Tech Today w/ Ken May

Unfortunate news for anyone who saw HTC’s Sense 3.0 UI and started dreaming about seeing it on their Desire HD, Incredible S or any other handset that doesn’t ship with it preloaded. HTC has said that because of the hardware requirements of the fancier new Android skin, only the dual-core Sensation 4G and EVO 3D smartphones and the 1.5GHz Flyer tablet will be benefiting from it for now. The company’s expected to introduce more tablets in the summer and its inevitable march forward with smartphones will continue, but Sense 3.0 — and those delectable multifunctional lock screens — will remain the exclusive privilege of its highest-end devices.

Continue reading HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind

HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unfortunate news for anyone who saw HTC’s Sense 3.0 UI and started dreaming about seeing it on their Desire HD, Incredible S or any other handset that doesn’t ship with it preloaded. HTC has said that because of the hardware requirements of the fancier new Android skin, only the dual-core Sensation 4G and EVO 3D smartphones and the 1.5GHz Flyer tablet will be benefiting from it for now. The company’s expected to introduce more tablets in the summer and its inevitable march forward with smartphones will continue, but Sense 3.0 — and those delectable multifunctional lock screens — will remain the exclusive privilege of its highest-end devices.

Continue reading HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind

HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The FBI and the Justice Department on Wednesday began dismantling a ring of international computer thieves who have stolen an undetermined amount of money by infecting over 2.3 million computers with malicious software, the biggest such enforcement action U.S. authorities have ever taken against cyber criminals.

Read More:
US targets ring infecting 2.3 million computers

When the A4 came out, I was surprised at the fanfare surrounding it. Why such a big deal? Apple was now designing their own chips, isn’t that great?— came the echoing chorus. But they weren’t — the A4 was almost entirely a Samsung design implementing existing ARM processor tech. But Apple touched it, so it turned to gold. I kind of expected Apple to ride that wave for a while and just “overclock” the processor for the iPad 2, but to my surprise, out came the A5.

The decision to use a mostly off-the-shelf piece for the launch of a potentially disastrous product line (the iPad could easily have been bad, or at any rate unpopular) was one of economy; why go to the great expense of truly redesigning a chip, when tweaking an existing design will serve, and for a fraction of the cost? Chances are that development of a new chip would have happened sooner or later, but the success of the iPad made it a necessity to differentiate after that first volley.

This analysis of the A5 (based on the Chipworks images from last month) is five pages long, but is mostly meta-discussion, and the only real conclusion (considering how little is actually known about the SoC) is that while the CPU and GPU are licensed, the rest of the chip is kind of a mystery. By surface area, the CPU cores and GPU take up less than half the die. Assuming the usual business of memory management and I/O takes up another 10% or so, what is Apple doing with fully half of its design?

There’s no answer at present. But EE Times raises the possibility of a set of specialized chips set to do the kinds of calculations and transformations that Apple knows are absolutely necessary to the device. It could be the reason for, say, the smooth and responsive scrolling on web pages. A processor has to track those pixels, perform the little calculations that describe the input, and so on. Many little tasks that Apple may have essentially set aside die space for: a core or a fraction of a core totally dedicated to image filtering, JPEG decoding, accelerometer smoothing — things that might have been integrated by OEMs in the components, but which Apple could easily take over and bend to their own purposes.

It’s a truly custom-built system, and what makes it exciting is that these unknown functions could be almost anything — even unused. They could easily be for something like hardware video transcoding, or physics calculations, entire instruction sets that have yet to be implemented, but leave plenty of room for expansion in directions Apple has already charted.

I was bearish on the A4, but I’m bullish on the A5. I think we’ve only barely begun to see what it can do.

View article:
Analysis Of Apple’s A5: It’s Not What We Know, It’s What We Don’t Know

Taco shell made from Dorito chips? What can be more awesome? According to reports by Slashfood and Food Beast, Taco Bell is experimenting with Nacho Cheese Doritos Taco Shell.

What do you think? Will you eat it? Link

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Taco Bell’s Doritos Chip Taco Shell

Illustration: Kenji Aoki / The New York Times; Prop Stylist: Nell Tivnan.
Source: UI.S.D.A. 2009 Estimates

How much do we love sugar? The amount may surprise you – the average
American eat about 3,550 pounds of sugar and 313 gallons of high fructose
corn syrup in a lifetime. And according to Dr. Robert Lustig, UCSF expert
on pediatric hormone disorders and childhood obesity, it’s killing us:

Lustig’s argument, however, is not about the consumption
of empty calories — and biochemists have made the same case previously,
though not so publicly. It is that sugar has unique characteristics,
specifically in the way the human body metabolizes the fructose in it,
that may make it singularly harmful, at least if consumed in sufficient
quantities.

The phrase Lustig uses when he describes this concept is “isocaloric
but not isometabolic.” This means we can eat 100 calories of glucose
(from a potato or bread or other starch) or 100 calories of sugar (half
glucose and half fructose), and they will be metabolized differently
and have a different effect on the body. The calories are the same,
but the metabolic consequences are quite different.

Link

See also Lustig’s fascinating lecture, Sugar:
The Bitter Truth, about how bad the sweet stuff is for us:

View original post here:
Is Sugar Toxic?

I spent some time this morning watching the fascinating videos that illustrate the amazing mechanisms and geometrical solids discussed in the book How Round is Your Circle? by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin. They show linkages that allow you to draw an exact straight line, non-spherical solids that behave like ball bearings, a way to measure the area of an irregular shape with a coat hanger, and more. It’s fun stuff that’s reminiscent of Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Recreations” column from Scientific American.

How do you draw a straight line? How do you determine if a circle is really round? These may sound like simple or even trivial mathematical problems, but to an engineer the answers can mean the difference between success and failure. How Round Is Your Circle? invites readers to explore many of the same fundamental questions that working engineers deal with every day–it’s challenging, hands-on, and fun. John Bryant and Chris Sangwin illustrate how physical models are created from abstract mathematical ones. Using elementary geometry and trigonometry, they guide readers through paper-and-pencil reconstructions of mathematical problems and show them how to construct actual physical models themselves–directions included. It’s an effective and entertaining way to explain how applied mathematics and engineering work together to solve problems, everything from keeping a piston aligned in its cylinder to ensuring that automotive driveshafts rotate smoothly. Intriguingly, checking the roundness of a manufactured object is a trickier proposition than one might think. When does the width of a saw blade matter to an engineer’s calculations–or for that matter, the width of a physical line? When does a measurement need to be exact and when will an approximation suffice? Bryant and Sangwin tackle questions like these and enliven their discussions with many fascinating highlights from engineering history. Generously illustrated, How Round Is Your Circle? reveals some of the hidden complexities in everyday things.

How Round is Your Circle?

Follow this link:
How do you draw a straight line? How do you determine if a circle is really round?

More than half the internet is filled with videos and more than half the fun of videos is sharing them. Showyou combines all the videos shared from your friends and turns them into a personalized TV network for your iPad. The beautifully interactive 2D wall will give you material to watch for days. More

Several kinds of female animals, including spiders, are known to devour their male counterparts, often right after they finish having sex. But every so often, the female isn’t deadlier than the male, as South America’s wolf spider will tell you. More

I’ve always thought it nuts that many cruise ships have golf ball driving ranges where you hit into the open seas. Isn’t that, um, littering? Seems that University of Maine Researchers agreed, so they’ve developed a biodegradable golf ball from lobster shells. From UMaine News:

Though biodegradable golf balls already exist, this is the first to be made with crushed lobster shells with a biodegradable binder and coating, creating value from waste material.

“We’re using a byproduct of the lobster canning industry which is currently miserably underutilized —