Well, I decided to remove the forums from my site, and create a blog-style website. It’s all default theme etc at the moment, I will slowly be designing a theme for the site, so check back soon.

You can also register on the site to post comments etc, I will also be needing some news posters, so if you have some spare time, please register, and email me: admin[at]austech.org with your username, and info regarding how much you can contribute etc.

-Juzman

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opencity writes “The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided … for now. ‘Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.’ Gizmodo also has a good photo.”

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kgagne writes “Computerworld has a blog with video about an $18,000 home theater system that Intel set up at Storage Networking World in order to promote their new home server system. But what’s really cool about this set up is that the server was connected to a 24″ iMac, an Apple TV, an Xbox 360, a Wii, an iPod Touch, a Nokia N810 mobile Internet tablet, various cameras and a 15″ wireless digital picture frame. The server was streaming all the various feeds to a top-of-the-line Pioneer Elite 50″ plasma TV. The Intel reps said the high-definition movie downloads, which could be browsed through a menu, were as high quality as those from a Pioneer Elite Blu-ray player they had set up.”

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Roland Piquepaille writes “Even with recent improvements in virtual reality technology, it’s still almost impossible to physically walk through virtual environments. Now, European researchers have started a project named CyberWalk and they’ll demonstrate next week their omni-directional treadmill, named CyberCarpet. According to ICT Results, the researchers ‘had to address five key issues: providing a surface to walk on, controlling the surface in a way that minimized forces on the user, developing a non-intrusive tracking system, displaying a high-quality visualization, and ensuring a natural human perception of the virtual environment.’ The researchers think that their new virtual environments would be used by architects and the gaming industry.” Additional details are also available via the project website.

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J. Dzhugashvili writes “Is Nvidia worried about the advent of both CPUs with graphics processor cores and Larrabee, Intel’s future discrete graphics processor? Judging by the tone adopted by Nvidia’s CEO during a financial analyst conference yesterday, not quite. Huang believes CPU-GPU hybrids will be no different (and just as slow) as today’s integrated graphics chipsets, and he thinks people will still pay for faster Nvidia GPUs. Regarding Larrabee, Huang says Nvidia is going to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ on Intel, and that Intel’s strategy of reinventing the wheel by ignoring years of graphics architecture R&D is fundamentally flawed. Nvidia also has some new hotness in the pipeline, such as its APX 2500 system-on-a-chip for handhelds and a new platform for VIA processors.”

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holy_calamity writes “IBM has created the first working ‘racetrack memory’ device — a technology we’ve discussed as it’s been touted as the future of memory. It works by writing bits using the magnetic domains inside a very thin wire. Those domain can be shunted along this ‘racetrack’ and past read heads.”

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Barence writes “PC Pro has up a look at Asus’ concept triple-GPU graphics card. It’s a tech demo, so it’s not going to see release at any point in the future, but it’s an interesting look at how far manufacturers can push technology, as well as just how inefficient multi-GPU graphics cards currently are. ‘Asus has spaced [the GPUs] out, placing one on the top of the card and two on the underside. This creates its own problem, though: attaching heatsinks and fans to both sides of the card would prevent it from fitting into some case arrangements, and defeat access to neighbouring expansion slots. So instead, Asus has used a low-profile heat-pipe system that channels the heat to a heatsink at the back of the card, from where it’s dissipated by externally-powered fluid cooling pipes.’”

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Pickens writes “Inexpensive GPS devices like the Zoombak (which costs just $200 plus $10 a month) have becomes so prevalent that some people are using them routinely to keep tabs on their most precious possessions. Kathy Besa has a Zoombak attached to the collar of her 5-year-old beagle, Buddy. If Buddy wanders more than 20 feet from the house, she gets a text message on her phone that says, ‘Buddy has left the premises.’ The small size made possible by chip advances over the last two or three years is enabling many novel uses of GPS tracking. An art collector in New York uses one when he transports million-dollar pieces, a home builder is putting them on expensive appliances to track them if they disappear from construction sites, a drug company is using them after millions of dollars in inventory turned up missing, and a mobile phone company is hiding them in some cellphone boxes to catch thieves.”

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HockeyPuck writes “The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. ‘It’s hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,’ said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company’s baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. ‘Hold your index finger out in front of your face,’ Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. ‘In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.’”

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An anonymous reader writes “Is there any end to this ubiquitous computing thing? Plants that send thank you notes, player pianos that follow the dancer’s movements, and umbrellas that warn you of upcoming rain are just a few of the uses of embedded computers described in this article from the NY Times. Laptops seem so dull when it’s easy to embed chips, install a Linux distro and sew them into your clothes. Do we really need to wear our computers? Why can’t the world be happy with a good old desktop? It was good enough for the PC generation.”

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