And using Crossfire, you can make that 24. It has 4GB onboard RAM and can handle full 3D over all the slots at once – make your own cave!

Powercolor hd5970 with 12 display outputs – The Inquirer.

Dupont has managed to print out a 50″ OLED screen, which tests say should be reliable for around 12 years, in 2 minutes time. This should speed up the production and implementation of OLED, as well as make it quite a bit cheaper.

Technology Review: New Inks Could Mean Cheaper OLED Screens.

The experimental graphene resistor they’ve built goes at 100 GHz, quite a bit faster than the ~40GHz of silicone resistors. They can still improve on the technology, so they’re expecting higher speeds.

IBM Press room – 2010-02-05 Made in IBM Labs: IBM Scientists Demonstrate World’s Fastest Graphene Transistor – United States.

Display Port allows the data for up to 4 1920 x 1200 monitors to be streamed through one cable, as well as 3D, USB and audio data.

DisplayPort 1.2 receives final VESA blessing, grows into a real standard — Engadget.

This article explores why computers can’t do floating point maths, which is what makes Excel and all those online calculators such lousy mathematicians – basically because computers are binary, they can’t calculate anything after a decimal point, so the workaround is to put the number including the decimal point in a register of a certain size (say 32 bits) and reserve a few parts of the register for the decimal. Should the number you need to calculate become too big for the register, you run into trouble with rounding errors, which can compound. It then shows how nasty compound errors can become by citing the example of why a Patriot missle battery missed a Scud attack, resulting in the deaths of 24 people.

Why computers suck at maths | News | TechRadar UK.

Using Augmented Reality goggles, powered on an Android platform, marines are able to maintain their vehicles 46% faster than using a laptop with technical manuals.

The AR system provides label names to each object, shows a 3D model of the tool you need and gives instructions for specifica tasks overlaid on the camera view of what you are looking at.

Technology Review: Faster Maintenance with Augmented Reality.

The Lausanne university in Switserland has moved from the software to the reality: they’ve managed to get robots to evolve and learn behaviours, as well as the behaviour to decieve and cooperate through communication (flashing lights) and movement. It’ s a very interesting experiment, showing that robots are getting smarter every day and are now showing some very very lifelike traits.

Darwin’s Robots | h+ Magazine.

Which goes to show – it’s the Ipod / Iphone which is floating the Apple. Nope, Macs just suck and their fanboy users are a teeny tiny minority. And the rest of the I-Have-A-Mac smug bastards are hypocrites. You wouldn’t need a PC if your Mac was so perfect, now would you, mister I’m a Mac.

85% of Mac users own a PC | News | PC Pro.

Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM)

…

Unlike conventional memory, which involves moving electrons around a chip, PCM data would literally be frozen in place, even when the machine is off. That means these devices could switch on nearly instantaneously.

via Melting memory chips in mass production : Nature News.

This thing has a 300MHz processor and has been hacked to run Linux with mouse and sound support.

$38 Zipit Wireless Messenger receives Linux injection, becomes $38 netbook.

A South African IT firm sent a carrier pigeon 50 miles with a datacard attached to it’s leg. The pigeon was faster than the internet, which after 2 hours had only completed 4% of the transfer. This was in protest at the sucky internet connection available through Telkom.

Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s Telkom – Yahoo! Canada News.

These flowcharts are very very good indeed, with a “Boot Failure Troubleshooting Poster” which encompasses all of the flowcharts in one huge poster.

Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts – Troubleshooting Dell, HP, Sony, eMachines, IBM, Compaq and Gateway PC’s.

MegaTux, the Dell Thunderbird with 4480 Intel processors will run 1 million copies of bots in a limited area botnet over Wine in order to create simulations of differnet botnets on a massive scale. Researchers can then stop the simulation at any point and have a look at the state of the different virtual PCs.

Researchers Try to Stalk Botnets Used by Hackers – NYTimes.com.

This thing is made up from a few pieces of PVC piping, costs around $10,- to make and works really really well.

Homemade Steadicam Costs About $24,990 Less Than The Real Thing – Steadicam – Gizmodo.

DataSlide’s Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD) does not use read-write heads moving across the recording surface of a spinning hard disk drive (HDD). Instead an ultra-thin, 2-dimensional array of 64 read-write heads, operating in parallel, is positioned above an piezo-electric-driven oscillating rectangular recording surface, and delivers 160,000 random IOPS with a 500MB/sec transfer rate.

via DataSlide reinvents hard drive • The Register.

The idea is to use cheap off-peak energy at night to freeze a tank of water or “distributed energy storage system” then use that great block of ice to cool your data centre in the daytime. Refrigerant would circulate from the tank to the Data Aire equipment eliminating the need to run the energy-intensive compressor and condenser during peak daytime hours.

Apparently this can save up to 45% on energy requirements for the cooling.

via Ice air con system aims for cool on the cheap • The Register.

as it turns out from the launcher screen of your Pre simply type in the phrase “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” — which if you parse with spacing might be more easily recognizable as the infamous Contra Konami code look it up — and up comes a hidden app called “Developer Mode Enabler.”

via The secret to Palm Pre dev mode lies in the Konami code.

It’s only been a few days since the Palm Pre was released, but one of the biggest breakthroughs for the outside-the-system developer community may have just been made.

With this, people can probably tell how the OS hooks into the hardware, which will allow them to hook in themselves – something Palm itself has been loathe to share with their userbase.

via Pre Recovery Tool Leaks Out, Including webOS Root Image(!) | PreCentral.net.

It’s been a long long while since anything new has come out for military flight sim enthusiasts, and this looks like it is just what the doctor ordered. Since Vista dropped support for the gameport – and thus for my F-15 inspired Suncom set up (no longer for sale, but definitely the best stick / throttle setup I’ve ever seen!) there’s been not much, excepting the odd Thrustmaster setup.

A Parisian scientist at the observatory has figured out a way to fix your position in time and galactic space by measuring the radio signals sent out by four pulsars.

The Toradex Robin Modules for Intel Atom are tiny and cheap: around $129,- and up.

Kinetic Energy Recovery System, stores the energy created by regenerative breaking and stores it in a battery. When the driver presses a button, he gets a turbo boost as the energy store is emptied onto the drivetrain. This system gives him up to 6.5s of turbo boost per lap.

Only $40,000

This external HD, in 500 GB, 1TB or 1.5TB, is fireproof for 30 minutes at 1550o F and can stand submerged in 10′ water for 3 days.

Not being a fan of taking the control panel off your radio every time you leave the car, I used to have a Sony with a blank face, which swivelled when you wanted to use the controls.

Apparently it senses if your hand is near it, so you can break screensaver and get to the controls.