An anonymous reader passed us a link to a Network World article filling in the details behind the massive internet outage Japanese web users experienced earlier this week. According to the site faulty Cisco routers were to blame for the lapse, which left millions of customers without service from late evening Tuesday until early in the morning on Wednesday. "NTT East and NTT West, both group companies of Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), are in the process of finalizing their decisions on a core router upgrade, according to the report. The routing table rewrite overflowed the routing tables and caused the routers' forwarding process to fail, the CIBC report states."

An anonymous reader writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Bill Hewlett's famous garage is now on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places. It's not clear what exactly this will do for the structure, since it's already owned by HP and it already very well restored to its original glory. Anyway, for history fans and HP fans alike, this is exciting news, akin to saving the original Edison or Marconi labs. 'At my user group's museum, where David Packard actually worked for a while when it was a military base, our collection features an HP-300A Harmonic Wave Analyzer. That's a generation or two removed from HP's garage years, but it's still fun to appreciate the connections between their first products and the computer revolution.'"

prostoalex writes "The Guardian takes a look at the current developments in the world of holographic storage. Despite being available in research for over 40 years, the technology is getting commercialized only now, with InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall. What avout the price? "The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market — a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.""

MojoKid writes "AMD disclosed a few details today regarding their upcoming mobile platform technologies, codenamed 'Griffin' and 'Puma'. According to AMD, Griffin will be manufactured at 65nm and it will feature a new mobile optimized on-die Northbridge with a power optimized DDR2 memory controller, HyperTransport 3 connectivity, and larger L2 caches than current designs. The new memory controller should also extend battery life thanks to new power saving features, that allow the controller to operate on a separate power plane and at a lower voltage than the execution cores."

Roland Piquepaille writes "In a short article, Popular Science reports that researchers at the University of Washington have built a robotic cable inspection system. This system should help utility companies to maintain their networks of subterranean cables. The robot, dubbed Cruiser, is about 4-feet-long and is designed like a snake. When it detects an anomaly on an underground cable, it sends a message to a human operator via Wi-Fi. The first field tests took place in New Orleans in December 2006. But a commercial version should not be available before 2012."

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies. 'One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive. Directory information and formatting data always take up some space. Second, the hard drive industry's definition of a megabyte differs from the rest of the PC business. One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB, as measured by the OS. That's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition.'" Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article.

DuracellFan writes "Intel recently released its PowerTOP utility, which builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. The PowerTOP website also hosts patches for several Linux apps and the kernel. In the Linux.com article, lead PowerTOP developer Arjan van de Ven of Intel says that PowerTOP could soon show which applications keep the disk busy." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.

An anonymous reader writes "A paper was recently published about Shift at the Computer Human Interaction Conference earlier this month. The authors (Daniel Vogel, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto and Patrick Baudisch, a research scientist at Microsoft Research) developed the technology to solve several problems with mobile-phone touch screens. Most such screens are designed to be operated with a stylus; when touched with a finger the UI doesn't work so well. They also created a short video with a demonstration of how Shift works. Shift builds on an existing technology known as Offset Cursor, which displays a cursor just above the spot a user touches on the screen. That allows a user to place their finger below the item they wish to choose so that they can see the item, rather than hiding it with their finger."

space_mongoose writes "Hitachi thinks that a simple chemical additive could significantly improve battery life. Alkaline batteries have a positive electrode of manganese oxide and a negative electrode of finely powdered zinc, but zinc oxide forms around these grains of zinc. Hitachi's solution is to replace the zinc with a fine powder of zinc-aluminum alloy, displacing the zinc within the zinc oxide layer making it a much better conductor."

Phanatic1a writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is suing Dell, alleging bait and switch financing tactics, false advertising, and 'numerous other deceptive business practices relating to their technical support services, promotional financing, rebate offers, and billing and collection activity.' According to Cuomo himself, 'At Dell, customer service means no service at all.'"

Galactic_grub writes "An experimental new type of memory that uses nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire could dramatically boost the capacity, speed and reliability of storage devices. Magnetic domains are moved along a wire by pulses of polarized current, and their location is read by fixed sensors arranged along the wire. Previous experiments have been disappointing, but now researchers have found that super-fast pulses of electricity prevent the domains from being obstructed by imperfections in the crystal."

autofan1 writes "Toyota's vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, has said cost cutting on the electric motor, battery and inverter were all showing positive results in reducing the costs of hybrid technology and that by the time Toyota's sales goal of one million hybrids annually is reached, it 'expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars.' Takimoto also made the bold claim that by 2020, hybrids will be the standard drivetrain and account for '100 percent' of Toyota's cars as they would be no more expensive to produce than a conventional vehicle."

J. Dzhugashvili writes "The folks at The Tech Report have whipped up a detailed expose of the new AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card's architecture and features, with plenty of benchmarks. While the card dazzles with 320 stream processors, a 512-bit memory bus, and oodles of memory bandwidth, its performance and power consumption seem disappointing in the face of Nvidia's six-month-old GeForce 8800 graphics cards."

rohar writes "SHPEGS is an open design not-for-profit project to design and prototype a base-load renewable electrical generation system suitable for moderate climates and built from common materials. The design centers around creating a local geothermal source with an efficient solar thermal water heater system and can be scaled from single residence to mega-scale. The heliostat system used in Europe's first solar thermal plant could be used in a scaled-down SHPEGS system with Practical Solar's small scale heliostats."

PetManimal writes "Mike Elgan has had it with useless lights on gadgets and computers. He singles out the Palm Treo and the Dell XPS gaming laptops as being particularly bad with the use of unnecessary lights, and also cites the plethora of LEDs on desktop PCs and peripherals. 'My PC and other computing equipment make my office look like a jet cockpit. I have two LCD monitors, each of which has two indicator lights that flash even when the PC is turned off. The attached sound control has a light on it. My keyboard has multiple lights. The power cord has lights, the printer has lights, and the power button is illuminated. My cable modem and Linksys router flash like crazy all the time. Together, these useless lights create a visual cacophony of blinking, multicolored lights that make me feel like I'm taking part in a NASA stress test for astronaut candidates.' Elgan calls on manufacturers to respect his 'Gadget Bill of Lights' to restrict the use of nag lights and allow users to turn them off. He also says the industry should pay more attention to industrial design when creating new products."

Skidge writes "Wired is running a piece showing the drastically reduced mileage ratings for hybrids after the upcoming changes in gas mileage calculations by the EPA. While the cars themselves aren't changing, plugging these new numbers in to the equation makes a hybrid much less cost effective: "The two top-selling hybrid vehicles, the Prius and Honda's Civic Hybrid, will lose 12 and 11 miles per gallon respectively from their city driving estimates." The new values come from more realistic testing; the old, over-inflated ratings were higher in part because the cars idled a lot, allowing the hybrids to completely turn off their engines. The new ratings should be more in line with what hybrid drivers are actually seeing."

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek has uncovered some documentation which provides some details amid today's hype for AMD's announcement of its upcoming Phenom quad-core (previously code-named Agena). AMD's 10h architecture will be used in both the desktop Phenom and the Barcelona (Opteron) quads. The architecture supports wider floating-point units, can fully retire three long instructions per cycle, and has virtual machine optimizations. While the design is solid, Intel will still be first to market with 45nm quads (the first AMD's will be 65nm). Do you think this architecture will help AMD regain the lead in its multicore battle with Intel?"

An anonymous reader writes "LG.Philips LCD has announced it has developed the world's first 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper display, equivalent in size to an A4 sheet of paper. The 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper uses electronic ink from E-Ink Corp. to produce a maximum of 4,096 colors. It can be viewed from a full 180 degrees, so that images always appear crisp, even when the display is bent."

mrneutron2004 writes "Tweaktown seems to have the first review out of the gate on AMD's flagship R600 core. 'Our focus today is solely on the HD 2900 XT 512MB GDDR-3 graphics card – it is the first GPU with a fast 512-bit memory interface but what does this mean for performance? ... After taking a look at the GPU and the card from PowerColor as well as some new Ruby DX10 screenshots, we will move onto the benchmarks and compare the red hot flaming Radeon monster against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX along with the former ATI GPU king, the Radeon X1950 XTX."

Techdirt has an quick look at how it is becoming much more common for people to blame their mistakes on technology. "There are people driving off cliffs and through flooded roads and taking detours that span half of England, apparently at the behest of their navigation units. Things got so bad in one place that authorities even had to put up "ignore your sat nav" signs. Now, a woman's car got hit by a train, and for some reason, she's blaming a GPS navigation unit."