You Can Now Buy This Tiny Computer for $35 (Updated)

Source: gizmodo

Over the past year, we've seen a lot to get excited about over this tiny computer, the Raspberry Pi. It can stream video via Airplay, can run Quake III, yet only costs $35. Fortunately, now you can buy it.
The Model B Raspberry Pi is just finishing production in China, but is now available for pre-order. It features an ARM11 processor, 256MB of RAM, 2 USB ports, a LAN port, an SD card slot, audio-out and HDMI-out. It's capable of running an Ubuntu install or a version of Xbox Media Center, but nothing comes per-installed so you'll be spending some time at a command line.
But the best bit is: it costs $35. Thirty. Five. Freakin'. Dollars. This thing is incredibly cheap, and a great way to get you—or your kids—into coding. In fact, the beauty of the Raspberry Pi business model is that all the profits will be pushed into a charity set up to encourage kids to get into coding, an initiative which will itself use these tiny computers.
You can buy Raspberry Pi online from Premier Farnell or RS Components.
Update: Demand is proving high, and the Farnell and RS websites are struggling to deal with the demand. Patience, young grasshopper.

How to prepare for Google's privacy changes

Source: CNN
By Doug Gross, CNN

(CNN) -- On Thursday, Google's much-discussed new privacy policy goes into effect.
To say that the change has stirred concern on the Web would be an understatement. Public officials and Web watchdogs in the United States and elsewhere have expressed fears that it will mean less privacy for users of the Web giant's multitude of products, from search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Maps to smartphones powered by the Android operating system.
Google points out that the products won't be collecting any more data about users than they were before. And, in fairness, the company has gone out of its way to prominently announce the product across all of its platforms for weeks.
The major change is that, instead of profiling users separately on each of its sites and products, Google will now pull all of that information together into one single profile, similar to what's found on Google's dashboard page.
The result encapsulates perhaps the most basic conundrum of the modern Web. More information means better service (and potentially, more targeted advertisements). But that service (in this case more accurate search results, more interesting ads and new features that work across multiple sites) requires you to give up some of your privacy in return.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz has called it "a somewhat brutal choice."
Google, not surprisingly, takes a different tack: The payoff for the company collecting your data is cool new services. For example, they could push cooking videos to you on YouTube if you'd been looking for recipes through Google search, privacy director Alma Whitten wrote in an editorial for the Sacramento Bee.
"We just want to use the information you already trust us with to make your experience better," she wrote. "If you don't think information sharing will improve your experience, you don't need to sign in to use services like Search, Maps and YouTube.
"If you are signed in, you can use our many privacy tools to do things like edit or turn off your search history, control the way Google tailors ads to your interests and browse the Web 'incognito' using Chrome."
Wednesday is the last day for people to tweak those Google settings before the new policy begins, although they can change them afterward as well.
Here are a few tips on how to keep your data a little more private on some of Google's most popular features.
Don't sign in
This is the easiest and most effective tip.
Many of Google's services -- most notably search, YouTube and Maps -- don't require you to sign in to use them. If you're not logged in, via Gmail or Google+, for example, Google doesn't know who you are and can't add data to your profile.
But to take a little more direct action ...

Removing your Google search history
Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has compiled a step-by-step guide to deleting and disabling your Web History, which includes the searches you've done and sites you've visited.
It's pretty quick and easy:
-- Sign in to your Google account
-- Go to www.google.com/history
-- Click "Remove all Web History"
-- Click "OK"
As the EFF notes, deleting your history will not prevent Google from using the information internally. But it will limit the amount of time that it's fully accessible. After 18 months, the data will become anonymous again and won't be used as part of your profile.
Six tips to protect your search privacy (from the EFF)
Clearing your YouTube history
Similarly, users may want to remove their history on YouTube. That's also pretty quick and easy.
-- Sign in on Google's main page
-- Click on "YouTube" in the toolbar at the top of the page
-- On the right of the page, click your user name and select "Video Manager"
-- Click "History" on the left of the page and then "Clear Viewing History"
-- Refresh the page and then click "Pause Viewing History"
-- You can clear your searches on YouTube by going back and choosing "Clear Search History" and doing the same steps.
Gmail Chat
When you start a chat with someone, you can make the conversation "off the record." Off-the-record chats will not be stored in your chat history or the history of the person with whom you're talking. All chats with that person will remain off the record until you change the status. To go off the record:
-- Click the "Actions" link at the top right of the chat window
-- Scroll down to "Go off the record." Both you and your chat partner will see that the chat has been taken off the record.

source: cnn

The Internet of the Future Will Be Powered by Optical RAM

Fiber optics are the future of data transfer. The problem is that when that light signal reaches a machine, it must be converted into an electrical signal copper-veined devices can handle, resulting in speed bottlenecks. But Japanese engineers at NTT think their groundbreaking optical RAM will allow for an internet backbone comprised entirely of light-based components.
According to PhysOrg and Nature Photonics, the optical RAM cells have memory gates that take 1s and 0s of binary code creates pulses of light by blocking or allowing light to pass.

To make the memory cell, the team buried a very tiny strip of indium gallium arsenide phosphide in a small piece of indium phosphide. The outer portion was then etched with holes small enough to control the flow of laser light of a certain frequency. They left a path running though the middle of the material un-etched to provide a means for light from a laser to move in and out of the cell.
When laser light is shone on the material, it follows the path through the memory cell and the refraction index is changed causing a pulse of light to either pass through on not, representing either a 1 or O state. Another pulse changes it to another state and so on. To help the memory material maintain its state, a second laser provides a constant stream of background light.

At 30 nanowatts, this optical RAM also consumes five times less power than a flash drive, and Nature says that it has the potential to scale on a large level. And having this in a huge data center somewhere will be cool, but I'll hold out hope that it'll make it into our computers someday.

Source: gizmodo

Code-cracking quantum computers leap closer to reality

Real-world computers that can speedily crack even the most secure codes are within grasp thanks to recent advances that will allow for so-called fault-tolerant quantum computers, according to an expert in the field.
Quantum computers differ from classical, or regular, computers at the most basic unit of information. In classical computing, the basic unit of information is a bit: either a 1 or 0.
"A quantum bit can do the same thing, but it can also be both [a 1 and a 0] at the same time, which is a very strange concept," Matthias Steffen, the manager of IBM's experimental quantum computing group, told me on Monday.
It's like being two places at once – here and there.
"What this enables you to do is to perform certain tasks much, much faster than you can with a classical computer," added Steffen, who will present IBM's most recent findings on quantum computing Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society.

Code crackingOne of the tasks researchers in quantum computing know for sure they can do faster is factoring – breaking a number down into its prime components, such as 3 and 5 are the prime factors of 15.
Most data encryption, Steffen explained, relies on the fact that factoring big numbers takes a long, long time. Being able to factor quickly is central to solving the complex math problems at the heart of encrypted data.
"On the quantum computer, you can perform these tasks exponentially faster, so that really has broad implications for data encryption," he noted.
Other potential uses for these futuristic computers may include more efficient searching through databases of unstructured information, perhaps to make sense of all the stuff we've revealed about ourselves in Google searches, Facebook status updates, and tweets.
Whether quantum computers will be used for database searches remains to be seen, partly because although quantum computing reduces the number of steps in any given calculation it requires a longer time on each step. "There will be a crossover somewhere," Steffen said, researchers just aren't sure where.

Error prone computersThat uncertainty stems, in part, from the fact that quantum computers were, until very recently, mostly a theoretical science experiment. Building practical quantum computers and figuring out their usefulness just hasn't been a priority.
The first order of business has been showing such a computer was even possible, which has been hampered because a quantum bit, when in the excited or "1" state, behaves like an artificial atom "and it can decay down from the 1 to 0 state, which would be an error," Steffen said.
One way to reduce this error is to make quantum bits live longer in this excited state. To do this, IBM researchers and colleagues have been working with a three-dimensional superconducting qubit that is a sandwich of a superconducting metal, a thin insulator, and a thin metal.
Experimental results show that this 3-D qubit maintains its coherence, or integrity, for up to 100 microseconds, which is a factor of 10,000 improvement over the state-of-the-art a decade ago, Steffen said.
What's more, this value reaches just beyond the minimum threshold to enable effective error correction schemes (ways to deal with faulty components), according to IBM. This, in turn, should free up engineers to begin thinking about how to build an actual quantum computer.
"It is not about one or two qubits anymore, it is how do I put ten of those on a chip," Steffen said.
"How do we actually get them to talk to each other? How do we get this to interface with the electronics we use, how do we write the software? How do we analyze all of our data?" he added. "That layer of the onion towards building a quantum computer is the next task we really have to delve into."
A functional computer with perhaps 100 qubits is plausible within 10 to 15 years, Steffen suggested. Getting there will require qubits with even longer coherence times, but reaching them is no longer as daunting, he added. And within his lifetime, he noted, a full scale quantum computer will likely exist.
When we have that computer, we'll have to figure out what to do with it, beyond cracking codes.
"There is great optimism that this will lead to something," Steffen said, "but it is not unambiguously clear at this point."

Source: John Roach, MSN

A $100 solar-powered tablet is coming soon

Source: By Laurie Segall @CNNMoneyTech February 24, 2012: 6:16 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- You may not have heard of Yves Behar, but chances are you've seen his designs.

He's the visionary behind the popular Jawbone Jambox sound system, Herman Miller's Sayl chairs, Swarovski chandeliers, and even New York City's free condoms.
The Swiss designer, now based in San Francisco, has plenty of commercial hits. That gives him the financial freedom to pursue his belief that design can change the world. It's a passion he put to work on his most famous project, One Laptop Per Child, better known as "the $100 laptop."
Now he's nearing completion of the sequel: A $100 tablet. It's rugged, solar-powered, and designed for children in the world's poorest countries.
"The tablet is a refinement of the laptop," Behar told CNN's Sanjay Gupta in interviews for The Next List. "It's much smaller, it's much lighter, it uses less energy, less materials -- it can be even more cost effective."
The project began six years ago when Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT's Media Lab, approached Behar with an idea many deemed impossible: create an inexpensive and impeccably designed laptop for children across the world.
"He described to me his vision of education, his vision for technology being available to all," Behar says."I got very inspired for the first time in the field of technology."
"It's in some sense more integral than food and water," Negroponte says of the project's mission. "With education, you can actually solve the water problem and the energy problems and, you know, the health problems."
It took years to turn the vision into reality, but OLPC has now distributed more than 2.5 million laptops around the world, stretching from Birmingham, Ala., to Uganda.
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, OLPC showed off its next breakthrough: the XO-3 tablet. Like the original laptop, it's designed to appeal to kids -- and to survive their rough handling.
The tablet's screen is both flexible and durable, Behar says. The bright-green cover includes a solar panel that lets the laptop charge in sunlight. Gizmodo raved about the demo model on display at CES, calling it "perfectly suited to its target environs." The XO-3 is slated for release later this year.
Behar is slowly expanding deeper into the tech realm. One of his newest creations is an app-powered, fitness-tracking wristband called Jawbone UP. It got off to a rocky start, but that doesn't faze Behar.
"I think many times in the last 10 or 11 years or so, we have created products and experiences and built brands where others didn't think it was possible," he says.
His latest pro bono project is another venture into uncharted territory.
After being approached by the Mexican government and Augen Optics to help with their "See Better to Learn Better" campaign, Behar designed a collection of customizable eye glasses that could be given away for free to students in Mexico.
"They were inspired by One Laptop Per Child," he says. "The manufacturing cost had to be extremely low, and at the same time they had to be really engaging."
That's the catch. "Children in Mexico and most of South America really see wearing eyeglasses as a stigma," Behar says. So he created an array of multi-colored glasses and encouraged children to have fun choosing their own colors.
Behar takes on those kinds of projects at no cost.
"I can't tell you that's what made business sense," he says. "But I can tell you that's what made human sense.

Source: cnn

New tests will tell the tale on faster-than-light neutrinos

By: msnbc.com staff and news service reports

Scientists look at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus detector, otherwise known as OPERA, at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory.

GENEVA — Physicists are to run new tests in May after Thursday's confirmation that a faulty connector could have been behind findings appearing to show that one of Albert Einstein's fundamental theories was wrong.

Last fall's results from the OPERA experiment appeared to contradict Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity, by suggesting that subatomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractionally faster than light.
Einstein's theory, which underpins the current view of how the universe works, says that nothing can travel faster than light. For decades, superluminal travel has been used as a science-fiction device to enable backward time travel, warp-speed exploration and other fictional wonders.


Europe's CERN research center said two possible effects had been identified that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement during its OPERA experiment. "New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May," it said in a statement. A similar statement was issued by Italy's INFN research center, which has been working with CERN on the experiment.
The OPERA experiment involves shooting neutrinos from CERN's facility on the French-Swiss border to INFN's Gran Sasso National Laboratory, 450 miles (732 kilometers) away. The faster-than-light finding was recorded when 15,000 neutrino beams were pumped over three years from CERN to Gran Sasson.
CERN said one of the potential effects concerned an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS (Global Positioning System) synchronizations, which could have led scientists to overestimate the neutrino's time of flight.

The other effect appeared likely to be more significant in the faster-than-light finding of the original OPERA experiment.

"The second concerns the optical fiber connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken," said CERN. "If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos."
Physicists had long suspected that some experimental flaw was behind the faster-than-light results but could not put their finger on it — until now. "A possible explanation has been found. But we won't know until we have tested it out with a new beam to Gran Sasso," CERN spokesman James Gillies told Reuters.
When the results were first reported, OPERA team members said they had checked and rechecked the experiment for many months, looking for anything that could have produced a misreading.
A second test whose results were announced in November appeared to provide further evidence that neutrinos were traveling faster than light. But many experts remained skeptical.
University of Chicago physicist Edward Blucher said the original finding would have been breathtaking if it had been true. As it was, the research inspired many spirited discussions, if few believers.
"I don't think I met anyone who said I bet it's going to be true. I think the people on the experiment worked as carefully as they could, and I think they ran out of ideas of what could be wrong and they decided to present it," he said. "Maybe they should have waited a few more months."



Source: msnbc

Look, no Hands! The Driverless Driving is Here

Will there be a time in our lives when cars don’t crash? When a Mustang can warn a BMW that it’s changing lanes – or when we can just sit back and relax and our cars will drive themselves?
Auto technology experts say “yes." And they say that some of those advances may happen quicker than you might think.
“We are seeing just seismic changes as we speak,” said Scott Belcher, president and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America.
Founded in 1991 as an advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Transportation, ITSA is now an independent non-profit that advocates for technology that will improve the safety and efficiency of cars and trucks.
On Tuesday, Consumer Reports announced that it now supports vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology – systems that essentially let cars talk to each other, helping avoid accidents in the process.
In the wake of the announcement, we chatted with Belcher about that and other tech that could be changing the way we drive (presumably for the better) in the next few years.

On vehicle-to-vehicle technology

"That's going to be our next major safety advance - on par with airbags or safety belts,” Belcher said.
Belcher said studies suggest that as many as 81 percent of “non-impaired” crashes could be avoided through vehicle-to-vehicle communication, which uses a dedicated part of the radio spectrum that’s been set aside by the federal government.
“That’s pretty huge,” he said. “That’s a big, big number.”
His group plans a pilot program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in which 3,000 cars will be equipped with the tech. Results will help highway-safety officials to decide whether to require the system in the future.

On cars that drive themselves

At first glance it seems like the stuff of science fiction. But Belcher said fully automated cars could be close at hand. In fact, he said, what might ultimately keep them off the road could be us.
“The question is going to be not whether we can do autonomous vehicles, but how much autonomy we are willing to put up with as a culture. We don’t really like to give up control of our vehicles," he said.
“But if you look at where we are today – the adaptive cruise control is semi-autonomous. Cars that park themselves – that’s autonomous. You’ve got buses that operate in rapid transit systems that, for the most part, are autonomous.”
He noted that Google has logged more than 200,000 miles with a driverless car in Nevada (where lawmakers are considering legislation to allow automated driving) and a challenge by the U.S. military’s DARPA in which contestants successfully piloted automated cars in an urban setting.
“It’s out there. But how quickly and how much we see it is really going to be dictated by society, not technology,” he said. “It’s going to be the liability issues, the control issues that are going to prevent it.
Volvo has a system that scans for pedestrians moving into the path of the vehicle and can even apply the brakes  to avoid hitting someone.

Society’s technology ‘tipping point’

Part of the reason car tech is moving so quickly, Belcher said, is that the public is demanding it and car manufacturers know they have to meet that demand or lose out to another company that does.
“We’ve become a society that has become dependent on our phones and dependent on our access to technology and our access to communication networks,” he said. “The car is just becoming an extension of that. We can’t imagine we’re going to lose that connectivity as soon as we get in the car.”
“We’re at this tipping point in society right now and it’s going to be fascinating to watch it play out. The cat’s out of the bag, so to speak.”
Automated cars, for example, could become a reality because of pressure from both ends of the driving spectrum.
For the oldest drivers, automation could become a way to keep driving longer, Belcher said. And for the youngest, car tech that lets them stay engaged with their other gadgets may eventually have more appeal than, say, stomping on the pedal of a 1970 Dodge Charger.
“They could care less about that,” he said. “They just want to play with their phone.”

The spread of existing, high-end tech

It’s a constant in the tech world. Be it DVD players or smartphones or 3D televisions, the early adopters are going to pay a premium to say they were first. But as production ramps up and becomes more efficient, the price drops.
In the car world, that could mean more of us will see high-tech safety features that only come equipped on the fanciest cars right now.
Belcher specifically mentioned rear-view cameras, which activate an in-dash screen when the driver is backing up, showing objects that may be hard to see normally.
Also in line to make the trip from high-end luxury to standard feature? "Adaptive” cruise control that will automatically shift speed when you get too close to another car, and vehicles that automatically send you signals when someone is in your blind spot or if you stray from your lane.
Automakers also are testing augmented-reality windshields, controlled by hand gestures from the front seat, that would display real-time info about passing landmarks.

What does it all mean?

“If we can make cars that don’t crash, then think about what that does to the cars we can build,” Belcher said. “Right now, what we build is cars that help you survive when you crash. But if you don’t crash, do we really need to two tons of metal? Can you use other materials?”

Source => www.cnn.com
By Doug Gross