What’s cooler than jetting from Paris to Tokyo in under three hours? Getting there in a biofuel burning hybrid rocketplane. The recently announced superjet, the Zehst (short for “Zero Emission Hypersonic Transportation”), loopholes around the whole pollution angle by only using its rocket engines in the stratosphere. Below the ozone however, seaweed-biofuel powered jet engines will kick in for some keen, green landings. Don’t get too excited though, the EADS won’t even have a prototype ready until 2020, and commercial flights aren’t expected to follow until the hump of the century. Look on the bright side though, you’ve still got that airline-approved Galaxy Tab to keep you occupied for the next four decades of long, dark, redeyes. That’s almost as cool, right?
Remember the K — the Fujitsu supercomputer that promised to do a whopping ten petaflops by the year 2012? Well, it hasn’t reached that threshold just yet, but according to the latest Top 500 supercomputer list, it’s still faster than any other machine on Earth.
In fact, the top-ranked beast is more powerful than the next five supercomputers combined, consumes enough electricity to power about 10,000 homes for a full year, and is capable of churning out about 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second — three times as many as what runner-up (and former number-one) Tianhe-1A can process.
Today’s announcement marks the first time since 2004 that a Japanese creation sits atop Top500.org’s rankings, but Fujitsu isn’t exactly resting on its laurels. Before deploying it next year, engineers at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science are aiming to add about 100,000 cores to the K’s collection of 548,352, which would provide it with even more computational muscle, and likely spell doom for all of humanity.
Microsoft said that it would reveal more about Windows 8 in September, but it didn’t give anything away about when customers would start using the new OS. However, Microsoft Corporate VP Dan’l Lewin gave hints at a start-up LAUNCH event at the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus that Windows 8 could be on target for a Fall 2012 release.
TechRadar quoted Lewin saying: “we will be in market – if you look at the crystal ball and just say what happened in the past is a reasonable indicator of what our forward looking timelines will be and just speculate – we’ve made the point about having a developer conference later this year, and then typically we enter a beta phase, and then in 12 months we’re in the market, so let’s make that assumption.”
Microsoft will be holding its BUILD conference this year September 13 to 16 in Anaheim. Hopefully there will be more news by then.
The iPhone 4 has a very high-resolution screen (for a smartphone) packed into a small space. The intense pixel density of 326 ppi means that the dots are so small that they’re almost imperceptible. Apple markets this as Retina Display, and it’s a key differentiation point when comparing iPhone hardware against other handsets.
Some figured that Apple would be bringing a Retina Display to the iPad 2, but that didn’t happen and the current iPad still has the same 1024×768 resolution as the original model.
New hints have been discovered in the iOS 5 developer beta software that strongly suggests that Apple is prepping for something that has four times the resolution of the current iPad.
Graphics for the Apple’s Newstand application on the iPad come in both the current 1024×768 resolution as well as 1536×2048. Artwork for the new Twitter framework also references the new resolution. See screenshots of it at Techunwrapped.
Reuters this week also cited sources saying that the next iPad will have a new screen with five to six times the resolution.
These graphics could be just a test for Apple, but it wouldn’t be a far leap to assume that iPad 3 will be launched with a high-resolution screen sometime during iOS 5′s shelf life.
Google’s Chrome browser is very much engineered for speed. Software optimizations can only take you so far until the bottleneck becomes latency and bandwidth of your connection.
In the next version of Chrome, Google will be employing a background pre-loading trick that many other web accelerators have been using for years. Google says that it has an algorithm to know when Chrome can confidently preload the top search result so that when it’s clicked, it will load instantly.
What is prerendering? Sometimes a site may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which link the user is most likely to click on next–for example, the ‘next page’ link in a multi-page news article. In those cases, it would be faster and better for the user if the browser could get a head start loading the next page so that when the user clicks the page is already well on its way to being loaded. That’s the fundamental idea behind prerendering. The browser fetches all of the sub-resources and does all of the work necessary to display the page. In many cases, the site simply seems to load instantly when the user clicks.
Although Google.com is the most high profile site to use prerendering, it’s a technology that is available to any site. Triggering prerendering well, however, is challenging to do correctly and will only be useful to a handful of sites that have a high degree of certainty of where their users will click next. Triggering prerendering for the wrong site could lead to the link the user did click on loading more slowly.
Instant pages will be in the next version of Chrome, but those who are adventurous can try a developer version here.
TorrentFreak has gained access to a lawsuit filed by San Francisco-based Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network against BitTorrent, Inc. claiming that uTorrent and the BitTorrent Mainline client infringes on a file-sharing related patent. The lawsuit was filed at a U.S. District Court this week and seeks monetary compensation for losses the ongoing patent infringement has caused the plaintiff.
According to the lawsuit, BitTorrent is infringing on a patent originally filed back in April 1999. “By making, operating, using and/or selling [uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline] and or other software, BitTorrent has infringed and continues to infringe, contribute to the infringement, or induce the infringement of at least claim 1 of the ’944 patent,” the complaint reads.
Tranz-Send’s patent, “Media file distribution with adaptive transmission protocols” which was finally granted in November 2007, describes a file-sharing system consisting of a file database, a transfer client and a distribution server that doesn’t necessarily describe the way BitTorrent tosses data around between clients. Read more…
Microsoft wants Windows 7 to grow to surpass Windows XP as the most popular operating system in the world. While the problem in getting users to transition away from Windows XP may be just due to older hardware, Microsoft is still hitting all the demographics.
With that in mind, Microsoft has just made available the official Justin Bieber theme for Windows 7. That’s right, images and other theme items are lifted from material related to the Justin Bieber film, “Never Say Never”.
That’s right, Microsoft is making Windows 7 appealing to tweenage girls too. Check out the Windows 7 theme at the link below. This could also make a great “prank” by plastering your friend’s Windows 7 machine with some Bieber Fever, unless they’re already infected by the fever that is.
Although this concept just looks like any typical stylish, stainless steel, touch screen enabled LCD watch on the surface; it actually comes equipped with a safety precaution to make sure its user practices safe drinking shenanigans. With a simple press of the drink icon located on the screen of the watch, users are able to blow into the watch to get an accurate reading of their blood alcohol content level.
With an indication of the user’s level of sobriety (or lack of) it will be easier to make a safe and informed decision about driving home or hitching a ride with somebody else. For the alcohol loving folk who are too intoxicated to realize their impaired judgement and likely regrettable behavior, perhaps this handy watch will bring them to a sobering reality. Regardless of the situation, wearing one of these watches is a perfect way to stay safe without compromising style.
Microsoft wants Windows 7 to grow to surpass Windows XP as the most popular operating system in the world. While the problem in getting users to transition away from Windows XP may be just due to older hardware, Microsoft is still hitting all the demographics.
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