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OCAU News |
Somebody has modded their iPod shuffle for use underwater up to a certain depth. "That's right, SWIMMAN has turned an honest-to-goodness second generation iPod shuffle into a "100% waterproof" player capable of operation in waters up to 10 feet deep. You can't scuba with it, but it'll clip onto the back of your googles just fine if you're a swimmer. Hell you can even wear it the shower... assuming you can find something to, uh, clip it to."
PCStats has taken a look at recycling PC's and e-waste and why it is such a problem. "The components of a computer contain a long list of chemicals, metals, plastics and reclaimable materials in their make up. The hard drive for example contains all sorts of materials; some are mundane like aluminum and steel, and valuable like the trace amounts of gold on electrical connectors. Yet it's the other trace amounts of materials generally found in electronic components like lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury that are a real concern."
An American company has developed a dual screened laptop which opens up in a similar fashion to a book. "Pennsylvania-based Estari started out as a software company but somehow ended up developing a patented dual-screen computer originally for the U.S. military and is now selling its wares to the public."
ArsTechnica has some more information on Quantum computing and how it all works. "In what passes for normal in the quantum world, a properly prepared quantum object kept in isolation from the environment will actually exist in all possible states (be they energy, spin, etc.) at once—it exists as a superposition of states. Depending on the inputs to the system, a single state will be the most probable one occupied; repeated measurements of the same, freshly-prepared system can identify this most probable state. If you think of that object as a bit, it's easy to see how calculations can be done: set it in a ground state, perform a calculation by providing an input that influences its state, and then read it. Repeat the process a few times to get the probabilities sorted, and you've done a 1-bit calculation with a quantum bit, or qubit."
It seems that ATI Vista drivers are going well and in the writers opinion ATI is in a better Vista driver situation than Nvidia. "While the project was huge, Makedon was quick to point out that the software development and testing weren't necessarily harder or more difficult than anything else they had done before; there was just a whole lot of it. ATI's team apparently planned out their development cycles so that they would be 100% ready for the OS launch and I was able to tell just how prepared the driver team was in our initial look at Vista gaming performance."
ZDNet has posted some info on IBM's Power6 chip which supposedly boasts more processing performance and less power consumed. "IBM is a major proponent of "big iron," refrigerator-size systems with numerous processors to handle many tasks simultaneously. Few customers have tasks that can occupy the full attention of these top-end machines, but the servers also can be divided into independent partitions useful for consolidating work."
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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