Behold, the Pioneer BDR-205! Thrill to the 12x write speeds on double layer Blu-ray media! Marvel at the 50Gbytes of storage capacity! Be amazed by the low, low price of $250 United States dollars! Click on through to read the entire exciting press release!

Smartphones are great. Ubiquitous data access is great. Mobile computing is great. Unfortunately, each smartphone represents its own little walled garden of convenience. Apple’s iPhone is tied tightly with iTunes and various other Apple services. Android is tied tightly with Google services. Each manufacturer makes a modicum of effort to allow their smartphone to sync with someone else’s services, but as is too often the case, such integration is usually lacking some important functionality. After all, there’s little business incentive to allow your users to use someone else’s services, right? Enter Funambol, and their open source mobile cloud sync.

Storage is cheap, and just keeps getting cheaper. I remember buying my first 250 megabyte hard drive, and paying just under a dollar per meg. Now we’re approaching multi-terabyte drives at retail stores for extremely reasonable prices. The age old problem, though, is how to protect all that precious data. RAID solutions have been around for a long time, but the consumer-grade products haven’t been all that great, and the commercial-grade products have been way too expensive. Things are starting to change, though, and the iStoragePro iT4UFER is a good indicator of what’s to come. Read on for a complete review, and a chance to win a $100 Starbucks gift card!

You thought Eyefinity was pretty cool, huh? What could be cooler? How about a gigantic 10×4 setup of seamless monitors, for super-high resolution visualization. That’s what you’ll find at KAUST! I’ll let this video speak for itself. Note the resolution values being shown in the bottom corner

Yesterday I introduced CORNEA, the CAVE system at KAUST. CAVEs are great, but they require a huge investment: you need to build a facility around it, or renovate a space to accommodate it. Then you need to spend enormous amounts of money to buy and install the gear. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have an immersive 3D environment without all that effort? Researchers at KAUST, in conjunction with folks from U.C. San Diego, are doing just that with NexCAVE, a scalable, modular immersion system.

In addition to NexCAVE, there’s several other great visualization projects underway at KAUST. Video and more inside.

I’m in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the inauguration ceremony of KAUST, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This is a 30-square kilometer state-of-the-art research institution with faculty and students from all over the world. For the next couple of days I’ll be getting some behind-the-scenes access to technology in use here, both for education and research, as well as the tools used to bring this place together. Read on for my initial impressions of some of the tech here.

The jig is up, and the Silver Penguin award has been presented to the winner of the Fake Linus Torvalds competition! Before you learn who won, though, you need to know who was actually playing. As you recall, four famous people were pretending to be Linus on Twitter and Identi.ca, and the community selected their favorite. Click on through to see who the fakes were, and which one won the competition!

The word for the day is “malvertising”. It’s a linguistic mashup that means “malicious advertising”. Not deceptive, or antagonistic, but actually harmful. You know, the kind of online advertising that delivers a virus payload that jacks up your sister-in-law’s computer and then she calls you and you have to try to troubleshoot it over the phone and she doesn’t listen and just keeps clicking that damned mouse — you can totally hear her clicking clicking clicking — while you’re trying to be methodical and solve the damned problem. You know, that kind of advertising. Well Microsoft has had enough, and they’re finally going to do something about it! They’re filing lawsuits against malvertisers! Thank the maker!

Convergence. That’s the word that comes to mind when I watch the fancy demonstration of the HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart web printer. We’ve all seen the all-in-one PC design, a la the iMac, but how often do we see a printer and a computer in one package? HP is bundling a teeny little touch-interface computer with their latest set of printers, allowing you to access stuff from the Internet without using your PC at all! Some of the examples don’t seem particularly useful: I don’t think I’m likely to go to my printer when I want to buy movie tickets, for example, but letting kids print out their own coloring books seems like a pretty good idea to me. And printing Google Maps will be helpful for those Luddite friends of mine who don’t have GPS units.

Microgravity researchers at NASA have used a superconducting magnet that generated a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside a mouse, effectively simulating weightlessness for the rodents, right here on earth! The first floating mouse didn’t seem very happy about the ordeal, so subsequent tests involved sedating the test mice. As should be expected, the doped up mice had a much better time floating around.

Ice doesn’t get me very excited. I rarely get ice in my beverages because it’s merely “delayed water”. But some scientists have been studying ice, and have created a completely flat sheet of ice only two molecules thick. Apparently ice normally forms in a “puckered” layered formation. Thrilling! All you need is some graphene, platinum, a vacuum, and the ability to lower temperatures to 125 kelvin (about negative 235 F, or the temperature on the dark side of the moon).

While the developed nations of the world spend huge amounts of money trying to eek out just a little more efficiency from traditional solar panels made from silicon, an industrious young lad from Nepal has figured out how to use human hair to get 9V of electricity from the sun. The fine articles are a little light (ha!) on the science, but even if there’s some hyperbole in these reports you’ve got to admit that it’s still wicked cool to use human hair to convert solar rays into electricity.

Microsoft, will you stop at nothing to protect your hegemony? Your “Linux Facts” campaign from a couple years ago was poorly executed, and trumped up a bunch of selective information to make Windows look better than Linux. You killed that, and replaced it with a Windows Server “compare” site, but it’s still a bunch of selective data points that don’t tell the whole story. Now, you’re even trying to get the sales drones at Best Buy to steer folks away from Linux!

We’ve been hearing for what feels like decades about the “paperless” revolution, wherein everything will be written on computers. The problem is that computers — even smartphones and tablet PCs — still make it unnecessarily complicated to jot down a quick note. You know, the kind of thing that doesn’t have any lasting permanence but something you’re going to forget in the next five minutes before you need to use it. Sure, you could use a Post-It note, but that involves the killing of trees and who really needs that on their conscience? The quirky Scratch-n-Scroll mousepad may be worth your consideration.

Paul Atreides, House Harkonnen, Bene Gesserit, Sandworms — what’s not to love about Frank Herbert’s Dune? And what better way to immerse yourself in that world than by recreating things in LEGO bricks! If LEGO were to create a packaged set for Dune, the way they have for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, I would certainly buy a couple, and feel no remorse whatsoever playing with them, alone, in my basement. Alas, no such sets have been made, so enterprising fans of less-mainstream sci-fi and fantasy franchises are left to their own devices to create their favorite things from whatever collection of colored plastic bricks they can assemble.

If you think AutoCad is complicated, what with its terrifying number of keyboard shortcuts, you should check out SketchPad, the world’s first electronic drafting program. Designed by Ivan Sutherland in the 1960s, it allowed an operator to draw line segments, arcs, and circles on an oscilloscope with a lightpen and a complex set of buttons, switches, and knobs. Videos after the jump!

Passwords suck. A good password is hard to remember, and a weak password is easy to guess. There are lots of attempts at finding ways to solve the problems of passwords, like one-time passwords, biometric authentication, and more. One of the most attractive solutions is two-factor authentication, which requires that you know something (a short passphrase, usually), and that you have something. The thing that you have is most often a little token generator: every 30 or 60 seconds a new set of digits is displayed on a screen. To successfully log in, you need to supply the passphrase that you know along with the digits displayed on the token. Big businesses have been using two-factor authentication for some time. Now it’s being made available for anyone with an Amazon Web Services account.

Tablet PCs never really caught on, did they? And yet, nearly every laptop sold today has a touchpad / trackpad thingie. Wouldn’t it be cool to use that for the few tablet-y things you’d like to do, like signing your autograph on a document, or making a doodle? Well now you can, with Autograph!

Chances are most of you know what the Turing Test is, and therefore have a passable familiarity with Alan Turing, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th century. For most people, knowledge of the man stops there. Some might know that he was a fantastic mathematician and cryptanalyst responsible for much of the code-breaking success of the UK’s Bletchley Park during WWII, including much of the work that lead to the breaking of the German Enigma machine codes.

Are you a privacy-minded person living in the Netherlands with at least $82,000 USD to spare? If so, quantum cryptography can be your’s today, thanks to a new partnership between Siemens and id Quantique! Siemes has a bunch of dark fiber it’s willing to sell to you for use with your shiny new id Quantique Cerberis quantum key distribution system.

As you all know, quantum cryptography key distribution uses light over fiber optic cables. In order to ensure that the key exchange occurs securely, you need dedicated fiber. And if, somehow, someone manages to peek in on your key exchange, the quantum properties of photons ensures that you’ll know about, since the very act of observing quantum events changes their outcomes.

The terribly named “White-Fi” is a research effort to bring WiFi transmission to the unlicensed TV spectrum — the so-called “whitespace” (get it? White-Fi!) of TV channels in the UHF band . Big whoop, right? Well, with transmission ranges up to 1 kilometer, that actually is a pretty big deal. Mesh networking is also in the works. But most interesting of all are the requirements that the FCC has imposed on White-Fi devices to make sure they don’t interfere with any television broadcasts or wireless microphones. Basically, any White-Fi device needs to immediately switch frequencies the instant it detects a signal from a television or microphone.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has thrown down the gauntlet by comparing IT workers to the hated TSA goons at airports. I, for one, won’t stand to have my hard work besmirched in such a way! Sure, there are some power-hungry jerks working in IT, taking great delight in causing consternation and frustration to hapless users. But not all IT folks are like that.

Researchers in Japan have developed an attack against WiFi Protected Access when using the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) that can successfully break the encryption in less than a minute. If you’re using WPA with TKIP, switch to AES, or step up to WPA2.

We all know and love Fake Steve Jobs, right? We all know that Linux users copy everything that Mac OSX and Windows do, right? So it should come as no surprise that the Linux Foundation is copying Fake Steve in their new Fake Linux Torvalds competition! Not content with a single fake Linus Torvalds, there will be four fake Linus Torvaldses (Torvaldi?)! And in true Linux geek fashion, the competition will take place on both Twitter and identi.ca, the free software micro-blogging alternative!