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Human dynamo: How energy from your knees could power an IpodBy DAVID DERBYSHIRE - More by this author » Last updated at 00:43am on 8th February 2008  It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase power walking.  A gadget that converts the movement of the knees while walking into electricity has been unveiled.  On a gentle stroll, the knee-brace generates enough electricity to run a mobile phone. Scroll down for more...       Although the prototype is bulky - like something Robocop might have attached to his leg - smaller versions could one day be incorporated into clothing....

New cable cut compounds net woes A submarine cable in the Middle East has been snapped, adding to global net problems caused by breaks in two lines under the Mediterranean on Wednesday. The Falcon cable, owned by a firm which operates another damaged cable, led to a "critical" telecom breakdown, according to one local official. The cause of the latest break has not been confirmed but a repair ship has been deployed, said owner Flag Telecom. The earlier break disrupted service in Egypt, the Middle East and India. "The situation is critical for us in terms of congestion," Omar Sultan,...

I run Ubuntu on several machines. 7.04 Feisty, 7.10 Gutsy, and 8.04 Hardy, running Gnome on all. I'd like to hear viewpoints on the merits, or lack of merits, on the various Desktops others use and have experience with.

It’s one small step for Dell, and another great leap for Asterisk — the open source VoIP phone system. Dell plans to promote Fonality (a major Asterisk proponent) to small business customers seeking IP telephony systems. It’s a landmark development, folks, that benefits Dell in multiple markets (open source, VoIP, unified communications, and managed services). Here’s why. While most people are zigging, Michael Dell continues to zag. In mid-2007, Dell announced the surprising decision to pre-install Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux on selected desktops and laptops. Red Hat and Novell were the obvious choices for that deal (and Dell maintains partnerships with...

Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America Introduces New Category of Large-Format Televisions with Groundbreaking Laser Technology Mitsubishi's Revolutionary Laser Television Raises Home Entertainment to a New Level LAS VEGAS--(Business Wire)--Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, Inc. today announced the world premiere of the laser television category during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, unveiling a new large-format LaserTV that delivers as much as twice the color of current high-definition televisions. Mitsubishi has harnessed its worldwide leadership in precision laser technology to produce the first-ever laser-powered television, delivering a range of color never before seen in home entertainment. Precise and focused, the purity of...

An international team of mathematicians announced in May that they had factored a 307-digit number—a record for the largest factored number and a feat that suggests Internet security may be on its last legs. “Things are becoming less and less secure,” says Arjen Lenstra, a computer scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) in Switzerland, who organized the effort. Messages in cyberspace are encrypted with a random 1,024-bit number generated by multiplying two large primes together. But if hackers using factorization can break the number into its prime multipliers, they can intercept the message. Factorization currently takes too long to...

Here's a video of the iPhone Firmware 1.1.3, with confirmation that the leak is real from Natetrue, famed iPhone hacker. Like before, the update breaks unlocks and third-party apps, patching previous vulnerabilities at the same time. The video shows how to move icons around in the Springboard, wobbling to indicate they can be dragged and dropped around, which is kind of an Apple-meets-Nintendo touch: [video available on website] We had some doubts, but now we can tell you we are sure: the new firmware 1.1.3 is real. Or as Nate puts it: "if it is a hoax, they did a...

A company called MPK is designing a light source that will glow continuously for more than 12 years without any additional energy. The material, dubbed "Litrosphere," can cover a standard sheet of paper for a cost of about 35 cents, and comes in a variety of colors. It´s also flexible, and can take the form of either paint or injection-molded plastic. The material is not affected by the heat or cold, can withstand 5,000 pounds, and stays on constantly. According to the company's patent, the material is based on betavoltaics and uses the radioactive gas tritium as the power...

Toshiba have stunned the world with their announcement of what's pretty much the holy grail in Lithium battery technology – the Super Charge ion Battery, which recharges up to 90% of its energy in just five minutes, and has a lifespan of over 10 years. Slow charging has been the key hurdle to public acceptance of battery-electric vehicles as viable distance travelers, so this breakthrough has all sorts of implications for the automotive industry as well as being a very welcome upgrade to a whole host of other portable devices. The first of Toshiba's groundbreaking SCiB packs will ship in...

JOSH SHENKLE knew that he couldn’t hook up any old PC to the 106-inch Panasonic projection television in his home theater. Most computers come with buzzing fans, whirring disk drives and whining capacitors that compete with the sound system. “After a while, the noise gets to you during quiet scenes,” he said. “It overwhelms you and takes you away from the movie.” Computer users who want silent offices and living rooms are starting to ask for quiet computers. Manufacturers are taking notice. Some new computers like the Apple iMac or the Alienware Area-51 7500 are marketed for their silence. A...

Zetix is a fabric so strong it will resist multiple car bomb blasts without breaking. It absorbs and disperses the energy from explosions thanks to an inner structure so adamantiumtastic it can be used in body armor, window covering, military tents and hurricane defenses—it might even be able to fend off my ex-wife. When not shielding from explosions, it can be used as medical sutures that won't damage body tissue. All of this is thanks to a property that apparently defies the laws of physics: Zetix is built around the principle of auxetics: objects that actually get fatter the more...

I got a great deal on an Emachine about 16 months ago, so great one of the guys in my office got one the same day. He emailed me over the weekend his power supply went out - not normally a big deal, just a simple replacement - the down side is that when this power supply goes, it changes the polarity of the motherboard - so when it goes, the motherboard goes. He found out from the Geek squad this is becoming a huge problem. Well, today my son's PS went out taking the motherboard with it so now,...

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests, regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer, says Devil Mountain Software.In the latest Mac versus PC ad, that put-upon Windows guy quietly concedes he's "downgrading" from Vista to XP. He may have good reason: new tests show that the older XP runs common productivity tasks significantly faster than Microsoft's newest operating system. Researchers at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based developer of performance management tools, have posted data from their most recent Windows performance tests -- and Vista, even after it's been upgraded to the new...

BLACKSBURG -- Several thousands people gathered on Virginia Tech’s Drillfield this morning to form a giant message of thanks to the world for its support after the April 16 massacre. Photos of the event are posted on hokiesthanktheworld.org. Dressed in the school colors of maroon and orange, and surrounded by fall foliage of the same hues along the Blue Ridge Mountains, the crowd was arranged to form Tech’s "VT" logo, and under it, "THANKS YOU." At 11:10 a.m., a satellite aimed to capture the image as the thousands waved up at the sky.

I'm at work and I am operating Windows XP Professional version 2002 with Service Pack 2 on an Intel Pentium 4 CPU with 2.6GHz and .98GB of RAM. I keep getting the error message, after my computer has been on a while, even after I'm closed out of most of my programs, that states: Network drive:\ not accessable. Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service. And other times I get an error message that there isn't enough memory to complete the command/operation.

Physicists in Arizona State University have designed a revolutionary laser technique which can destroy viruses and bacteria such as AIDS without damaging human cells and may also help reduce the spread of hospital infections such as MRSA. The research, published on Thursday November 1 in the Institute of Physics' Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, discusses how pulses from an infrared laser can be fine-tuned to discriminate between problem microorganisms and human cells. Current laser treatments such as UV are indiscriminate and can cause ageing of the skin, damage to the DNA or, at worst, skin cancer, and are far from...

Virginia Tech officials gave out more than $8.5 million on Monday to people who were wounded, lost loved ones or survived the shootings at the Blacksburg campus on April 16. The "bulk" of the money, according to university President Charles Steger, was being disbursed "to 79 families and individuals." "There is no right way to disburse these monies, but we believe the best way to continue the healing is to put as much as possible in the hands of those who have suffered most," ... some of the recipients will get "the disbursements over time in the form of free...

I need some help from the Techies and Computer Nerds. I am the proud owner of a Power Mac G5 2.5Ghz. I want to upgrade the memory to 8G. I have a limited budget so I have been shopping around a little and have come across Ramjet.com which is offering 4G for $259. Edge memory goes for $273 for 4G Kingston $385 for 4G (I have had a Apple store employee tell me that Kingston works well in Macs). Simple Tech $1,969 for 4G (what did I say? STAGGERING). Does anyone have any experience with the memory sold by Ramjet...

By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that's as strong as steel but lighter and transparent. It's made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue. Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it "plastic steel," but the new material isn't quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft. Kotov...

A team of astronomers have taken pictures of the stars that are sharper than anything produced by the Hubble telescope, at 50 thousandths of the cost. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), used a technique called “Lucky Imaging” to take the most detailed pictures of stars and nebulae ever produced – using a camera based on the ground. Images from ground-based telescopes are usually blurred by the Earth’s atmosphere - the same effect that makes the stars appear to twinkle when we look at them with the naked eye. The Cambridge/Caltech...