Korea to sell programmable robot

South Korean scientists say they plan to begin marketing an advanced robot that can be programmed by personal computers.

The two-legged robot -- named D2V-ZN -- is to be introduced in October and sold from about $750, The Korea Times reported Monday.

"D2V-ZN can identify its owner with an embedded camera and take some pre-set orders after recognizing voices," D2E Robotics Chief Executive Officer Chung Kee-chull told the newspaper. "It will arguably be the smartest robot in the market. In addition, users can add new motions or functions to the model on their PCs with easy-to-use, customized graphic software. This is a programmable robot."

Chung, also a professor at Daeduk College in Taejon, said unlike current robots "our customers will be able to install new moves on their own."

"In other words," he told the Korea Times, "their imagination will be their only limit."

Chung said he is considering selling the robot through TV home-shopping channels in time for the Christmas season.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

Critics, fans weigh in on Apple's iPad

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Heady from the success of the iPhone and iPod, Apple is getting spanked with criticism, even mockery, by pundits who expected the company to change the world anew with its iPad tablet computer.

Critics and fans were rushing Thursday to fill the 60-day void between the unveiling of what Apple chief executive Steve Jobs hailed as a "revolutionary" device and the time the first models will begin shipping globally.

While some heralded the iPad as a powerful "Kindle killer" with multimedia capabilities that eclipse current electronic readers, others scoffed at adding to their lives a mobile gadget seemingly named for a feminine hygiene product.

"Clearly, women are not finding this name attractive," said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley. "The name looks like a mistake a man would make. Steve should have spent more time talking to his wife and daughters."

Reaction by women echoed a video clip from an old Mad TV comedy television show skit about a fictitious high-tech tampon called an "iPad." The video has gone viral since Jobs uncloaked the iPad on Wednesday.

The mixed reaction to the color touchscreen tablet was reflected in two of the most popular gadget websites.

Gizmodo published an "Eight things that suck about the iPad" story while rival Ubergizmo crowned the device "the best tablet ever built."

Popular complaints included the lack of a camera, multi-tasking capabilities, a USB port, and support for videos made with Adobe Flash software.

Enderle recalled that "there is an extensive list of people who just pissed all over the iPhone when it launched.

"The iPad will advance a lot," he said. "Generation three will probably be the killer product."

It was a third generation iPhone, tied to an online store for fun applications, that catapulted the Apple smartphones to the top of the market and have brought billions of dollars to the firm's coffers.

"There are a number of things that have to come together to make this the 'Jesus Pad' people imagined," Enderle said. "The iPhone wasn't that great when it came out either."

Apple worked its marketing magic and built up hype and anticipation before the iPad unveiling, but has left two months for pundits, "fan boys," bloggers and others to nitpick a device that Jobs said must be held to be appreciated.

Still, some technology analysts predict the iPad will be the best-selling electronics device of 2010.

Unveiling the notebook-sized iPad, Jobs admitted he was taking a gamble by trying to carve out an entirely new device category between the laptop computer and the smartphone.

"We think we've got the goods," Jobs said. "We think we've done it."

Reviewers were mixed on whether the iPad will be a smash hit like the iPod, which controls over 70 percent of the market for MP3 players, or the iPhone, which completely transformed the smartphone arena.

The tech blog of Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said that after months of pre-launch hype, "expectations for the new Apple product were so high they were difficult to fulfill."

Spain's El Pais said the iPad opens up a new avenue for content creators struggling to adapt to the digital era, while a Los Angeles newspaper referred to the device as a large iPhone without the phone.

Om Malik of tech blog GigaOm said the iPad is "made for the consumption of digital media: games, music, photos, videos, magazines, newspapers and e-books.

"The iPad's primary purpose is to help you consume the ever-expanding amount of digital content on offer," he said, calling it the "ideal device for today's world."

Claudine Beaumont, technology writer for Britain's Daily Telegraph, hailed the sleekness of the iPad, its reading software and virtual keyboard.

"It won't replace your laptop, but I think it may have sounded the death knell for notebook computers," she wrote.

MG Siegler of tech blog TechCrunch, after playing with the iPad, said "it felt like I was holding the future" but the iPad may not be a "must-have" device yet.

Users eager to judge for themselves will have to wait two months before the first iPads are shipped worldwide at an entry-level price of 499 dollars.

High-performance 512GB SSDs with ultra-fast SATA revision 3.0 interface announced

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Samsung Electronics announced today volume production of SSDs (solid state drives) that support the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 interface with data transmissions at six gigabits per second (6Gb/s). The new high-performance PM830 SSDs are available at up to 512 gigabyte (GB) densities.

Samsung's new high-speed SSDs are ideally suited for use in high-performance OEM notebooks and tablets. Sample production of the SATA 6Gb/s 512GB SSDs began in May, with Samsung Electronics. “The industry is expected to quickly embrace SATA 6Gb/s-based SSDs, which also will help increase market interest in 256GB and higher densities significantly,” he added.

The SATA 6Gb/s SSD shortens system boot-up time to about 10 seconds, while its high-performance allows users to download up to five DVD video files in less than a minute.

The 512GB SSD utilizes Samsung’s most advanced 20 nanometer (nm) class** 32Gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory chip incorporating the toggle DDR interface. A proprietary NAND controller facilitates exceptional performance levels that take full advantage of the toggle DDR architecture and the SATA 6Gb/s interface. The new SSD doubles the performance of a SATA 3Gb/s drive, with sequential read speeds of 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speeds of 350MB/s.

The drive also features the industry’s highest level of security, which uses an AES 256-bit encryption algorithm to protect personal or corporate data from unauthorized access.

Samsung’s SATA 6Gb/s SSDs are available in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB densities. The new high-performance SSD line-up is targeted for use in premium OEM notebooks, and tablets.

According to market research firm IDC, the global outlook for client-side SSDs is expected to grow ten-fold from 11 million units in 2011 to 100 million units in 2015. Moreover, the use of NAND in 256GB SSDs is forecast to more than double from 19 percent of all NAND used in SSDs in 2011 to 42 percent in 2015. Further, demand for 512GB SSDs is expected to grow from a 0.3 percent portion in 2011 to eight percent in 2015, also underscoring the growing interest in higher density SSDs.

Cornell robot fails to break a record, but students learn

Engineering education needs to include a few rough spots to be worthwhile. An attempt to set an unofficial world record for how far a robot could walk failed the night of March 30, but the team will keep trying.

The Cornell Ranger, a robot developed by a team of students working with Andy Ruina, professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, fell down after about 4.75 laps -- about .95 kilometers ( .59 miles) -- around the running track in Barton Hall. An earlier version of the same robot had already set a record by free-walking a bit over 1 kilometer, about .62 miles. (Another robot has walked 2.5 kilometers (1.55 miles) on a treadmill, Ruina noted.)

Ruina was hoping for 10 or more kilometers, more than 6 miles, depending on how long the robot's battery charge would last. The Ranger, like other robots developed in Ruina's lab, is designed for maximum energy-efficiency. Although its four-legged design makes it look a bit like a walking sawhorse, it mimics human walking technique, using energy only to push off with its pivoting toes, but depending on gravity and forward motion to swing its legs forward.

The goal of the research, Ruina said, is not only to advance robotics but also to learn more about the mechanics of walking so the information can be applied to rehabilitation and prosthetics for humans.

After a promising start, the robot literally stubbed its toe after failing to tilt one of its feet upward as the leg came forward. With that, the team of students went into an intense diagnostic session, reviewing telemetry that showed the signals sent by the robot's computer controller to its motors and switches, watching video of the fall and taking new video as the robot was repeatedly tested. The problem was eventually diagnosed as a loose connection in the wires leading to a sensor that measures the angle of the legs relative to the ground.

"I'm actually sort of glad this happened," Ruina said as he watched the students cluster around a laptop to review the robot's programming. "They need to learn that failures are a part of engineering in the real world."

Source: Cornell University

NTT DOCOMO Develops Solar-powered Handset

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NTT DOCOMO, Japan's largest mobile operator, announced today its development of the SOLAR HYBRID (docomo STYLE series SH-08A), a solar-powered, waterproof mobile phone that will go on sale in Japan from September.

The SOLAR HYBRID can be recharged with sunlight as well as electricity. Even if the battery has completely lost its charge, just 10 minutes of solar recharging via a panel on the phone's body provides approximately one minute of talk time.

The handset comes with an 8-megapixel CCD camera that takes excellent photographs even dim lighting or when objects are moving.

The SOLAR HYBRID's waterproof body, resistant to water sprays from all directions and submergible to depths up to one meter, enables safe, carefree mobile communication in the bath, kitchen, beach, rain or other environments where water is present.

The SOLAR HYBRID will be exhibited at the DOCOMO booth at Wireless Japan 2009, which will take place at Tokyo Big Sight from July 22 to 24.

Provided by NTT DOCOMO

DFI LANParty SLI-DR Expert Board

SLI-DR Expert

SLI-DR

DFI is getting their SLI-DR Expert board ready for massavailability this week and will use the current nForce 4 SLI chipset instead ofthe new nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset. Reason cited is that there is no performancebenefit running two x16. The layout of the SLI-DR Expert board is different fromthe current one with changes made to the CPU socket, DIMM slots, PWM area.According to DFI, it is meant to improve overall heat dissipation. The x16 slotsare now wider and the SLI mode is digitally controlled that will bring moreconvenience to the SLI users. The emphasis of this board is on the memory aspectwhere it can support 4 sticks of 1GB DDR400 memories at 1T. The memory voltagesoption in the BIOS is further enhanced with finer steppings for eg. 2.80, 2.83,2.87, 2.9V.

Expensive hard disks boosting SSD sales

The effect of last months Thailand floods is still felt far and wide in the storage industry as well as the computer market in general. Prices triple that of usual are still not uncommon for many hard disk drive types, as the componentry for them was coming from flood-affected areas - even then, its hard to find them. Now, SSDs dont suffer from the same problem, it seems, so what to make out of it?

Yes, it does seem that there is benefit for SSD sales, even the biggies like Intel have privately acknowledged that. The immediate benefit for them is that, coupled with some SSD price reductions and Xmas period promotions, having a 120 GB-class SSD is now not exactly unaffordable even for a mainstream PC. A 240 GB one may still feel a little pricey, but not nearly as much as it was a quarter ago when the price-per-GB vs hard disk was like five times higher. And, when you take into account that exponentially higher read performance - writes can still be a bit of problem sometimes depending on the controller youre using - and the cool factor of having a solid state drive to show off, the sales would improve surely.

With the differential being much lower now, having the first system drive as SSD, and using your old - no extra price to pay - HDD as the second drive for the paging file and often-rewritten documents or data, means good sense. However, keep in mind that, within a quarter, the HDD supply situation should come back to normal, so SSD vendors better figure out the way to maximise the use of the current hard disk supply doldrum before their comparative price benefit diminishes again.