Tech Today w/ Ken May

An anonymous reader writes “Researchers at Notre Dame have created a nanoparticle paste, which acts as the main ingredient in solar cells that are very easy to construct. In a short video clip, they can be seen assembling a functional solar cell with little more than a heat gun, tape, and some binder clips. The paste is made from a mix of t-butanol, water, and a mix of cadmium selenide with cadmium sulfide nanoparticles. So far, the experimental devices are not nearly as efficient as standard solar cells, but they were just developed. If the materials were slightly less toxic, it might even be a project that kids could do at home.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Solar Cells Made From a Spreadable Nanoparticle Paste

It’s true. According to Bill Colton, a VP at ExxonMobil, a single gallon of gas has enough energy to charge an iPhone once a day for 20 years. Of course, that’s never going to happen but it’s a point ExxonMobil uses to stress the fact that there is a lot of energy in gasoline. More »

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A Gallon of Gas Can Power an iPhone for 20 Years [Factoid]

Gremlin sez, “Sonos recently pushed an update to their once stellar music system which disabled windows DRM. They decided that it was unnecessary to continue to support this feature moving forward. Unfortunately they also pushed this update without warning to many customers, and they are offering no way for those customers to roll back to the previous version. Their answer to those customers effected is that they’ve made the decision for us. Many customers have been complaining, but it sets a dangerous precedent for them to be able to remove features at will. Today it’s a lightly used DRM system (mostly it effects people using Zune Pass at this point) tomorrow maybe it’ll be Sirius Satellite, spotify, or something else more people use. We’ve suggested that we’d be fine with them allowing us to roll back and making the decision ourselves to not take future update but they will not allow this to occur.”

It’s entirely possible that the decision wasn’t Sonos’s to make. After all, DRM license agreements routinely provide for “revocation” in which a DRM vendor or licensing body reserves the right to order its partners to discontinue the playback of its DRM for some reason or another. Which is one of the great dangers of DRM: you buy a device with six features today, and tomorrow it has five, or four, or three, or none. The negotiations resulting in these confiscations are confidential, conducted between giant corporations without any input from the people who’ve bought the equipment and the media to play on it.

I wrote a long, open letter to Wired editor Chris Anderson about this in 1994, when he told me that rejecting DRM was “idealistic” and defended taking a “pragmatic stance” when reviewing technology that had DRM in it. But worrying about what happens when your devices are designed to be remotely deactivated without your consent or knowledge is eminently pragmatic and has nothing to do with idealism, as we keep on learning.

Question 3.6 “Sonos will no longer support the Windows Media DRM format”

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Sonos removes Windows DRM playback, customers left high & dry

The biggest hindrance to consumer adoption of 3D technology thus far has been a lack of content, and price, of course. While I can’t vouch for their price tags quite yet, it would seem that Stream TV Networks has come up with some new 3D technology that could make that whole limited content thing much less of an issue.

How, you ask? Well, for one thing the new Ultra-D tech converts 2D content to 3D. But it gets better. Not only will that content be brought over to the third dimension, but you won’t have to wear any clunky glasses to enjoy it. Ultra-D technology also converts 3D content to autostereoscopic (sans glasses) 3D. It also works with just about any format, from Blu-rays and DVDs to PC games to cable and satellite content, and all the conversion is done in real time.

Stream TV Networks, under the Ultra-D brand, has 3D-capable products coming out for TVs, converter boxes, tabs, PCs of all shapes and sizes, smartphones, and even digital signage and picture frames. The technology also allows for the user to customize the 3D effect, letting users increase or decrease the real-time 3D rendering effect.

Products will be announced at CES, and we’ll be there to keep you in the loop. ‘Til then, pop on those glasses.

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Stream TV Networks Introduces Ultra-D: Glasses-Free 3D Conversion Tech

MojoKid writes “Rumors of AMD’s Southern Island family of graphics processors have circulated for some time, though today AMD is officially announcing their latest flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970. AMD’s new Tahiti GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors with a 925MHz engine clock, featuring AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. And yes, it’s crazy fast as you’d expect and supports DX11.1 rendering. In the benchmarks, the new Radeon HD 7970 bests NVIDIA’s fastest single GPU GeForce GTX 580 card by a comfortable margin of 15 — 20 percent and can even approach some dual GPU configurations in certain tests.” PC Perspective has a similarly positive writeup. There are people who will pay $549 for a video card, and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested

Researchers from Kyoto University have discovered a new technique that could dramatically improve the efficiency of some semiconductors. They took gallium arsenide, and blasted it with a terahertz range electric field pulse for just a picosecond, which lead to a 1,000-fold increase in exciton density. An exciton is a pair of an electron and a positively charged area it came from, which are attracted to each other and recombine to luminesce. They’re how we get light out of LEDs and other applications, and this new technique could make them dramatically more efficient. More »

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Hitting semiconductors with a superfast electric pulse massively increases their efficiency [Materials Science]

A fresh contender for your blow-out 2012 Olympic gaming rig: AMD’s first 28nm GPU, the Radeon HD 7970. It’s scheduled to arrive on January 9th, priced at $549 — nearly $200 more than its direct ancestor, the 6970. Then again, this newcomer packs some supremely athletic specs, including a 925MHz engine clock that can be readily OC’d to 1.1GHz, 2,048 stream processors and an uncommonly muscular 384-bit memory bus serving 3GB of GDDR5. At the same time, AMD hopes to make the card more practical than the dual-processor 6990 by bringing the card’s power consumption down to less than 300W under load and a mere 3W in ‘long idle’ mode, and promising quieter cooling thanks to improved airflow and a bigger fan. We’ll have to wait for benchmarks in January before we hand out any medals, but in the meantime NVIDIA’s forthcoming 28nm Kepler GPU might want to step up its training schedule.

Continue reading AMD announces next-gen Radeon HD 7970 for $549, says it ‘soundly beats’ rivals

AMD announces next-gen Radeon HD 7970 for $549, says it ‘soundly beats’ rivals originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AMD announces next-gen Radeon HD 7970 for $549, says it ‘soundly beats’ rivals

1sockchuck writes “A new data center project in Norway plans to use a fjord-powered cooling system, drawing cold water from an adjacent fjord to cool data halls. The fjord provides a ready supply of water at 8 degrees C (46 degrees F), eliminating the need for an energy-hungry chiller. The Green Mountain Data Center joins a small but growing number of data centers are slashing their cooling costs by using the environment as their chiller, tapping nearby lakes, wells and even the Baltic Sea.”

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The Fjord-Cooled Data Center

No interest in snapping up an iCade? No sweat. Jim VanDeventer has just pushed today’s app-to-end-all-apps into Apple’s App Store, and while it’s only been live for a few hours, iMAME is already on a mission to change the world. Built-in titles include Circus, Crash, Hard Hat, Fire One, Robot Bowl, Side Track, Spectar, Star Fire and Targ, and while it’s not officially endorsed by Nicola Salmoria or the MAME Team, you can certainly pretend. It’s available now in the source link for precisely nothing, and yes, both the iPhone and iPad (and iPod touch!) are supported. Get it while the gettin’ is good.

[Thanks, Gary]

iMAME emulation app hits the App Store, humanity cheers in unison originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iMAME emulation app hits the App Store, humanity cheers in unison