Slashdot: Hardware
The Power Grid Can't Handle Wind Farms DesScorp writes "The Times reports on the problems of adding wind farms to the power grid. Because of the grid's old design, it can't handle the various spikes that wind farms sometimes have, and there's no efficient way to currently move massive amounts of that power from one section of the country to the other. Further complicating things is the fact that under current laws, power grid regulation is a state matter, and the Federal government has comparatively little authority over it right now. Critics are calling for federal authority over the grid, and massive new construction of "superhighways" to share the wind power wealth nationally. Quoting the article, 'The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376600007/article.pl
Digital Storage To Survive a 25-Year Dirt Nap? AlHunt writes "I've been tasked with finding a way to bury digitally stored photographs in a small underground time capsule to be opened in 25 years. It looks like we'll be using a steel vessel, welded closed. I've thought of CDs, DVDs, a hard drive, or a thumb drive — but they all have drawbacks, not the least of which is outdated technology 25 years from now. Maybe I'll put a CD and a CD-ROM drive in the capsule and hope that the IDE interface is still around in 25 years? Ideas and feedback will be appreciated." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376567309/article.pl
Andy Hertzfeld Shares His Thoughts on 25 Years of the Mac blackbearnh writes "It may make you feel very, very old, but the Macintosh will be turning 25 in January. As we approach this momentous anniversary, O'Reilly News had a talk with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh designers, about the long and storied history of the Mac. Hertzfeld, who tells the story of the Mac in his book A Revolution in the Valley, shares his thoughts about how the Mac has aged over time, how life might have been different if Steve Jobs had stayed on at Apple, and the differences between working for Apple, and for Google (his current employer.)" Read on below for a bit of what Hertzfeld had to say. Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376521823/article.pl
Full Immersion Cooling Comes To Desktop PCs mr_sifter writes "After three years of research and around £100,000 of R&D costs, UK-based Armari has unveiled its XCP prototype. It's a full immersion liquid cooled PC which supports standard ATX components. Unlike conventional liquid cooled PCs, the components are all easy to swap in and out as they're swimming in liquid, rather than under waterblocks. It also looks amazing, pumping around 70KG of electrically inert cooling fluid (salvaged from an old Cray) around its military grade perspex shell." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376491229/article.pl
Capturing 3D Surfaces Simply With a Flash Camera MojoKid writes with this excerpt from Hot Hardware (linking to a video demonstration): "Creating 3D maps and worlds can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming. Also, the final result might not be all that accurate or realistic. A new technique developed by scientists at The University of Manchester's School of Computer Science and Dolby Canada, however, might make capturing depth and textures for 3D surfaces as simple as shooting two pictures with a digital camera — one with flash and one without. First an image of a surface is captured without flash. The problem is that the different colors of a surface also reflect light differently, making it difficult to determine if the brightness difference is a function of depth or color. By taking a second photo with flash, however, the accurate colors of all visible portions of the surface can be captured. The two captured images essentially become a reflectance map (albedo) and a depth map (height field)." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376386735/article.pl
Nvidia Firmly Denies Plans To Build a CPU Barence writes "A senior vice president of Nvidia has denied rumours that the company is planning an entry into the x86 CPU market. Speaking to PC Pro, Chris Malachowsky, another co-founder and senior vice president, was unequivocal. 'That's not our business,' he insisted. 'It's not our business to build a CPU. We're a visual computing company, and I think the reason we've survived the other 35 companies who were making graphics at the start is that we've stayed focused.' He also pointed out that such a move would expose the company to fierce competition. 'Are we likely to build a CPU and take out Intel?' he asked. 'I don't think so, given their thirty-year head start and billions and billions of dollars invested in it. I think staying focused is our best strategy.' He was also dismissive of the threat from Intel's Larrabee architecture, following Nvidia's chief architect calling it a 'GPU from 2006' at the weekend." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376241890/article.pl
Space Cube – the World's Smallest Linux PC Barence writes "Meet the Space Cube — the world's smallest fully functional PC. Primarily designed for use in space, it somehow manages to cram a working PC with USB ports, card readers, audio outputs and proprietary interfaces into a tiny cube chassis measuring just two inches square. It runs a basic Linux front-end, which the blogger takes a look at, and there are some great photos of the device being loomed over by everyday objects like coffee mugs and cellphones. It has connections for controlling various electronics used by ESA, NASA and JAXA, but it will also apparently be for sale to the public soon, for use by amateur engineers and robotics clubs." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376203945/article.pl
Gaining RAM For Free, Through Software wakaramon writes with a piece from IEEE Spectrum about an experimental approach to squeezing more usable storage out of a device's existing RAM; the researchers were using a Linux-based PDA as their testbed, and claim that their software "effectively gives an embedded system more than twice the memory it had originally — essentially for free." "Although the price of RAM has plummeted fast, the need for memory has expanded faster still. But if you could use data-compression software to control the way embedded systems store information in RAM, and do it in a way that didn't sap performance appreciably, the payoff would be enormous." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376193217/article.pl
What To Do With All of My Gadget Chargers? legoman666 writes "On my desk I have chargers for the following gadgets: Nokia N810, LG Chocolate, Sony Ericcson Z310a, Canon Powershot SD1000, Cowan iAudio X5L, Lenovo Thinkpad, Logitech MX1000 and my Nintendo DS. Not a single pair of them share a similar connector. I have two power strips whose singular purpose is to energize these chargers. My question to Slashdot is: How do you organize all of your different chargers? Please, share your secrets." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/376046008/article.pl
Paralyzed Man Walks Again Using Exoskeleton dominique_cimafranca notes a story up at the Daily Mail in the UK about a partially paralyzed man who is able to walk again using an exoskeleton frame. The article goes a bit far in comparing the device to Robocop, but it does show pictures of the man, paralyzed for the last 20 years, regaining some use of his legs. Quoting: "The device, called ReWalk, is the brainchild of engineer Amit Goffer, founder of Argo Medical Technologies, a small Israeli high-tech company. Something of a mix between the exoskeleton of a crustacean and the suit worn by Robocop, ReWalk helps paraplegics — people paralyzed below the waist — to stand, walk and climb stairs. The system, which requires crutches to help with balance, consists of motorized leg supports, body sensors and a back pack containing a computerized control box and rechargeable batteries." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/375520962/article.pl
Gamepark Holdings Officially Announces the WIZ Handheld Croakyvoice writes "Gamepark Holdings, the makers of the GP2X Console, have today announced the successor, which is called the WIZ. The new GBA Micro-sized console features a touchscreen, Linux OS, an Arm9 533MHZ 3D processor with 64MB of ram and will have commercial games on sale at launch in October. Best of all for fans of homebrew and emulation on the GP2X, all that needs to be done is recompiling of sourcecode." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/375399760/article.pl
Google Drops Bluetooth API From Android 1.0 Ian Lamont writes "Google has dropped Bluetooth and the GTalkService instant messaging APIs from the set of tools for Android 1.0, but says that handsets using the Android OS will work with other Bluetooth devices such as headsets. According to a post on the official Android developer blog, Google dropped the Bluetooth API from the mobile OS because 'we plain ran out of time.' The GTalkService API was removed because of security concerns that included the possibility of applications revealing more details about users than they might want to let out, such as their real names and e-mail addresses." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/375352996/article.pl
Fuel-Cell Car Racing Series Aims To Spur Green Motoring Anonymous Cow writes "The world's first international fuel-cell powered motor racing series kicked off in Rotterdam over the weekend. The organisers hope that 'Formula Zero,' like Formula 1, can become a forum for competing technology as much as anything else, helping green consumer cars to become better." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/375221921/article.pl
The Best Gaming PC Money Can Buy SlappingOysters writes "Gameplayer has gone live with their best PC hardware configurations for Q3 2008. They've broken it into three tiers depending on the investor's budget. And while the prices are regional, it is comparative across the globe. 'In order to play these slices of gaming goodness, you're going to need a decent rig, and we sent our PC hardware guru in search of maximum frames in maximum detail, but at a minimum cost. We have three tiers for the three levels of PC gamers out there and all the detail you could possibly want on where, why and what to buy. So choose your poison and get amongst it.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/374490249/article.pl
The 1-Petabyte Barrier Is Crumbling CurtMonash writes "I had been a database industry analyst for a decade before I found 1-gigabyte databases to write about. Now it is 15 years later, and the 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling. Specifically, we are about to see data warehouses — running on commercial database management systems — that contain over 1 petabyte of actual user data. For example, Greenplum is slated to have two of them within 60 days. Given how close it was a year ago, Teradata may have crossed the 1-petabyte mark by now too. And by the way, Yahoo already has a petabyte+ database running on a home-grown system. Meanwhile, the 100-terabyte mark is almost old hat. Besides the vendors already mentioned above, others with 100+ terabyte databases deployed include Netezza, DATAllegro, Dataupia, and even SAS." Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/374242564/article.pl

| Home | Bytepowered Articles | Guides Index |
| Privacy Policy | About | Site Map | Contact US |

| Shopping For Hardware | Shopping Securely | Computer Hardware Online - Compare Retailers | Get The Plan | Choosing Hardware | Motherboards Guide | Computer Cases | CPU Guide | Memory Guide | Video Card Guide | Hard Drives Guide | Hardware Organizer | Download OpenOffice |