How AT&T Wanted Apple to Cripple the iPhone(and Why There Isn't a Verizon iPhone, Yet)

Revolutionary Intel chip uses light to send data

In a development that could revolutionize how PCs and other tech gadgets communicate, Intel announced Tuesday that it had made the first chip that sends and receives information using beams of light.
The Santa Clara chipmaker said the fingernail-size research prototype already can move 100 hours of digital music or 45 million tweets in a second from one device to another. And the company expects to make one eventually that can transmit a laptop's hard drive in one second and the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in less than two minutes.
Moreover, because the chips are made of the same material the company uses for its brainy microprocessors, Intel envisions mass producing these "silicon photonic links" at low cost, making them practical for use in everything from personal computers to smartphones.
"The range of potential applications here rivals that which existed at the invention of the transistor," Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, said in a conference call with reporters. "It's only limited by our imaginations."......

Data sorting world record falls: Computer scientists break terabyte sort barrier in 60 seconds
Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego broke "the terabyte barrier" – and a world record – when they sorted more than one terabyte of data (1,000 gigabytes or 1 million megabytes) in just 60 seconds. During this 2010 "Sort Benchmark" competition – the "World Cup of data sorting" – the computer scientists from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering also tied a world record for fastest data sorting rate. They sorted one trillion data records in 172 minutes – and did so using just a quarter of the computing resources of the other record holder.
Companies looking for trends, efficiencies and other competitive advantages have turned to the kind of heavy duty data sorting that requires the hardware muscle typical of data centers. The Internet has also created many scenarios where data sorting is critical. Advertisements on Facebook pages, custom recommendations on Amazon, and up-to-the-second search results on Google all result from sorting data sets as large as multiple petabytes. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes......

The saga surrounding the iPhone continues: Apple is investigating complaints that its iOS 4 updates are causing headaches for iPhone 3G users, the Wall Street Journal says Symptoms of those headaches include slowdowns, battery drain and overheating. Some are speculating that the complaining users will have to downgrade to a previous operating system, while some wonder whether Apple will bother to allocate resources to fix problems on a phone that’s so two generations ago.
And speaking of overheating, Apple’s other hot “i” product, the iPad, is the subject of the most recent lawsuit against the company, just a few days old: Three of its users have sued the Cupertino company, saying the tablet overheats, turns itself off after a few minutes, and is “virtually unusable” in direct sunlight. “Using the iPad is not ‘just like reading a book’ at all since books do not close when the reader is enjoying them in the sunlight or in other normal environmental conditions,” the lawsuit
which seeks class-action status, states

1962 glass could be Corning's next bonanza seller

An ultra-strong glass that has been looking for a purpose since its invention in 1962 is poised to become a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Corning Inc.

The 159-year-old glass pioneer is ramping up production of what it calls Gorilla glass, expecting it to be the hot new face of touch-screen tablets and high-end TVs.

Gorilla showed early promise in the '60s, but failed to find a commercial use, so it's been biding its time in a hilltop research lab for almost a half-century. It picked up its first customer in 2008 and has quickly become a $170 million a year business as a protective layer over the screens of 40 million-plus cell phones and other mobile devices.

Now, the latest trend in TVs could catapult it to a billion-dollar business: Frameless flat-screens that could be mistaken for chic glass artwork on a living-room wall.----