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Honda says it has developed new humanoid robot Dec. 5 TOKYO, Japan - Honda Motor Co. has developed a new model of its intelligent humanoid robot ASIMO, which can interpret the postures and gestures of humans and move independently in response. Honda said Dec. 5 the new robot can greet approaching people, follow them, move in the direction they indicate and even recognize their faces and address them by name. (Kyodo) Honda releases improved ASIMO robot Dec. 11 TOKYO, Japan - Honda Motor Co. showed reporters Dec. 11 an improved version of its ASIMO humanoid robot that walks and...

4,000-processor Linux cluster hunts for oil By Peter Williams [13-12-2002] Lots of penguins huddled together The world's top oil producer is building a cluster of 4,000 Intel-based Linux systems to run its oil detection systems. State-owned Saudi Aramco, which oversees a quarter of the world oil reserves, uses algorithms known as Pre-stack Time Migration (PSTM) to enhance complex seismic data and create 2D and 3D images of oil and gas targets. "This is a mission-critical application. It does some of the most important work of our business," said Mohammad Huwaidi, exploration systems analyst and PSTM deployment team leader, in...

  Senate Closes Accidental AnonymizerBy Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Dec 10 2002 1:24PMNever let it be said that the United States Senate has done nothing for Internet privacy. Network administrators for the U.S. government site www.senate.gov shut down an open proxy server over the weekend that for months had turned the site into a free Web anonymizer that could have allowed savvy surfers to launder their Internet connections so that efforts to trace them would lead to Capitol Hill. A proxy server is normally a dedicated machine that sits between a private network and the outside world, passing internal users'...

Star Trek Continues to Satisfy America's Quest for Moral Clarity, Says Kellogg School of Management Consumer Anthropologist Good Versus Evil With a Technological-Spin Suited for Complex, Uncertain Times EVANSTON, Ill., Dec. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Star Trek as mythology for the post-September 11 world? A consumer anthropologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management believes it is so. "Star Trek is an ideal bellwether of our times," said Robert Kozinets, an assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School who has been studying Star Trek consumer behavior since 1995. "Right now, it is expressing American society's hunger for a sense...

Intel's Grove warns of the end of Moore's Law Feeling the heat By Paul Hales: Wednesday 11 December 2002, 12:33 ONE THE MAJOR TECHNICAL HEADACHES facing chipmaker Intel is the leaking of current from inactive processors, company chairman Andy Grove told an audience at International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco yesterday. "Current is becoming a major factor and a limiter on how complex we can build chips," said Grove. He said the company’ engineers "just can’t get rid of" power leakage. The problem of leakage threatens the future validity of Moores Law. As chips become more powerful and draw...

Hacker Allegedly Steals 80,000 Credit Card Numbers FBI Works With Israeli Police On Case Posted: 7:54 a.m. EST December 10, 2002 JERUSALEM -- Israeli police, aided by the FBI, arrested an Israeli suspected of hacking into computers of a U.S.-based electronics company and stealing personal information, including the credit card numbers of some 80,000 customers, according to court document released Sunday. David Sternberg, 24, of the port city of Haifa, was arrested late Friday while driving in a stolen car, police said. The FBI notified the Israelis he was wanted in 2000 and police began searching for him in...

By Mike MartinNewsFactor Network December 9, 2002 In science fiction, from Star Trek to The X-Files, silicon-based life forms have proven deadly to carbon-based humans. In the real world, however, carbon-based transistors may prove fatal to the future prospects of silicon wafers. Xerox (NYSE: XRX) researchers in Canada claim they have stabilized polythiophene, a normally unstable, yet highly flexible, semiconducting polymer that can be etched with electronic circuits in place of rigid silicon chips , promising newspaper-thin computer monitors and televisions you can pin to your wall. Carbon-based "printable organic electronic" devices have eluded manufacturers because the polythiophene compounds synthesized...

FROM THE BONE OF A HORSE, A NEW IDEA FOR AIRCRAFT STRUCTURES Dec. 2, 2002 GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The horse, a classic model of grace and speed on land, is now an unlikely source of inspiration for more efficient flight. So says a group of University of Florida engineers who have recreated part of a unique bone in the horse’s leg with an eye toward lighter, stronger materials for planes and spacecraft. The third metacarpus bone in the horse’s leg supports much of the force conveyed as the animal moves. One side of the cucumber-sized bone has a pea-sized hole...

A WORKING TRANSISTOR which IBM claims is 10 times smaller than any in production will be demonstrated later today at an electronics conference in San Francisco.IBM said the transistor is six nanometers long and claims that demonstrates there's still life in the devices at this molecular level.IBM said that further work will be needed to achieve both higher performance and the management of power density and heat dissipation. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, and IBM said that the Consortium of International Semiconductor Companies has projected that transistors need to be smaller than nine nano by 2016 to...

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 9 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. will announce on Monday the smallest ever working silicon transistor to serve as the nerve center in electronics ranging from televisions to PCs and cars.For the past 30 years the industry has been shrinking microprocessors -- the brains of computers -- and other chip components to put more function into smaller and smaller cell phones and other computing devices.Transistors, basically the on-off switches that regulate the flow of electronic signals used for computing and other processes, are key parts of the chip.Reducing the size of the on-off switch in the...

IBM's $2.1bn Rational deal to upset market By Peter Williams [06-12-2002] Big Blue's biggest takeover since acquiring Lotus In its largest software takeover since acquiring Lotus, IBM is to buy software development tools company Rational Software for approximately $2.1bn (£1.33bn). Rational provides software and services to 98 of the Fortune 100 companies, including IBM itself, operating in a market that analyst group IDC estimates will grow from $9bn (£5.7bn) now to $15bn (£9.5bn) by 2006. Ian Charlesworth, senior research analyst at Butler Group, said: "The announcement is clearly huge news, and is likely to 'unsettle' the application development market,...

Truly remarkable results gobsmack us A SHARP EYED contributor to Ace's Hardware Forum has noticed that Intel is making some truly remarkable claims for the 3.06GHz Pentium 4. A demo on its site – it requires Flash to view – compares a spreadsheet calculation. That takes five minutes 39.9 seconds on a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 without hyperthreading while with hyperthreading, Intel claims it takes 35.58 seconds. [ Actually, if you see the demo, it is supposed to take the non-hyperthreaded P4 an even longer 6 minutes 15 seconds. (5:40 + :35) ] This is a remarkable feat and leads us...

I installed Flash Movie player when I installed Internet Explorer. Okay stuff, funny animations and some games are done in Flash. Now the problem. Some idiot came up with Flash Movie advertisements. These hover over the newly opened web page. You can't see the page until they are over, also they play loud music and announcements. TV Guide is the worst, they have a 5 minute job for "24" and it plays every time you update the page to see what's coming on next. Enough is enough said I. I went to uninstall Flash Movie Player. Surprise! It does not...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A University at Buffalo engineer has developed a novel method for assembling nanoparticles into three-dimensional structures that one day may be used to produce new nanoscale tools and machines. The work could be an important step in fulfilling the immense potential of nanotechnology because it gives scientists and engineers improved control and flexibility in the creation of materials for the manufacture of many nanoscale devices, according to Paschalis Alexandridis, associate professor of chemical engineering in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Alexandridis and postdoctoral research associate Aristides Docoslis used non-uniform AC electric fields generated by microfabricated...

One day you could be storing data inside molecules. A group of scientists have found a way to manipulate the atoms in a molecule to store more than 1000 bits of information. The trio managed to briefly store a small image in the molecule before extracting it with the same method they used to put it there. Despite the success, the researchers say it will be a long time before their work results in working molecular memories. Obstacles The group of scientists used a single liquid crystal molecule as their data storage medium. They stored 1024 bits of information by...

AUSTIN, Tex.--Paving the way for a new class of applications, startup Molecular Imprints Inc. (MII) next week will unveil its first product--a tool aimed at the emerging “nano-imprint” lithography market, SBN has learned. MII will roll out what the company calls a “step and flash imprint lithography” (S-FIL) tool for use in processing a range of emerging devices at the 100-nm (0.10-micron) node and below. The Austin-based company also claims that it has demonstrated the ability to process devices at linewidth geometries down to 20-nm (0.02-micron). The company's first tool, dubbed the Imprio 100, will be formally introduced at the...

IBM will announce a new low-end server Wednesday, its first Power processor-based system that can run the Linux operating system without needing IBM's AIX as well. IBM's pSeries machines already are available with Linux but have also required AIX, IBM's version of Unix. Now, as expected, Big Blue has modified Linux sufficiently that its p630 servers will start up without AIX. The p630 is the lowest-end product to use IBM's 64-bit Power4 processor, and Big Blue is positioning the product as a lower-cost Linux alternative to Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based offerings. Itanium, like Power4 and Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc, is a 64-bit processor...

Summary of slides in PDF file, which can be read (or saved by right clicking) on this Link Large Scale Goal of 100-million domestic users Biometric Fingerprint-based (price/performance, mechanical footprint, and high user acceptance) Personal Search Code used to basket users Point of Sale Open system (biometric algorithms & sensors) High transaction volume Establish regional hubs with optional in-store servers Account data Credit, Debit, Check/ACH, Rewards/Account info Count the cards in your wallet… Speed Must be fast Target: 2 seconds, front-to-back Easy to remember personal search code Focus of Environments Multi-Lane Retail Speed, though this won’t be the limiting factor...

  Fasten your seatbelts: Peter Jackson's second Lord of the Rings installment will feature one of the most spectacular battle scenes in film history, a product of the digital dark arts. by Dan Koeppel   AGENTS OF DESTRUCTION:Thousands of digitally created fighters clash with humanity in the Battle of Helm’s Deep, top. Bottom: A Massive agent uncloaked.   IN DECEMBER VAST HORDES OF EAGER FILMGOERS will mob cineplexes across the land and witness, at the climax of The Two Towers, one of the most anticipated scenes in recent movie history: the great Battle of Helm's Deep. The Two Towers is...

NASA nanometer breakthrough uses hot pond protein You couldn't make it up By Paul Hales: Wednesday 27 November 2002, 11:35 NASA SCIENTISTS say they have invented a breakthrough biological method to make ultra-small structures that could be used to produce electronics 10 to 100 times smaller than today’s components. The scientists apparently use modified proteins from 'extremophile' microbes to grow mesh-like structures so small that an electron microscope is needed to see them. These naturally-occurring microbes live in near-boiling, acidic hot springs, according to an article in on-line version of the journal Nature Materials. One of the scientists, Andrew McMillan,...