me-kenneth writes "Business Week covers the soaring demand for power and cooling capacity in data centers. Electricity consumption for US data centers more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. Among the other stats: for every dollar spent on computing equipment in data centers, an additional half dollar is spent each year to power and cool them; and half the electricity used goes for cooling. Iceland, with its cool climate and abundant cheap power, is courting big users like Google and Microsoft as a future data center location. (Can't help thinking they're gonna need a bigger cable first, though.)"

A number of readers let us know about the Chaos Computer Club's latest caper: they published the fingerprint of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (link is to a Google translation of the German original). The club has been active in opposition to Germany's increasing push to use biometrics in, for example, e-passports. Someone friendly to the club's aims captured Schäuble's fingerprint from a glass he drank from at a panel discussion. The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister's fingerprint — ready to glue to someone else's finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint. The article says a ministry spokesman alluded to possible legal action against the club.

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in Xconomy, iPhone hacker and author Jonathan Zdziarski was invited to speak at an Apple Store in Cambridge, MA last week where he talked about the history of iPhone hacking, jail-breaking, and limitations of the official SDK. From the article, "Zdziarski was one of the first software engineers to figure out how to hack the iPhone, and he's the author of a forthcoming O'Reilly Media book called iPhone Open Application Development, which gives readers explicit instructions on jail-breaking iPhones. So for Apple to give Zdziarski the podium at an Apple retail location is a little like Steve Ballmer inviting Linus Torvalds to speak at a Windows product launch." Zdziarski reports in his own blog how the open source community was on the iPhone developer scene as early as 2007, long before enterprises got there, and estimates that nearly 40% of all iPhones have been jail-broken to run the third-party community software installer. Finally, this story from Top Tech News suggests that open source software might actually create competition for Apple's "official" developers, because applications using the open source iPhone compiler are not subject to the same limitations as official Apple SDK programs are."