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Flexible Television And Computer Screens
Image courtesy of btopenworld.com
"Organic light emitting diodes have in recent years emerged as a promising low cost technology for making large area flat panel displays and flexible light emitting fabrics," explains Richard Martel, professor at the Universite de Montreal's chemistry department. "By using carbon nanotubes, a highly conductive and flexible tube shaped carbon nanostructure, thin sheets a few tens of nanometers in thickness can be fabricated following a procedure akin to making paper. These sheets preserve the conductivity and flexibility of the carbon nanotubes and are thin enough to be highly transparent." By following the fabrication procedure they developed, the scientists succeeded in producing a high-performance OLED on this new electrode material. In their work they also outline the parameters that can be further optimized in order improve the performance of their design. "In addition to their flexibility, carbon nanotube sheets exhibit many properties that make them an attractive alternative to transparent conducting oxides for display and lighting applications," says Carla Aguirre, a researcher at the École Polytechnique affiliated with the Universite de Montreal. "By applying the appropriate chemical therapy they can in principle be also made to replace the metal electrode in order to make OLEDs that emit light from both sides."........ Posted by: Ryan Permalink Source IBM Fine Tunes Mainframes For Net Biz
Driving this is the rising tide of services oriented architecture (SOA). Thanks to the Internet an explosion of interconnected business processes -- such as grocery chains cross-checking inventory and shipping with suppliers -- now flow through interconnected applications. And businesses are relying on modular code, or "services," to string together applications between different types of computers. As per a survey of U.S. and European companies by Forrester Research, nearly 70 percent of SOA users say they will increase their use of SOA, and 62 percent of organizations with more than 20,000 employees are currently using or plan to use SOAs in the next 12 months. Almost half of large enterprises that deploy SOAs are using the mainframe for strategic business transformation, said the report. "Mainframes -- which process much of the world's most strategic information and applications -- are now finding second careers as the hub for SOA," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "Customers today are just beginning to scratch the surface of what a services-oriented approach to software can do to make their businesses more responsive and opportunistic. By using mainframes to free up, connect and use information that's stored in applications, companies can bring products to market faster, make quicker connections with global business partners, deliver better service to customers and streamline their IT operations"......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Recognizing the Brightest Minds in Computer Science
Recognizing this broad challenge for academia, Microsoft's External Research & Programs group (ER&P) established the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship program in 2005 to identify and support the best and brightest minds working to solve complex challenges in computer science, engineering and applied sciences at universities throughout North America. The objective is to stimulate and support creative research by promising scientists who have the potential to make a profound impact in the "state of the art" in their respective disciplines. The program accepts just one nominee per university and includes a rigorous multi-round selection process that culminates in live interviews before a distinguished panel of reviewers from Microsoft Research and the academic community. In just the second year of the program, more than 100 faculty members applied for five coveted positions. Winners were announced on April 26. "Across the board, applicants for these fellowships represent some of the sharpest minds in science today," says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "Some of these scientists are working on ideas and concepts that sound like the stuff of science fiction movies, and it is very exciting for us to be able to support them in their work."........ Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Sony Vaio FE590 Review
The boot up time is a bit of a joke on this model, the splash screen can take almost a minute from the time you press the power button to the time the Windows XP loading screen appears. Once that windows logo is up this laptop flies taking barely 30 seconds from then to loading your own programs. This is a perfect gaming laptop in my opinion because the screen is so brilliant and the GPU handles games like Black and White 2 and Battle of the gods with ease, even on high settings. I would recommend at least 1GB of RAM to improve performance and gaming as the GPU borrows a fair chunk of it. This unit has never crashed or stalled on me yet -- surprising given I run Windows. Conclusion: Overall I'm extremely happy with this notebook as it's very powerful in every application I use it for. Despite its flaws I would definitely recommend this notebook if you're after something lightweight and with a great screen. Pros:
Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source How Internet Addiction Is Affecting Lives
While still not defined as a true addiction, a number of are suffering the consequences of obsession with the online world, unable to control their use. From gaming to sexual and emotional relationships, the internet is taking over lives. More and more people will be confronted with consequences such as divorce and physical symptoms which will force them to seek both medical and psychological therapy. Online marital infidelity (cybersex) can lead to divorce and harm personal relationships. Individuals who seek out sexual partners online also appear to be at higher risk for sexually transmitted disease. Furthermore, such behaviors can lead to cybersexual addiction. Prior studies have reported that "Approximately 9 million people, or 15 percent of Internet users, accessed one of the top adult Web sites in a 1-month period"......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Hybrid Hard Drive from Samsung and Microsoft
The drive comes with 128MB more storage capacity and will be used with Microsoft's Windows ReadyDrive. Apparetly, Vista will support this hybrid where the flash memory device which may well come Vista logo on it......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source When Silence Isn't Golden
The company's admission follows criticisms from a security researcher that its policy of silently fixing software flaws is "misleading" and not in the spirit of Microsoft's push for transparency. In an interview with eWEEK, Mike Reavey, operations manager of the MSRC (Microsoft Security Response Center), said the company's policy is to document the existence of internally discovered flaws as well as the area of functionality where the change occurred, but that full details on the fixes are withheld for a very good reason. "We want to make sure we don't give attackers any [additional] information that could be used against our customers. There is a balance between providing information to assess risk and giving out information that aids attackers," Reavey said......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Court Halts Spyware Operations
An operation that deceptively downloaded spyware onto unsuspecting consumers' computers, changing their settings and hijacking their search engines, has been halted by a federal court at the request of the Federal Trade Commission. The judge has ordered the operators to give up to more than $4 million in ill-gotten gains. The court also ordered a halt to another spyware operator's stealthy downloads and barred the collection of consumers' personal information, pending trial. The FTC sued both operations charging that the stealthy downloads of spyware were unfair and deceptive and violated federal law. Eventhough the companies used different techniques to direct consumers to their Web sites and implement the downloads, the FTC alleged that both operations hijacked consumers' computers without the consumers' knowledge or approval, secretly changed their settings, and barraged consumers with pop-up ads. The spyware and other software the defendants installed caused a number of computers to malfunction, slow down, or crash, causing consumers to lose data stored on their computers. The FTC alleged that Sanford Wallace and his company, Smartbot.Net, exploited a security vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer's Web browser in order to distribute spyware. The spyware caused the CD-ROM tray on computers to open and then issued a "FINAL WARNING!!" to computer screens with a message that said, "If your cd-rom drive's open.You DESPERATELY NEED to rid your system of spyware pop-ups IMMEDIATELY! Spyware programmers can control your computer hardware if you failed to protect your computer right at this moment! Download Spy Wiper NOW!" Spy Wiper and Spy Deleter, purported anti-spyware products the defendants promoted, sold for $30......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source New 'metal Sandwich' May Break Superconductor Record
The new lithium monoboride (LiB) compound is a "binary alloy" consisting of two layers of boron -- the "bread" of the atomic sandwich -- with lithium metal "filling" in between, the researchers said. Once the material is synthesized, it should be superconductive at a higher temperature than other superconductors in its class, according to their results. The researchers reported their findings in the May 5 online edition of the journal Physical Review B, Rapid Communications. "To the best of our knowledge, this alloy structure had not been considered before," said Stefano Curtarolo, professor of mechanical engineering and materials sciences at Duke's Pratt School. "We have been able to identify synthesis conditions under which the LiB compound should form. And we believe that if the material can be synthesized, it should superconduct at a higher temperature, perhaps more than 10 percent greater, than any other binary alloy superconductor". "The significance of the work is not only the discovery of lithium monoboride itself, but also that this opens the door to finding derivatives that could aid in the search for additional novel superconductors," added Aleksey Kolmogorov, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Pratt School. He said that once a new superconductive material is identified, scientists typically can manipulate the substance -- twisting it or doping it with other elements - to create related structures that might have even more appealing properties......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Basis Technology Releases Rosette Linguistics Platform 5.0
New features and improvements include: Rosette Entity Extractor (REX) - which identifies names, places, dates and other entities in unstructured text - has added Traditional Chinese to its list of ten supported languages, and improved its overall speed by an average of 35 percent. Specific language accuracy was also improved, highlighted by Chinese and Arabic, which increased by 27 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Rosette Language Identifier (RLI) - which identifies the language and encoding of a document - has improved accuracy on short text segments which help with the analysis of smaller documents, and has added Pashto, Somali, and Urdu detection. The addition of a Japanese Orthographic Analyzer (JOA) which allows search engines and text mining applications to find occurrences of words that have multiple spelling variations but shared meaning, a common and frequent instance in the Japanese language. JOA enhances RLP's Base Linguistics component which performs critical functions such as word segmentation, decompounding, and part-of-speech analysis......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source |
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