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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Sony will now discontinue production of both 20GB and 60GB models in Japan,



20GB, 60GB PS3s axed in Japan

If you want a PS3 that plays PS2 games, the race is truly on because, flowing the killing of 60GB PS3's here in the West, Sony will now discontinue production of both 20GB and 60GB models in Japan, too.

An official statement reads: "Along with both the increased efforts to improve software development environment and the availability of a more extensive line-up of software titles for PS3, SCEI will vigorously promote the expansion of the PS3 platform by further concentrating on the 40GB HDD (CECHH00 Series) model introduced in November 2007, equipped with the core technology components that make PS3 the most advanced high-definition entertainment system while realizing lower power consumption."

That leaves just the 40GB version, which lacks PS2 BC support (although PS1 support remains) and chops two of the older model's four USB ports as well.

We plan to keep our 60GB full-fat PS3s in mint condition for 200 years, then sell the 'OMG RARE!!11' console for about 80 million quid.

Sony discontinuing 20GB and 60GB PS3 in Japan
The PlayStation maker has axed the two more expensive models of the console in the region.
The newest PlayStation 3 SKU, the 40GB machine, has proved a controversial choice for those who hoped that their next-generation console would play PlayStation 2 games. According to Sony, the 40GB PS3 is not backwards compatible in any way, shape, or form.

It is, however, cheaper. And it looks like the price is right for Japanese gamers, as the new model--released in the region in both piano black and ice white colours in October--has helped Sony gain market share, according to Bloomberg.

At the moment there are three different PS3 models on sale in the region, the 20GB, the 40GB, and the 60GB. Price-wise, the 40GB is the cheapest of the three, weighing in at 39,800 yen ($362), followed by the 20GB at 44,980 yen ($410), and the 60GB, which retails for 54,980 yen ($501).

Sony intends to whittle this down to leave just the 40GB model on sale in the country. In the UK, a similar plan is underway, as the 60GB model has been given a price cut (£350, $687) as it is phased out, with the plan to leave only the 40GB (£300, $589) on sale.

In the US, the 40GB PS3 ($399) is also on sale, along with an extra large 80GB model ($499).
Tokyo (eCanadaNow) - On Thursday, Sony announced plans to drop the 20-gigabyte and 60-gigabyte PlayStation 3 (PS3) in Japan.

The company said the move is designed to better focus on the 40-gigabyte model.

Unlike the other models, the 40GB unit does not support PlayStation 2 (PS2) games. The unit also uses less energy, allowing Sony to use smaller components, AHN reported.

In addition to focusing their attention on the 40GB model, Sony will "vigorously promote the expansion of the PS3 platform" throughout 2008, with "increased efforts to improve software development environment and the availability of a more extensive line-up of software titles for PS3."

Late last year, Sony cut the PS3 line in the European market as well.

Across the U.S and Canada, gaming fans still have a choice between all models of the PS3.

The motion, formation, and recycling of Earth’s crust



Earth's Moving Crust May Occasionally Stop
The motion, formation, and recycling of Earth’s crust—commonly known as plate tectonics—have long been thought to be continuous processes. But new research by geophysicists suggests that plate tectonic motions have occasionally stopped in Earth’s geologic history, and may do so again. The findings could reshape our understanding of the history and evolution of the Earth’s crust and continents.

Synthesizing a wide range of observations and constructing a new theoretical model, researchers Paul Silver of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Mark Behn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found evidence that the process of subduction has effectively stopped at least once in Earth’s past. Subduction occurs where two pieces of Earth’s crust (tectonic plates) collide, and one dives beneath the other back into the interior of the planet.

Most of the major geologic processes on Earth—the formation of continents, the birth of volcanic island arcs, the opening and closing of ocean basins—are driven by tectonic plate motions and intimately linked to subduction and to seafloor spreading. If those processes were shut down, there would likely be a global decrease in earthquakes and volcanism.

Today, the vast majority of subduction occurs around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, which is slowly closing as the Atlantic Ocean opens. In roughly 350 million years, researchers estimate that the Pacific basin will be effectively closed and a new supercontinent will be formed.

Closure of the Pacific basin could shut down most of the Earth’s capacity for subduction, unless the process begins somewhere else on the planet. However, there is no evidence that subduction is currently expanding or initiating anywhere else on the planet.

Though such a shutdown defies the prevailing wisdom about plate tectonics, Silver and Behn read the geologic evidence to suggest that just such a dramatic decrease in subduction happened about one billion years ago, after the formation of the supercontinent Rodinia.

Their findings—captured in a paper entitled “Intermittent Plate Tectonics?”—were published in the January 4 issue of the journal Science.

“The scientific community has typically assumed that plate tectonics is an active and continuous process, that new crust is constantly being formed while old crust is recycled,” said Behn, an assistant scientist in the WHOI Department of Geology and Geophysics. “But the evidence suggests that plate tectonics may not be continuous. Plates may move actively at times, then stop or slow down, and then start up again.”

Behn and Silver started their investigation by considering how the Earth releases heat from its interior over time, also known as “thermal evolution.” If you take the rate at which the Earth is releasing heat from its interior today and project that rate backwards in time, you arrive at impossibly high and unsustainable numbers for the heat and energy contained in the early Earth. Specifically, if the planet has been releasing heat at the modern rate for all of its history, then it would have been covered with a magma ocean as recently as one billion years ago.

But we know this is not true, Behn said, because there is geological evidence for past continents and supercontinents, not to mention rocks (ophiolites) on the edges of old plate boundaries that are more than one billion years old.

The Earth cools more quickly during periods of rapid plate motions, as warm material is pulled upward from deep in the Earth’s interior and cools beneath spreading ridges.

“If you stir a cup of coffee, it cools faster,” said Behn. “That’s why people blow on their coffee to get the surface moving.”

“It is a similar process within the Earth," Behn added. "If the tectonic plates are moving, the Earth releases more heat and cools down faster. If you don’t have those cracked and moving plates, then heat has to get out by diffusing through the solid rock, which is much slower.”

Periods of slow or no subduction would help explain how the Earth still has so much heat to release today, since some of it would have been capped beneath the crust.

Silver and Behn conclude their paper by suggesting that there is a cycle to plate tectonics, with periods when the shifting and sliding of the crust is more active and times when it is less so. Rather than being continuous, plate tectonics may work intermittently through Earth history, turning on and off as the planet remakes itself.


On the Net:

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean's role in the changing global environment.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research since 1902. It is a private, nonprofit organization with six research departments throughout the U.S. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.

Cooperative behaviour is common in many species, including humans



Why it pays to be choosy
Cooperative behaviour is common in many species, including humans. Given that cooperative individuals can often be exploited, it is not immediately clear why such behaviour has evolved.
A novel solution to this problem has been proposed by scientists at the University of Bristol and is published today in Nature.

Professor John McNamara and colleagues demonstrate that when individuals in a population are choosy about their partners, cooperativeness is rewarded and tends to increase.

Professor McNamara explained: “The problem is that the process of natural selection tends to produce individuals that do the best for themselves. So why has a behaviour evolved that appears to benefit others at a cost to the individual concerned?

“In our model, an individual’s level of choosiness determines the level of cooperation demanded of its partner. If the current partner is not cooperative enough the individual stops interacting with this partner and seeks a better partner, even though finding a new partner incurs costs.”

So when is it worth leaving the current partner and seeking a more cooperative one? Two components are necessary for this to be beneficial:

There must be better partners out there.
There must also be time to exploit the relationship with the new partner, which will be true for long-lived animals like humans.

If these conditions are met, natural selection will lead to a certain degree of choosiness evolving. And once this happens, an individual that is not cooperative will be discarded by its partner and must pay the cost of finding another partner.

Thus when there is choosiness, cooperativeness is rewarded and tends to increase. In this way the level of cooperation and the degree of choosiness increase together over time, and cooperation can evolve from an initially uncooperative population.

This research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Professor Nigel Brown, Director of Science and Technology at BBSRC, commented: “This is one of a number of fields where modelling studies are advancing biological science more rapidly than experiment alone can achieve.”

In a computational model, the team considered a large population where, in each of a discrete series of time steps, pairs of individuals engage in a ‘game’ in which each individual does best by being uncooperative and letting its partner put in the hard work.

Each individual was characterised by two traits: a cooperativeness trait, which specifies the amount of effort that the individual devotes to generating benefits available to its co-player, and a choosiness trait, which specifies the minimum degree of cooperativeness that the individual is prepared to accept from its co-player. The traits are not adjusted in response to the co-player’s behaviour and do not change over an individual’s life.

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Cash-rich, time-poor: it pays to be choosy
It may be the cost of success but relentlessly long hours are not to everyone’s liking.
Beware young lawyers – you may be walking into a war zone. The news that the Priory Group, the bolt hole for celebrities, has designed a stress-management programme for City solicitors should send out a strong message that you are entering dangerous territory.

Concern about the quality of solicitors’ working lives is being expressed at every level of the profession from irreverent comments on websites such as rollonfriday.com to the president of the Law Society, Fiona Woolf. Indeed, the society is taking it so seriously that it has been holding discussion sessions to “explore issues relating to working life at leading law firms”.

Stress, poor quality of life and a long-hours culture are commonplace among lawyers. And although these can affect people at all stages of their careers it is almost inevitably the new entrants, typically the trainees and associates under 30, who are most at risk.

In many firms this is seen as a rite of passage. If you are tough enough to survive it you have earned the right to move up to the next rung towards partnership. But, in any case, the business model for the most profitable firms makes it unavoidable that when late-night shifts or weekends must be worked to close a deal then it will be the junior people who will be called upon to take the strain. How could it be otherwise, indeed, when top City firms are committed to providing a 24/7 service to compete with their opposite numbers in New York?

It was no surprise then that the tragic death of a Freshfields associate a few months ago sparked off a debate about whether the long-hours culture in many City firms had reached an intolerable level.

First, though, be realistic. Lawyers in their twenties in successful corporate law firms are extremely well paid, earning incomes three or four times greater than their college friends who had entered, say, teaching. Long hours are inevitably part of the deal and most firms openly admit that if fairly frequent 12-hour days do not appeal, then don’t apply.

But while most trainees know what they are letting themselves in for when they apply, what they don’t know is whether they can cope with it.

Of course it does vary from firm to firm. Chargeable hours are not in themselves a definitive indicator of the total time worked, but whereas most of the largest dozen or so firms will expect about 1,600 chargeable hours a year from young associates, smaller outfits – such as the London office of Blake Lapthorn Tarlo Lyons – will be content with 1,300 to 1,400.

But the wrecking part of the young lawyers’ lifestyle is when the regularity of the long hours becomes relentless. Being known to be compliant may mean that you are taken for granted. One of the key skills is to be able to dodge an excessive workload without appearing to lack commitment. As one associate said: “I’m quite prepared to work for several days at a time doing very long hours. But the problems arise if it rolls over from one job to the next.”

Most leading firms would claim to bend over backwards to put in place safeguards to ensure that work is allocated in a responsible way. And they normally offer channels lawyers to register their concerns if they feel they are being overworked.

These are, however, remedial systems rather than preventive measures. And clearly they often don’t work. If a firm has to send a lawyer to the Priory, then it has failed.

So are there any firms that have got it right? Not, it seems, in the “magic circle” – nor indeed anywhere close. Given their size and prestige, the complete absence of magic circle firms from The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work for is striking. While leading accountants such as KPMG, Ernst & Young and Pricewaterhouse-Coopers feature in the roll call of the best large companies, there is no sign anywhere of an equivalent law firm.

So if you want to find a good employer, according to The Sunday Times, you must look outside the capital to firms such as Manchester’s Pannone, Birmingham’s Wragge & Co. or East Anglia’s Mills & Reeve. Alternatively, check out the medium-sized City outfits such as Olswang and Addleshaw Goddard.

At these firms quality of life issues are central to their corporate culture. That is why, interestingly enough, they have relatively few structured systems to prevent people overdoing it. Instead, it is the culture that stops it happening in the first place. At Wragge’s, for example, there are no hourly targets. Associates are simply expected by Ian Metcalfe, the managing partner, to work conscientiously during the day and then go home at a reasonable hour. And if they need flexibility to cope with domestic issues they can have it. Meanwhile, at Pannone, under the leadership of managing partner Joy Kingsley, the attitude on working hours is that people should “do 9-to5 plus one hour” and then be out of the office – getting on with the rest of their lives.

The International Consumer Electronics Show is a great place to show off some new high-tech gadgets for the auto industry



Autos Becoming Vibrant Electronics Hub

The International Consumer Electronics Show is a great place to show off some new high-tech gadgets for the auto industry. Much of the ado over cell phones, televisions, video games and wireless Internet are also showing up in the auto market.

For example, one theme at CES is the development of touch-screen and voice-activated controls for portable devices. Cars are showing that off, too, with systems that let people make phone calls, navigate, choose music and have e-mails read to them without dangerously fumbling for manual controls.

The highlight on Internet content is big as well. Autonet Mobile Inc. offers a small box for car trunks that takes a cellular broadband signal and uses Wi-Fi to relay it to portable computers in the car. While the car is parked near a home wireless network, users can transmit music and videos for enjoyment on an upcoming road trip. "The car is a lifestyle product," said Sterling Pratz, Autonet Mobile's CEO. "It's not just a car anymore."

Technological accessories have been part of automobiles ever since the introduction of the car radio. In-vehicle technologies were an $11 billion market in 2007, according to the CEA, and it is expected to increase to $12.8 billion by end of 2008 .

However, the auto and electronics industries have not been closely connected. Attempts to link the two technologies with the Internet in the 90s failed. One factor that has been complicated is that car makers design for a much longer future than gadget makers, which expect buyers to reach into their wallet virtually every year.

Now, though, factory-installed technologies are getting more powerful. One example is the way Ford Motor Co. has teamed with Microsoft Corp. on Sync, a voice-activated communication and entertainment system.

One reason for automakers' increasing comfort is that powerful computers now found in cars can get software updates by wireless networks, letting vendors fix bugs and keep features up to date, said Erik Goldman, president of Hughes Telematics Inc. His company is expected to begin outfitting Chrysler and Mercedes cars with a navigation, entertainment and diagnostics service in 2009.

Another change is that car makers have often sought to differentiate themselves with proprietary electronic systems, like General Motors Corp.'s OnStar, that operate independently from gadgets people regularly use outside the car.

Today, automotive electronics are being more closely retrofitted with standard Web technologies. For example, the Hughes Telematics system will include a personal Web portal that lets people remotely lock and unlock their car doors, plan routes, check their auto's emissions and engine status, select music playlists and even monitor their vehicle's location.

Increasing ties to the Web could broaden the field of automotive-tech vendors beyond traditional players. Last year,OnStar began working with MapQuest.com, part of Time Warner Inc.'s AOL LLC, so drivers could plan their routes online and send them to the car.

General Manager of BMW’s "Connected Drive" initiative, Eckhard Steinmeier, showed a commercial at a CES panel in which a woman says she wants to investigate sushi options. So she heads out of her house, in the rain, to do a Google search from her Beemer's dashboard.

Even though car technology is catching up to the gadget technology, it still is not quite on the bandwagon yet. The electronics industry "is still developing technology faster than the automaker can adapt," said Chris Cook, a vice president with Mitek Corp., a maker of car audio equipment.

There is one sure sign of enthusiastic cross-breeding though. Some automotive technologies at CES are described with some of the Web’s most painful slang. Can people handle all this “infotainment” in their car?

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The deep bass sound vibrates your breastbone as you meander through a corner of the massive International Consumer Electronics Show. Someone is simply showing off car audio systems, but it feels like the vehicles themselves are announcing their beefy presence.
And why not? Cars and automotive technologies from startups and established aftermarket makers are abundant at this gadget show. They're coming in such variety that they encapsulate many of the advances seen elsewhere at CES in cell phones, TVs, video games and wireless Internet networking.

For example, one theme at CES is the development of touch-screen and voice-activated controls for portable devices. Cars are showing that off, too, with systems that let people make phone calls, navigate, choose music and have e-mails read to them without dangerously fumbling for manual controls.

Or look how CES overall is highlighting the widening availability of Internet content. Autonet Mobile Inc. offers a small box for car trunks that takes a cellular broadband signal and uses Wi-Fi to relay it to portable computers in the car, so people can browse the Internet in the vehicle. And while the car is parked near a home wireless network, people can beam music and video content to it for enjoyment on upcoming road trips.

"The car is a lifestyle product," said Sterling Pratz, Autonet Mobile's CEO. "It's not just a car anymore."

The goal of all this stuff is to keep drivers better informed and their passengers entertained. But no one seems to have a great answer to the question of whether adding more technological choices to moving vehicles will increase the dangerous problem of driver distraction.

Automobiles have had technological accouterments ever since the advent of the car radio. In-vehicle technologies are already a $10 billion market, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

But the auto and the electronics industries have not been closely linked. Attempts in the 1990s at connecting cars to the Internet flopped.

Two Unusual Older Stars



Two Unusual Older Stars Giving Birth to Second Wave of Planets

Hundreds of millions — or even billions — of years after planets would have initially formed around two unusual stars, a second wave of planetesimal and planet formation appears to be taking place, UCLA astronomers and colleagues believe.

"This is a new class of stars, ones that display conditions now ripe for formation of a second generation of planets, long, long after the stars themselves formed," said UCLA astronomy graduate student Carl Melis, who reported the findings today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

"If we took a rocket to one of these stars and discovered there were two totally distinct ages for their planets and more minor bodies like asteroids, that would blow scientists' minds away," said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and co-author of the research, which has not yet been published. "We're seeing stars with characteristics that have never been seen before."

The stars, which Melis says possess "amazing" properties for their age, are known as BP Piscium, in the constellation Pisces, and TYCHO 4144 329 2, in the constellation Ursa Major.

These two stars have many characteristics of very young stars, Melis said, including rapid accretion of gas, extended orbiting disks of dust and gas, a large infrared excess emission and, in the case of BP Piscium, jets of gas that are being shot into space. Planetesimals, like comets and asteroids, along with planets, form from the gas and dust particles that orbit young stars; planetesimals are small masses of rock or ice that merge to form larger bodies.

"With all these characteristics that match so closely with young stars, we would expect that our two stars would also be young," Melis said. "As we gathered more data, however, things just did not add up." For example, because stars burn lithium as they get older, young stars should have large quantities of lithium. The astronomers found, however, that the spectroscopic signature of lithium in BP Piscium is seven times weaker than expected for a young star of its mass.

"There is no known way to account for this small amount of lithium if BP Piscium is a young star," Melis said. "Rather, lithium has been heavily processed, as appropriate for old stars. Other spectral measurements also indicate it is a much older star."

As seen from Earth, some 75 percent of BP Piscium's radiant energy is being converted by the dust particles into infrared light, and about 12 percent of TYCHO 4144 329 2's. These are unusually high amounts, which Melis described as "spectacular" in comparison to other stars that are known to be not-young.

TYCHO 4144 329 2 orbits a companion star that has a mass similar to that of our sun; a second generation of planets is not forming around this companion, which appears to be an ordinary old star in all respects. By studying this companion star, the astronomers have deduced that TYCHO 4144 329 2 is just 200 light-years from Earth — very close by astronomical standards. They do not know precise age of TYCHO 4144 329 2, or BP Piscium's age or distance from Earth.

The astronomers are continuing to study these stars with a variety of ground-based telescopes and with space-based observatories, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, and they are searching for additional similar stars.

Hundreds of millions -- or even billions -- of years after planets would have initially formed around two unusual stars, a second wave of planetesimal and planet formation appears to be taking place, UCLA astronomers and colleagues believe.

This is a new class of stars, ones that display conditions now ripe for formation of a second generation of planets, long, long after the stars themselves formed," said UCLA astronomy graduate student Carl Melis, who reported the findings today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

"If we took a rocket to one of these stars and discovered there were two totally distinct ages for their planets and more minor bodies like asteroids, that would blow scientists' minds away," said Benjamin
Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and co-author of the research, which has not yet been published. "We're seeing stars with characteristics that have never been seen before."

Grass Makes Better Ethanol



GRASS GAS: Turning fields of switchgrass like this one in northeastern Nebraska into ethanol produces 540 percent more energy than the amount consumed growing the native perennial.


Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does
Midwestern farms prove switchgrass could be the right crop for producing ethanol to replace gasoline
Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass-a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally-and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.


Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).


Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."


But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed-in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors-growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.


The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is partially funding the construction of six such cellulosic biorefineries, estimated to cost a total of $1.2 billion. The first to be built will be the Range Fuels Biorefinery in Soperton, Ga., which will process wood waste from the timber industry into biofuels and chemicals. The DOE is providing an initial $50 million to start construction.


"Cost competitive, energy responsible cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass or from forestry waste like sawdust and wood chips requires a more complex refining process but it's worth the investment," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at the Range Fuels facility groundbreaking in November. "Cellulosic ethanol contains more net energy and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than ethanol made from corn."


In fact, Vogel and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that switchgrass will store enough carbon in its relatively permanent root system to offset 94 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted both to cultivate it and from the derived ethanol burned by vehicles. Of course, this estimate also relies on using the leftover parts of the grass itself as fuel for the biorefinery. "The lignin in the plant cell walls can be burned," Vogel says.


The use of native prairie grasses is meant to avoid some of the other risks associated with biofuels such as reduced diversity of local animal life and displacing food crops with fuel crops. "This is an energy crop that can be grown on marginal land," Vogel argues, such as the more than 35 million acres (14.2 million hectares) of marginal land that farmers are currently paid not to plant under the terms of USDA's Conservation Reserve Program.


But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. "To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization," he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. "Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber."



Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass--a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally--and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.




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CES 2008 – Dell’s Curve monitor is something to drool over


Las Vegas (hybrid-ces ).Invention innovation attracts all. In CEs 2008 Dell’s Alienware Curve monitor is definitely a sight to behold. Crowds at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show lined up to see Crysis being played o the 3-foot wide curved screens. The Curve can display 2880 by 900 pixels and has an incredible .02 millisecond response time.

The concept behind the monitor is actually quite simple. There is a DLP rear projection unit and the picture is simply streamed to the curved screen which spans your frontal and peripheral vision space. Of course this all takes space and this thing is both wide and deep. No LCD thinness here!

Company officials said the monitor is a prototype and that the white border lines that you see in the picture will be fixed by the time the product ships.

Unfortunately, there was no mention of pricing, but we expect it to be very, very expensive.

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