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Tech News: Tux/Stick, The Linux Gateway

Linux-powered gateway crams into USB key

A tiny, Linux-based gateway has won an award for hardware innovation at the 2007 Embedded World conference in Nuremberg this week. SSV Embedded Systems’s “Tux/Stick” interfaces between USB-enabled PCs and various industrial and embedded networks, including LANs, WiFi networks, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and in-car networks.

The Tux/Stick looks like a typical USB memory stick. And, one end does plug into a USB port, just like a memory stick, drawing power from the host PC and booting a tiny ARM9-powered processor running Linux.
from LinuxDevices.com.

D-Wave Demonstrates First Quantum Computer

Touted as a systems-level “proof-of-concept” machine, the Orion uses a new type of analog processor that taps into quantum mechanics, rather than using the conventional physics associated with today’s digital processing, to drive the computation.
D-Wave maintained that its approach allows for the building of scalable processor architectures using many of the conventional processes and technologies employed in the semiconductor industry today. Furthermore, because Orion’s processors are computationally equivalent to more standard devices, D-Wave says that any application can be developed for one type of quantum computer and then recast as an application for another.
by Bryan Gardiner.

RAID Recovery: The Data Knight Kroll Ontrack To The Rescue!

What can you do once you know that an important hard drive is definitely broken? Or what happens if you pulled the wrong drive out of the slot while you were desperately trying to save your data? First of all: don’t panic! You need to act systematically and thoughtfully to be successful, as well as to ensure that you spend as little as possible on recovery – costs can hits four digits easily.
To this end, we met with data recovery specialist Kroll Ontrack to take a look at possible data recovery methods, including RAID recovery.
by Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos.

Demystifying Display Connectors

The analog VGA was the standard for such a long time, some of us just got used to it. Today, I don’t remember the last time I got a performance-grade graphics card with a VGA port on the back of it; I have a small cadre of DVI-to-VGA adapters that I use to plug in my monitors.

DVI as a standard features a number of sub-standards, some analog, some digital. Now DVI is already seeing the writing on the wall due to its limited bandwidth, just as the world grows accustomed to it. HDMI is crossing from the TV set to the computer, UDI is creeping into the market, and DisplayPort is riding over the horizon and hoping to take over the world.
by Joel Durham Jr.

Crack in Blu-ray, HD DVD encryption gets wider

A poster named arnezami on the Doom9 forums has claimed to have found a method of extracting the Volume ID signatures from both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, which could make it easier for hackers to extract an unprotected version of the high-resolution video and audio content from store-bought titles.
by Jeremy Reimer.

Webcam Roundup

With the introduction of YouTube and Skype, and video support having been added to many other chat programs such as MSN and AIM, it’s hard not to be tempted to purchase a webcam so that you can finally see the people you speak with. A few years ago webcams were choppy, running at incredibly low frame rates, and lacking lifelike colors. Today, however, webcams have come a long way. They can take pictures, stream, track your face, record video, and act as a microphone, among a host of features available.

I gathered five webcams and put them to the test against each other. To make things more interesting, and to help you make your decision, I also chose webcams at a variety of price levels, so you can see what your hard earned dough will get you.
by Todd Haselton.

Klik: the un-packaging system

Klik is unique among software installation systems for Linux, in that each package installed through klik is self-contained, isolated from the rest of the operating system. Klik isn’t a package management system; rather it’s an application that lets you download and run software without installing it.
by Nathan Willis.

A sad day for the PPC architecture

The Macintosh PowerPC architecture didn’t really die when Apple moved to x86. It died today instead.
Today the “Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to reclassify PowerPC as an unofficial architecture, rather than a fully supported architecture, for Ubuntu 7.04 and subsequent releases. This means that packages and ISO images will continue to be produced, but releases will not be delayed due to problems which are specific to PowerPC, and the quality of the PowerPC release itself will depend very much on the extent to which members of the Ubuntu community drive PowerPC testing and bug fixes.”
by Eugenia Loli.

Sun’s Niagara2

Niagara2 sports 8 SPARC cores, all of which are connected to 4MB of shared L2 cache by a large crossbar switch. Each core is capable of eight-way simultaneous multithreading, giving each Niagra2 chip a total of 64 simultaneous threads of execution. All of this thread-processing power enables Niagra2 to double its predecessor’s throughput and performance/watt.
by Jon Stokes.

IBM Details Memory Advance for Chips

International Business Machines Corp. said Wednesday that its new memory technology will help unclog crippling bottlenecks that build up as increasingly powerful microprocessors attempt to retrieve data from a separate memory chip faster than it can be delivered.
by Jordan Robertson.

GMail opens its doors to the world

GMail, the popular web-based e-mail service provided by Google, is going global. Today Google announced that new GMail accounts will now be available to anyone on the planet.
by Jeremy Reimer.

Filesystem encryption in mixed environments with TrueCrypt

If you want to encrypt your sensitive files so that no one can access them without your personal password or decryption key, you have several options. But if you want a free, cross-platform, open source encryption application, try TrueCrypt.
by Anze Vidmar.

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