Desktop Takes Back Seat at Linux Conference

Source: Gizmodo | 21 Sep 2009 | 6:20 pm

Springtime stunners from Saturn - msnbc.com

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Springtime stunners from Saturn msnbc.com The Cassini orbiter has sent back a spectacular set of pictures taken during Saturn's equinox, including a moody portrait of the giant planet's rings at their darkest. Taken together, the pictures reveal that Saturn's rings are bumpier, more active and ... Snapshots from Saturn's EquinoxThe Planetary Society New images show that rings around Saturn are not flatTelegraph.co.uk We can't see why NASA claims Saturn's rings contain mountains the ...Dscriber Science News -Universe Today -Discover Magazine all 50 news articles »

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

I’m in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the inauguration ceremony of KAUST, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This is a 30-square kilometer state-of-the-art research institution with faculty and students from all over the world. For the next couple of days I’ll be getting some behind-the-scenes access to technology in use here, both for education and research, as well as the tools used to bring this place together.

KAUST was brought about, rather obviously, by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Says the king:

It is my desire that this new University becomes one of the world’s great institutions of research; that it educates and trains the future generations of scientists, engineers and technologists; and that it fosters, on the basis of merit and excellence, collaboration, and cooperation with other great research universities and the private sector.

The university, as the name implies, is science-focused. It offers degrees in nine fields of study:

• Applied Mathematics and Computational Science
• Bioscience
• Chemical and Biological Engineering
• Computer Science
• Earth Science and Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Environmental Science and Engineering
• Materials Science and Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering

As a well-funded, brand-new university, there’s a lot of top-notch tech here. From a nanofabriacation lab with a Level 100 clean room (no more than 100 particles per square foot), to a room filled with ten Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometers, to Shaheen, the fastest supercomputer in the Middle East, the facilities at KAUST are a researcher’s dream.

I plan to dig into more, but here’s two quick overviews of things I found remarkably impressive: Shaheen, and the CORNEA immersive virtual reality facility.

Shaheen
Shaheen, currently the 14th largest super computer in the world, is comprised of 16 IBM BlueGene/P racks, offering 220 teraflops in its current configuration. The plan is to raise that to a petaflop by 2011. That’s a huge performance jump in just two years. It has more than 65,000 processors. It’s also the largest system that the U.S. Department of Commerce has ever permitted to be exported, and as you might expect Uncle Sam places some usage restrictions on it. Right now, Shaheen draws 1.2 megawatts of power, and has an enormous cooling requirement.

The room in which Shaheen lives is pretty bland, and doesn’t make for very good photography. But here’s a photo, nonetheless:

We weren’t permitted inside because it’s operated inside a clean room environment. Aside from the fact that KAUST has been a construction site until just recently, there’s also serious concern about the effects of salt from the Red Sea coming into the room, so the project coordinators are playing it safe by restricting access and strictly controlling the environment.

CORNEA
CORNEA is a CAVE system that projects images onto all four walls, the ceiling, and the floor of a room in order to create a truly immersive virtual environment. Users within the room wear active stereoscopic glasses to produce a 3D effect. CAVEs aren’t particularly new, though they are still super cool.

Two things set KAUST’s CAVE apart from all the rest. First, it has the world’s highest resolution at 100 million pixels, and second, it has a phenomenal audio system inside the room. Speakers placed in the room pick up sounds and project them back in any of a number of programmable acoustic configurations. So if you’re walking through a visualization of an actual cave, your voice will echo and reverberate. This is actually amazingly hard to describe in text, and even harder to capture on video. Here’s a quick video I took while inside CORNEA:

When the audio is on, you really do feel like you’re in a larger space. Then when the audio is muted, you feel like you’re in any other room in the world. It’s very impressive what a dramatic effect sound has on our sense of sight.

If you guys have any techie questions for the KAUST staff or faculty, leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll do my best to get them answered!

The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there's secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe.

 

1. John Arquilla
Go on the Cyberoffensive

2. Thorkil Sonne
Recruit Autistics

3. Gregg Easterbrook
Embrace Human Cloning

4. Ralph Keeney
Cheat Death

5. Dambisa Moyo
Cut Off Aid to Africa

6. Nils Christie
Empty the Prisons

7. Stewart Brand
Save the Slums

8. Stefan Szymanski and Stephen Ross
Bust Up Big League Sports

9. Ludwig Minelli
Legalize Assisted Suicide

10. Jamie Heywood
Forget Medical Privacy

11. William Gurstelle
Take Smart Risks

12. Robert Gates
Overhaul the Pentagon

Illustration: Tucker & Bennett

Stefan Szymanski and Stephen Ross: Bust Up Big League Sports

Major league athletes are rewarded for talent, toughness, and single-minded dedication. Major league team owners, on the other hand, are rewarded for mediocrity. Having bought their way into a league, lackadaisical owners can extort hundreds of millions of dollars from their hometowns (and charge exorbitant ticket prices) under threat of decamping for another city. They can allow wretched teams to languish year after year and pocket the league's revenue-sharing money rather than invest it in talent, knowing that when they're ready to sell, a scrum of millionaire suitors will materialize. That's because big league teams in the US—and the leagues themselves—are, in effect, monopolies. Major League Baseball even has an explicit antitrust exemption. Without name recognition, fan loyalty, and access to top talent, an upstart league doesn't stand a chance.

How to spark owners with the same competitive fire they demand of their players? Stefan Szymanski and Stephen Ross have a plan: Make teams compete for a spot in the majors.

Szymanski, an economics professor at City University London, and Ross, a law professor at Penn State, borrowed their model from European soccer. In that system, no team is assured of a place in the top national league. Instead, each league has multiple levels: England's Premier League, Spain's La Liga, and Italy's Serie A are all the top rungs of their respective ladders. At the end of each season, the bottom few teams at each level are relegated to the rung below and are replaced by that level's winners.

Applied to American pro sports, the European system would eliminate the artificial scarcity that owners exploit. Anyone with the resources could simply start their own team and play their way up into the top tier. As a result, owners looking to boost their take by threatening to skip town would find they had no leverage, since other cities big enough to support a serious contender for the top tier would already have one. And there would be no such thing as a perennial cellar dweller; teams that performed poorly would be demoted. Demotion would cut their value, driving even the most complacent owner to do what it takes to get competitive. "You're sharpening the incentives," Szymanski says.

Of course, team owners wouldn't like it, but they could be convinced. Szymanski holds out hope that a bit of moral suasion from high places would suffice. "It's possible for courts and the legislature to decide the public has had enough of this monopoly system. The government can tell the leagues that if they don't sort themselves out in a sensible structure, government will do it for them," Szymanski says. "It would be very Barack Obama, I think."

Gregg Easterbrook: Embrace Human Cloning

Human clones, it is widely assumed, would be monstrous perversions of nature. Yet chances are, you already know one. Indeed, you may know several and even have dated a clone. They walk among us in the form of identical twins: people who share exact sets of DNA. Such twins almost always look alike and often have similar quirks. But their minds, experiences, and personalities are different, and no one supposes they are less than fully human. And if identical twins are fully human, wouldn't cloned people be as well?

Suppose scientists could create a clone from an adult human: It would probably be more distinct from its predecessor than most identical twins are from each other. A clone from a grown-up would have the same DNA but would come into the world as a gurgling baby, not an instant adult, as in sci-fi. The clone would go through childhood and adolescence with the same life-shaping unpredictability as any kid.

The eminent University of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass has argued that human cloning would be offensive in part because the clone would "not be fully a surprise to the world." True, but what child is? Almost all share physical traits and mannerisms with their parents. By having different experiences than their parents (er, parent) and developing their own personalities, clones would become distinct individuals with the same originality and dignity as identical twins—or anyone else.

Others argue that cloning is "unnatural." But nature wants us to pass on our genes; if cloning assists in that effort, nature would not be offended. Moreover, cloning itself isn't new; there have been many species that reproduced clonally and a few that still do. And there's nothing intrinsically unnatural about human inventions that improve reproductive odds—does anyone think nature is offended by hospital delivery made safe by banks of machines?

This does not necessarily make human cloning desirable; there are complicated issues to consider. Initial mammalian cloning experiments, with sheep and other species, have produced many sickly offspring that die quickly. Could it ever be ethical to conduct research that produces sick babies in the hope of figuring out how to make healthy clones? And clones might be treated as inferiors, rendering them unhappy.

Still, human cloning should not be out of the question. In vitro fertilization was once seen as depraved God-playing and is now embraced, even by many of the devoutly religious. Cloning could be a blessing for the infertile, who otherwise could not experience biological parenthood. And, of course, it would be a blessing for the clone itself. Suppose a clone is later asked, "Are you glad you exist even though you are physically quite similar to someone else, or do you wish you had never existed?" We all know what the answer would be.

Robert Gates: Overhaul the Pentagon

From his earliest days as secretary of defense, Robert Gates kept a little countdown clock in his briefcase. It ticked off the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until January 20, 2009, when President George W. Bush would leave office and Gates could retire to his secluded home in the Pacific Northwest, 43 years after entering public life. He'd be punting some tough issues to the next guy. But that wasn't his problem.

Until it was. Barack Obama prevailed on him to stay—in the midst of economic turmoil and two ongoing wars, the new president needed a low-key, no-surprises steward at the Pentagon.

That's not what the president got. More than five months after his countdown clock hit zero, Gates has turned out to be neither a caretaker nor merely the guy tasked with cleaning up the mess Donald Rumsfeld made of the Department of Defense. Instead, Robert Gates has emerged as the most radical secdef in generations, upending the politics of national security, scrapping the traditional ways gear gets to troops, and defying the military-industrial complex.

Gates denies all that. Mostly. As he leans over a small desk crammed into a cabin on board a modified 757, he comes across as just another Washington big shot. His starched white shirt has two pens in the breast pocket. His blue jeans are hiked up a bit too high on his waist, like he's been wearing suits too long to remember where dungarees belong. He waves off talk of massive change, of revolutions in military affairs.

Rather, he offers what sounds like common sense: The military needs to fight today's battles, not tomorrow's. Generals are always fighting the last war, the old saying goes, but in reality the Department of Defense has the opposite problem. While a relative handful of troops fight and die "downrange" in war zones, a massive bureaucracy develops strategies, spends money, and—most especially—builds weapons, all in the name of theoretical, decades-hence showdowns. It's a $500 billion perpetual motion machine.

Every secdef talks about changing the Pentagon, then almost immediately gets stymied by bureaucratic resistance. Only this time, Gates' talk is turning into action—a Gates Doctrine, if you will. Its core tenets: Base policy on the wars that are most likely to happen and the technology that's most likely to work. Stop trying to buy the future when you can't afford the present. With a White House veteran's feel for Washington, a love of policy, a penchant for secrecy, and an old man's sense of the ticking clock, the silver-haired administrator has become the most dangerous person in the military-industrial complex. "I've referred to myself as the secretary of war, because we're at war," he says in a nasal Kansas twang, raising his voice over the roar of the plane's engines. "This is a department that principally plans for war. It's not organized to wage war. And that's what I'm trying to fix."

On the Sunday before the midterm elections in 2006, while guests mingled in the main house at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, for the first lady's 60th birthday party, Bush took Gates into his private study and asked him to take over the Defense Department. Gates was a national security pro, having served in the White House and at the CIA for six presidents. He was a trusted protégé of Bush Senior and had continued to sit on several important advisory panels even after leaving DC in 1993.

As Bob Woodward told it in his 2008 book The War Within, Gates and the president talked about increasing the size of the Army, halting unneeded weapons programs, the unfinished fight in Afghanistan. But Gates knew only one topic really mattered: Iraq. The country Bush had set out to liberate was turning into The Road Warrior, with more bombs. Donald Rumsfeld's approach—"go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want"—had helped fuel the chaos. All the American power and prestige Gates had fought for decades to preserve was disappearing. He took the job.

When Gates arrived at the Pentagon in December 2006, without aides or entourage, he learned that few people in the building shared his sense of urgency about Iraq. Part of this was institutional: The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 essentially splits the military in two—relatively small, regional commands do the fighting, and everyone else does the conceptualizing, training, and gear-buying. But the bigger hurdle was attitude. Iraq was important, the Pentagon's prevailing wisdom went, but so were a whole range of other conflicts just over the horizon. "There wasn't any kind of dedicated place in the institution where people were coming to work every day saying, 'What can I do to help the people downrange today?'" Gates says. "And that got me—" His lips tighten. His eyes narrow. He takes a breath. "It made me very impatient."

Click to enlarge infographic.
Source: Department of Defense

Just two months into Gates' tenure, The Washington Post revealed that Walter Reed Army Medical Center was keeping wounded soldiers in moldy, mouse- and cockroach-infested squalor. Gates fired the general in charge. Then he fired the secretary of the Army and forced out the Army's surgeon general. On Rumsfeld's watch, no one got fired for incompetence—not even after the Abu Ghraib prison debacle. Gates was clearly different. "I can't tell you how cathartic, how refreshing that was," says Ryan Henry, a top aide to both secretaries.

But replacing bureaucrats is easier than diverting whole bureaucracies. Gates found that out as soon as he began acting on his promise to focus on waging war, not planning for it. He knew that soldiers were driving thousands of Humvees with substandard armor and that improvised explosive devices, which easily pierced the vehicles' thin skins, had caused 70 percent of US casualties in Iraq. The Army's answer to the pressing need for hardened vehicles was to keep pouring billions of dollars into Future Combat Systems, a program that was supposed to yield a next-generation networked, lightly armored infantry vehicle by, oh, 2016 or so.

Meanwhile, in one part of Iraq, hard-shelled trucks called MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected) had withstood hundreds of attacks without a single US fatality. But in May 2007, just 64 were delivered into the field—they were considered too big to use anywhere but Iraq, and the Army already had Future Combat Systems going. Gates learned about MRAPs not from his generals but from an April 2007 article in USA Today. "Nobody wanted the things, because they were afraid they'd wind up with thousands of them in a big car park at the end of the war," Gates says. "My attitude was: If you're in a war, it's all in. I don't care what we have left over at the end."

So Gates ordered a task force to figure out how to deliver 1,000 MRAPs a month by 2008. This was, to put it gently, crazy talk. Typically, defense contractors crank out just a few hundred armored vehicles a year. But task force chief John Young set up a plan to buy 17,000 specialized tires per month (Michelin, the sole supplier, was producing less than 1,000) and 21,000 tons per month of high-strength ballistic steel. It would eventually cost $25 billion—a lot of money, even at the Pentagon.

Gates put Young's plan into practice. He asked Congress for permission to expand manufacturing lines with $1.2 billion from other programs, and he activated a rarely used Cold War law to force steel makers to prioritize sales to the Pentagon's MRAP manufacturers. Monthly MRAP deliveries climbed to 1,189 by the end of the year. Today, there are 13,000 MRAPs deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. IED attacks have gone up, but in the 325 bombings involving MRAPs in Afghanistan so far this year, only five servicemembers have died.

The Gates Doctrine was emerging: Spare nothing to win today's war. Don't let the future distract you from the present day.

As a veteran of the national security and intelligence communities, Gates is both a defense outsider and a Washington insider. The son of a Wichita, Kansas, auto parts dealer, he was an Eagle Scout who dreamed of becoming a doctor—dissecting rats and cats in his parents' basement to get ready. He ended up majoring in history at William & Mary and then landed in the master's program at Indiana University. In his memoir, Gates claimed he met with the CIA recruiter there on a lark. "I thought I could get a free trip to Washington," he wrote.

Gates spent eight years as a junior analyst and an Air Force intelligence officer, then joined Nixon's National Security Council staff in 1974. Administrations changed, and political parties swapped control of the White House, but Gates remained. On the old boys' network, he had become a central node. He advised Carter on the Iranian hostage crisis, sized up Gorbachev for Reagan, and wrote George H. W. Bush's war aims for Operation Desert Storm.

All the while, Gates was learning how to bend a bureaucracy to his will. As a deputy national security adviser to the first President Bush, Gates took charge of the Deputies Committee, an interagency group responsible for the nuts and bolts of national security policy. The committee was a mess: rambling, inconclusive, a haven for back-channelers and leakers. Gates reined it in, ensuring no meeting lasted longer than an hour and that every one ended with a decision. Even the scuttling of his 1987 nomination to head the CIA didn't stop him. (Opponents alleged Gates, then the CIA's number two, hadn't done enough to stop the Iran-Contra scheme.) When Bush nominated him again four years later, Gates defused his critics with self-effacing humor and humility and was confirmed easily.

He left government in 1993; about a decade later he became head of Texas A&M and, once again, cleaned house. He replaced underperforming administrators with more- scholarly-minded deans, sending a message to an insular bureaucracy to focus on academics. A&M became one of the top public- service universities in the country and created hundreds of new academic positions.

Such a record should have told the current Pentagon establishment what to expect from their new boss. But to them, he turned out to be inscrutable. In some meetings, Gates would rarely speak; in others, he told stories from his Cold War glory days or cracked jokes about Washington's stuffed shirts. Rumsfeld was famous for intimidating people and bruising egos; Gates never interrupts. He can be stiff and reserved, until emotion comes gushing out. During one speech, recalling the death of a marine, he nearly broke down in tears, surprising even longtime friends. Gates doesn't travel much on the Beltway's social circuit, instead spending off-hours with his wife and a small cadre of aides. He smokes cigars, drinks Belvedere martinis with a twist (the first President Bush weaned him from gin to vodka), and watches trashy movies—Transformers and Wolverine were recent favorites.

Gates is also unforgivingly tough on failure. In August 2007, an Air Force unit mistakenly flew six nuclear warheads across the US on a B-52—a cardinal sin to an old Cold Warrior like Gates. Later, when Air Force chief of staff Mike Moseley briefed Gates on the incident, Gates asked him how many generals were going to get fired over the mishap. Moseley was taken aback; he said he wanted to spend time fact-finding first. More than 90 officers and airmen were eventually relieved or reassigned.

But there was a bigger problem with the Air Force. The service saw itself as the high tech deterrent against an apocalyptic encounter with another superpower. Current conflicts—and weapons for those conflicts—got short shrift. Unmanned aircraft like the Predator are cheap (compared to planes with pilots on board) and flexible, and they provide fast, useful intelligence to troops. But despite having been at war for nearly six years, the Air Force had fewer than a dozen Predator air patrols, or orbits, over Iraq and Afghanistan. US commanders were getting increasingly frustrated with the shortage.

In April 2008, a second task force—headed by Brad Berkson, a former partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company—investigated drone operations headquarters at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Berkson found a host of inefficiencies limiting drone time in the air. They were flying for only 20 hours a day, and some of the Nevada ground control stations used for practice in the daytime were simply shut down at night, instead of being used to control drones over the battlefield.

The Air Force brass thought the idea of the head of the entire freakin' military sending staff to spend this much time down in the weeds was, in the words of one former senior Air Force officer, "just amateurish." Gates found their recalcitrance equally frustrating. "I had to go outside the bureaucracy to get any kind of urgent action," Gates says. In late April, he gave a talk at the Air War College, one of the service's intellectual hubs, and told the assembled fliers that reform was going too slowly: "Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth." Gates knew that what he said was impolitic; after the speech he reached Moseley at his father-in-law's home in Texas to assure him that he hadn't meant to single out the general or the Air Force.

Moseley got the message anyway. The Air Force increased the number of drones over war zones; today there are 37 orbits over Afghanistan and Iraq. But drones weren't at the heart of the Air Force's strategy. What the service really wanted was the F-22 Raptor. At $250 million a pop, this next-gen superjet is unquestionably a champion dogfighter, all but invisible to radar and able to fly at least Mach 1.5. It's decades ahead of anything out of Moscow or Beijing.

Against insurgents and terrorists, however, F-22s are of little use compared to drones. So Gates wanted to cap F-22 production at 187, a level set by Rumsfeld, and emphasize drone use. Yet Moseley and Michael Wynne, secretary of the Air Force, kept lobbying for more. Raptors, they said, were essential replacements for the aging US aircraft fleet.

A couple of weeks after his speech at the Air War College, Gates met with the Joint Chiefs and a few other officials to talk about a strategy document. It included a line about the US accepting some risk in fights with superpowers in order to win asymmetric, unconventional conflicts. Moseley, a former fighter pilot, said that such a risk was unacceptable, that he needed those Raptors. Representatives from the Army, Navy, and Marines all registered similar discontent. They wanted their future war gear, too. "They kept making the case over and over. You would've thought someone's children we're being held hostage, how they carried on," a former senior defense official says.

Gates sat through it silently for about an hour. Finally, he told them he wouldn't ask Congress for any more Raptors. "It was like a cold shower. Like, 'Wow, what just happened here?'" another former official says.

Wynne and Moseley took one more crack at Gates at yet another meeting. The secdef wouldn't budge. "You know, Buzz," Wynne told Moseley afterward, "I think that just sealed our fate."

An internal DOD investigation into how the Air Force had accidentally shipped to Taiwan four fuses used in nuclear missiles didn't help. Gates read it and asked for Wynne's and Moseley's immediate resignations, but the fuses may have been just an excuse. "It was so spylike, to claim it was about the nuclear incident," a former Air Force official familiar with the situation says. "It was an opportunity. It had all the right labels."

By 2009, changes to the status quo, combined with a successful counterinsurgency push in Iraq, resulted in adjusted attitudes at the Pentagon. The new Air Force chiefs were talking about how awesome drones were. Pentagon staffers were talking about asymmetric war. Anyone discussing showdowns with China or Russia tended to use the same theoretical tone one might employ in considering war with Alpha Centauri.

Still, these changes were marginal compared to the $500 billion-a-year spending machine. Now, $300 billion of that was sacrosanct, going to troops, operations, and maintenance. But the rest went to the Pentagon's deeply odd process of developing and acquiring new weapons. Among the ongoing projects when Gates came aboard: a constellation of five "transformational" communications satellites that talk to one another using a technology that hasn't been shown to work, a laser-equipped 747 designed to zap incoming missiles (which had its first test fire last summer after 13 years in development), a presidential helicopter with a kitchen that can heat up meals after a nuclear war, and Future Combat Systems—the Army's $160 billion, grand modernization project, due to actually get high tech gear to troops by 2011. "You ever read Superman comic books?" asks Eric Edelman, the former Pentagon policy chief. "Well, acquisitions is like the Bizarro universe. Everything is reversed; the world is square, not round."

Every secdef from McNamara to Rumsfeld tried to cut over-budget, long-delayed weapons programs. Usually, though, their efforts leaked to the press and Congress, who hit them with a tsunami of tears over lost jobs and weakened national potency. Starting in 1989, then-secdef Dick Cheney (before he became a supervillain) tried four times to ax the Osprey, an aircraft that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like a plane. It took $26 billion, 30 dead crewmembers, and 25 years of development, but the Osprey eventually flew. Even Cheney couldn't stop it.

Gates thought his circumstances gave him a better shot. Even amid two wars and a collapsing economy, he had already lived through one scandal, and he was the only cabinet secretary to serve both Bush and Obama. "I decided to take full advantage of the opportunity," Gates says. He told his aides to forget about the economy, about generals and defense contractors and all the other extraneous political bullshit. "Let me worry about the politics," he said.

Then he made his deliberations covert. "I don't want this leaking out in pieces," he told his staff. "We'll get eaten alive." For the first time, everyone involved in the process had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Gates' team set up an exclusive reading room for the budget documents. Only top-ranking generals—four stars—were allowed inside, and they were not permitted to take the briefings out.

Starting on January 6, Gates and a handful of advisers began meeting regularly. "Everything is on the table," Gates told them. The group would get a white paper on a given issue—missile defense, fighter aircraft, ground forces—and Gates would review the options on what to keep or kill. Gates wouldn't say outright what he wanted to do with a given program; that way, no one would have details to leak. But everyone knew cuts were coming. Under the Bush administration, Pentagon spending had gone up 75 percent in eight years. "You need a cut to force the institution to make changes to the system," says Berkson, who coordinated the budget deliberations. "You need that pressure."

In the end, Gates cut the satellites, the nuke-proof helicopter, the laser-firing jumbo jet prototype, the Future Combat Systems trucks, and, most symbolic, the F-22. Each one of these strike-throughs meant billions of dollars and thousands of jobs lost in dozens of congressional districts. Taken together, they represented the biggest reorg of the Pentagon in a generation.

After the April budget announcement, Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma said that Gates was "gutting our military." One congressional committee after another voted to keep building F-22s and other Bizarro projects. Gates and the Pentagon "need to learn who's in charge, and the Congress is," said Democratic representative Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii. Not even Obama's threats to veto any budget with F-22s had an effect. The jet had become a symbol of resistance to the Gates Doctrine. By one tally, the Raptor had 45 supporters in the Senate. Gates had only 23 backers.

In mid-July, the weekend before the crucial vote, the White House and Gates' team started lobbying. Gates assured senator John Kerry that the Massachusetts Air National Guard wouldn't be severely impacted, and he reportedly warned the CEO of Raptor-maker Lockheed Martin that if his company lobbied in favor of the F-22, Gates would cut other Lockheed contracts. The new Air Force secretary told Wyoming senator Mike Enzi he didn't want any more Raptors anyway. The following Tuesday, the Senate voted 58-40 to stop production of the Raptors. Gates had won.

Aboard his plane, however, the secretary tries to downplay the importance of the budget votes. This is a onetime, temporary win over the square planet, not some wholesale rewriting of the rules, he insists. "Given the nature of the Pentagon, if you're in the middle of a war, you're going to have to have a lot of direction from the top, to break down bureaucratic barriers and get people to move out with a sense of urgency," he says.

Now the secretary of war is working on phase two of his plan, speeding up a once-every-four-years grand strategy review and working on even bigger changes in next year's budget. For decades, the Pentagon prepped itself for a straightforward set of superpower wars because ... well, those were the battles the US knew how to prepare for. It bought exquisite high tech weapon systems because they had the coolest capabilities, not because they necessarily countered any threats.

At long last, a changing world may be changing the Pentagon. Gates says he's trying to build an organization prepared for threats that defy present-day categorization—terror groups with bigger and better weapons and organization, and superpowers like China and Russia adopting the tactics of guerrillas. "Conflict in the future will slide up and down the spectrum," Gates says. "You're not only going to have irregular warfare over here and high-intensity conventional war over here." But every case will still require a pragmatic approach to strategy and equipment, even if that seems to clash with Gates' "all in" approach to war. Stanley McChrystal, the man Gates named in May to be top general in Afghanistan, has asked for more troops. Gates is "deeply skeptical"—his understanding of the Soviet experience there tells him more grunts may not be the way to defeat the Taliban.

After three years under Gates, the Defense Department is finally learning the right lesson: You wage war with the enemies you have, not the ones you wish you had.

Contributing editor Noah Shachtman (wired.com/dangerroom) wrote about ionospheric research in issue 17.08.

Large-Scale Mac Deployment?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NYC intern needed

Are you a student or shut-in? Are you a fan of electronic devices? Have you ever spent time in a Turkish prison? If you answered yes to all or two of these questions, have we got an offer for you. CrunchGear needs a Fall intern to help out on the site, attend swanky press events, and make coffee and prepare the editor’s shots of HGH.

How do you apply? Send an email to john@crunchgear.com with a brief description of your gadget collection along with a sample post based on a recent tech news story. Extra points for good spelling, grammar, and the ability to place commas and periods in the correct order. Put “NYC INTERN” in the headline.

Rumor: Microsoft Readies Touchscreen Tablet

It’s looking more and more likely that 2010 will be the year of the tablet. Add Microsoft to the list of tech giants rumored to be developing a touchscreen tablet, along with two touchscreen phones to compete with the iPhone.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley claims receiving tips that Microsoft is developing a touchscreen tablet featuring technologies used in its Surface touchscreen table. She tacks on a rumor about Pink, a “Microsoft-branded (but not Microsoft-manufactured) phone,” with a January 2010 launch date. No indications when, exactly, a Microsoft Surface-powered tablet would emerge. Perhaps next year as well?

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft is waiting for Apple to show its tablet hand before trotting out its revamped tablet,” Jo Foley writes.

ZDNet’s details on the devices are scarce, but more interesting is the mounting evidence suggesting tablets will be a buzzing product category next year. In August, Wired.com received tips that Dell and Intel are collaborating on a touchscreen tablet due for release next year. Also, an analyst told Wired.com he’s heard Nokia and HTC are working on tablets as well. And of course, there has been a plethora of reports citing sources who claim Apple will deliver a touchscreen tablet in 2010.

On top of these hints, market research firm Display Search now projects the touchscreen market will triple in the next few years, from $3.6 billion to $9 billion. The iPhone played a significant role in driving touchscreen technology into the mainstream, analysts told Wired.com.

Of course, just because tablets are likely to be trendy among manufacturers in 2010 doesn’t mean they’ll be hot sellers. We’ll have to wait a little longer to learn more about how these new tablets will differ from the scores that have come and gone in years past.

See Also:

• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
• Rumor: $800 Apple Tablet Coming in October
• Analyst Predicts Apple Will Unleash Touchscreen Tablet Next Year …
• How an Apple Tablet Could Pit iTunes Against Amazon.com
• Analyst Claims to Have Seen Apple Tablet

Photo of the Microsoft Surface, whose technology is rumored to appear in a tablet next year: Marilink/Flickr

Brizzly: Faster, Better, More Open

Brizzly, the web-based Twitter client that was first unveiled at our Real-Time Stream Crunchup in July, continues to roll out the improvements. After allowing users to upload and host their own pictures on its servers a few weeks ago, last week saw them give the service a significant speed boost, which also brought stream auto-updating. Today, the service rolled out the ability to send invites to other friends.

If you haven’t tried out Brizzly yet, you really need to. It’s a great way to use Twitter from the web thanks to its inline images and videos, new reply and message indicators, and most importantly, the ability to group the people you follow. You can also mute people in your main feed if they’re at a conference, or doing something for a set period of time that you really don’t care about.

I’ve gushed previously about the grouping feature, but the auto-updating is really nice as well. Rather than having to reload the page each time to see if there are new tweets from the people you follow (as you must on Twitter), Brizzly will pull in news ones automatically every so often. Long time users of Twitter will remember that it used to automatically pull in new updates back in the day (the feature was killed off to reduce server strain). This is also standard on FriendFeed (though Brizzly is not working quite that fast yet).

Brizzly also recently updated it own tutorial video to walk new users through some of the features. Find it below.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

FCC Chairman talks about Net Neutrality rules

Section: Communications, Cellular Providers, Web

Those who have been around the geekier parts of the Internet over the last few years probably know at least a decent amount about Net Neutrality.  For those who don’t or need a refresher, Net Neutrality is an idea that’s meant to keep the Internet free, to prevent ISPs from throttling your service, blocking access to sites or giving priority to certain types of traffic.  It’s been a topic of discussion for some time and the new FCC Chairman is looking into making rules that promote the idea.

This morning, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski talked about his plan for Net Neutrality.  The plans, which will be officially put forth in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at the FCC’s October meeting, basically boil down to network operators must allow users to access lawful content,applications and services that they want to, and must allow anyone to connect any non-harmful device to their networks.  However, Genachowski’s speech didn’t limit the rules to wired ISPs, he also decided to include wireless providers in the mix.

The inclusion of wireless providers like Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint is sure to upset a few.  AT&T is already having trouble with its network without having to allow unfettered access to data streams.  The rules would make it so Skype would have to be allowed to work on a 3G connection through an iPhone.  Although, it’s unclear how that would affect Apple’s App Store approval process, if it can still reject Sling and Skype for using the 3G network.  Although, it would also give AT&T more of an excuse to issue out their 3G MicroCells without wired ISPs complaining.  Of course, Verizon already has to allow any device to connect to its 700 MHz band, so that might not be an issue for them, even if they company might not be happy with it.

If the rules do get passed, it would be a huge win for consumers, and the EFF would surely be rejoicing.  It’s a good sign of things to come from the FCC under President Obama and it’s nice to see the rules getting pushed.

Read [CNet News]

Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Terminal Man Meets the Seatmate From Hell

World of Warcraft is back in China~!

Chinese gamers can once again feel the joy of buying an epic on the Auction House for 100G, then selling it for 300G to some sap. Yes, World of Warcraft is officially, 100 percent back in China. This is clearly huge news that’s totally worth your time of day.

You’ll recall that WoW had been offline in China for quite some time, owing to a dispute between Blizzard, the local company handling the game’s operation, and the Chinese government. The game had to be censored to a degree, and then it was put into a beta, and then is came out. Oh, that’s where we are today—it’s out again.

Kotaku says more than half of WoW’s players comes from China, so you can imagine that this must have been quite the headache for Blizzard to deal with.

This is where I make the tenuous link between China, MMOs, and gold farming. Although I will say this: I am so damn sick of corpse spam in the game. It totally takes you out of the game, so to speak. I was going to do a “Please Kill the Corpse Spam, Blizzard” post, but then I’m like, “You idiot, you don’t think Blizzard’s already working on the problem? What good will your complaint do?”

Anyway, WoW is back in China. Let us celebrate by having many brews at Brewfest, which is still my favorite in-game holiday.

Jack Kirby Heirs Reclaim Marvel/Disney Rights

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AV Tests Find That Reputation Really Does Count (PC World)

Foursquare Hasn’t Started Playing The Monetization Game Just Yet

There’s some hoopla today that the location-based social network Foursquare has found its business model (and as such, has beaten the more mature Twitter to one). But hold your horses. While Foursquare does have an idea for how to eventually make money (as we’ve discussed in the past), they aren’t actually focusing on making any just yet, co-founder Dennis Crowley confirmed to us today.

While there is a Foursquare For Business section on the site now, there is no monetization plan for any of these deals yet. “[We're] really just focusing on getting the product working properly (crashes / UX etc). [It's] worth noting that we don’t want to shoehorn biz stuff in at the last min, which is why we’re trying to get local merchants involved now. Even if all the deals are freebees,” Crowley wrote to us in an email.

That being said, obviously, Foursquare eventually hopes these types of deals (dubbed “Mayor Deals”) become a business of some kind. But having just raised its first seed round of funding, and only having been in existence for a few months, Foursquare has some time. And it seems smart to do this type of stuff the right way, rather than just “shoehorning” it in, as Crowley put it.

Crowley also says that they’ve been adding a good number of these specials recently. And they finally have a tool that makes it easy to do so. So we should be seeing more such deals in the future both on the mobile apps, and the website. You can see the current list of deals on the right hand column of this page. As you can see, most are in California or New York, which is where the service is most popular right now.

When Foursquare does decide to attempt to monetize such deals, it’s unlikely to be quite as straightforward as simply flipping a switch and accepting money to show coupons. For example, if there are tangible incentives to be a mayor of an establishment, this is likely to encourage cheating. Foursquare has been working on ways to combat that, but depending on how good the deals are (a free beer sounds pretty good to me), it will undoubtedly be a challenge.

There’s also the issue of price. How much do you charge a business to show these deals? Certainly it’s in the a local businesses interest to have these types of deals as it will probably drive more traffic to their establishments, but Foursquare would also already be getting a bump from the fact that the deals also entice users to use Foursquare.

Such deals would likely have to happen on a massive scale for Foursquare to make significant money. And if/how quickly that happens will be a testament to the power of local and location services overall.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Alliance Semiconductor Announces Receipt of Tax Refund

AT&T breaks out its new 3G Microcell - CNET News

DailyTech

AT&T breaks out its new 3G Microcell CNET News AT&T has finally unleashed its new femtocell in a public market trial in Charlotte, NC Dubbed the 3G MicroCell, the AT&T femtocell is designed to boost both the voice and data signal in your home by using your home broadband network. ... UK groups seen powering AT&T femtocell driveEETimes.com AT&T Trials MicroCell for Indoor CoveragePC World AT&T Launches 3G Microcell To Soothe Spotty NetworksChannelWeb SlashGear -InformationWeek -PC Magazine all 83 news articles »

Netgear Offers Networked Storage for Consumers

Netgear has announced a network-attached storage device, Stora, that will allow consumers to bring their hard drives online and access files, photos, music and other information from anywhere.

The cube-shaped Stora lets consumers share photos and videos with friends without having to upload them to websites or transfer them over email, says the company.

Stora is similar in functionality to the $100 Pogoplug, a small, consumer friendly device that was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. Where it differs is that, unlike the Pogoplug, Stora comes with a one TeraByte storage and one extra drive bay.

Pogoplug does not offer any storage of its own and only has a USB port for attaching external drives. Earlier this month, Pogoplug licensed its technology to Seagate to be included in the latter’s USB-based DockStar line of products.

Netgear’s Stora is compatible with Mac, PC and Linux systems. Stora can also serve content to other networked devices such as photo frames, XBox 360, PlayStation 3,  iPhone and the Blackberry.  The device also comes with automatic backup utilities for PCs and Macs.

The Stora, which is available currently in North America, will cost  $230. Integration for services such as Flickr and mobile phones is optional and will cost users $20 a year.

See Also:

• Cloud Engines PogoPlug Review
  

Photo: Netgear

GOP Senators Move to Stop Obama Net Neutrality Rules

Rearden Commerce Raises Another $40 Million, Lays Off 18 Percent

Rearden Commerce, the under-the-radar automated online assistant that helps people organize travel needs and other services, has raised another $40 million in a Series F funding from JPMorgan Chase. This latest round brings Rearden’s total funding up to $240 million since the company’s launch in 2000. JPMorgan Chase is a marketing partner and a pre-existing investor. Greg O’Hara and Rick Smith, both general partners from One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private equity fund, will be joining Rearden’s board, although the funding comes from Chase Capital Partners.

Unfortunately, the funding is bittersweet for the company because it coincides with a round of layoffs. Rearden let go roughly 60 employees from a staff of 335 employees (or 18 percent), following a round of layoffs last November of around 10 percent (or 40 employees) of the company’s staff.

At this point, with so much capital invested in the company, the best hope for Rearden investors to see a returns is if it goes public. Rearden is hoping for an IPO, but before it files it wants to hit profitability, and therefore it is cutting its way there. Public investors are going to want to see evidence of sustainable profits and clear revenue growth. Investors generally prefer companies that are hiring to keep up with growth than cutting back to hit their numbers.

Rearden is better known in the corporate world, offering its services to more than 5,000 corporations, up from 1,700 in May, 2008, with over 2 million individual employees using the service. American Express resells the service to its business customers. Last year, Chase also signed on as a reseller and marketing partner, offering the Rearden’s personal web concierge service to its bank cardholders.

Rearden offers enterprises an automated personal assistant that helps their employees organize any sort of travel-related task. They can set their profile up with the types of restaurants they like, whether they like aisle or window seats, and their preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of their trip for them. Rearden also launched a mobile version of its service that will sync up with their calendar, message them with alerts and allows them to make changes to their itineraries and bookings. The service also keeps track of reward miles and points from airlines, hotels, and rental cars, and lets employees use those points to book additional travel and other services. The service will even keep track of travel credits and apply them to future trips.

The company had a banner year in 2008, raising $100 million in funding, growing the company’s client and user base and expanding into the mobile space. The site also acquired Global Ground Automation to assist with limousine and other ground transportation reservations, and ExpenseWire to simplify expense reporting for users. Rearden is still planning to target consumers directly, after promising to roll out a consumer-facing service for the past few years.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The real Fake Linus Torvalds has been selected

The jig is up, and the Silver Penguin award has been presented to the winner of the Fake Linus Torvalds competition! Before you learn who won, though, you need to know who was actually playing. As you recall, four famous people were pretending to be Linus on Twitter and Identi.ca, and the community selected their favorite.

The participants were:

1. Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs), reporter for Newsweek
2. Matt Asay, blogger for CNET.com
3. Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager at Novell
4. Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical

And the winner of the Silver Penguin is: Matt Asay! The runner-up was Jono Bacon.

Here’s a terrific quote from Matt:

Linus Torvalds is such an impressive figure, even being his facsimile is an honor. Linus is, of course, the founder of the Linux kernel, but he also represents the soul of open source: open without being dogmatic, collaborative while still being sharp-witted and sharp-elbowed, and quality and performance above all. I won’t be faking his voice anymore, but I do hope to emulate it.

Congratulations, Matt, and great work to everyone involved!

Video Surveillance System That Reasons Like a Human

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shocking Coincidence! Republicans, AT&T Unhappy With Proposed Network Neutrality Rules. [Digital Daily]

That was fast.

Just hours after Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, unveiled his open Internet proposal, a number of Republican senators stepped forward to oppose it. Arguing that Net Neutrality will “impede investment and innovation of new technologies,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas) proposed an amendment to an Interior Department appropriations bill that would bar the FCC from using federal funds to implement the proposal.

“I am deeply concerned by the direction the FCC appears to be heading,” Hutchison, the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a statement. “Even during a severe downturn, America has experienced robust investment and innovation in network performance and online content and applications. For that innovation to continue, we must tread lightly when it comes to new regulations. Where there have been a handful of questionable actions in the past on the part of a few companies, the commission and the marketplace have responded swiftly.”

Joining her in proposing the amendment were Senators John Thune (R., S.D.), Sam Brownback (R., Kan.), David Vitter (R., La.), Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), and John Ensign (R., Nev.), who had this to say in a statement of his own:

“In this struggling economy, any industry that is able to thrive should be allowed to do so without meddlesome government interference that could stifle innovation. We must avoid burdensome government regulations that micromanage private businesses or that limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want. The Internet has flourished in large part because of a lack of government interference; I see no need to change that now.”

Nor does AT&T (T), which–coincidentally, I’m sure–happens to be a top-20 donor not just for Ensign and Hutchison, but for the four other senators who would block Genachowski’s initiative as well. Said Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs: “AT&T would be very disappointed if [the FCC] has already drawn a conclusion to regulate wireless services despite the absence of any compelling evidence of problems or abuse that would warrant government intervention.”

Multiplied Media and V-ENABLE partner to provide local restaurant search

Saturn Equinox Reveals Mountains in Rings

The New York Times, Brought to You–Literally–by Twitter [MediaMemo]

It has been easy enough to be skeptical about Twitter’s influence and staying power–I do it all the time. But there’s no denying that Twitter has become a powerful driver of Web traffic.

Just ask the New York Times (NYT), which says Twitter is about to become one of the top 10 referral sources to the paper’s site.

Impressive. But what exactly does this mean?

There was a flurry of excitement this afternoon on Twitter–of course–when Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan threw out a much more exciting data point: Reporting/Tweeting from an industry conference, Morgan said Times digital boss Martin Nisenholtz had announced that “Twitter now drives 10% of NYT digital distribution, up from 0 a year ago.”

Other attendees report hearing the same thing. But whether they were participating in a mass hallucination or Nisenholtz misspoke, here’s the Times’s official line, via spokeswoman Diane McNulty: “At its current growth rate, Twitter is, or will soon move into, the top 10 in terms of referrals to NYTimes.com.”

If that’s the case, then Twitter likely accounts for much less than 10 percent of the Times’s traffic. If you assume that Google (GOOG) is the paper’s largest external referral source and that it likely accounts for a third of the site’s traffic (these are semi-educated guesses, but I’m happy to adjust), then Twitter and other sources at the bottom of the top 10 are going to be in the low single digits.

Still! It is a lot of traffic, and a year ago it either didn’t exist or someone else was directing it to the Times. Now the trick for Twitter (and its investors) is to figure out a way to capitalize on this phenomenon.

Medis Secures Bridge Financing From Institutional Investor

UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

Netflix awards $1M prize to improve movie picks (AP)

AP - And the winner is ... Netflix.

A Quick Guide to Intel’s Chips, From Arrandale to Yorkfield

Intel’s processor for desktops and laptops can be a jumble of codenames — Lynnfield, Nehalem or Clarkdale anyone? Add to that a rebranding initiative, unveiled three months ago, that split the same codenames across different chip families, and it can get downright confusing.

With Intel’s developer conference, aka IDF, set to kick off Tuesday, we have created a guide to understanding Intel’s different consumer processors.

Intel currently has three main chip families: Core i7, Core i5 and Core 2. All are based on the 45nm technology that Intel started moving to in late 2007 and are available to consumers now. Eventually the company hopes to phase out the Core 2 line of products and introduce a new entry-level processor, Core i3.

Read on for a more detailed explanation of each family.

Core i7: Codenamed Bloomfield and Lynnfield, Core i7 includes the latest desktop processors from Intel. The CPUs are billed as Intel’s fastest and most advanced processors.

The 45-nanometer processors are based on Intel’s Nehalem micro-architecture. They include features such as hyperthreading technology that gives the chips the ability to execute eight threads simultaneously on four processing cores, better power management and an integrated memory controller. (Read more about Nehalem and its key features.)

The Core i7 desktop family comes in two broad flavors: regular and extreme. Once carrying the Lynnfield moniker, Core i7’s regular edition processors have clock speeds from 2.66 GHz up to 3.06 GHz.

The extreme edition, formerly codenamed Bloomfield, offers two processors with clock speeds of 3.20 GHz and 3.33 GHz. These are CPUs billed for hardened Call of Duty and Crysis gamers and graphics creators. The chips help deliver more realistic game environments for players and are popular among graphics and multimedia creators, says Intel.

Intel also has a Core i7 CPU for laptops in the works, with the codename Clarksfield. The company is expected to announce specification and details of availability for these processors “very soon.”

Core i5: The Core i5 family comprises mid-range processors that have four cores and are available with clock speeds from 2.66 GHz to 3.20 GHz. They were also formerly bunched under the Lynnfield codename. The chips are based on the 45nm lithography process but lack the advanced features of the Core i7 chips, such as hyperthreading. These CPUs are targeted at mainstream PCs that do a bit of gaming and multimedia but not enough to require the blow-out-the-sockets kind of horsepower that comes from the Core i7 chips.

Intel plans to release 32nm versions of the Core i5 chips, codenamed Clarkdale, early next year.

Core i3: There’s not much known about the Core i3 family beyond that it is expected to be Intel’s entry-level processor. The company’s newest chips are always introduced for high-end PCs and then trickle down to more basic computers.

Intel has said that Core i3 chips could be out in early 2010, although the company now promises to have it ready for release at the end of the year. Speculation about Core i3 has so far been focused on the Arrandale and Clarkdale chips. Arrandale is expected to be a 32nm CPU for laptops, while Clarkdale will be the version for desktops.

These chips won’t have some of the advanced features, such as Turbo Boost, but they are expected to offer a step forward from the earlier generation of processors in terms of speed.

Core 2: The Core 2 line of chips come in dual-core and quad-core versions, known as Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, respectively.

The Core 2 Duo, formerly called Penryn, has two processing cores and is available in clock speeds ranging from 2.13 GHz to 3.16 GHz. It is mostly also based on the 45nm process technology, though Intel does still offer a Core 2 Duo chip based on the 65nm process.

The Core 2 Quad processors, codenamed Yorkfield, have four processing cores and offer clock speeds ranging from 2.33 GHz to 2.83 GHz.

Intel offers a version of the Core 2 processors called Core 2 Extreme for laptops. The 45nm Core 2 Extreme processor comes in two-core and quad-core versions with clock speeds ranging from 2.53 GHz to 3.06 GHz.

The chart below explains Intel’s consumer processor families.

See Also:

• Why Intel’s Processors Aren’t Big on Cellphones
• Intel, Nokia To Create New Mobile Architecture and Devices …
• Intel Pushes New Operating System For Netbooks
• Intel Demonstrates Wireless Power Technology
• Intel Launches New Desktop Processor

Photo: Nehalem wafer/ Intel

A Quick Guide to Intel's Chips, From Arrandale to Yorkfield

A Quick Guide to Intel's Chips, From Arrandale to Yorkfield

Tim Kring to answer questions about Heroes on Gaia Online before season 4 premiere

FROM GAMERTELL - The chat starts an hour before the two-hour season opener and is to be followed up with freebies for a few lucky participants…
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

FCC Position May Spell the End of Unlimited Internet

AT&T testing its version of the Airave, the MicroCell

Section: Communications, Accessories, Cellphones, Cellular Providers

Starting today in Charlotte, North Carolina, AT&T Wireless customers will be offered the chance to get a femtocell to boost indoor coverage.  The device, which AT&T is calling MicroCell, is their version of Sprint’s Airave.  Both devices connect to the user’s high speed Internet connection (DSL or Broadband) to improve in building coverage.  They use VoIP technology to handle calls rather than local cell towers and cover a range of up to 5,000 square feet.  Charlotte will serve as a test market for the device, which may eventually be offered to all their customers if response is good.  The company is considering two pricing plans.  Plan one would offer the MicroCell for $150 with no further fees while the other would offer it with a $100 rebate but a $20 monthly charge.

Up to 4 devices can use the MicroCell at once.  AT&T recommends a data connection of at least 1.5Mb per second upstream and 256Kbps downstream and says satellite broadband is not recommended for use with the MicroCell.

I have an Airave, which works just like the MicroCell, and I’m very happy with it.  Where once we used to get poor signal, dropped calls and lots of roaming we get 5 bars of solid coverage now.  Our EVDO data is solid now as well.  AT&T customers, especially those with iPhones, have been complaining loudly about the poor network for awhile now and the MicroCell just may be the answer!

Read [PCWorld]

Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Using the Sea To Cool Your Data Center

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix CEO: We’ll Get to the iPhone…Eventually [Digital Daily]

Netflix is headed to the iPhone–at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future. Asked by Reuters if he’d ever consider a partnership with Apple (AAPL), Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said he would, but only after the company had secured its foothold on videogame consoles and elsewhere.

“[A partnership with Apple] is something that’s likely to come over time,” Hastings said. “But nothing in the short term. [With] movie watching, we are not focused on mobile yet, but on the TV, on Blu-ray and on the video game consoles. We will get to mobile eventually, including the iPhone.”

Of course, bringing a Netflix (NFLX) streaming-video app to the iPhone will no doubt take some doing–and a few concessions. Certainly, it seems unlikely that AT&T (T) would be thrilled to have Netflix streaming movies over its wireless cellphone network. So at the very least, the company would have to agree make its app Wi-Fi-only.

FairPoint Communications Notified of Noncompliance With NYSE Continued Listing Requirements

Appletell reviews SplashID password management for iPhone, iPod touch

FROM APPLETELL - Now that I’ve tried the iPhone app SplashID from SplashData, I’ve finally found an app that understands data security is a fairly broad issue.
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Tyrannosaur Found Mauled by Kin

GSI Group Inc. Receives Notification from Nasdaq Regarding Minimum Bid Price Deficiency

Statement of Association for Competitive Technology President Jonathan Zuck on the European Commission's Intel Antitrust Findings

Oclaro Increases Revenue Outlook for First Quarter Fiscal 2010

Oclaro Receives NASDAQ Listing Compliance Notification

MSI Wind U110 ECO claims over 15 hours of battery life

Section: Computers, Laptops, Netbooks

The MSI Wind, a favorite for Hackintosh enthusiasts, has a new model out called the Wind U110 ECO.  MSI touts the battery life at over 15 hours on a 9-cell battery.  The specs are pretty much what you expect out of a netbook these days: Intel Atom processor (1.60GHz), 10-inch display at 1024 x 600 resolution, webcam, and a 160GB hard drive.  This model has 802.11 b/g/n for Wi-Fi, so you can get some nice speeds on this machine if you have a N router.  At 3.2 pounds and 1.24-inches at its thickest point, this netbook stays on the thin and light side even with the 9-cell battery.  The Wind U110 ECO costs $429.99 and comes in any color you want as long as that color is silver. 

Company Site: [MSI US]

Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

The Perils of Ramming Products Down IT's Throat

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ozone depletion might be getting better

How Scientists Think: Fostering Creativity In Problem Solving

Invasive species spread hard to predict

Palm’s webOS to mature on September 24th?

Section: Communications, Smartphones, Mobile

Over at Digital Daily, John Paczkowski says it is confirmed that the Palm will start offering applications for a fee on its popular webOS that runs on the Palm Pre.  This is the news many Palm fans have hoped for and represents a milestone for the Palm team.  Many have suggested Palm has to have a robust paid application store for its new platform to succeed.

Paczkowski says September 24th, 2009 is the day the App Catalog goes paid and developers can charge for their third party applications like Apple’s uber-successful App Store for the iPhone.  Rumors swirled today that the GSM Palm Pre version would drop in Europe sometime this fall to compliment the paid apps.

Currently, Palm’s App Catalog is filled with free applications.  Adding paid applications provides developers the incentive to build lucrative apps.  Palm is hoping its App Catalog can duplicate the success that Apple’s has.

Our man Iyaz got some hands-on time with the Palm Pixi, a sibling to the Pre that runs the very same webOS, and was impressed.  As Palm develops more and more phones on the webOS and more carriers offer their products, the incentive for developers increases quickly.  It looks clear that Palm hopes to kick things into high gear rather fast.

Read [Digital Daily]

Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Sony Ericsson Develops Contact Headphones

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toys ‘R’ Us trying to be tops for game trade-ins

FROM GAMERTELL - Toys ‘R’ Us has entered the game trade arena with a vengeance as some games can net you as much as $40 in credit…
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Scientists call for marine life study

Amazon starts its own A/V and computer accessories brand: AmazonBasics

Section: Business News, Audio, Accessories, Video, Accessories, Computers, Hardware, Networking

Amazon is getting in on the cable business.  The AmazonBasics line of cables is Amazon’s audio/video and computer cables that come in Amazon’s Frustration Free Packaging (meaning no blister-packs).  Assuming AmazonBasics are decent quality cables, this is an interesting development.  Finding a particular cable on Amazon.com can be somewhat troublesome with so many different vendors selling various brands of cables.  The AmazonBasics line ought to streamline picking up odds and ends for your computer or home theater. 

I would imagine that certain companies will not like the idea of Amazon pushing its own branded goods over their own.  Would you pick up a $99 Monster HDMI cable or an AmazonBasics HDMI cable for $8.94? 

Right now, the AmazonBasics line includes USB cables, FireWire cables, CD-Rs, DVR+R, DVD-Rs, networking cables, and various home theater cables.  Prices seem quite reasonable when compared to some other brands.  I wouldn’t expect to see televisions or portable electronics under the AmazonBasics brand, but Amazon could always come up with some other clever name for that - maybe AmazonElectronics?

Read: [Pocket-Lint]

Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

How Proteins Talk To Each Other

Cassini finds new Saturn ring details

Displaced Pandas To Return Home By 2012

Study finds protein link to fat storage

Rattle Your Bones With Single-Speaker Surround Sound

Cell Phone Art: Camera phone photos get an art gallery (or two)

When you think of camera phone photos, what words pop into your brain? For us, that would be “blurry”, “blueish”, and “craptastic” – but that’s because 95% of our camera shots come when we’re three drinks deep in a bar lit like the Bat Cave. Name any sub-niche of photography, from pin-hole to lomo, and there’s a community of capturers dedicated to taking the style to the limit. Camera phone photography is no different – and for just a little while in Atlanta, GA and Stowe, VT, it’s an art form.

The exhibit in Vermont, called “Relentless Eye: Global Cell Phone Photography”, runs from Sept. 25th to Nov. 28th at the Helen Day Art Centre. (Careful clicking around that page if you’re working for someone who’s heavy on the NSFW-whip – it’s all artsy stuff, but thar be exposed boobies in them thar hills.) Artists “from Tokyo to Burlington” have contributed one-of-a-kind 8×10s, which will sell for $25 a pop.

A second event runs a bit shorter and reaches beyond just photography, but you still ought to check it out if you’re around Atlanta. From September 25th to November 7th, the Spruill Center For The Arts will be running an exhibit called “on the flip side”, which looks to explore “the impact of this burgeoning technology on art, and presents a range of work that includes drawing, musical composition, photography and sculpture.”

We’re a bit too far away to stop into either of these events ourselves – but let us know if you go.

[via Cellular Obscura]

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

River deltas sinking due to human activity

Private Firms Preparing for Moon Flights

T-Mobile fires up 21 Mbps HSPA+ in Philadelphia

Look at you go, T-Mobile! T-Mo was one of the last off the bat with a 3G network — hell, their 3G network is just now really getting to a respectable size — but now they’re the first in the US to roll out a 21 Mbps HSPA+ (still considered 3G, though its 5-7x faster than what they’ve got now) test market. It’s only in Philadelphia for now, though more markets ought to light up early next year.

This is right around the same time we’d expect AT&T to be lighting up their HSPA+ test zones, if they hadn’t bailed on the upgrade in hopes of speeding up their move to 4G technology LTE.

[Via MobileBurn]

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Latest iPhone OS May Cause Battery Problems; Apple Investigates

Hundreds of iPhone customers are reporting shorter battery life after upgrading to the latest iPhone OS (3.1). Apple appears to have acknowledged the issue, as the company’s help desk is contacting some affected customers to diagnose the root of the problem.

In Apple’s support forums, nearly 500 posts complain about the iPhone’s shortened battery life after upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1. The AppleCare help desk is contacting some of these forum members with an 11-part questionnaire, according to The iPhone Blog.

The questionnaire includes queries about possible power suckers such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and push e-mail. Question 10, for example, reads, “When you notice a power drop, does it seem to be a legitimate power drop, or rather an issue with the battery icon indicator?”

The note also contains a file that installs an unsigned profile for battery-life logging on the iPhone. If users opt to install the profile, their battery-life logs can be synced with iTunes, and they can request that those logs be sent back to Apple for inspection, according to The iPhone Blog.

Are you an iPhone user? Let us know in the poll below whether you’ve been experiencing shorter battery life since upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1, or share your anecdotes and possible solutions in the comments below.

Meanwhile, I’ll share my own experience: I haven’t been actively monitoring battery life with iPhone OS 3.1 in particular, but I have noticed some quirks with the general 3.0 OS. At one point my battery life dropped from 100 percent to 20 percent in about 10 minutes. I looked into the problem and saw reports from several users that the problem was a corrupt iTunes backup of your iPhone.

The solution? Unfortunately it involved doing a clean wipe of the iPhone, setting it up as a new device and re-synchronizing my entire iTunes library. (You can do all of this by clicking the “Restore” button in iTunes, then selecting the option to set up your iPhone as a new device. After that, all you have to do is synchronize your iTunes library.) In the course of this process I lost my entire SMS history, my voicemails and library of photos snapped with the iPhone. That sucked, but a clean restore fixed the problem.

See Also:

• Everything You Wanted to Know About iPhone 3.1 But Were Afraid to Ask
• Battery Tests Confirm iPhone 3GS Improvements, But Complaints Linger

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Latest iPhone OS May Cause Battery Problems; Apple Investigates

BLOG: The Mars of H.G. Wells

Low-priced SSD options rolling out from Active Media

Section: Peripherals, Storage

Solid state drives are an attractive option to people who want a laptop that have no moving parts and/or want better battery life.  Picking a SSD option is usually quite expensive, but Active Media announced its new line of SaberTooth S3 Mini PICe SSDs for Asus Eee PCs with pretty low prices.  The 16GB model costs $69, the 32GB model is $89, with top of the line model at 64GB for $159.  The read speed for these devices are 95MB/sec with write speeds at 70MB/sec (numbers are sequential read and write speeds).  Keep in mind these new SSDs use a Mini PCI Express connector.  If you have an Asus S101, 900, 900A or 901 Eee PC, these SSDs are guaranteed to be compatible.  If you’re feeling adventurous with another laptop, it’s up to you.

Product Page: [Active SaberTooth S3]

Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

WATCH: Is It Future Yet?: Moonbase

HTC Touch2, Touch Pro2, and Garmin-Asus G60 get priced for AT&T

Ready to dump out a chunk of change to AT&T for your next smartphone? Need to know how much to pull out of the “non-essentials” (food, hygiene, etc) savings? This might help.

BGR managed to finagle some details over the weekend, shedding a light on the price points for the HTC Pure (Touch2), HTC Tilt2 (Touch Pro2), along with the long-fabled Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60.

According to what they’re hearing, pricing is as following:

• Tilt2: $199.99 ($149.99 after mail in rebate) with contract, launching around mid-October.
• Touch Pro2: $299.99 with contract, making their Touch Pro2 cheaper than T-Mobile and Sprint’s, but not Verizon’s.
• nuvifone G60: $299.99 with contract, which seems pretty damn high to us when compared to other handsets that AT&T offers for less.

So what do you think – are any of these calling your name? Are you as shocked as we are to see the nuvifone G60 finally coming stateside?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Verizon looks at the BL40, wimps out, goes with some boring handset

Look, Verizon. I know that we’ve given the BL40 (or “Chocolate Touch”) a lot of crap since it first leaked out. It was a pretty grand departure from Chocolates past and, well, it looked big enough to churn butter with. That said, we liked it.

Apparently we were the only ones – either that, or the people in Verizon’s “Focus group” were just jerks. They got handed two prototypes: one resembling the BL40, the other (pictured at right) looking just like every other touchscreen handset released since 1981. Why, Verizon, Why?! How am I supposed to fight off assailants or measure football fields with this nubby little thing?

Good job to PhoneArena for scoopin’ the shots.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Appletell reviews Samson’s Go Mic

FROM APPLETELL - While an internal microphone might be a small step forward for recording ease, the Samson Go mic is a giant leap forward for quality.
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Frustrate yourself for a few minutes and then give up with the Revomaze

Described as an 'extreme puzzle,' Revomaze comes in three colors, representing increasing degrees of extremity, and comes with one of those fishy "win cash if you solve it" offers. [ThinkGeek via The Automata Blog]

Ninja Drive

At $125, the only thing GeekStuff4U's Ninja thumbdrive gets stealthy with is your wallet!

Recently on Offworld: Nintendo's holiday lineup, Marian moves, Angry Dad the Game

Recently on Offworld we took an in-depth look at the games coming to both Wii and DS throughout the beginning of 2010 that you should be paying attention to (above), including new versions of Maxis's Spore -- which has just received a new, surprisingly full featured Flash version of its Creature Creator utility for your web perusal, in anticipation of the upcoming games.

We also saw indie fave Infinite Ammo show off an affecting debut video of their upcoming puppet-girl opus Marian, as Team Meat also debut the first trailer for their brutal WiiWare platformer Super Meat Boy: a must see for its all-replays-at-once feature demo near the end.

Elsewhere the animators at Aardman take on the DS's new sketchbook cartoon app, Rez and Lumines creators Q unveil a love-connection-puzzle game for iPhone, a man brilliantly mods Half Life 2 to use only mouth-sounds, James Kochalka's Game Boy Advance album hits iTunes, and Taito unveils an arcade game that simulates the impotent rage of the angry dad.

And our 'one shot's: Nathan Barley/Dead Set's Charlie Brooker gets into games, Konjak captures the end of Mario's quest, our well-spent childhoods, and open season on invaders.

Paralyzed Rats Regain Their Footing

The contempt commences at 3:20

The introduction of the ROKR, from CNET's vault. [via Daring Fireball]

Russian Billionaire Installs Anti-Photo Shield on Giant Yacht

Students Send Model Airplane to 7,000 Feet

On the morning of September 11th, a small group of Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics students set up their class project at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. The gear consisted of a small table, a couple of MacBooks and two battery-powered model airplanes. The goal: fly the autonomous balsawood and foam aircraft as high as possible.

One of the team, Zouhair Mahboubi, launched the first plane, throwing it into the air much like you or I would throw a paper-dart, and it behaved just the same, crashing to the ground a few seconds after launch. The second plane was more successful, and after take-off flew to 2,177 meters, or 7,142 feet, before the team lost contact.

Because the aircraft was autonomous, the flight didn’t end there. The plane went immediately into landing mode and made it safely back to land, and this turned out to be the trip that set an (unofficial) world record for autonomous craft under 5 kilos in weight. A third sortie saw similar altitudes, but before the plane could climb higher it flew too close to the edge of the allotted airspace — this was on NASA’s ground at Edwards Air Force Base, remember.

For the final attempt, the plane was sent soaring from a mile to the north to buy more climbing time before the strengthening winds again took the craft too far south. The plane, named Blue Panther, made it to 2,490 meters, or 8169 feet, but the winds finally won and blew it well off course to the East, where Blue Panther sent itself spiraling to Earth at 78 mph when it engaged “flight termination” mode. The flight was the highest, but because of the crash landing it doesn’t count for the record.

The students had managed to put these planes, very successfully, into the air where they pretty much looked after themselves, and to do it in just a year, from drawing board to sky. More surprisingly, the models cost just $500 each. Not pocket money, but the sort of success-to-cash ratio that is certainly to be attracting the military. Especially as the tests took place in its backyard.

Stanford students claim new altitude record for tiny, autonomous planes. [Stanford News]

Photo credit: Zouhair Mahboubi

See Also:

• The $150 Edge-of-Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer …

Students Send Model Airplane to 7,000 Feet

AT&T launches ‘MicroCell’ signal booster

Video: Pool-Playing Robot is Unbeatable

SLIDE SHOW: Top 10 Volcanic Blasts

Swiss Army Knives, Rebooted

You have, of course, heard the saying “jack of all trades and master of none”, and it might have been coined for the Swiss Army Knife. While is is undoubtedly very convenient to have a tiny tool-kit in a pocket-sized package, the tools themselves are never as good as the standalone versions. The knife is hard to pull out and folds back in, chopping fingertips, when you press any way but the right way, the screwdriver doesn’t so much drive screws as scratch and tickle them, and the corkscrew somehow manages to slip one of your spinal disks with every bottle you open.

Swiss designer Thilo Fuente has teamed up with Wenger, the original Swiss Army Knife maker, and come up with some less diverse but certainly more functional tools, from a knife with an angled handle to make opening and wielding it easier, through a large blade with fold-out handles which change the function depending on where you place them, to a separate handle and blade which are screwed together and have an integrated grind-stone.

We think these designs are fantastic, and they retain the steel and aluminum materials and red/polished metal of the originals. All except the rather pocket-unfriendly set of five tools which are held together by a hank of red cord. Put these on sale, Wenger, and you’ll be getting a pocketful of my dollars.

Product page [Fuente y Fuente via Core77]

See Also:

• Swiss Army Knife Launches the Age of the Multitool
• Chill Out With The Swiss Peace Knife
• Bonfort Classic Swiss Army Knife
• June 12, 1897: The Swiss Army Gets Its Own Knife
• Roundup: Folding Pocket Knives

Russian Billionaire Installs Anti-Photo Shield on Giant Yacht

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has a rather curious new addition built in to his latest oversized yacht. The 557-foot boat Eclipse, the price tag of which has almost doubled since original plans were drawn to almost $1.2 billion, set sail this week with a slew of show-off features, from two helipads, two swimming pools and six-foot movie screens in all guest cabins, to a mini-submarine and missile-proof windows to combat piracy.

It might not seem like somebody with such ostentatious tastes would crave privacy, but along with these expensive toys, Ambramovich has installed an anti-paparazzi “shield”. Lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph. According to the Times, these don’t run all the time, so friends and guests should still be able to grab snaps. Instead, they will be activated when guards spot the scourge of professional photography, paparazzi, loitering nearby.

We dig it, although the British courts might not be so pleased. UK photo magazine Amateur Photographer asked a London lawyer about the legalities of destroying photos from afar. Here’s what he said: “intermeddling with goods belonging to someone else, or altering their condition, is a trespass to goods and will entitle the photographer to claim compensation without having to prove loss.”

Any sentence containing the word “intermeddling” is of course wonderful. The lawyer spoils it somewhat by (inevitably) mentioning James Bond and mixing up lasers with laser guns: “I would also be worried that lasers cause collateral damage, both to the camera and/or the claimant’s health.”

Roman Abramovich zaps snappers with laser shield [Times]

Celebrity Photographer ‘Laser Shield’ - Is It Legal? [Amateur Photographer]

Top photo: An older ship owned by Abramovich’s, Pelorus, which is only 377 feet long and lacks anti-CCD lasers. Photo credit: Alexander Andreev/Flickr

Cursive Writing a Fading Skill

Video: Pool-Playing Robot Is Unbeatable

Pool, the cut-down version of snooker preferred by degenerate hustlers and people who like fun, seems ripe for automation. After-all, it’s all about calculating the right angles and then holding the cue steady, both of which a robot can easily manage. Add in the fact that a robot doesn’t drink its performance into oblivion as the night deepens, and the ball-sinking pool robot known as Deep Green seems invincible. In short, once it is playing, it will never have to leave a quarter on the side of the table.

Deep green is an industrial gantry robot, equipped with a cue and hung over a standard coin-op table. A digital camera reads the scene below and the robot’s computer brain compares it to 30 pre-stored images of an empty table, using the differences to decide where, and what color, the balls are. From there, the robot can nominate a ball and pocket and slide into action.

Because the motors that move the robot are capable of error, there is a secondary camera which looks along the line of the cue, just like a human does. By comparing the line seen from this point-of-cue (effectively sighting the centers of the balls) with the ideal line seen by the overhead camera, Deep Green can adjust itself to sink the perfect pot.

It can even rack the balls with perfection, picking up and then placing each one precisely in position without the need for a rack.

But what of a machine that can pot the ball every time? It would be a kind of idiot savant without a complex physics engine that knows about spin, bounce and all the other strategic factors a pro-player’s brain can assimilate. Thus, Deep Green thinks ahead. You’d better make sure you get your first shot in, and don’t miss another, or it’ll be game over.

Or will it? Deep Green also has an “augmented reality pool” mode where it can help you make your shots. Just like a pool-sim video game, Deep Green can project the ideal line for you right onto the baize. It will show you exactly where each ball will go depending on how you hold the cue, adjusting angles and rebound lines in real time as you change the angle of your incipient strike. Of course, you still have to hit it right, and decide on the amount of power and spin you want to add.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to beat the pool-playing robot. No amount of standing behind it and shouting “Miss! Miss!” is going to help you. Asking your girlfriend to stand behind the pocket it’s aiming for is unlikely to help either. We guess you could try our cheat of last resort, which is lot lot safer practiced on an emotionless bot than the usual tattooed pool-shark we lose to: Stand nearby and, just as it makes the shot, shove it’s elbow, apologize and buy it a drink.

Project page [Deep Green Robot]

Toward a Competitive Pool-Playing Robot [Computer.org via the Giz and BBG]

Helmet Mount Puts Cameras Up-Top and (First) Personal

I’m already preparing my Christmas gift list. And if, for the first time in years, somebody actually buys me a present, they can buy me this, the Photojojo Happy Helmet Bike Camera Mount.

The mount is dead simple — a pair of 1-inch wide nylon straps which thread through the ventilation holes in a bicycle helmet and cinch tight with plastic clamps. In the center is a quick-release tripod socket, strong enough to hold a compact point-n-shoot camera as you jiggle down the street.

Why is this better than, say, our own abortive attempt to build a handlebar camera mount? Because, being up on your head it is rattled much less, as you body absorbs the shock, making for a safer camera and also (unless you are a heavy drinker on a morning ride) less shaky pictures and video. It’ll also follow what you are looking at instead of slavishly staring ahead into the backs of frustrated, traffic-jammed cars.

And we guess video is what this mount will be best at, unless you want to rig a remote shutter release, too. Worried about looking dorky? Too late! You’re already wearing a bike helmet, so it can’t get much worse (note, we fully endorse wearing a helmet. We just don’t like the look of them).

$20 each, or $36 for a romantic his’n’hers double-pack. Available now.

Product page [Photojojo]