Our Top Story Tonight | Happy 150th, Oil! So Long, and Thanks for the Tech Alexis Madrigal August 27, 2009 | One hundred and fifty years ago on Aug. 27, Colonel Edwin L. Drake sunk the very first commercial well that produced flowing petroleum. The discovery that large amounts of oil could be found underground marked the beginning of a time during which this convenient fossil fuel became America’s dominant energy source. But what began 150 years ago won’t last another 150 years — or even another 50. The era of cheap oil is ending, and with another energy transition upon us, we’ve got to scavenge all the lessons we can from its remarkable history. | 1 | The World's 5 Fastest Trains You Can Ride RIght Now Allie Haake August 27, 2009 | On Aug. 24, the applications for rail stimulus were due—and now the states that applied are waiting on the Federal Railroad Administration's picks for approved projects. While the href="3 billion in stimulus will not make the U.S. a train-commuting country overnight, and may, in fact, make some states unhappy (in July, 40 states preapplied, seeking href="02 billion in aid for high-speed rail projects, nearly 10 times what is actually being doled out by the federal government), it is a start for high-speed rail. Here, we take a look at the five fastest trains in the world—inspirations in design and technology for the future of high speed in the U.S. | 2 | How Robot Armies Will Work Jonathan Strickland
| "The Terminator" showed us a future where battalions of sentient, humanoid robots wage war on mankind. While that vision is still well within the realm of science fiction, many countries are looking into creating robot soldiers, including the United States. In fact, in 2001, the Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act set a goal for the U.S. Armed Forces -- create an unmanned combat vehicle force that would account for one third of all vehicles in operation. So far, the robot designs don't resemble the Terminator, but they can be just as lethal. | 3 | Holographic GPU renders at near real-time speeds Chris Lee August 26, 2009 | If the resurgence of 3D glasses at local cinemas are any indication, we all want a bit more, ahem, depth to our cinematic experience. Unfortunately, the stylish glasses don't exactly lend themselves to an immersive experience. What would be really cool would be animated holograms. While holograms aren't the easiest things in the world to make, it is possible to take a 3D computer model and compute the data necessary to generate a hologram that can be used to project a 3D image from a screen. Given that animation is largely computer generated now anyway, where are my holographic animated movies? One of the problems turns out to be efficient rendering. A recent paper in Optics Express, although it presents a huge speed-up in holographic rendering, demonstrates just how difficult the problem is. The basic animation is now well within the reach of modern rendering farms—unfortunately, that doesn't leave any power left to put into important things like shading, lighting, and shadows (much less character and plot). | 4 | Moral Machines? New Approach To Decision Making Based On Computational Logic ScienceDaily Aug. 26, 2009 | Researchers from Portugal and Indonesia describe an approach to decision making based on computational logic in the current issue of the International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems, which might one day give machines a sense of morality. Science fiction authors often use the concept of "evil" machines that attempt to take control of their world and to dominate humanity. Skynet in the "Terminator" stories and Arthur C Clarke's Hal from "2001: A Space Odyssey" are two of the most often cited examples. However, for malicious intent to emerge in artificial intelligence systems requires that such systems have an understanding of how people make moral decisions. | 5 | If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Designers... Francisco Inchauste, August 27th, 2009 | Styles in design are described and classified in many ways. Sometimes they are given a moniker, like "Web 2.0," other times they are referred to by their appearance: grungy, minimalist, retro, big type. The people (and brands) to which modern design styles are attributed are as numerous as the styles themselves. Many designers look to a brand such as Apple as an example of great modern design because a designer’s sensibility is infused into everything it does. Even though many current styles and trends can be connected to recent design pieces, they do not originate there. So much modern design originated before computers and the Web were even a glimmer in the eye of their creators. | 6 | Core i7 Extreme Overclocking with LN2 Mathew Miranda August 26, 2009 | Enthusiast level hardware is exciting, especially if you can make use of its full potential. When Intel released the monster 3.33GHz Core i7 975 processor, they laid claim to the highest performing desktop CPU on the market. Interestingly enough, they were competing with themselves as the 3.2GHz 965 held the pole position up to that point. But the new model was welcome as it brought with it the new D0 stepping which lowered operating voltage requirements, tightened up memory timings and brought slightly cooler temperatures. Of course enthusiasts also noticed another tangible benefit in the form of higher overclocking headroom. | 7 | 6 Things You Need to Know About Mac OS X Snow Leopard Brian X. Chen August 26, 2009 | Apple’s next operating system, Mac OS X 10.6, aka "Snow Leopard," hits stores Friday. If you’re already a Mac user, you’re probably going to get the upgrade sooner or later, thanks to its low "0 price tag. But it’s not a major upgrade. Apple has stressed that this OS mainly delivers a performance boost for Macs equipped with 64-bit Intel processors. Thus, many of the changes aren’t going to be immediately obvious. | 8 | 5 Apps Tap the Internet's Infinite Playlist Eliot Van Buskirk 08.24.09 | It used to be you needed a ginormous hard drive to build and store your digital music collection. But now that most songs exist somewhere in the cloud—on YouTube, one-stop streaming sites like imeem, or blog aggregators like Hype Machine—services have emerged that help you squeeze the Internet for any track you need. Wherever music lives, you can now play, collect, and share it without downloading any audio files. None of these sites is pitch-perfect, and their fidelity isn't as high as your meticulously encoded lossless library. But in these lean times, free jams are sounding better by the minute. | 9 | 7 Backup Strategies for Your Data, Multimedia, and System Files Lincoln Spector Aug 25, 2009 | Nobody likes backing up, but one day, it’ll save your bacon. Here are the most efficient methods of protecting your stuff, no matter what your situation. Your hard drive might crash. Thieves might steal your laptop at a café. You might realize on Friday that you desperately need the now-departed Wednesday version of an important document that you significantly altered on Thursday. At times like these, having a secure, up-to-date backup of your hard drive can be a lifesaver. Here are seven practical strategies, including using USB storage, backing up via the Internet or through your local network, backing up Windows itself, and preserving huge media files like songs and videos. | 10 | Transfer Windows Installation DVDs To Flash Drives Martin
| It is not easy as it sounds to transfer a Windows installation DVD to a flash drive. The whole process can be divided into two manual steps. Files from the Windows installation DVD have to be transferred to the USB drive which has to be made bootable as well. Beginners might prefer an easier solution to the manual approach. WinToFlash has been designed to make the process as straightforward as possible. The portable software program comes with a wizard that helps users transfer files from a Windows installation DVD to an USB flash drive. The software supports the transfer of various Windows installation DVDs, namely transferring Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 or Windows 7 installations to an USB flash drive. | 11 | Prep For GRE, GMAT, SAT Tests With Words Martin
| You might want to check out the cross-platform software program The program will display on word and five definitions at a time. The user selects an answer with the 1-5 keys on the keyboard. It is also possible to press ESC to see the result. Pressing ESC will count as a wrong answer on the other hand. | 12 | How to Upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7 Without Losing All Your Settings Sharninder August 26th, 2009 | It is nice to know that Microsoft has been listening all this while and promises that Windows 7 will be much better than Vista both in terms of resource utilization and general useability. That and the fact that Microsoft has decided to withdraw support for Windows XP, will see a lot of people migrating to Windows XP from Windows 7. The only problem is that Microsoft has not provided a direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7, so there are only two options for people who want to migrate up from Windows XP. | 13 | Make Firefox Faster by Vacuuming Your Database Adam Pash Aug 24 2009 | Firefox tip: Firefox 3.0's Awesome Bar added all kinds of features to the 'fox, but unfortunately it's also created some performance issues—for example, by upping the default history time, leading to larger, fragmented databases. This quick hack speeds things up. All-things-Firefox weblog Mozilla Links previously detailed how to defragment SQLite databases with a vacuum command, but the whole process was a bit clumsy, and it required a restart. Now they've updated the technique with a simple bit of code you can run inside Firefox's Error Console that requires no restart. | 14 | "Vacuum Places Improved" Speeds Up Firefox with a Click of Your Mouse Adam Pash Aug 27 2009 | Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): On Monday we showed you how to speed up Firefox by vacuuming your fragmented database regularly using a copy-and-paste Error Console command. Sounds like a pain, right? Vacuum Places Improved handles it for you with a mouse click. This experimental extension adds a small icon to the Firefox status bar that, when clicked automatically "vacuums" your Places database—the one that slows down Firefox when it gets fragmented. You can also automate the task by ticking the Automatically clean places checkbox in the Vacuum Places Improved extension Preferences and entering your desired number of Firefox startups since last cleaning. | 15 | To Buy Or To Pirate? Get A Clue RIAA!
| Is the RIAA’s strategy to stop music piracy working? According to a recent study, interesting data has been collected from college students that holds both good and bad news for the RIAA. Where does this leave the future of downloading? 204 undergraduates from a large Midwestern University were promised anonymity and were recently sampled in a piracy study since students download more often than non-students. Researchers believed college students were the best representatives of digital music consumers and studied an equal number of males and females in regards to software piracy, movie piracy, and music piracy. The Elsevier findings blew away previous research and statistics about digital pirates. | 16 | If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing Brian X. Chen August 25, 2009 | As you shove your way through the crowd in a baseball stadium, the lenses of your digital glasses display the names, hometowns and favorite hobbies of the strangers surrounding you. Then you claim a seat and fix your attention on the batter, and his player statistics pop up in a transparent box in the corner of your field of vision. It’s not possible today, but the emergence of more powerful, media-centric cellphones is accelerating humanity toward this vision of "augmented reality," where data from the network overlays your view of the real world. Already, developers are creating augmented reality applications and games for a variety of smartphones, so your phone’s screen shows the real world overlaid with additional information such as the location of subway entrances, the price of houses, or Twitter messages that have been posted nearby. And publishers, moviemakers and toymakers have embraced a version of the technology to enhance their products and advertising campaigns. | 17 | Fixing Windows with Knoppix
| Recovering Data If your Windows system crashes completely and cannot be recovered using the registry editor or the boot.ini, you may face some serious problems if important data on the system wasn't backed up. Knoppix can come to your rescue by enabling you to access your Windows partition and save your important data to multiple devices for restoration later. These devices include USB jump drives (also called flash drives or key drives), CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, and copying data over the network. This section explains how to recover and save the data that you'll restore after you have re-installed Windows following a crash. | 18 | Australian Scientists Develop World’s Most Efficient Solar Cell Ariel Schwartz
| The race for the world’s most efficient solar power cell is forever played out in fractions of percentages. The latest victory comes from scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who have concocted a multi-cell combination that converts 43! So how did the team break the record? By using a special silicon cell optimized to harness light at the red and near-infrared end of the light spectrum. When the silicon cell was combined with four other cells made from gallium, indium, phosphorous and arsenic, the scientists were able to reach the magic 43(Graph3) | 19 | Another Little Ice Age? Solar activity and climate change John Timmer August 25, 2009 | Over the weekend, a paper published in the American Geophysical Union's journal Eos attracted a lot of attention, as it suggested that the levels of magnetic activity associated with recent sunspots indicated that the sun might be returning to a state of low activity, similar to that of the Maunder Minimum, which occurred in the late 17th century. That change in solar activity was notable for setting off what's called the Little Ice Age, which plunged Europe into a deep chill. Left undiscussed is what that might mean in a world where greenhouse gas changes are threatening a period of extended high temperatures. To understand how a significant change in sunspot levels might be felt in the Earth's climate, we'll back up and look at how sunspots relate to solar output, how that output gets felt on Earth, and how it interacts with changing levels of greenhouse gasses. The answer appears to be that it could reverse the climate change that occurred during past century, but would only delay the changes expected by the end of this century. | 20 | Triumph of the commons: Helping the world to share Mark van Vugt 25 August 2009 | DO YOU ever get the impression that civilisation has degenerated into an unedifying free-for-all? Like pigs gobbling at their troughs, we all seem to be out to get as much as possible of whatever is on offer. Everyone is at it, from loggers felling the Amazonian rainforest and fishers fighting over the last few cod to SUV drivers running the oil wells dry and politicians on their gravy trains. Science even has a name for the phenomenon - one that seems eerily prescient following the recent revelation about MPs' expense claims in the UK. It is called the Tragedy of the Commons. Four decades ago, ecologist Garrett Hardin published a ground-breaking paper on this phenomenon, arguing that when personal and communal interests are at odds, overexploitation of resources is inevitable. His tragedy of the commons referred to the destruction of communal pasture when individual herders act rationally in their own best interests, each putting as many cows as possible onto the land. The same fate, he noted, is likely to befall any shared limited resource, from the atmosphere and oceans to national parks and rivers. Over the years, and with the rise of environmentalism, Hardin's ideas have become hugely influential. | 21 | The opposite of Twitter: new site requires 1,400-character minimum Jon Brodkin 08/24/2009 | For anyone who complains that Twitter posts are too short to be meaningful, we present you with Twitter's exact opposite: Woofer. Similar to Twitter, Woofer counts down the amount of characters you have input with a big number at the top right of the screen. But you're not allowed to post anything until you hit 1,400. | 22 | Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess Gary Wolf 08.24.09 | The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do? Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low? | 23 | PC Makers Still Not Being Totally Truthful With Battery Life Claims Shawn Oliver August 24, 2009 | It's a topic we cover often because it's near and dear to our hearts. It's battery life, and it's finally starting to get the attention that is has long deserved in the industry. We've seen article after article point out that battery life claims on laptops are flawed in one way or another, and AMD's own Pat Moorhead is stepping forward this week with some facts and figures to back that up. For whatever reason, AMD has taken a strong, vocal stance against shoddy battery life claims. They've had it with PC manufacturers pumping out notebook after notebook with crazy claims, ones that they can't possibly deliver. Take any laptop of your own, for example. Has it ever fully lived up to the claims on the box? Have you ever considered returning it because it didn't? The answer to both questions is probably "no" considering that you know very well that any machine you received in return would have the same problem: lofty promises, lackluster delivery. | 24 | Hack Your Palm Pre Jamie Lendino 08.26.09 | After several years of stagnation with the tired, old Palm OS, Palm surprised the tech industry with its long-awaited, webOS-powered Palm Pre. The Pre delighted techies with its stunning interface and powerful features. Between Palm and Sprint, the two companies got almost everything right, except for one thing: third-party apps. Alas, Palm was late in releasing its Mojo SDK to third-party developers. That worked for Apple, which had spent an entire year playing coy about native apps before launching the App Store. But it didn't work for Palm, who really needed to be competitive with Apple's App Store right out of the gate. | 25 | 10 Common Mistakes Made by New Linux Administrators Blair Mathis August 26, 2009 | As Linux squeezes itself into all facets of technology, more people are being forced to use it who have little knowledge of the foreign Unix land. Maybe you're trying to learn your way around, or maybe you're the Windows guy who just got 'promoted' to maintaining the Linux system; either way, things are odd, and you just really, really don't want to fubar the system. For those of you who fall into that category, this article is for you. Below are fifteen mistakes often made by new Linux administrators. | 26 | Top 10 iPhone Annoyances (and How to Fix Them) Jared Newman
| Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Praise it all you want, but the "Jesus phone" has plenty of little annoyances or nuisances that get under a user's skin. Fortunately, technology is all about workarounds to common problems. So we've not only put together a Top 10 list of iPhone annoyances to vent about, we're also offering solutions (where we can) to fix those pesky iPhone problems we hate so much. | 27 | 18 cool things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn't Aditya Chandrasekhar
| From Windows 3.1 to Windows Vista, the Windows operating system has taken many giant leaps. And while Vista received a lukewarm reception from some users, Windows 7 is likely to be remembered for addressing those criticisms. | 28 | Utilities may get dedicated chunk of spectrum for smart grid John Timmer August 26, 2009 | On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission joined the alphabet soup of federal agencies that's contemplating what its role might be in bringing our electric grid a bit of intelligence. It's not unreasonable—smart grid devices are all about starting a two-way conversation between utilities and their distribution equipment and end-user devices. But the FCC held the hearing as part of its broadband initiative, and the hearings allowed those in the industry to press the Commission to allocate the smart grid a chunk of spectrum in order to provide its components guaranteed wireless broadband. Not everyone at the hearing felt it was necessary; at least one person providing testimony suggested that existing cellular networks could easily absorb the added bandwidth. But many of those providing testimony pointed out that deadzones and strangled bandwidth might be acceptable to cellular providers, but wouldn't be tolerated by utilities. | |