Slashdot Mirror

AmiMoJo writes: Sharp has announced that sales of DC powered air conditioners will begin by the end of the year. Most appliances use the standard AC electricity supply in homes, but as solar panels become more common switching to DC can save on conversion losses. Solar panels produce DC, which is then typically converted to AC before being fed into the house's wiring, and then converted back to DC again by appliances. Sharp has announced that it intends to produce a range of DC powered appliances for home use.

mrspoonsi (2955715) writes "A breakthrough has been made in SSD technology that could mean drastic performance increases due to the overcoming of one of the major issues in the memory type. Currently, data cannot be directly overwritten onto the NAND chips used in the devices. Files must be written to a clean area of the drive whilst the old area is formatted. This eventually causes fragmented data and lowers the drive's life and performance over time. However, a Japanese team at Chuo University have finally overcome the issue that is as old as the technology itself. Officially unveiled at the 2014 IEEE International Memory Workshop in Taipei, the researchers have written a brand new middleware for the drives that controls how the data is written to and stored on the device. Their new version utilizes what they call a 'logical block address scrambler' which effectively prevents data being written to a new 'page' on the device unless it is absolutely required. Instead, it is placed in a block to be erased and consolidated in the next sweep. This means significantly less behind-the-scenes file copying that results in increased performance from idle."

Nakeot writes "On Friday, Sony plans to unveil their newest portable fuel-cell technology, aimed at a variety of mobile applications. From the article: "The system contains both a methanol fuel cell and a Li-on battery" and can "intelligently switch between power from the battery, fuel, or even both under high-draw circumstances." Sony intends to show off two models claimed to power your cell for a week or a month, respectively, as well as the latest developments with their sugar-batteries that can now run purely off your favorite cola beverage. This model builds on Sony's 2008 model, their first commercially-demonstratable prototype, and could make waves with Sony's OLED devices, but will Sony be able to avoid another battery recall?"

Talinom writes "ZDNet has an article sure to raise the hackles of any self-respecting geek. They report that housewives buying small laptops like the Asus EE are causing Linux usage for that demographic to spike. A reporter for Tech-On states that 'Retailers and contract manufacturers in Taiwan say that novice PC users there, like students and housewives, tend to buy the Linux version of the Eee PC701, while geeks go for Windows XP.'"

Chris Salzberg writes "The Japanese government made major moves this month toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication. In a series of little-publicized meetings, two distinct government ministries pushed ahead with regulation in three major areas of online communication: web content, mobile phone access, and file sharing. Content regulation will cover anything on the web, including personal blogs and web pages. Upcoming mandatory filtering of mobile phone access is targeted at users under age 18, and will cover chat rooms, forums, bulletin boards and social networking services. File sharing legislation will initially target illegal downloads, but, according to critics, may ultimately broaden to include streaming media from sites such as YouTube."

Tech.Luver writes to tell us that Hitachi has developed a new visual search engine that can supposedly find similar images from within millions of video and picture data entries in around 1 second. "The technology assesses the similarity of images based on image characteristics presented as high-dimensional numeric information. The information is acquired by automatically detecting information regarding the images, such as color distribution and shapes."

Gamespot is reporting that this year's Tokyo Game Show will feature a record number of titles on display, some 573 games. The huge numbers reflects the console launch cycle, but surprisingly a full half of the games on offer are either PC or mobile games. The official TGS site has the full list of games, with Square Enix having some particularly interesting titles on offer. Sony has released the list of playable PS3 and PSP games that will be at the event, with heavy hitters like Heavenly Sword, Lair, Resistance, and Warhawk rounding out the list nicely. Game|Life has some commentary on the games selection for the curious. "Also on Sakaguchi's plate are two Xbox 360 RPGs to be published by Microsoft. Blue Dragon was reconfirmed to be shipping this year, and Lost Odyssey will be at Tokyo Game Show but ship in 2007. Microsoft's dreams of publishing the next big Japanese RPG don't stop there, however. The company's partnership with Star Ocean creators Tri-Ace will come to fruition next year with an RPG called Infinite Undiscovery."

Nora writes "developerWorks has posted a slightly expanded version of the paper presented at LinuxTag today by IBM's Linux-for-Cell maintainer Arnd Bergmann (which was mentioned on Slashdot a few weeks ago). I searched the LinuxTag site to post a link to their copy of the paper also, but I couldn't find one (but my German is not so good, so it's probably my fault). In addition to the abovementioned paper on the SPU file system, we have also published an interview with Arnd Bergmann in which we learn more about programming for Linux on Cell, and programming for Cell in general -- and also that there is no such thing as the so-called 'Cell Workstation' that some of us have been looking forward to for a long time (apparently, it's just the Blade board prototype that many of us have already seen). And of course, much more. "

slashflood writes "Only a few clients in a hotel room near Los Angeles had the chance to see the first Cell based server blade running Linux 2.6.11. 'We demonstrated the prototype to show that Cell continues to mature. The product is expected to have several times higher performance compared to conventional servers,' said an IBM engineer."

Cybro writes "Toshiba has demonstrated some cool applications for the Cell Microprocessor. They also revealed that they have written their own OS for the new processor. However the article on TechOn does not reveal the license of the OS."

anocow writes "According to this press release at Nikkei Biztech (Japanese), Toshiba will be selling a Bluetooth enabled 5 gig external hard disk called the "Hopbit". It will be priced at 49800 yen. Apparently it will run on batteries for a maximum of 6 hours continuously. Talk about mobility!"

anocow writes "According to this press release at Nikkei Biztech (Japanese), Toshiba will be selling a Bluetooth enabled 5 gig external hard disk called the "Hopbit". It will be priced at 49800 yen. Apparently it will run on batteries for a maximum of 6 hours continuously. Talk about mobility!"

bachoom writes "Today, NIKKEI(Japanese story) announced that Turbolinux Inc. sold worldwide Linux business to SRA, Japanese SI company. Turbolinux has burned through at least $100 million raised across three rounds from a dazzling collection of companies including Intel, IBM, and many Japanese companies. Currently, They were sold by $1 million."