Category: Sci/Tech

Look out, satellite radio, here comes The Brain …er… I mean Steve Jobs and his bid to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Apple has switched on the houselights for their Podcast subscription feature built into iTunes version 4.9. Now you can search on and subscribe to podcasts, see the top downloaded ‘casts, and I bet soon, view celebrity podcast subscription lists.

Watching the vid last night of Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and his rumored, but still shocking to hear, announcement that Apple was switching from IBM’s PowerPC technology to Intel processors, I immediately thought: “Wait a minute. Hasn’t Apple spent a bunch of time arguing that PowerPC-based chips provide the fastest desktop architecture on the planet? So, how is all this so earth-shattering? Isn’t Apple moving backwards?” TUAW asks the same question this morning. The comments to the blog item respond in the same way that I did to myself (hey, when it’s 3:30am and I’m up watching a devconf keynote, I’m allowed to talk to myself): Jobs was talking about future Intel-based processors, not the current product line. Allegedly, Apple and Intel engineers will work (I’m sure already are working) together to build new chips that Apple will hype to death like they did the existing PowerPC processors.

On a related note, our favorite(?) cyber-curmudgeon John C. Dvorak has an interesting piece in his Second Opinion column today about how, strangely enough, Linux might be the big loser in this bargain.

“3D printing,” “digital fabrication,” “person fabrication,” “Napster fabing:” Call it what you want, but the idea of creating a cheap and easy-to-use system for the “desktop” manufacturing of three dimensional objects, has been a hot R&D area in the last few years. This technology has taken another step forward with the recent announcement of the “Self-Replicating Rapid Prototyper,” or “RepRap,” a 3D fabricator that not only prints in plastics, but can also print electrical circuits into the structural material.

The brainchild of Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the UK, the continued development of RepRap will be made open source, with the design details available online. Bowyer sees a world in the near future where such desktop fabs could sell for a few hundred bucks and could even have a recycling feature so that when something broke, you would just feed it back into the machine and fab a new one. Cool!

[Thanks, Alberto!]

Gizmodo has a funny rag on a Mediabistro.com tech review writing seminar. They tell you to save your money, and spill all of our precious tech writer trade secrets in the posting, riffing on the seminar’s teaser text. Some of our favorites:

• Tricks to make your review a compelling read
Insider’s Tip: Start with a fond anecdote from your childhood, contrasted with an insulting or adulatory mention of the iPod. See: T; See Also: A.

• How to involve real people in a review story
Insider’s Tip: Invent likely-sounding names with likely-sounding color quotes, unless pitching to MIT Technology Review or Wired News. In those cases, make the color quotes from celebrities, whose quotes the media are legally not obligated to fact-check, especially if they are hilarious.

Ars Technica has a fascinating, in-depth look (Part 1, Part 2) at the core architecture of the Xbox 360’s Xenon processor and the system’s use of “procedural synthesis.” If you’ve been poking around the geekosphere recently, you’ve probably heard this term. The article explains the technology and what it means to next-gen computing. Here’s an interesting quote from the piece. I wonder how this will differ from the Cell processor?:

Xenon will be a streaming media monster, but the parts of the game engine that have to do with making the game fun to play (and not just pretty to look at) are probably going to suffer. Even if the PPE’s branch prediction is significantly better than I think it is, the relatively meager 1MB L2 cache that the game control, AI, and physics code will have to share with procedural synthesis and other graphics code will ensure that programmers have a hard time getting good performance out of non-graphics parts of the game.

[Via Evil Avatar]

In case you missed Cory’s posting on Boing Boing, we thought we’d make sure that all Street Techies know about the new EFF Action Alert asking you to email your Congresscritter about opposing any legislation that attempts to breath new life into the FCC’s broadcast flag legislation (which was unanimously struck down earlier this month).

Given all of the current media hoopla about Star Wars piracy (while the movie continues to break all box office records), now’s a good time to remind Congress that you don’t want the movie industry and the FCC dictating what sorts of digital media hardware you can have in your home.

The Alert is total push-button activism. All you do is enter your zipcode and press Submit to send a form letter to the appropriate lawmaker (or better yet, craft your own impassioned prose in the field provided).

Fascinating piece on LiveScience about R&D being done on nuclear batteries. The batteries get their power from decaying tritium which emits a radioactive gas that is then captured by a silicon wafer, a process (called “betavoltaics”) similar to solar power generation (photovoltaics).

The resulting batteries will be able to last for over a decade, making them ideal for powered implants, such as pacemakers. And you thought leaky silicone breast implants were a problem! Actually tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, is fairly safe and can be as easily contained as current dry-cell chemical batteries. The technology is also promising for use in things like long-range spacecraft and deep sea robotic probes.

A Federal Appeals Court in DC has tossed out the FCC’s “broadcast flag” rule which would have prevented all digital TVs (starting July 1) from recording or outputing unecrypted signals. On the EFF’s page about the decision, they say:

The court ruled, as we argued, that the FCC lacks the authority to regulate what happens inside your TV or computer once it has received a broadcast signal. The broadcast flag rule would have required all signal demodulators to “recognize and give effect to” a broadcast flag, forcing them not to record or output an unencrypted high-def digital signal if the flag were set. This technology mandate, set to take effect July 1, would have stopped the manufacture of open hardware that has enabled us to build our own digital television recorders.

This is great news!

[Thanks to Kate on the assist]

Fascinating piece on NPR about DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation) and it’s miraculous ability to seemingly “switch off” intractable depression in some patients.

[Thanks, Kate!]

A nine year old Pakistani girl has become a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). If you had any doubts that Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat, is right on the money, this goes a long way toward proving his point.