Geekly Update - 07 February 2012

Category: Tech-News

Is the FBI working on a new way to peek into what you're saying on Facebook or Twitter? Has Nikon finally introduced an x-ray vision feature in their new Coolpix digital cameras? And forget about the football -- what was the best commercial aired during Super Bowl 2012? Get answers to these burning questions, and the scoop on the latest tech news, in this edition of the Geekly Update. It's guaranteed to make you 146% smarter, read on...

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

"Doubles as a portable space heater!" The BOXX electric moped can go 80 miles on a single charge, at speeds up to 35 mph. At a length of 36 inches and a weight of 120 lbs, the BOXX will set you back $3,995 but will carry up to 300 pounds, has all wheel drive, LED lighting and anti-lock brakes. (Not recommended for single men who someday want to have a girlfriend.)

Over 110 million people watched the Super Bowl last Sunday. But for many, the football game is less interesting than the commercials. See the best and worst of the 2012 Super Bowl commercials. You can even catch up on the ones you missed from prior years, all the way back to 1969.

The FBI is working on an app to monitor social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to improve its real time intelligence searches.
Geekly Update 02-07-12

In front of a Worldwide Threat hearing in Washington D.C. this week, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified that cyber-espionage will one day be the number one threat to the USA, rather than terrorism. The number two threat? See previous item.

"Shouldn't they be doing this on TWITTER??" Those love birds are prepping for an Angry Birds event on Valentine’s Day, February 14. Rovio will be bringing its latest version to Facebook in a collaborative version of the popular game.

Lenovo’s long awaited ThinkPad X130e is now out and about. Designed for students, the notebook has an 11.6-inch, 1366x768 display, AMD's dual-core, 1.3GHz E-300 Fusion processor and is built with "enhanced durability."

NPD In-Stat believes that living room video calling may increase from 1.5 million minutes in 2011 to 16.4 million by 2015. This seems to be dependent on the purchase Internet TVs with a built-in webcam and the rise of services such as Skype.

Firefox 10 has finally been released by Mozilla with the ability to run full screen apps. Other improvements include add-ons that are compatible by default, a forward button hidden until back navigation is needed and anti-aliasing for WebGL. Install it now! Or wait until next month, when Firefox 16 comes out.

Microsoft has debuted the Kinect for PCs but it will cost you $249, more than $100 over the original. The controller tracks movements about 40 cm away, has improved speech recognition, "skeletal tracking" and has a software developer's kit (SDK) for programmers who want to create related apps.

"What, still no x-ray vision feature?" Nikon has introduced two new Coolpix cameras, one of them the P150 that boasts a 42x optical zoom, the longest on the planet. The P310 features a 16.1 mp backside illuminated sensor and a fast f/1.8 maximum aperture, NIKKOR glass lens to capture video even in low light.

 
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Most recent comments on "Geekly Update - 07 February 2012"

Posted by:

Paul, Upstate New York
07 Feb 2012

Back illumination is a technique used to make CCD (and more recently CMOS chips more sensitive to light.

A conventional camera chip is manufactured in the conventional fashion with photosensitive sites as the bottom layer of the stack to keep them flat. All the circuitry used to bucket-brigade the electrons liberated in the sites by incoming photons to the edge of the chip where they can be read out and turned into data. The problem is that the Silicon in the overlaid circuitry is less than perfectly transparent. (Transparent substances are really bad at capturing light for reasons that should be obvious.) This reduces the sensitivity of the photosites because a fraction of the photons aren't even reaching them.

Back (or rear) illumination is a trick where after the chip is fabricated in the conventional manner, a thick layer of undoped, and therefore insulating, Silicon is deposited on top of the circuitry, the wafer is flipped over, and most of the original substrate is ground away, leaving the photosites as the new top layer. This has been done for a long time on sensor chips for astrophotographic and other scientific cameras, but hasn't been seen in ordinary consumer cameras because the added manufacturing steps add hugely to the manufacturing costs.

You're probably wondering why not just make the chips with the photosites on top of the other circuitry in the first place. The reason, near as I can figure out, is that they need to be flatter than they can be made on top of the supporting circuitry.

-- Paul


Posted by:

Frank K.
07 Feb 2012

FWIW: In your mention of Firefox 10 you did not mention the ESR version release as an option. This version will only be updated for security issues until Feb. 2013...rather the 6 week sked that Mozilla has implemented for the standard releases.
I for one opted this version to stabilize my desktop and addons.


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