Wednesday, October 24, 2007

HDTV: Wired Names Olevia 747i Best LCD in 38- to 49-inch Category

tv_olevia_747i_f.jpgAfter a post about Olevia's new lower-priced 65-inch HDTV ($6999), we were wondering just the other day exactly how good these Olevia TV sets are. Now our estimation of the brand just raised up a notch or two when we saw a big thumbs up from Wired for the 47-inch 1080p Olevia 747i LCD TV, topping a roundup of nine flat panels including some pretty stiff competition from the likes of Sony, Samsung, Philips, Westinghouse, Panasonic, Toshiba, Visio and Polaroid. Gushed Wired in its upcoming "Test" issue:

It's smarter, with a killer video-processing chip that helped it ace all our tests, syncing up and smoothing out the noisiest screwball video we threw its way.
The reviewer also liked the set's pretty appearance, called its built-in speakers the best he tested, and even liked Olevia's 3Dish menus and remote control. The nine out of ten rating bestowed upon this $2499 HDTV constitutes quite an endorsement. Might be one to examine come Black Friday. [Wired]

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Vroom: Suzuki Biplane Pities Harley-Davidson

medium_1727954269_f8d5631459_o.jpgThe Tokyo Auto Show is bringing us some wicked concepts, including this Suzuki Biplane motorcycle. Inspired by the classic biplane first introduced by the Wright Brothers, we're a bit confused exactly where the twin stacked wings fit within this redesign, but who knows, maybe Suzuki has made motorcycles fly. Not to mention, there's about a 50/50 chance that you could instantly turn into a super hero when sitting on this bike...which counts for something. Hit the jump for a big pic, or the link for a full gallery. [jalopnik]

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Elcomsoft turns your PC into a password cracking supercomputer (gulp)

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You know all that talk about GPUs being the new CPUs ? Well it's not just a lot of hot, ventilated air. Thanks in large part to the launch of development kits like nVidia's CUDA, Russian outfit Elcomsoft has just filed for a US patent which leverages GPUs to crack passwords. Their approach harnesses the massively parallel processing capabilities of modern graphics cards to make minced-meat of corporate-strength password protection. An NTLM-hashed Microsoft Vista password, for example, can now be cracked in 3 to 5 days (instead of two months) using a simple, off-the-shelf, $150 graphics card -- less complicated passwords can take just minutes. Dial the GPU up to an $800 GeForce 8800 Ultra and Elcomsoft's approach will crack passwords at a rate some 25 times faster than existing CPU-only approaches. Yippee? [Via NewScientist, thanks Sultan]

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Shigeru Ban’s Metal Shutter Houses

October 24th, 2007 by Chantal

Shigeru Ban's Metal Shutter Houses are going up in west Chelsea. That's the name for a condo with nine duplex apartments with jaw-dropping exterior features.

"The Metal Shutter Houses" have walls that lift up completely out of the way, as well as "perforated metal shutters that operate exactly like the rolling grates of the Chelsea galleries and Korean delis that inspired them."

The facade motorized perforated metal shutters serve as light-modulating privacy screen at the outer edge of each residence's terrace adjacent to the double-height living rooms.

This subtle "removable skin" echoes the neighboring gallery after-hours shutters, subtly contextualizing the building within its site. The building can literally close down, becoming a uniform minimal cube, or it can open completely (as well as virtually unlimited permutations between). South of the terrace, twenty foot tall, upwardly pivoting glass windows open completely, thus blurring the boundary between the inside and outside – the double height living room and terrace become one. Similarly, a series of interior sliding glass doors create an open "universal floor" in each of the duplex houses – one vast and uninterrupted expanse which transitions seamlessly from inside to outside, or partition the space into private areas.

Link Via [The New York Times]

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Student snags maths prize - The Simplest Turing Machine that can compute any problem

Stephen Wolfram's $25,000 prize claimed.

The state of the head (up or down droplet) and the pattern of colour (orange, yellow and white) in a given row depends upon the row above. A simple start can lead to an incredibly complex picture. The state of the head (up or down droplet) and the pattern of colour (orange, yellow and white) in a given row depends upon the row above. A simple start can lead to an incredibly complex picture.Wolfram Institute

A twenty-year-old university student has answered a challenge by one of the world's most well-known mathematicians.

Alex Smith, a undergraduate electrical engineering student at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, has proven that a primitive type of computer known as a 2,3 Turing machine can solve every computational problem there is. Proving the "universality" of the 2,3 Turing machine was the subject of a US$25,000 challenge from entrepreneur and mathematician Stephen Wolfram.

Wolfram, founder and chief executive of Wolfram Research in Champaign, Illinois, issued the challenge this May to satisfy his own curiosity about how complexity emerges from simple systems. The idea is that a properly applied set of basic rules can create an enormously intricate result. "It's actually a lot easier to make complexity than one might have thought," he says. "I find it particularly tantalizing."

Turing machines were imagined by the British mathematician Alan Turing in 1936, and consist of a read–write head that can be put into one of several states and a long strip of tape on which can be written a set of colours. At each step, the machine looks at the state of the head and the colours on the tape. It then uses a set of fixed rules to move the state of the head into a new position and write a new row of colours on the tape (see picture).

Intricate patterns

The machine specific to Wolfram's prize has a head with only two states and a tape that can hold three colours. It is one of the simplest kind of Turing machines, but depending on the first row on the tape, the results can be remarkably intricate, according to Smith. "Even if you know the rules, you don't necessarily know how it will behave," he says. Smaller, simpler Turing machines are possible (such as 1,2 for example) but these are not thought to be capable of universality.

Smith learned about Wolfram's challenge in an Internet chat room and almost immediately went to work fiddling with the machine. After learning its behaviour, he set about proving that it was computationally equivalent to another type of simple, conceptual computer known as a tag system.

Mathematicians have already shown that tag systems can compute any problem, so proving the two were equivalent effectively proved the power of Wolfram's machine. Smith's proof is 44 pages long.

The solution isn't hugely relevant to modern computer science, says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Most theoretical computer scientists don't particularly care about finding the smallest universal Turing machines," he wrote in an e-mail. "They see it as a recreational pursuit that interested people in the 60s and 70s but is now sort of 'retro'."

Nevertheless, Lenore Blum, a researcher at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittburgh, Pennylvania, who served on Wolfram's Prize committee, says the find is interesting enough on its own to warrant attention. "This could stimulate some new work," she says.

For his part, Smith, now in the third year of his electrical engineering degree, says that he has no big plans for his prize money. "I'm just going to put it in the bank," he says.

Find a gallery of more Turing machine outputs on the Wolfram prize site.

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