A robotic suit named "HAL" (will they never learn???) will become available for 2,200 monthly rental in Japan. It is actually a brain-directed mobility assistance device.
The 22-pound (10-kilogram) battery-operated computer system is belted to the waist. It captures the brain signals and relays them to mechanical leg braces strapped to the thighs and knees, which then provide robotic assistance to people as they walk.
Wikipedia reduces its server complexity by moving all services to one Ubuntu distro. According to computerworld:
In a few months, Wikipedia will finish a major transformation by moving from a combination of versions of Red Hat products to Ubuntu Linux Version 8.04 on all 400 of its servers that support the Web site.
The changeover began in 2006 as the growth of the site took off, said Brion Vibber, CTO of the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation Inc., the nonprofit group that supports the online Wikipedia encyclopedia and other projects.
Apple will produce a ca. $900 notebook. Maybe.
... The first of the two rumors comes from an Inquisitr source described as "reliable" and "accurate," and involves an advanced price list .... The new price list has 12 models on it, the lowest of which comes in at a bargain-basement... $800. Currently, ...
The second bit of news is a bit more plausible, ... comes from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. His prediction also includes a price drop, but in this case an $899 or $999 price tag would be attached to a MacBook rather than something entirely new.
Veriozon, which is quickly moving into position as Teh World's Most Annoying Company Evah, provides us with this weekend's best joke. From a Texas technology wonk, as reported in networkworld:
..."In a period of three hours I received 14 e-mails promoting Verizon's 'Secure the Information. Secure the Infrastructure' webinar series, and three e-mails promoting their '2008 Data Breach Investigations Report Road Show." ... Considering their content (about data-breach seminars), I thought it very humorous that the TO: field of the e-mails contained over 1,200 e-mail addresses: 17 e-mails times 1,200 addresses equals more than 20,000 chances for leaks."
And last but not least, Linux Kernel 2.6.27 is out today. This will mean almost nothing to most people, but there is a newsworthy aspect of this item: Linux now has a new filesystem for use specifically with flash-type storage media. Very cool and innovative. The details (most you you will want to stop reading at this point):
Summary: 2.6.27 add a new filesystem (UBIFS) optimized for "pure" flash-based storage devices, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation for ext4, multiqueue networking, an alternative hibernation implementation based on kexec/kdump, data integrity support in the block layer for devices that support it, a simple tracer called ftrace, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, extraction of all the in-kernel's firmware to /lib/firmware, XEN support for saving/restorig VMs, improved video camera support, support for the Intel wireless 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 family of chipsets, more new drivers, improved support for others and many other improvements and fixes.
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HAL is perfectly safe, so long as nobody orders him to conceal information.
(As those of us who paid attention during that long long movie know.)
I assume you mean 2200 dollars per month. If it were 2200 yen, I'd get one myself just for kicks. (Get it? Kicks? Tip your waiters!)
Spending nearly $25 grand a year just so you could take the stairs? Are there no elevators?
Open the pod-bay zip, Hal.
I can't do that, Greg...