Kermit writes "Ars Technica has put together a green DIY system building guide. The idea is to build a PC offering decent energy efficiency as well as solid performance. The 'Green Gaming Box' draws about 125W at full load (not including a monitor); the minimalist 'Extreme Green Box' uses a mini-ITX case and a VIA CPU-motherboard combo for about 30W at typical load. If you want to mix and match components, or modify your current system so that it uses less energy, there are plenty of options for swapping out individual components."

Daily Tech is reporting that details about Intel's new processor models were leaked over the weekend. Both the six core Dunnington and Nehalem architectures were featured in this leak. "Dunnington includes 16MB of L3 cache shared by all six processors. Each pair of cores can also access 3MB of local L2 cache. The end result is a design very similar to the AMD Barcelona quad-core processor; however, each Barcelona core contains 512KB L2 cache, whereas Dunnington cores share L2 cache in pairs. [...] Nehalem is everything Penryn is -- 45nm, SSE4, quad-core -- and then some. For starters, Intel will abandon the front-side bus model in favor of QuickPath Interconnect; a serial bus similar to HyperTransport."

ozmanjusri brings us a Wired report on Apple's efforts to patent the multitouch gestures used on their laptops, smartphones, and tablets. The article discusses concerns over how this could affect the standardization of certain gestures in developing multitouch technology. We've previously discussed the patent applications themselves. Quoting Wired: "If Apple's patent applications are successful, other manufacturers may have no choice but to implement multitouch gestures of their own. The upshot: You might pinch to zoom on your phone, swirl your finger around to zoom on your notebook, and triple-tap to zoom on the web-browsing remote control in your home theater. That's an outcome many in the industry would like to avoid. Synaptics, a company that by most estimates supplies 65 to 70 percent of the notebook industry with its touchpad technology, is working on its own set of universal touch gestures that it hopes will become a standard. These gestures include scrolling by making a circular motion, moving pictures or documents with a flip of the finger, and zooming in or out by making, yes, a pinching gesture."

Active Seti points out a story about upgrades for the Very Large Array radio telescope. The improvements will increase the VLA's capabilities 10-fold, allowing it to "pick up a cell phone signal on Jupiter." Work on the 28-antenna array is already underway, and it is expected to finish by 2012. From Scientific American: "Data gathered by all 28 of the 82-foot- (25-meter-) diameter dish antennas are brought to a correlator--a central, special-purpose computer--which merges the input into a form that allows scientists to produce detailed, high-quality images of the astronomical objects under investigation. A new fiber-optic system replaces the older waveguide system for taking data collected by the receivers to the central control building and increases the amount of data that can be delivered from the antenna to the new $17-million correlator being built by Canadian scientists and engineers to handle the increased data flow."

Michael Larabel writes "With the Free Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) starting today, where John Bridgman of AMD will be addressing the X.Org developers, AMD has this morning released their 3D programming documentation. This information covers not only the recent R500 series, but goes back in detail to the R300/400 series. This is another one of AMD's open source documentation offerings, which they had started doing at the X Developer Summit 2007 with releasing 900 pages of basic documentation. Phoronix has a detailed analysis of what is being offered with today's information as well as information on sample code being released soon. This information will allow open source 3D/OpenGL work to get underway with ATI's newer graphics cards."

A number of readers wrote in about the launch this morning of a Japanese H-2A rocket carrying a Kizuna ("Winds") satellite into orbit. Kizuna is intended to provide "super high-speed data transmission" for Japan and Southeast Asia. The news stories on the launch, such as the AP's linked here, are short on technical detail. For example they say the satellite successfully achieved orbit 175 miles above the earth — hardly suitable for Internet communications to a specific area on the surface (remember Teledesic?). Reader nebulus4 provided a link to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency site with an illustration and a little more detail. Such as the fact that Kizuna is destined for geosync orbit, and that a 45-cm antenna will equip eventual users for 155 Mbps down / 6 Mbps up, whereas a 5-m antenna will allow enterprises and ISPs to tap into 1.2 Gbps down. Given the latency to geosync orbit, you probably wouldn't want to use Kizuna to play an online shooter.

Mark writes "Big Blue inadvertently revealed details about its new z10 Enterprise Class mainframe set to launch on Feb. 26, as well as details on z/OS v1.10, a new version of the mainframe OS due out in September. 'According to an internal IBM document obtained by SearchDataCenter.com, the z10 Enterprise Class will come in five different models and feature 64-way chips, compared with the 54-way z9 mainframes and earlier 32-way models. In a conference call last month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that the z10 would have 50% more capacity, which indicates that it will probably tap out at around 27,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) at the top end, compared with about 18,000 MIPS on the previous z9 Enterprise Class.'"

nerdyH writes "German board vendor Lippert has unveiled what it claims to be the first motherboard based on Intel's 'Menlow' chipset for ultra-mobile PCs. The CoreExpress-Menlow is smaller than a credit card, yet clocks to 1.5GHz, has 1GB of RAM soldered onboard, has multiple PCI Express lanes, USB 2.0, HD audio, an IDE interface, and a digital LVDS video interface. The board is the first in a proposed 'CoreExpress' standard motherboard form-factor measuring 2.6 by 2.3 inches (65 x 58 mm)."

mickq writes "The Age reports that Melbourne scientists have built and demonstrated tiny CMOS chips, 5 mm per side, that can transmit 5 Gbps over short distances — about 10 m. The chip features a tiny 1-mm antenna, a power amp that is only a few microns wide, and power consumption of only 2 W. 'GiFi' appears set to revolutionize short-distance data transmission, and transmits in the relatively uncrowded 60GHz range. Best of all, the chip is only about a year away from public release, and will only cost around US $9.20 to produce."

mklickman writes "I've been hearing more and more about mobile broadband offered by the big wireless phone providers, and for the first time came to ask myself how it compares to using a wireless router. Since my wife and I both have laptops, and we're out a lot, would it be wise and/or worth it to do away with the standard cable-modem-plus-router setup and switch over to mobile broadband with (for example) AT&T or Sprint? I'm not really concerned about the cost of the PC cards themselves; they're not much more expensive than a decent router. Also, the cost of the wireless service per month is only (roughly) ten dollars more than my current ISP is charging me. Is it a good idea?"

genji256 writes "Adding to his first impressions, Walt Mossberg has published a full review of the soon-to-come Lenovo X300. As a bottom line he 'recommends the X300 for road warriors without hesitation, provided they can live with its two biggest downsides: a relatively paltry file-storage capacity and a hefty price tag.' Gizmodo lists all the comparisons with the MacBook Air that Walt inevitably makes. Final score: it's a tie, though certain points are arguable ('Doesn't use Mac OS X Leopard. Winner: MacBook Air')."

An anonymous reader writes "Google is reportedly looking into investing in or buying a company called Space Data, which provides wireless voice and data services to remote areas with a fleet of weather balloons fitted with transceivers." My mind is sorta tripping over how something like this could work, but I gotta admit that the idea is really cool.

ScienceDaily is reporting that a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is part computer, part robot, and part child. Part of the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit "WizKid" is able to focus on human faces and follows your movement allowing you to interact with objects on its display simply by waving your arms. "Wizkid looks like a computer with a neck. But there the similarities with the familiar personal computer end. Wizkid isn't static. The screen on the mobile neck moves about like a head, and it's trained to hone in on human faces. Once it sees you, Wizkid focuses on you and follows your movement. Unlike a computer, which requires you to stop what you're doing and adapt your behavior and social interactions in order to use it, Wizkid blends into human space. There's no mouse and no keyboard. You don't touch anything. There's no language getting in the way. On Wizkid's screen you see yourself surrounded by a "halo" of interactive elements that you can simply select by waving your hands. If you move away or to one side, Wizkid adapts itself to you, not the other way around. If you're with a friend, Wizkid finds and tracks both of you and tries to figure out your relationship, expressing surprise, confusion or enjoyment when it gets your response."

eldavojohn writes "Are you one of the few who boarded the HD-DVD Titanic ship headed to the bottom of ocean to join BetaMax? Fret no longer, friend, simply convert those and pretend like you never invested in the wrong technology! All you need is a Windows machine with a fast processor, an HD-DVD drive, a Blu-Ray burner, 30GB of free disk space, at least, though 40GB or more is recommended and an internet connection to download the software! Or you can sit and be the crazy guy who continues to argue that HD-DVD is the superior technology whether it's true or not."

gbjbaanb writes "Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone. Headsets which read neural activity are not new, but Ms Le [president of US/Australian firm Emotiv] said the Epoc was the first consumer device that can be used for gaming. 'This is the first headset that doesn't require a large net of electrodes, or a technician to calibrate or operate it and does require gel on the scalp,' she said. 'It also doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars.'" Wait until the government can get warrantless wiretaps on the logs of those things.

If NASA and the British National Space Centre succeed in their 'MoonLite mission' you won't be able to say, "In space no one can hear your ringtone." They plan on building a satellite system/phone network that would provide full four-bar signal coverage for colonists living in the base NASA wants to build at the south pole of the moon after 2020.

Engadgets is reporting that researchers at Penn State have built a new kind of solar cell that can harvest hydrogen directly from water. "The folks at Penn State have now developed a process that more closely mimics the photosynthesis process in plants, and while we won't pretend to understand all the nitty gritty of dye usage and other such nonsense, we do know that such a system could eventually attain 15% or so efficiency, providing a nice and clean way to gather power for that fuel cell car of the future."

Multiple users have written to tell us that Toshiba is planning to halt production of devices related to HD-DVD. According to Japanese broadcasting network NHK, Toshiba will lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" as the format war finally draws to a close. Regardless, investors are pleased that Toshiba has made the decision to cut its losses. This comes after a last-ditch price cut was unable to prevent Wal-mart from throwing their lot in with Blu-ray, although some sources suggest that Wal-mart was already aware of Toshiba's plans to withdraw from fight.

tringtring alerts us to news that the National Science Foundation has requested $20 million in funding to work on "Science and Engineering Beyond Moore's Law." The PC World article goes on to say that the effort "would fund academic research on technologies, including carbon nanotubes, quantum computing and massively multicore computers, that could improve and replace current transistor technology." tringtring notes that quantum computing has received funding on its own lately, and work on multicore chips has intensified the hunt for parallel programming. Also, improvements are still being made to current transistor mechanics.

An anonymous reader brings us a whitepaper from Codenomicon which discusses the state and future of wireless security. They examine Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and also take a preliminary look at WiMAX. The results are almost universally dismal; vulnerabilities were found in 90% of the tested devices[PDF]. The paper also looks at methods for vendors to preemptively block some types of threats. Quoting: "Despite boasts of hardened security measures, security researchers and black-hat hackers keep humiliating vendors. Security assessment of software by source code auditing is expensive and laborious. There are only a few methods for security analysis without access to the source code, and they are usually limited in scope. This may be one reason why many major software vendors have been stuck randomly fixing vulnerabilities that have been found and providing countless patches to their clients to keep the systems protected."