Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM)

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Unlike conventional memory, which involves moving electrons around a chip, PCM data would literally be frozen in place, even when the machine is off. That means these devices could switch on nearly instantaneously.

via Melting memory chips in mass production : Nature News.

A South African IT firm sent a carrier pigeon 50 miles with a datacard attached to it’s leg. The pigeon was faster than the internet, which after 2 hours had only completed 4% of the transfer. This was in protest at the sucky internet connection available through Telkom.

Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s Telkom – Yahoo! Canada News.

These flowcharts are very very good indeed, with a “Boot Failure Troubleshooting Poster” which encompasses all of the flowcharts in one huge poster.

Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts – Troubleshooting Dell, HP, Sony, eMachines, IBM, Compaq and Gateway PC’s.

MegaTux, the Dell Thunderbird with 4480 Intel processors will run 1 million copies of bots in a limited area botnet over Wine in order to create simulations of differnet botnets on a massive scale. Researchers can then stop the simulation at any point and have a look at the state of the different virtual PCs.

Researchers Try to Stalk Botnets Used by Hackers – NYTimes.com.

This thing is made up from a few pieces of PVC piping, costs around $10,- to make and works really really well.

Homemade Steadicam Costs About $24,990 Less Than The Real Thing – Steadicam – Gizmodo.

DataSlide’s Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD) does not use read-write heads moving across the recording surface of a spinning hard disk drive (HDD). Instead an ultra-thin, 2-dimensional array of 64 read-write heads, operating in parallel, is positioned above an piezo-electric-driven oscillating rectangular recording surface, and delivers 160,000 random IOPS with a 500MB/sec transfer rate.

via DataSlide reinvents hard drive • The Register.

The idea is to use cheap off-peak energy at night to freeze a tank of water or “distributed energy storage system” then use that great block of ice to cool your data centre in the daytime. Refrigerant would circulate from the tank to the Data Aire equipment eliminating the need to run the energy-intensive compressor and condenser during peak daytime hours.

Apparently this can save up to 45% on energy requirements for the cooling.

via Ice air con system aims for cool on the cheap • The Register.

as it turns out from the launcher screen of your Pre simply type in the phrase “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” — which if you parse with spacing might be more easily recognizable as the infamous Contra Konami code look it up — and up comes a hidden app called “Developer Mode Enabler.”

via The secret to Palm Pre dev mode lies in the Konami code.

It’s only been a few days since the Palm Pre was released, but one of the biggest breakthroughs for the outside-the-system developer community may have just been made.

With this, people can probably tell how the OS hooks into the hardware, which will allow them to hook in themselves – something Palm itself has been loathe to share with their userbase.

via Pre Recovery Tool Leaks Out, Including webOS Root Image(!) | PreCentral.net.

It’s been a long long while since anything new has come out for military flight sim enthusiasts, and this looks like it is just what the doctor ordered. Since Vista dropped support for the gameport – and thus for my F-15 inspired Suncom set up (no longer for sale, but definitely the best stick / throttle setup I’ve ever seen!) there’s been not much, excepting the odd Thrustmaster setup.

A Parisian scientist at the observatory has figured out a way to fix your position in time and galactic space by measuring the radio signals sent out by four pulsars.

The Toradex Robin Modules for Intel Atom are tiny and cheap: around $129,- and up.

Kinetic Energy Recovery System, stores the energy created by regenerative breaking and stores it in a battery. When the driver presses a button, he gets a turbo boost as the energy store is emptied onto the drivetrain. This system gives him up to 6.5s of turbo boost per lap.

Only $40,000

This external HD, in 500 GB, 1TB or 1.5TB, is fireproof for 30 minutes at 1550o F and can stand submerged in 10′ water for 3 days.

Not being a fan of taking the control panel off your radio every time you leave the car, I used to have a Sony with a blank face, which swivelled when you wanted to use the controls.

Apparently it senses if your hand is near it, so you can break screensaver and get to the controls.

This thing is totally awesome: a UPMP the size of a phone with a touchscreen, sliding qwerty keyboard with 3G in it.

At $1500 the price isn’t too bad either.

This machine will take a 3D object on a turntable and scan it in 3D

It’s a full size keyboard. With a touchscreen. And a whole PC inside it. With loads of ports on it. Now you just need a roll up screen to carry it in and you’re superportable!

This causes vibration which in turn leads to quite measurable latency.

Mcor Technologies has a 3D printer which is remarkable in that it uses paper and glue to make the models. This makes the models themselves a whole load cheaper to produce, so you can print MOAR! The printers themselves are going to be sold for a “reasonable” price, whatever that is… They do have the following in their FAQ though:

Previously lasers weren’t used for projection as they had a speckle effect. The Chinese Academy of Science has found that fusing three lasers (RGB) into a single white laser and then using traditional DLP technology to break the beam up into RGB again and the mirrors to put the picture onto the wall cancels this speckling. The resultant image can display around 80% of the human visible colour range compared to traditional wet film, which only catches 60% and is considered the ‘gold standard’ in these things. So. We have vibrant colours. But we also have a power consumption of only 35% of traditional xenon lamps in these projectors. Only the initial cost is very high.

CADSpan has released a plugin that translates Google Sketchups to an STL file.