Posted 10/13/08 at 03:49:51 PM by Alex Castle

When it comes to Moore’s law these days, it seems like everyone’s a cynic. However, now there’s one more reason to be optimistic about the future of miniaturization, as researchers have published a paper describing a lithography technique which may provide a new means of producing chip features smaller than 32nm.  

The technique involves the use of quasiparticles called plasmons to focus light at an incredibly high resolution. Chris Lee at Ars Technica describes the technology: “A lens, based on plasmons, can be created by a set of concentric metal rings. The fields from the plasmons in each ring act in such a way as to create a tightly focused spot of light. In principle, these lenses could focus light tightly enough to create features about five to ten nanometers in size.”

The problem with plasmon lenses is that they must be positioned at just 20 nm away from the wafer. The scientists claim to have overcome this hurdle with their new technique, which uses air pressure to control the lens’s distance from the wafer.

Significantly, the new technique eliminates the need to create a new photomask for each revision to the chip, potentially lowering costs and speeding up development.

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hardware, Moore's Law, Science, manufacturing process

Posted 10/13/08 at 02:15:56 PM by Alex Castle

Long the king of entertainment for the attention-deficit, YouTube is finally hosting full-length episodes of TV shows. Taking a cue from Hulu, Google will be offering the videos with the new theater view mode, “dimming the lights” on the rest of the page and adding a superfluous red curtain on either side of the video playback.

Also like Hulu, the full-length episodes will include ads before, after, and during the episodes. On their blog, YouTube explains: “As we test this new format, we also want to ensure that our partners have more options when it comes to advertising on their full-length TV shows. You may see in-stream video ads (including pre-, mid- and post-rolls) embedded in some of these episodes; this advertising format will only appear on premium content where you are most comfortable seeing such ads.”

So far, the site is offering a handful of episodes of Star Trek, MacGyver, Beverly Hills 90210 and The Young and the Restless, with the promise of more to come.

What do you think?  Is YouTube going to be successful in the video on-demand market?  Is it going to take more than low-res MacGyver to get you to tune in?  Let us know after the break.

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Software, youtube, Hulu, Theater View

Posted 10/13/08 at 12:55:09 PM by Paul Lilly

In what's becoming a trend, Washington D.C. joins the ranks of more than 500,000 businesses and organizations with its head in the clouds. District CTO Vivik Kundra inked an agreement with Google that will port the organization's 38,000 employees over to Google Apps.

According to Bloomberg, the agreement, which was signed back in June, is worth almost $500,000 a year and will include applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Video for business, and Google Sites to District employees. The latest win comes as another notch in Google's belt, as its Google Apps has been well received since launching a little over two years ago as Gmail for your domain.

But Google isn't the only one challenging Microsoft in the productivity world. Zoho also offers a collection of online apps and managed to snag GE as one of its customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft has largely been content to ride the success of its offline Office suite, but things could get interesting if cloud computing continues to pick up steam.

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microsoft, Software, office, google web apps, washington, cloud

Posted 10/13/08 at 12:33:34 PM by Paul Lilly

Noticeably late to the solid state storage (SSD) party is Seagate, who earlier said it would offer its first SSDs sometime in 2008. As the year is quickly coming to an end, the company has now pushed its entry into 2009.

"Our history is based on rotating magnetic media," Seagate's senior manager of market development Rich Vignes told Cnet. "But as solid-state comes online, we're embracing this new media type."

Not everyone would agree that Seagate is "embracing" the increasingly popular storage medium. While several companies have made a push to get SSDs into the mainstream market, Seagate's late entry will focus solely on the enterprise market with consumer drivers to be sold "later." So far the company has not yet announced announced plans to manufacturer NAND flash memory by itself like many of it competitors are doing. Instead, Seagate has kept the focus of its flash business to hybrid (flash/HDD) hard drives.

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storage, seagate, ssd, solid state drive, build a pc, enterprise

Posted 10/13/08 at 12:13:39 PM by Paul Lilly

When you find a groovy tune, it's a tough task to turn the dial down below ear shattering levels, and if that statement needed any quantifiable proof, it now has it. According to a study for the European Union, personal music players are threatening permanent hearing loss for as many as 10 million Europeans.

A team of nine experts on the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks conducted the study and warned that most young people aren't aware of the damage until years after it's already done.

"Regularly listening to personal music players at high-volume settings when young often has no immediate effect on hearing but is likely to result in hearing loss later in life," the report said.

Listening to music for just five hours a week at high-volume settings can expose your ears to more noise than permitted in the loudest factory or workplace, and if you have a particularly good set of headphones, cranking up the volume to its highest setting can punish your hears as much as the sound of an airplane taking off.

The new study is one of just several to warn of long-term hearing loss among today's youth, but the older generation might be just as susceptible. Some estimates put the total number of EU residents listening to portable music players at anywhere from 50 million to 100 million out of a total population of 500 million.

If you can't avoid the temptation to avoid cranking up the volume, you might consider investing in crappier music.

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mp3, music, consumer electronics, eardrum, hearing loss, crank it up

Posted 10/13/08 at 12:00:17 PM by Alex Castle

We at Maximum PC remember a time, long ago, when having a dual-monitor setup was enough to establish some pretty serious nerd cred. These days, however, everyone and their grandma are playing World of Warcraft and checking their email at the same time on their two screens. So what’s a guy got to do to stand out from the pack? Here’s one idea: run two computers in tandem.

Synergy is a free, open source program that allows you two control two or more computers with a single keyboard and mouse. The linked computers behave as though they were simply different monitors in a traditional multi-monitor, single-computer setup. That is to say, if you drag the mouse off the left side of the right monitor, it appears on the left monitor, directing all keystrokes to that box. More impressively, Synergy synchronizes the two computers’ clipboards and even their screensavers.

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Software, pc, linux, open source, how_to, Mac, hack, kvm, synergy

Posted 10/13/08 at 11:31:55 AM by Paul Lilly

It doesn't matter that the first-generation iPhone lacked 3G functionality or that early adopters were slapped in the face so quickly after its release. Even intentional bricking through a firmware update hasn't been enough to knock Apple's iPhone off its pedestal as the must-have cellular phone for geeks and hipsters alike. Can T-Mobile's HTC G1 Android phone deliver the right hook and make this a fight?

It's far too early to tell, but early indications look promising. According to the Motley Fool, T-Mobile subscribers have already gobbled up all of the available preorders for initial shipments of the G1, prompting T-Mobile to triple its order with handset maker HTC. Those have sold out too. All tallied, roughly 1.5 million G1s are already accounted for, with another couple million reserved for retail sales.

That still puts the G1 far behind the 10 million iPhones Apple said it would like to sell this year, but it's a good start for a phone that hasn't even been released yet and still won't be for another couple of weeks. And if the G1 is going to have any chance at taking a bite out of Apple, it's going to need to come out strong and convince buyers there's more to the Android platform than hype.

Anyone plan on picking one up or already placed a preorder? Hit the jump and sound off.

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mobile, apple, iphone, Cellular, android, t-mobile

Posted 10/13/08 at 11:02:12 AM by Paul Lilly

You won't find Lord British ruling over Britannia anymore, and after doing all that he could for the Ultima universe, Richard Garriott has started exploring ours. Literally. Garriott blasted off into space today in the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft mounted on a three-stage rocket. The $30 million flight ticket buys Garriot a 10-day excursion to the International Space Station (ISS).

While he might be the first virtual Lord to blast into space, he isn't the first in this family. That distinction belongs to Richard's father, Owen Garriott, who spent three months on a U.S. space station back in 1973, almost a decade before the first Ultima game saw store shelves. Owen, now 77, will support his 47-year-old son from mission control in Moscow.

Richard won't be collecting runes in space, but he doesn't plan to sit idly by, either. To help pay back companies who he says have contributed a "meaningful percentage" towards the ticket price, Garriott plans to carry out an experiment on behalf of the contributors, which involves protein crystal growth.

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space, travel, lord british, richard garriott, ultima

Posted 10/13/08 at 10:25:27 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing industry sources, DigiTimes reports Asus will soon add a motherboard line to what's quickly becoming a very crowded Eee series. Details remain nonexistent at this point, but if it happens, we could find ourselves on the brink of a new fad, specifically  the DIY nettop market.

In other Eee news, Asus' upcoming Eee Top (formerly known as the Eee Monitor), an all-in-one PC, is coming in 16-inch and 19-inch versions with the cost of entry starting at $450, according to DigiTimes. If earlier reports hold true, the touchscreen device will come powered with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB of hard drive space, a webcam, and various ports all riding on Windows XP.

Asus also addressed reports that its Eee Box systems were shipping with a virus. The company said an internal investigation revealed the virus most likely got onto systems through a USB key that's used for testing and inspection, further clarifying that the rogue file is only launched on models intended for the Japan market. The investigation remains open.

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motherboard, asus, build a pc, eee PC

Posted 10/13/08 at 10:00:00 AM by Will Smith

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windows, microsoft, apple, linux, OS X, PC Advisor