technology

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“It’s the not-to-distant future. They’ve turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope?”

That’s the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian scam e-mails and online porno. At the link you’ll find the top twenty entries, each hysterically funny… and clever!...

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Some cutting-edge stuff coming out of North Carolina State University: researchers there have created a chip the size of a human fingernail that can store… get this… a TERABYTE of data!

In layman’s terms that’s about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.

The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.

Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today’s techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.

Click here for the official press release from Dr. Jagdish “Jay” Narayan and his team at N.C. State., including how the processes ...

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The town of Claudville in Patrick County, Virginia – a place where I have lots of ancestral roots – is the launching site of the much-awaited white-space network technology! Described as “Wi-Fi on steroids”, white-space allows for much more bandwidth over larger areas. A bunch of it just got freed-up from switchover to digital television transmission earlier this year (what, you didn’t think that all that spectrum was just gonna go to waste, didja?). This first network comes as a result of collaboration between Microsoft, Dell and Spectrum Bridge.

Okay well what I wanna know is: does the Wal-Mart in Patrick Springs carry white-space routers already??...

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I absolutely hate, hate, HATE the very idea of electronic voting. Cannot say nearly enough rotten about it. I’ve no doubt that a lot of our more recent elections have been compromised and rigged – one way or another – by paperless tabulation. In a saner age, enough Americans would have gotten honked-off enough to have marched on the corporate headquarters of Diebold and Sequoia, burned the buildings down and sown the sites with salt.

Well friends and neighbors, tonight I get to grin a big ‘un: Sequoia has inadvertently released the source code of its voting machines and… wonder upon wonders… already the code is shown to be breaking election law!

“Sequoia blew it on a public records response. … They appear… to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold. They were wrong. The

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Gamasutra’s Kris Graft has written an interesting piece about the changing face of the multi-billion dollar video game console industry… and why it’s no longer about building “the next big thing” and rushing it into production. Blame Nintendo’s Wii for the revolution: motion control has become the biggest innovation for video gaming, and now Microsoft and Sony are working on entering the foray with Project Natal and Sony’s planned motion-based controller. But rather than waiting for the next generation of consoles, these features are being implemented into the already-existing Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. And that’s a good thing for everyone concerned…

…for Sony and Microsoft, motion controllers are their next-gen consoles. And it’s a damn sight easier than launching Xbox 720 or PS4. They can debut these peripherals without needing to engineer completely new boxes for consumers, potentially bundle them over time, and they have a much better chance

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You can’t recharge it – yet anyway – but a new battery designed at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel could revolutionize everything from cellphones to electric cars. Prof. Yair Ein-Eli (pictured) worked for almost three years with partners in the United States and Japan to develop the battery which gets its power from, of all things, silicon from plain ol’ sand. The new battery is said to provide constant power for thousands of hours, is extremely efficient, and is already drawing considerable commercial interest. It is also very safe on the environment.

Sounds like a winner to me. We could soon see the day when these things are powering our cars… and we can then tell OPEC, literally, to go pound sand 😛...

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For all the frustration that independent content producers such as myself are running into with multi-billion dollar media companies regarding YouTube and other self-publishing outlets, it’s comforting to know that we are not the first… and no doubt won’t be the last either.

Putting it into perspective, Nate Anderson has composed a very good piece over at Ars Technica titled “100 years of Big Content fearing technology-in its own words”. In it Anderson documents a century of hysteria on the part of copyright holders that in retrospect is absolutely laughable: everything from fears of the photocopier after World War II and how some dreaded the coming of the VCR, on back to John Philip Sousa’s screed against player pianos and gramophones (pictured). It’s only too interesting to note that in spite of all of the “warnings”, that there has been no evidence at all that technology has stifled creativity… or ...

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Okay, first the bad news: researchers have found a way to modify wireless networking signal processing so that people outside your home or office can “see” what you are doing right through the building’s walls.

But there is also good news: another group of researchers has developed a new kind of paint that blocks wireless networking radio waves! Just coat those same walls with this stuff, and if the paint lives up to its promise you’ll be free to do… whatever (and I don’t wanna know either).

I could also see a huge market for this paint among those worried about mind control rays…

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It’s a very rare moment when I read something for the first time that goes almost completely over the top of my head. This is one of them: researchers are building a “time telescope” that can compress data into smaller chunks of time, that is then transmitted via fiber optics. Hit the link if you want to feel your brains getting twisted.

Of course, there are going to be some who will say that time is going too fast already, but I digress… 😛...

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For a good while today many fans of the Gears of Wars video game series were taken aback by reports that Epic Games president Michael Capps had remarked at the Tokyo Game Show that the next installment in the series would have to wait for the next generation of consoles: putting it around 2011-2014. Which would be an awfully long wait.

Happily, it seems that things are more positive regarding the further adventures of Marcus Fenix and Delta Squad. Capps has since clarified his statements:

After the event, Capps told Eurogamer that if there is another Gears of War in the the next four to five years, it would appear on existing platforms. If it’s based on the next Unreal Engine though, it’ll have to be for next-gen hardware: “If we ship a game in the next few years, it’ll be Unreal Engine 3. If we ship a game

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