This is the latest in bionic hand technology: it’s controlled using the mind and existing musculature, you can manipulate the fingers independently and you have precision control over the power the fingers exert, meaning you don’t inadvertently crush things you’re trying to hold.

Yes, Intel has done it again – not the 1+1=1.999999999r float bug, but close enough. Read about it here…

El reg has a nice article on why development of intelligent / multifunctional robots is still stagnated and run by hobbyists. It runs through some of the real problems of software development for robot brains.

An Israeli team has created a tiny little robot that can travel up and down your veins and arteries, being manipulated by magnetic fields. It has a diameter of 1mm and crawls along your bloodstream using little arms.

Using nanowires assembled on glass and thin films of flexible plastic built using zinc oxide or indium oxide the transistors are not visible to the human eye. The researchers hope to create HUDs and displays on windsheilds, visors, spectacles, etc. Make my car look like the inside of an F-16 please!

Tom’s Hardware is running a great tutorial how to get a DLP projector, stereoscopic glasses and go all VR by turning your wall into a huge 3D display. They tell you what hardware to get and how to install it, and have reviews of several different types of games you can play.

Are CCD sensors now a thing of the past? The Samsung 8.4 megapixel CMOS Image Sensor uses only a tenth of the power of a CCD with the same fidelity and a high SNR.

Via is releasing a tiny motherboard/chip combo – the Epia PX (10×7.2 cm), a successor to the Pico-ITX (12×12 cm). It runs at 1GHz and has a whole scale of I/O for audio/visual and USB connectors.

The VoomPC2 ruggedized little thing comes pre-prepped to fit into your car. It comes with a 1.5 Ghz processor and a whole load of connectors:

Nickel Cadmium batteries lose their maximum charge after a while due to dendrite growth in them. Using an external power source, you can zap the battery and clear the dendrites, giving you a revived battery.

This new type of memory is 500 – 100 times faster than flash RAM and has half the power consumption. It’s non volatile, so it doesn’t need to be powered continuously.

Samsung has unveiled their new hybrid hard drives (HHD) composed of storage in the form of partially platter based (rotating) storage and flash memory storage. The flash memory works like a prefetch cache, but because it’s much faster than platter technology there should be significant speed increases on bootup and with writing small files. Once the buffer is full, data is transferred to the platters to free up room. Large files will be streamed directly to the platters. They’re starting with 128 and 256 MB of flash memory on the drives. Unfortunately the drives will only be compatible with Windows Vista, due to the memory management technologies employed in the OS. Samsung is specifically catering to laptop users first using this technology as the idea is that not spinning up the platters will also make a significant power saving.

Using tobacco virusses, you can apparently create very fast switching transistors. These guys have done it, and now need to find a way to link up all the virusses. This means your RAM may soon (the researchers think in around 4 years) be alive.

This site has instructions on how to build your own astromech – with galleries for all the different types of droids people have built untill now.

Matrox released this some time ago, but I just found it, so here it is:
The Triplehead2Go is a box you connect a single VGA (analog) out from your PC to and then connect 3 monitors to through it’s own VGA (analog) outputs. It’s not a graphics card – Matrox has decided to not compete with the likes of Nvidia and ATi, it processes the signal to create a max resolution of 3840×1024.
Reviewers rave about the size, immersion and cost of the product (3 monitors + the Triplehead2Go cost less than $1000) but unfortunately the desktop management software falls short, getting games to work properly can sometimes be a fiddle and if you have an ATi card you can forget about it. What surprises most reviewers is that there isn’t much of a framerate hit, and the bezels between the monitors doesn’t cause much disturbance to the viewer.

Good out of the box thinking by Matrox, but unfortunately it looks like this technology will have to mature a bit (by games manufacturers, ATi and Matrox) before it becomes a ‘must have’.

AVSim review
Tomshardware review
SimHQ review
List of compatible Matrox games

The article here claims it’s light through the chip itself, but reading it, it looks more like they’ve managed to find a way to transmit data using light between the chips themselves, which is still pretty cool and will speed up the bus no end (which is a major limiting factor in PC speeds nowadays).

In order to put a PC into your car, you need to power your computer from the car itself. You also need software and they reccomend a 7″ touch screen LCD. Full instructions to be found.

What is it with floating point operations that makes chip vendors so crap at them?
Intel had the floating point operation problem when it released the Pentium processor (1+1=1.999999999 but that’s good enough). Now AMD has the Opteron and it turns out that they accidentally released a few into the wild with floating point problems as well…

We make money not art has a great set of notes on a lecture by Tom Armitage about how the game controller is basically the same everywhere, and how they have evolved for specific platforms to the point where they are no longer intuitive to the new user of console games due to the plethora of buttons and combinations you have to use. He then gives some alternatives packaged with it

of which I thought the Capcom one was really cool…

Spirit makes RFID readers which can read a wide range of standards and come in USB or SDIO (Pocket PC / WinMobile) forms, and retail at only $99 – $199! Pretty soon they’re going to go nuts on the amount of data coming in.

Since Apple moved to intel chips, it wasn’t a surprise that someone was going to hack OS X and try to run it on a run of the mill PC. Apparently Apple put a poem in their OS asking people please to not hack OS X. But the hackers have apparently prevailed and allthough there is no easy to use installer or anything, it’s only a matter of time before there will be. Apple has closed the forums of a site that discussed such matters, but there’s always another forum isn’t there?
Apple themselves refuse to redo OS X so it will run on PCs. Naturally, because they won’t sell any Maggotboxes themselves. Uhm. Do they still sell Maggotboxes? I thought they’d become redundant a long time ago and got replaced by IPods…

So, what’s cooler than a flatpanel OLED display? A transparent OLED display – duhhhh!

Ze Germans have figured out how to create transparent OLEDs which we can use in our cars and stuff – I want my whole window to be an OLED display!

Clustered 64 bit computers with up to 16 AMD Opterons in one machine: nice!

Yup, it’s on the streets now!

AMD to follow next year.

The clever cloggs at IBM have managed to find a way to slow down light to 1/300th its normal speed, which allows it to be manageable enough to use it to impart information inside computer chips. They still need to find a way to mass produce the opticals, and of course for these new architechtures they’ll need to create entirely new OSses but the idea is cool.