power

Finavera Renewables, the Canadian company that wants to harness wind and wave power, has successfully deployed a prototype of its AquaBuoy 2.0 two and a half miles off the coast of Oregon.

Waves push the AquaBuoy up and down in the water. The motion puts pressure on a hydraulic fluid. The pressurized fluid then turns a turbine, which creates electricity. Wave and tidal power are primarily in the prototype and experimental stage, but several companies are ramping up prototypes and test vehicles. Marine Current Turbines hopes to put in a tidal turbine in the water off Northern Ireland later … Read more

Judging by its photos, the "118 WallyPower" doesn't look like a luxury yacht. If anything, it has a post-apocalyptic design that gives it the appearance of a maximum-security prison on the high seas, kind of like a water-borne "Badonkadonk" tank we featured recently. But for those who have the means to purchase one--for $23,903,925 (be sure you have exact change)--we suppose it can look like anything they want.

And if its fortress-like exterior doesn't provide enough security, the vessel can outrun any potential perpetrators with three gas-turbine engines that pack 16,… Read more

Powerset, which is developing a natural-language search engine to rival Google, will finally launch its service in September after more than a year in the labs, according to the company's Web site. Powerset CEO Barney Pell will demonstrate the technology, called Powerlabs, next week while speaking at the Singularity Summit, a two-day conference on artificial intelligence and the "future of humanity" in San Francisco, according to the newsletter KurzweilAI.net.

Unlike search giant Google, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Powerset is using techniques in AI to train computers not just to read words on the page, but to … Read more

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, has come up with a new formula for hydrogen pellets that looks like it holds a lot of energy, per gram.

The PNNL pellet is made out of ammonia borane, or AB, compressed into small pellets. A milliliter of AB weighs about 0.75 grams and can hold up to 1.8 liters of hydrogen. Researchers speculated that a fuel system powered by AB pellets will occupy less space and be lighter in weight than systems using pressurized hydrogen gas. That's one of the pellets (and not … Read more

Amplifier power is measured in watts, as in "100 watts per channel," but what does that really mean? Do all 100 watt per channel receivers deliver 100 watts? And what about those "1000 watt" home theater in a box systems? Are they more powerful than 2,000 A/V receivers? And what about high-end 100 watt per channel high-end power amps? Are all watts created equal? I don't think so!

Unfortunately power ratings are a near meaningless way to compare the loudness potential of one receiver, amplifier, or HTIB against another. That's what power … Read more

The people, bless their hearts, have spoken.

As reported Monday, Canon will restore raw-image support for its G line of compact cameras when its new $500 PowerShot G9 goes on sale in October. Raw images, the unprocessed data from an image sensor, retain a lot of information that's otherwise thrown away when cameras convert sensor light into a JPEG image. Raw images are useful for tasks such as correcting underexposure, enhancing tonal subtleties and tweaking color balance for different lighting conditions.

Raw images are not for everyone. They're bulky, usually proprietary, and photographers have to spend time staring … Read more

You might wonder why I'm posting again so soon after that twelve-post blogging marathon at Hot Chips. Well, I got a new gizmo last night and I just had to write about it.

Two years ago yesterday, I bought a Sierra Wireless AirCard 860 (a PCMCIA cellular modem card) from Cingular for my Apple PowerBook G4. I also… Read more

Okay, this is it for Hot Chips. Read the whole set of Hot Chips blogs here. Comments? You know what to do...

This final session opens with a presentation by Sun of "Victoria Falls," a multicore server processor due out in 2008. This chip is… Read more

I'm blogging today from Hot Chips 19, the annual chip technology conference hosted by Stanford University. I'm planning to summarize each session as it happens.

Before the sessions began, there were some announcements--expected attendance, for example, is about 600 people.

Famed computer architect John Mashey spoke on behalf of the Computer History Museum, giving an update on museum exhibits and inviting Hot Chips attendees to visit while they're in town. The museum will have one of the two working copies of Charles Babbage… Read more