WITH the international launch of Amazon's Kindle reader this week, perhaps electronic books will become the must-have present this year. But even as we unwrap our shiny new e-readers, we may be forgiven for wondering how long it will be before the long-promised colour versions are available. Moreover, with multifunctional devices such as the iPhone becoming the norm, how soon could these e-readers make the breakthrough to display video?
INTEL's latest microchip technology has created transistors 22 nanometres wide - a mere 200 times the width of a hydrogen molecule. Carving such tiny features is devilishly difficult and expensive, but in another realm of microchips altogether, something odd is happening: chips are being made on an outsized scale and then shrunk to the required size, avoiding much fiddly hassle.
In the final minutes of its plunge toward the moon, NASA's LCROSS spacecraft spotted the brief infrared flash of a rocket booster hitting the lunar surface just ahead of it – and it even saw heat from the crater formed by the impact. But scientists remain puzzled about why the event did not seem to generate a visible plume of debris as expected.
There are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.
When you give your employees internet access, you give them a resource that has the potential to deliver enormous business benefits. But it also has enormous potential to be misused and, in some instances, that misuse can be damaging for the business
Defence giant Boeing has released video of its Advanced Tactical Laser being fired from an aircraft at a (stationary) vehicle. You can download three videos of the event or watch two of them on YouTube.
Although the benefits of virtualising x86 servers have been pushed relentlessly for the past five years or so, much less discussed have been the challenges involved in moving to a world where resources are pooled and everything is linked.
