Thomas Hawk writes "Unfortunately it appears that some activations of Apple's new iPhone have gone badly. After waiting in line 36 hours I'm still unable to activate my phone. I'm documenting the AT&T circus call by call on my blog. I've had my hold calls dropped, been patched into other users unable to activate their phone instead of AT&T customer service reps, been told that my wife must get a new phone and that the family plan can't work for me. I've been told that the problem is that I'm not putting a new chip into my iPhone in the slot on the left side of my phone when no slot there exists. PR Blogger Steve Rubel has also been documenting his problems on his Twitterstream. According to an unscientific poll being conducted by Engadget about half of the people who bought iPhones have had activation trouble with about 38% of problems still unresolved." Even the folks at MacWorld weren't immune to these issues.

moon_monkey writes "Researchers in Japan have developed a display that makes 3D objects solid enough to grasp. The system, created by engineers at Japan's NTT, combines a 3D display with a haptic glove, making 3D items that look real but also feel solid to touch. Two cameras are used to image an object, to make the 3D image. A computer also uses this to render a solid representation. It could be used to inspect products remotely, or even to shake hands with someone on the other side of the world, the researchers say."

prostoalex writes "FastTCP technology, developed by researchers at CalTech, is being commercialized. A company called FastSoft has introduced a hardware appliance that delivers 15x-20x faster FTP transmissions than those delivered via regular TCP. Says eWeek: 'The algorithm implemented in the Aria appliance senses congestion by continuously measuring the round-trip time for the TCP acknowledgment and then monitoring how that measurement changes from moment to moment.'"

Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it. Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."

Mitechsi writes "Dell has struck a deal with Emerson to sell advanced liquid cooling systems and services to data center owners. One type of supplemental cooling technology is called the Liebert XD. The XD consists of refrigerant-filled pipes that snake around the server racks in a data center. The liquid system cuts the cooling power load by about 30%–50% compared to other types of cooling systems."

Gary lets us know about research out of the Netherlands that has succeeded in reading and writing a hard disk using polarized laser light. The researchers claim this offers a 100-times speedup over reading/writing using magnets. People have been trying for years to write data using polarized light; the secret of the current work's success lies in its disk's materials — gadolinium, iron, and cobalt. Working prototype drives should be available within a decade.

gurps_npc writes "The explosion of portable electronic devices, can really weigh you down. Carrying a pager, phone, iPod, camera, and game is quite a lot. Worse, it gives you many more such things to misplace or get stolen. This CNN story discusses some of the retrieval services that help you keep what belongs to you. I particularly like the first one, about a new Singapore-based software that when you download it to your phone, messages everyone in your phone's database whenever a new chip with a new phone number is installed in the phone. This makes it very hard for someone to steal your phone as all your friends get their new phone number."

mrdirkdiggler writes "ArsTechnica's Hannibal takes a look at how the power concerns that currently plague datacenters are shaping next-generation computing technologies at the levels of the microchip, the board-level interconnect, and the datacenter. In a nutshell, engineers are now willing to take on a lot more hardware overhead in their designs (thermal sensors, transistors that put components into sleep states, buffers and filters at the ends of links, etc.) in order to get maximum power efficiency. The article, which has lots of nice graphics to illustrate the main points, mostly focuses on the specific technologies that Intel has in the pipeline to address these issues."

mrspin writes "Media streaming boxes such as the AppleTV, XBox 360, PS3, and products from Netgear do a varying job of bridging the gap between the PC and television as well as, in some cases, delivering Internet content directly into the living room. But all are closed systems. The result of which is that users are left trying to hack these devices against the wishes of manufacturers or have to make-do with whatever official features are implemented. Bucking this trend, Neuros is taking a wholly different approach, and has open-sourced the firmware for its Neuros OSD media center, meaning that anybody is free to write add-ons that extend the device's functionality. This week the company announced that thanks to the open-source community, the device now lets users browse, search and view the entire YouTube catalog."

An anonymous reader writes "Rumors said the release wouldn't be until late Q4 but an August ship date is now promised for AMD's quad-core chips. They're only releasing up to 2.0 GHz processors at first, with the top speed devices coming out later in the year. 'AMD's Barcelona puts four cores on a single slice of silicon, an approach AMD calls native quad-core, and the company has argued that Barcelona will outperform the Xeon 5300. The only problem: that comparison soon will become obsolete. Intel's second-generation quad-core server processors, Harpertown a server member of Intel's Penryn family, will arrive this year, too, with the promise of better performance, lower power consumption and lower manufacturing costs by virtue of a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer features. AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process.'"

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Processors are typically compared by their performance alone. However, the folks at The Tech Report have put together an article that attempts to quantify the value propositions of AMD's and Intel's latest processors. The article takes 16 processors through an extensive battery of tests that range from gaming and video encoding to Folding@Home and energy efficiency, and examines the value they offer in each. The results may surprise you."

prostoalex writes "PC Magazine looks at 5 ideas that will reinvent computing. IMAX-quality movies at home with new projectors, a mid-air mouse that requires no flat surface, a home quantum computer, a router-based peer-to-peer system, and a man-made brain all made the list."

AnonGirl writes "Big banks are launching mobile banks to 'keep customers and generate more payment revenue down the line.' Citibank is working on two pilots: one with Obopay, and the other for contact-less payments. AT&T phones will have Wachovia already installed in their phones by fourth quarter 2007. The downside: 'Even though banks are not charging for their service, carriers do charge for accessing data through their phone.'"

Steve Kerrison writes "The Radeon 'R600' HD 2900 XT was late coming, and so by extension are the lower cost parts derived from it. The Radeon HD 2400 and 2600s are now available, just the same, with pricing aimed at knocking mid-range GeForce 8 series cards off people's shopping lists. There's more to a graphics card than price; performance and driver functionality are key too. HEXUS had some fun and games testing the new Radeons: 'The hardware designers may now be sitting back, content that their DX10-supporting midrange SKUs are at least as compelling as the competition's. But, and it's a big, big but, the current drivers aren't realizing the kind of performance we'd expect from a knowledge of the Radeon HD 2600 XT's setup.'" A very useful article ... unfortunately spread across a dozen pages with no 'print view' available.

kripkenstein writes "According to an Ars Technica report Microsoft will begin selling complete PCs, for the first time in the company's history. The program is aimed at customers in India. 'Dubbed the IQ PC, the machines will cost RS21,000 (about $525), are manufactured in partnership with Zenith, and will sport AMD Athlon CPUs. ... In some ways, the move to sell hardware is a natural extension of Microsoft's low-cost Windows initiative ... It may also be a response to projects like Intel's Classmate PC and the OLPC XO.' The Ars Technica summary is careful to state that they seriously doubt this will lead to Microsoft selling PCs in the US, yet the question must be asked: After Microsoft mice and keyboards, then the XBOX and Zune, Microsoft is increasingly becoming a hardware vendor. Is it only a question of time before Microsoft starts to compete directly with the likes of Dell and HP?"

Eukariote writes "Recently, Intel patched bugs in its Core 2 processors. Details were scarce; soothing words were spoken to the effect that a BIOS update is all that is required. OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has now provided more details and analysis on outstanding, fixed, and non-fixable Core 2 bugs. Some choice quotes: 'Some of these bugs... will *ASSUREDLY* be exploitable from userland code... Some of these are things that cannot be fixed in running code, and some are things that every operating system will do until about mid-2008.'"

Nom du Keyboard writes "According to this article in The Inquirer and this Microsoft Knowledge Base article, a fix for some significant problems in many of Intel's most recent processors has been quietly released — by whom is not clear. Patches are available on Microsoft's site. Affected processors include Core 2 Duo E4000/E6000, Core 2 Quad Q6600, Core 2 Xtreme X6800, XC6700, and XC6800. Details on just what has been fixed are scanty (it's called a 'reliability update'), however, it's probably more important than either Intel or Microsoft is openly admitting." There is no indication that Apple users are affected.

GamingHobo writes "Bit-Tech has posted an interview with NVIDIA's Roy Taylor, Senior Vice President of Content/Developer Relations, which discusses his team's role in the development of next-gen PC games. He also talks about DirectX 10 performance, Vista drivers and some of the upcoming games he is anticipating the most. From the article: 'Developers wishing to use DX10 have a number of choices to make ... But the biggest is whether to layer over a DX9 title some additional DX10 effects or to decide to design for DX10 from the ground up. Both take work but one is faster to get to market than the other. It's less a question of whether DX10 is working optimally on GeForce 8-series GPUs and more a case of how is DX10 being used. To use it well — and efficiently — requires development time.'"

ElvaWSJ writes "Wi-Fi was supposed to reduce complications, not create new ones. But in many offices Wi-Fi has been a headache. Like all radio signals, Wi-Fi is subject to interference. Its low power — less than even a typical cellphone — means that walls and cabinets can significantly reduce signal strength. Wi-Fi also creates networks that are more open than wired ones, raising security issues. And Wi-Fi has caused problems for virtual private networks. Some VPNs require a lot of processing power. If a wireless access point — at home, at the office, or on the road — isn't robust enough, a user often gets bumped off the connection."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting on IBM's claim that the Blue Gene/P will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop. It is actually capable of 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops. IBM claims that at 1 petaflop, Blue Gene/P is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops! 'Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns. Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.'"