WirePosted writes "MacSpeech, the leading supplier of speech recognition software for the Mac, has canned its long-running iListen product and has launched a Mac version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the top-selling Windows speech recognition product. MacSpeech had made a licensing agreement with Dragon's developer, Nuance Communications. The new product is said to reach 99% accuracy after 5 minutes of training."

UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: 'It's not a small improvement,' [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.' Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium — which holds the charge — that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life... 'We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology,' Cui said. 'There are no roadblocks for either of these.'"

An anonymous reader writes "After four fires in two years — see earlier Slashdot discussions for background — AT&T is going against its own independent lab findings and declaring that the Avestor batteries powering its U-verse network aren't safe and need to be replaced. This is the network that SBC was building out prior to acquiring AT&T. Following the latest broadband equipment cabinet explosion in Wisconsin, the carrier says it will swap out 17,000 batteries deployed in several states across its network."

Hellburner writes "Hoping to stop the inevitable, Toshiba has slashed the price of entry-level HD DVD players to $150 — down from the previous $300. 'It's a half-empty, half-full moment for retailers, who could see a sales boost at the same time that some may be faced with price matching from holiday sales ... The theory: play up the acceptance by consumers who have already paid for HD DVD versus those who get it with something else like a gaming console, get more players out there--and dare studios to ignore those consumers. In addition to the sales cuts, Toshiba will launch major initiatives, including joint advertising campaigns with studios.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Dell and Hewlett-Packard are both facing lawsuits over catastrophic equipment failures that lead to fires and injuries last year. 'In one case, a North Dakota auto lube shop owner claims that a Dell monitor he purchased caught fire and burned down his business ... meanwhile, an Arkansas man has sued HP, claiming that an HP Compaq Presario PC he purchased from Wal-Mart burst into flames, causing a blaze that destroyed his house and seriously injured his daughter.'"

meanonymous writes "HPCWire reports that a unique marketing model for 'manycore' processors is being proposed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers. The current economic model has customers purchasing systems containing processors that meet the average or worst-case computation needs of their applications. The researchers contend that the increasing number of cores complicates the matching of performance needs and applications and makes the cost of buying idle computing power increasingly prohibitive. They speculate that the customer will typically require fewer cores than are physically on the chip, but may want to use more of them in certain instances. They suggest that chips be developed in a manner that allows users to pay only for the computing power they need rather than the peak computing power that is physically present. By incorporating small pieces of logic into the processor, the vendor can enable and disable individual cores, and they offer five models that allow dynamic adjustment of the chip's available processing power."

elhaf writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that they successfully demonstrated the Open Voting Process in San Luis Obispo this weekend. OVC received a request from San Luis Obispo County on the previous Monday to provide software to run their January 12 straw poll. By Friday, they had the software prepared and Saturday's event goes down as a great success for Open Voting Consortium and the cause of transparent election administration. They used Ubuntu and their code is publicly available. Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science."

Romana Reynolds writes "The CES 2008 Innovations Design and Engineering Awards Showcase honored the Atom Chip Corporation, which was exhibiting the same 100GB, 500GB, and 1TB 'quantum optical' memory chips back in 2006. We actually wandered by, but long gone are the 'SolarMemory' chips, and he didn't know anything about Duke Nuk'em Forever. A little easy digging shows that they'd been making the same extraordinary claims and exhibiting prototypes at CES during the past three years, long enough to make 'atom chip hoax' the fourth suggestion on typing 'atom chip' into Google. I'm amused that the 'preeminent' panel of judges failed their vetting and gatekeeping functions. But I fear that Atom Chip will gather investors based on their recognition at CES, and continue in the game for many years to come, while honors at CES become a Hall of Shame."

palegray.net writes Robots.net covers an article about robotic exoskeletons for Japanese farmers. These exoskeletons would provide increased strength and support for manual labor intensive tasks. More information can also be found at robots-dreams.com. 'The robotic suit relies on ultrasonic motors along with various sensors and wireless networking gear. [...] The mass-produced version of the suit is expected to weigh in at 8 kilograms and cost about 200,000 yen.'"

An anonymous reader writes "At CES, SSD drives were a plenty on the show floor. "Some companies said we could see 250GB SSD units by the end of this year, while others predicted it could take up to a couple of years for them to become mainstream. None of the companies promised mainstream adoption, but they promised a bright future and we are inclined to believe them. High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate."

DirectedImpact noted an amusing little compilation of 10 strange keyboards. Some of them you've probably seen before (the laser keyboard, the optimus OLED keyboard) and others are quite real (I actually had one of those split keyboards for awhile) and others are pretty out there: like the keyboard built into the lacy doily placemat thingee.

Stony Stevenson alerts us to news out of CES that Sony has kick-started another standards war, this time over wireless USB. Ars notes that Sony "[never was] one to settle for an open standard when the opportunity to push a proprietary alternative presents itself." Sony's TransferJet technology uses low-power UWB at very short distances to transfer data at a nominal 520 Mbps. Almost every other large technology company — including Intel, Microsoft, HP, and Samsung — has embraced the W-USB standard, which promises transfer speeds of 480 Mbps at distances up to 3 meters, vs. TransfeJet's 3 centimeters.

Over a year ago, we discussed a start-up company, EEStor, that was making incredible claims about their new power source. Later, EEStor made waves with its bold predictions and secretive policies. Now, Lockheed Martin has decided to give EEStor a chance. The two companies signed a deal this week to use the new energy storage units in Lockheed's products. The folks at GM-Volt interviewed a Lockheed representative about the deal. The representative had this to say regarding EEStor: "We've visited their facility. We were very impressed. They are taking an approach that lends itself to a very quick ramp-up in production. We've seen a lot of their testing and efforts to measure the purity of the powders that they use, and the chemistry. Well be working with them very closely this year to develop prototypes in certain pursuits."

twitter brings us a story about the increasing number of digital devices reaching consumers with malware already installed. In this case, digital photo frames from three different Sam's Club stores were found to contain the same type of malicious code. We discussed a similar problem with iPods a while back, as well as a more recent situation with Maxtor hard drives. Quoting the Register: "While a compromise at the manufacturer is the most likely scenario, ISC's Sachs also pointed to retailers as a possible point of infection. Returned products, which could have been infected by the consumer, are frequently put back on the shelf, if they are in sale-able condition, and attackers could take advantage of a store's poor digital hygiene, he said. 'Trying to (infect a product) all the way back at the factory — getting it through all the checks and balances — would be pretty hard to do,' he said. 'But doing it at the store, where there might be loose return policies, and (where) they put it back on the shelf - you are not going to get a million infections, but you might get a person from an investment bank next door.'"

angryfirelord notes a DesktopLinux article on Lenovo's promise to deliver ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in the week of January 14. Quoting: "Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo's pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads. The starting price for this system will be $949, $20 less than the same laptop with Vista Home Premium."

eldavojohn writes "The One Laptop Per Child Project plans to launch OLPC America in 2008 , to distribute the low-cost laptop computers originally intended for developing nations to needy students here in the United States. Nicholas Negroponte is quoted as saying, 'We are doing something patriotic, if you will, after all we are and there are poor children in America. The second thing we're doing is building a critical mass. The numbers are going to go up, people will make more software, it will steer a larger development community.'"

holy_calamity writes "Proteins extracted from gelatin can dramatically improve the quality of ice cream by preventing the growth of ice crystals that ruin its texture. Perfect smooth ice cream has ice crystals around 20 microns in size, but slight thawing and refreezing makes them grow and ruins the mouth feel, making it gritty. The new proteins are similar to those in the blood of the snow flea, an insect able to keep active in sub-zero temperatures." Here are the abstract and the full article as published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

TeraBill writes "It seems that the California Energy Commission is looking to give utilities in the state the power to control the thermostats in private homes via a radio signal. The idea is that during times of significant energy crunch, the utilities could force thermostats to higher temperatures rather than having to implement a rolling blackout. The thermostats have been around for a while and new ones were on display at the CES show in Vegas this week. While I can see the argument for it, we just had a kid take over a tram system with a remote control, so how long before our thermostat gets hacked by the neighbors. And I'd almost rather have the power drop than have someone significantly raise the temperature in my home if I had a computer running there. (UPS and a graceful shutdown versus cooking something.)"

An anonymous reader writes to mention Nature is reporting that scientists have discovered a much more efficient way to use silicon to convert heat into electricity. This offers the possibility of many different applications including possibly charging your portable electronics just by wearing them close to your skin. "The concept of converting waste heat into electricity isn't exactly new, but it never really materialized due to efficiency hurdles. Now, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley think they may have found a key [to] increase the conversion efficiency by a factor of 100."

An anonymous reader writes "I'm wondering if anyone else out there has a stack of old hard drives sitting around and doesn't know what to do with them. I always remove the hard drives of my parents' and friends' computers before they recycle them or get a new computer, so now I've got a whole bunch sitting around. One, I'd like to dispose of them and know that whatever data was there is gone, but before that, I'd like to hook them up, one by one, and scan them to make sure there's nothing vital there worth saving. Some are years old and may be totally dead for all I know, but is there a good system for hooking up a hard drive as an additional device, perhaps via USB? And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data?" Well to start with you could always use your hard drives to make electricity or create a decorative wind chime. There are also many different options to ensure that your data doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. What other suggestions can folks come up with?