Acer debuts Liquid Android smartphone, new netbook

Acer, the world's third largest PC vendor, on Wednesday announced two of its most highly anticipated products with Google's Android mobile operating system on board, the Liquid smartphone and an Aspire One netbook.

Acer Liquid is a touchscreen smartphone running Android version 1.6, formerly codenamed Donut and the latest upgrade to the software. Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset inside the smartphone provides processing power and other capabilities.

The smartphone also includes a camera that tags photos with location information from the built-in GPS receiver, so people know where and when they snapped a shot. Songs and videos can be played on the handheld. Liquid is designed for Internet browsing, and allows high speed Web access through HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) mobile networks.

The smartphone will use a new user interface, Acer said in a statement. Few other specific details were immediately available about Liquid.

Acer also offered a further glimpse at its Aspire One with Android netbook.

The device will run both Android and Microsoft Windows, and users will be able to switch between the two simply by clicking to switch OS, Acer said.

Android will give people access to the Web on start up, with just an 18 second boot-up time. The OS shuts down in 3 seconds, Acer said.

Other details about the new netbook, including when the device might go on sale and how much it would cost, were not immediately available.

Greasemonkey replacement for Firefox add-ons

In terms of memory use, Firefox is one of the most efficient browsers around -- at start-up, anyway, without any extensions installed. As your browsing session rolls on, the add-ons and helper apps that make Firefox such a helpful browser start to eat up serious memory. Want a leaner, more elegant solution? Try using Greasemonkey user scripts to make the Web a better place.

If you don't have it installed already, grab Greasemonkey, a Firefox add-on that allows you to easily install and manage individual "user scripts." They're basically bits of custom JavaScript that make useful tweaks and changes to web pages without the overhead of installing extensions.

For example, if you run across a lot of links shortened with tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or other social services, the Long URL Expander automatically shows you the full URL and page title of those inscrutable links when your mouse pointer hovers over them. There's a full extension that does the same thing, with a few preference settings. But with a user script, you'll never have to worry about version upgrades, and can super-customize which sites it works on, how much it displays, and more by tweaking the script text.

Let's be a bit more productive, though. If you're a Google Apps user, you can give Gmail, Google Calendar, and Reader some nice facelifts with scripts obsessed with clean looks and the Helvetica font: Helvetical, Helvetireader, and Helvetimail. If you're a Google Docs user, your cautious hind-brain will reward you for grabbing Google Docs Download and backing up all your cloud-based files all at once to a place where a security issue won't lock you out of them forever.

Do you compulsively keep a Gmail tab open at all times? Stop clicking over to see if there's new mail. Grab Gmail Unread Message Count in Favicon and Gmail's red "mail" icon will get a tiny number next to it, displaying the number of unread messages. If you feel Gmail's sidebar labels could use a little more nested, Outlook-like organization, Folders4Gmail offers exactly what its name implies.

Troubled by typing inside too-short text forms? Textarea Resize gives you the ability to expand text areas vertically or horizontally by hitting Ctrl+Enter or Ctrl+Shift, respectively. Then again, maybe commenting on forums and social sites is more of a time-wasting problem. Grab NoAddict, modify it with the sites you know you're weak against, and insert a message like "Seriously? You want to waste time here?" If the sites you browse occasionally carry some rough language, and you'd rather it not show up on your screen, don't bother with filtering software. Grab the Profanity Filter and watch all those worked-up YouTube comments turn into endless asterisks.

MIT creates nanotube process that could shrink, speed chips

New manufacturing technique could replace copper wires and transistors with nanotubes to build smaller, faster computer chips

Researchers at MIT have found a way to grow the carbon nanotubes that manufacturers need to build smaller, faster computer chips.

As chipmakers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices work endlessly to find ways to build smaller and smaller chips, they often run into a multitude of problems.

A key issue that must be resolved: dealing with the tiny copper wires that connect transistors in a processor. As the chips shrink in size, so do the wires, making it increasingly difficult for them to maintain the level of current needed to meet performance requirements.

That's where the nanotubes come into play.

"When we shrink chip features, the interconnections between the transistors get smaller -- just like everything else," said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat. "And when they shrink, the performance isn't the same. Using carbon nanotubes is an interesting idea."

The question engineers have faced to date, he added, is "how do you do it?"

Gilbert Nessim, a researcher at MIT, said that chip manufacturers have consistently run into trouble by trying to build the nanotubes on a metal surface, which is needed to ensure an electrical contact.

Efforts to build carbon nanotubes on metal can face significant problems due to the heat required in the manufacturing process. The excess heat, for example, could cause the metals to form alloys that are not conducive to nanotube growth.

The MIT scientists used a combination of techniques to create a new process for using nanotubes. The techniques included vaporizing the metals tantalum and iron, which settle in layers on a silicon wafer. Then they placed the coated wafer at one end of a quartz tube, which was inserted into a furnace. The researchers also pump ethylene gas into the tube. The gas decomposes at high temperatures and the iron on the wafer catalyzed the formation of carbon nanotubes.

Nessim noted that the technique is based on processes already commonly used in the semiconductor industry. which should make them eaasier -- and cheaper -- for manufacturers to adopt.

Intel, long looking to create the next generation of chips, is an underwriter of the MIT research. Nessim said the semiconductor industry has been interested in finding ways to replace copper wires with nanotubes, but has been slowed by the effort to find a reasonable way to deal with the metal issues.

"I hope this [research] may revise that enthusiasm to some point," he said. "At some point, they'll be stuck with copper that does not work and they'll have to find an alternative. We hope that our insights ... have eased a little bit of some fabrication issues and hope this will match the requirements that they have."

Intel, in a statement responding to questions from Computerworld , said they hope such research breakthroughs can help the company switch copper wires to nanotubes by some time after 2015.