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Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”

Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”

China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues were broached.

Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down was bullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers had written in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’s monitoring project at the University of California, called it “the most vicious crackdown in years.”

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for ANSWERING questions about what we as a civilization collectively know. It’s the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world — a new leap in the intelligence of our collective “Global Brain.” And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way — it computes answers instead of just looking them up.

Wolfram Alpha, at its heart is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google. And it is not going to replace Google — it is not a general search engine: You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example — there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data.

IBM Fellow Carl Anderson, who oversees physical design and tools in its server division, predicted during the recent International Symposium on Physical Design 2009 conference the end of continued exponential scaling down of the size and cost of semiconductors. The end of the era of Moore's Law, Anderson declared, is at hand.

Anderson was one of 65 semiconductor gurus speaking at the conference, which also unveiled a new method for synthesizing critical paths, a host of analog design innovations and a new twist on the annual physical design contest.

The IBM Fellow observed that like the railroad, automotive and aviation industries before it, the semiconductor industry has matured to the point that the pace of continued innovation is slowing.

"There was exponential growth in the railroad industry in the 1800s; there was exponential growth in the automobile industry in the 1930s and 1940s; and there was exponential growth in the performance of aircraft until [test pilots reached] the speed of sound. But eventually exponential growth always comes to an end," said Anderson.

A generation or two of continued exponential growth will likely continue only for leading-edge chips such as multicore microprocessors, but more designers are finding that everyday applications do not require the latest physical designs, Anderson said.

Consequently, Moore's Law--halving of the dimensions and doubling of speed of chips every 18 months--will run out of steam very soon. Only a few high-end chip makers today can even afford the exorbitant cost of next-generation research and design, much less the fabs to build them.

There's trouble brewing in chip-making paradise. Manufacturers are rolling out 45-nm ICs, with 32-nm designs in the works; 22-nm and even smaller devices are in R&D. But delivery of chips at 32 nm and beyond won't be a cool breeze.

A new 300-mm fab runs $3 billion and process technology R&D is about $2.4 billion at each node, according to VLSI Research and other industry analysts. And these costs aren't the only potential hindrance to Moore's Law. Concerns about the foundry model are emerging, there are bottlenecks in the fabs and the IC-equipment supply chain is a mess. Rising energy costs are becoming a bone of contention in the fabs, too.

iTunes Store's new pricing scheme affects the charts, that Lightspeed Champion guy expresses surprise

USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps

Over all, these companies are doing quite well, making more money than ever, with lower capital investment. But if there was one weak spot jumping out of the numbers, it was not their Internet business but their traditional TV service, where the cost of paying for content to put on all those channels is rising faster than subscription fees.

Some observations:

Cable is a good business. Revenue at both Time Warner and Comcast rose 5 percent, a growth rate that many companies would kill for in these lean times. Their various measures of operating income and cash flow rose a bit faster than revenue because they’ve been able to keep a handle on costs.

SmartQ 7 Internet Tablet gets pictured and priced

 

The SmartQ 7 Tablet that surfaced earlier this week is getting more and more interesting as additional details about the portable device are uncovered. The 7-inch tablet made an appearance on the Chinese website EletroWorld where it was listed with a $189 price tag and the following specs:

• Samsung ARM S3C6410 667MHz processor
• 7-inch Touch-lens screen, 800 x 480 pixel display
• 128MB DDR RAM memory
• 1GB Flash storage memory
• Ubuntu Linux
• Chinese/English/German/French/Portuguese language support
• Memory card slot supporting up to 32GB microSD memory cards
• Supports WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth
• USB 2.0 host supported to connect EDGE/HSDPA network adapters or mobile phones
• Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Battery: 4500mAh

EletroWorld is reporting that they will get their hands on one sample unit on May 12th with a limited production run expected in the next month or two. If the SmartQ 7 turns out to be as good in person as it is on paper, then this tablet may be making its appearance on coffee tables, night stands, and backpacks of device lovers around the world. In fact, that lime one would look quite nice in my living room and would be perfect for those moments of impromptu web browsing.

The people who run such companies bear a considerable share of the blame. In 1993, just before the Internet became a consumer force, I argued in a book that newspapers had become too cautious, too incremental and too dull, tailored largely for insiders. The rise of hugely profitable monopoly papers in most cities made them increasingly bland, seemingly allergic to controversy.

Then the Net changed America, but newspapers remained mired in two-dimensional thinking. They created sites that were largely a static replica of their print editions. There was little updating, little sense of the dynamism of the Web, and when I started writing a blog for washingtonpost.com in 2000, I had little company in the mainstream media.

The missed opportunities were endless. For the first time in half a century, newspapers could compete against television with real-time reporting, but didn't. The Globe's previous owners turned down a 1995 offer from the founder of Monster.com to put Globe classifieds online, before his site became a smash hit. Why did no establishment media company create a Craigslist, a Huffington Post, a Google News, a Twitter, or other sites that have altered the boundaries of news and information?

Now that they are belatedly beefing up their Web sites, executives are using corporate-speak like "platform-agnostic" to explain why they are firing hordes of journalists suddenly deemed redundant. Perhaps newspapers had grown too fat and were always destined to slim down in the Web era, but the mass firings have about them an air of desperation. How can papers with far smaller staffs and reduced ambitions stem circulation declines?

Some high-level people are trying to square the circle. Post Co. chief executive Donald Graham and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and their lieutenants have been holding talks about a possible collaboration. This could range from creating new Web pages to technological tools for journalists or readers. Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling vital traffic to news sites, vacuums up their content without paying a dime.

Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology

Kingston DT300: the first 256GB USB Flash drive

Kingston says that the new 256GB drive will hold around 365 full music CDs or 48,640 MP3s can be stored on one drive. If movies are your thing, the DT300 will oblige by letting you store up to 54 full DVDs or 10 Blu-ray discs worth of cinematic entertainment and even the most snap-happy photographer might struggle to fill the unit's 51,328 image capacity (based on 10MP per image).

The drive can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms but the function that allows up to 90% of stored content to be password protected will only work with Windows. Windows Vista users will also benefit from it being Readyboost enhanced.

The cap-less 70.68 mm x 16.90 mm x 21.99 mm (2.78" x 0.67" x 0.87 in) stick is fast too, with claimed transfer rates of up to 20 MB/sec read and 10 MB/sec write. Kingston also offers 24/7 tech support and a 5 year warranty.

The downside? It's expensive at £599 delivered (that equates to USD$982 at time of publication). Those outside Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA) or Asia Pacific (APAC) are going to have to curb your enthusiasm for now.

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yeah baby,  $1000 bucks drive. (probably will cost $10 a year from now)

According to data from the Recording Industry Association of America, since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna’s 60th birthday.

The speed at which this industry is coming undone is utterly breathtaking.

First, piracy punched a big hole in it. Now music streaming — music available on demand over the Internet, free and legal — is poised to seal the deal.

AOL Picking Up Journalists Shed By Conventional Media

DigiTimes has been making the rounds of the Taiwanese OEMs, and the company claims to have the scoop on a coming wave of ARM-based netbooks, often called "smartbooks," that will wash ashore in the US in the last quarter of this year. Smartbooks based on Qualcomm's SnapDragon processor and NVIDIA's Tegra line are allegedly on deck from netbook names like ASUS, Acer, and Foxconn. Lesser-known Chinese netbook maker Compal, which was showing off products at this past CES but which doesn't yet ship to the US, is also named as an ARM netbook maker, as are Inventec and Mobinnova.

Then there's the Touch Book, from Always Innovating, which sent out a note today to everyone who contacted them via web form (including Ars) to say that the device is is now shipping. We haven't really covered the Touch Book, but boy have we been getting reader mail about it. A lot of folks want us to review it, and I've contacted the company in an effort to get a review unit. (No response so far, but I'll keep trying.) The Touch Books' main gimmick is that its screen can be detached and used as a standalone tablet, and the second gimmick is that it runs the TI OMAP 3 chip, which is looking like a killer PMP/tablet processor.

In all, it looks like by Christmas of this year, we'll have the long-awaited Intel Atom vs. ARM Cortex A8 netbook price/performance/power smackdown that the gadget press has been waiting for since 2007. There's a sizable amount of hype around the Cortex A8 parts being considerably cheaper and more power-efficient than Intel's Atom, but it's worth taking a moment to think about how the two platforms actually stack up against one another.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/08/arm-based-netbooks-set-to-arrive-on-us-shores-by-year-end.ars