IBM Turns Waste Silicon Wafers into Solar Panels

IBM announced today a new process that it invented to take discarded silicon wafers and reclaim them specifically to be sold to the solar cell manufacturing industry. The new reclamation process involves taking etched silicon wafers that are discarded and using a polish wheel/compound along with de-ionized water to remove all of the intellectual property from the surface of the wafer. The process does not damage the silicon underneath.

This new process is revolutionary won IBM the “2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award” from The National Pollution Prevention Program. IBM says that worldwide about 250,000 silicon wafers are started each day and that up to 3.3 percent of these wafers end up being discarded amounting to about three million discarded wafers each year.

In addition to merely saving the material and time used in the manufacturing of the reclaimed silicon wafers, IBM says that it sees an overall 90 percent energy savings because repurposing the scrap means IBM doesn’t have to manufacture as many new wafers to meet demands of its production process.

GMail 2.0

Google announced some news at its Analysts Day, which may excite some — it will be releasing a completely rewritten, optimized and improved version of GMail.The new version dubbed “GMail 2.0″ has two main goals:  faster service and better contact management.

Initial testers reported the test version felt noticeably faster and more responsive, particularly in contacts management.  They report a new contacts screen, as well as that the chat can now not be hidden (at least in the trial version). Another improvements is that contact pictures can be transferred directly from Google’s Picasa web albums, all server-side, to reduce bandwidth and processing expenses on the user side.
Hmmm first it was IMAP and now this, things are finally looking good for Google

NVIDIA Debuts the Cooler counterpart of GeForce 8800 series

NVIDIA today is set to launch its newest midrange graphics card part, the GeForce 8800 GT, previously known by its codename G92.

The GeForce 8800 GT sports a 100 MHz speed bump over the 8800 GTS, and comes factory clocked at 600 MHz. The 600 MHz clock speed of the 8800 GT is actually 15 MHz higher than the 8800 GTX’s default GPU clock, which is set at 575 MHz. The 8800 GT’s clock speed also comes within striking distance of the GeForce 8800 Ultra’s 612 MHz GPU clock speed.

The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT features 112 stream processors, 6 less than the 128 stream processors found on the ultra high-end 8800 GTX and 16 more than the 96 stream processors found on NVIDIA’s 8800 GTS.

The stream processors of the 8800 GT come clocked at 1500 MHz, the same speed as the stream processors of the GeForce 8800 Ultra. Comparatively, the GeForce 8800 GTX comes with its stream processors clocked at 1350 MHz while the 8800 GTS’ stream processors are clocked at 1200 MHz.

Instant Jailbreak for iPhone and iPod touch

A crew of hackers (including hdm/metasploit, rezn, dinopio, drudge, kroo, pumpkin, davidc, dunham, and NerveGas) have introduced a one-touch instant jailbreak for both iPhone and iPod touch. The jailbreak opens your iPhone for full disk access and installs Installer.app so you can add pretty much any third party application you like.

To use it, open Safari and point your browser to jailbreakme.com (which we aren’t linking to so folks won’t install this by accident, but you are prompted to confirm). Once there, read the directions, scroll to the bottom, and tap Install AppSnapp. If Safari disappears and you return to the main Home screen, you’re good. Just wait a minute more for your unit to restart–don’t touch anything until you see the slide to unlock screen. If Safari hangs, just quit out (press and hold Home for 4-8 seconds) and try again.

Once you get to slide-to-unlock, go ahead and unlock your iPhone or iPod touch. You’ll return to your home screen which will contain a new Installer.app icon. If you’ll want to ssh into your unit, install the BSD subsystem, Community Sources, and then install Open SSH–you may need to upgrade Installer.app (thanks Ste). With Open SSH and sshfs (part of Mac Fuse), you can open Finder windows that offer direct drag and drop access to your phone or touch.

The jailbreak really is as easy as it sounds. I restored my iPod touch and jailbroke it just a few minutes ago and it worked great

Hitachi shows off finger-controlled steering wheel

Rest assured, there are plenty of steering wheels on the road right now that happily accept finger commands, but Hitachi’s latest invention takes things one step further. The so-called finger vein authentication system can apparently be customized for a certain driver so that simple presses can adjust one’s seat, load up a given playlist, tweak the equalizer, crank the AC or start up the engine. Moreover, such a system provides an additional layer of security against theft or unwanted drive-offs (think mischievous children). Hitachi is still unsure if / when this will actually hit vehicles on showroom floors, but a ballpark figure of “three to four years” was thrown out there for good measure.

Samsung planning firmware updates for YP-P2

It looks like Samsung’s snazzy YP-P2 just became even more attractive. Apparently, the P2 will be hit with an update this December that enables a Bluetooth connection to one’s mobile phone, BT file exchanges and the addition of an e-dictionary . In late January of 2008, you can expect an upgraded Touch UI along with FM recording / playback.

Finally its looking like a device thats worth buying :)

Apple’s Lepord on the loose

Apples new OS Leopard(OS X 10.5) which was supposed to be released day after tomorrow,

has somehow leaked into the public torrent network.

 

And this is something not new to the Apple guys. Anyways here is a link to the torrent  .

enjoy it :)

Boot Camp taken down

With just three days to go before Leopard hits the scene, Apple’s gone ahead and made Boot Camp unavailable to download.

Tiger users with Boot Camp partitions who aren’t ready to make the leap to Leopard can rest easy, however, since existing Boot Camp installations will continue to work fine — but you’ll still be riding dirty since the beta license technically expires on Friday with Leopard’s release.

iPhone Elite team announces “revirginizer”

Over at Google Code, the iphone-elite team has released their revirginizing tool, which is designed to rebuild your iPhone’s seczone lock table. After using this tool, the team suggests, your 1.0.2 unlocked iPhone will return to its pre-unlocked state and be safe to upgrade to 1.1.1.As with all restore/revirginizing methods, I recommend caution. You may want to wait a few days, listen to reports, and see if iPhones truly get restored to a “never been kissed” or even “never held hands” state of pure Apple-in-the-Garden innocence.

iPhone Installer App Updated to 3.0beta3 With Many Improvements

The iPhone’s Installer.app has been updated to 3.0, and features a much better organizational system than the previous “everything listed in a flat list that takes forever to scroll through”. Not only are there sections now, you can “Update All”, and the packaging backend is improved as well. You can’t install this directly on your phone, but instead you have to install the older version, then update via installer itself. If you have 1.1.1, you’ll have to jailbreak first, then transfer it on manually. However, it does detect what firmware version you’re running and only displays the apps that run fine on yours. [Installer via PSMXY]