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"With these three skills combined. There’s only one limitation; your own imagination. Wolfram Alpha shows us the future of search engines." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

"The aircraft performed a series of runs at low speed during which the aircraft's braking and steering systems underwent initial tests. Operating at speeds up to 20kt, the crew tested the normal, alternate and emergency braking systems; the anti-skid system; and the nosewheel steering and reverse power. Maneuvers conducted during the 90 minute sortie included 180 degree turns and taxiing in reverse." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

"Dutch airline KLM has made the latest step in what appears to be a rush by airlines to demonstrate the use of alternative fuels. The airline made what it is calling the first passenger flight using biofuel. KLM completed the flight with one of its Boeing 747s using a 50 percent biokerosene mix to fuel one of the airplane’s four engines. On board during the hour long flight over the Netherlands were about 40 people including journalists, politicians, and the Dutch director of the World Wildlife Fund. The flight was not a scheduled flight, just a demonstration of the ability to use of biofuels." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

"They could hold 50 to 200 percent more charge than similar conducting polymer batteries, and once better optimized, they might even be competitive with commercial lithium batteries, the researchers noted. They also recharged much faster than conventional rechargeable batteries — while a regular battery takes at least an hour to recharge, the new batteries could recharge in anywhere from eight minutes to just 11 seconds. The new battery also showed a dramatic boost in the ability to hold a charge over use. While a comparable polymer battery showed a 50 percent drop in the amount of charge it could hold after 60 cycles of discharging and recharging, the new battery showed just a 6 percent loss through 100 charging cycles." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"The latest step in fuel cell flight has taken to the skies with the world’s first hydrogen helicopter flew for more than 20 minutes. The technology demonstrator developed by United Technologies Corp. features a proton exchange membrane fuel cell. There’s one small catch — the helicopter has a rotor diameter of two meters. The remote control copter was designed to run on batteries. UTC modified it to use a fuel cell, and the flight was made entirely with hydrogen. Despite the diminutive size of the helo, Dr. David Parekh of UTC called it a significant step forward because of the unique challenges of helicopter flight. “Achieving vertical flight represents a key milestone in fuel cell-powered flight as the power density requirements are much greater than for fixed wing aircraft,” he said." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"To slash CO2 significantly, the engine also needs an advanced design. The Enzo’s V12 will make way for a new direct-injection twin-turbo V8 – the same layout as in the legendary F40. Output is likely to be on a par with the Enzo’s 660bhp, but that lower weight should put performance on another level. Expect a three-second 0-60mph time and top speed in excess of 230mph. A twin-turbo V6 is also under consideration, to replace the 458 Italia and California’s V8s. Yet before either unit is signed off, engineers are keen to eliminate turbo lag." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Powered by Rolls-Royce BR725 engines, the bird is capable of traveling 7,000 nautical miles at 0.85 Mach and has a maximum operating speed of 0.925 Mach. Its 7,000-nautical-mile range means the G650 can fly nonstop from Dubai to Chicago. With an initial cruise altitude of 41,000 feet at 0.85 Mach, the G650 can climb to a maximum altitude of 51,000 feet and avoid traffic and inclement weather." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"the real reasons for touch-screen mishits are finger orientation and variation between users, suggests a study by Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. More importantly, they can be corrected." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

mis-hits... - TrafficBug

"The World Wide Web Consortium has published a draft of an interface that browsers can use to manipulate files better, one of a series of steps aimed at gradually improving the sophistication and polish of Web site interfaces. The draft File API (application programming interface) defines a number of ways that browsers and Web sites can handle files better. One big part of it: being able to select multiple files for upload, such as on photo-sharing sites or Web-based e-mail, a task that often relies on Adobe Systems' Flash today." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

Another wanted standard could be controlling the order of images loaded on a page with priority assigned to each, and instructing the browser to only download images below a certain size threshold... - TrafficBug

"The new GPU cluster will complement the supercomputing resources available to CSIRO researchers such as the recently installed NCI facility at the Australian National University. The cluster will allow CSIRO scientists to explore what may well be the next generation approach to supercomputing, the use of GPU technology for parallel processing. The CSIRO GPU cluster will be launched today in Canberra. The first of its kind in Australia, the cluster is about the size of six large refrigerators and contains 61 440 compute cores." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"The heart of QPACE is the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, an enhancement of the Cell/B.E. processor, which originally was developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for the Sony PlayStation 3. With its nine processor cores, the chip can carry out a very large number of calculations simultaneously and at a high speed. The novel concept of QPACE consists of connecting processors by a network of programmable units, called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), to an efficient scalable computer. Each of the QPACE installations in Jülich and Wuppertal can reach a maximum performance of 100 TeraFlops (double precision). That equates to 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) computing operations per second. As a result of the scalability of the network, it is in principle possible to increase the performance to the PetaFlops scale (one quadrillion operations per second). The technology concepts developed for the QPACE project are setting the trend for future high-performance computers. One example of this... more... - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

That's some piece of hardware I'd like to own :) - Ibrahim El Issaoui

GhettoBlaster mp3 :) - alexxandra from Bookmarklet

"The price of supercomputers is dropping quickly, in part because they are often built with the same off-the-shelf parts found in PCs, as a supercomputing conference here last week made clear. Just about any organization with a few million dollars can now buy or assemble a top-flight machine. Meanwhile, research groups and companies like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Intel are finding ways to make vast stores of information available online through so-called cloud computing. These advances are pulling down the high walls around computing-intensive research. A result could be a democratization that gives ordinary people with a novel idea a chance to explore their curiosity with heavy computing firepower — and maybe find something unexpected." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. Developer.linkedin.com is now live and open for business." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

"MathOptimizer enables the global and local numerical solution of a very general class of optimization problems defined by a finite number of real-valued, continuous functions over a finite n-dimensional interval region. Special emphasis is placed on nonlinear models, including those that typically have an unknown number of local optima. Nonlinear and global optimization problems are ubiquitous in the sciences, engineering, and economics. Several prominent examples are systems of nonlinear equations and inequalities, nonlinear regression, forecasting models, data classification, minimal-energy models, various packing problems, risk management and other stochastic decision problems, and the design and operation of "black box" engineering systems (which are often defined by a complicated, numerically intensive procedure)." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

"Analog Insydes is a Mathematica application package for modeling, analysis, and design of analog electronic circuits, tailored specifically for industrial applications. With Analog Insydes and Mathematica you can do all of the following in one integrated environment: * Describe linear and nonlinear circuits and control systems by means of hierarchical netlists * Set up circuit equations from netlists in the frequency and time domains * Compute transfer functions symbolically * Extract approximated symbolic design formulas * Simulate transient responses of nonlinear dynamic circuits * Visualize your analysis results with custom graphics functions * Document your work with text, formulas, and circuit schematics" - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

"A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

By replacing the brain with partial electronic circuitry, one could theoretically live forever but it would be kinda scary to look at such old people. But the applications seem interesting - one could digitize and store thoughts into a memory database, thus if you read it once, its all in your memory bank, indexed and ready to query. Students do not need to byheart anything, everything is available just by reading it once. - TrafficBug

"While no emissions-measuring method has proven itself as ultimately superior, analyses of carbon requirements and total fuel-cycle emissions show most biofuels to be cleaner than gasoline. However, inclusion of land-use impacts can completely cancel out such cleanliness, and prove biofuels to be even worse environmentally than gasoline. Moreover, infrastructure issues are substantial for biofuels, with numerous analyses showing that the United States is simply not ready to produce or distribute biofuels on a large-scale." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"In a study the National Academy of Engineering began in 2006, it concluded that “offshoring appears to have contributed to the competitive advantage of U-S.-based firms in a variety of industries, and the negative impacts of offshoring on U.S. engineering appear to have been relatively modest to date.”" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"U.S. Navy is getting out front with the development of a new ship class capable of modular reconfiguration to cope with various threats. The new ship is called the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). At least fifty-five of these ships are planned, expected to be 17 percent of the total future fleet. The plug-and-play terminology is borrowed from computers, where drivers for various accessories are already included, making reconfiguration easy." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"By matching children with rare or life-threatening diseases and modelling potential disease progression, researchers hope to find new routes forward. Software tools are being developed that can search and compare patient data at hospitals across Europe to find children with closely matched conditions. The doctors can then study how the matched patients at other hospitals were treated and whether that treatment was successful. The information will greatly improve doctors’ ability to choose the right path for their own patient." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Here's the Top 10: Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.75 petaflop/s) Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.04 petaflop/s) Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences (832 teraflop/s) JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich (825.5 teraflop/s) Tianhe-1, NUDT, National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin (563.1 teraflop/s) Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research Center (544.3 teraflop/s) BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflop/s) BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (458.61 teraflop/s) Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.20 teraflop/s) Red Sky, Sun, Sandia National Laboratories (423.9 teraflop/s)" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Over the next few months, powerful phones will be released. Sony Ericsson and Samsung are confirmed to be pushing out phones in the 800 MHz to 1 GHz range. It’s an exciting time for Android. Now it’s Google’s turn to play catch up, so to speak. The hardware is coming. Now the software has to learn to utilize the extra power it will be granted." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

Nope. - Zachary TG

"Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.'s 16-deck Oasis of the Seas docked Friday at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. It set sail from Finland to Florida in late October. The massive $1.5 billion vessel is nearly 40 percent larger than the industry's next-biggest ship and five times larger than the Titanic. It has 2,700 cabins and can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,100 crew members. The ship also features various "neighborhoods" - parks, squares and arenas with special themes. One of them will be a tropical environment that will include palm trees." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Engineering schools across the country report students are showing an enthusiasm for hands-on work that hasn't been seen in years. Workshops for people to share tools and ideas -- called "hackerspaces" -- are popping up all over the country; there are 124 hackerspaces in the U.S., according to a member-run group that keeps track, up from a handful at the start of last year. SparkFun Electronics Inc., which sells electronic parts to tinkerers, expects sales of about $10 million this year, up from $6 million in 2008. "Make" magazine, with articles on building items such as solar hot tubs and autopilots for robots, has grown from 22,000 subscribers in 2005 to more than 100,000 now. Its annual "Maker Faire" in San Mateo, Calif., attracted 75,000 people this year." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"By turning the brain cell activity underlying fly eyesight into mathematical equations, researchers have found an ultra-efficient method for pulling motion patterns from raw visual data." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"nationalization effectively halted renewable-energy projects, like a plan by the AES Corporation, which used to control the main electricity company in Caracas, for a wind farm on the Paraguaná Peninsula. Despite Venezuela’s large wind and solar potential, renewable energy here remains negligible. Most significant, though, may be the government’s failure to use its immense natural gas reserves, the second largest in the Western Hemisphere after those of the United States, to fuel existing power plants. Venezuela’s gas is technically hard to extract because almost 90 percent of it is associated with oil, but major projects have languished even as Venezuela’s neighbor, Trinidad, taps adjacent gas reserves with ease. Venezuela relies on Colombia, with which ties are increasingly tense, for gas imports. As a result, there is a disconnect between Venezuela’s energy potential and its ability to keep the lights on." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

Hugo Chavez is a prime example of how not to run a country. - Stephan Planken

"The trend has raised fears among business and political leaders south of the border, who see skilled immigrants as key drivers of economic growth. “The smartest people want to come here and that’s a huge advantage to us,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates told a congressional committee last month. “In a sense, we’re turning them away.” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been calling for an increase in the number of visas, citing Canada, among other countries, as a destination for talent. He points to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy, which found that every time an American technology company requested an H-1B visa position, it added five additional jobs." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

great! thank for the commercial, now piss off! - Aaron Kendrick

isn't apple the only one that causes such ridiculous problems? other devices like android and blackberry never have such issues, regardless of carrier - Mike Chelen