Science

Adobe Systems plans to release high-end photo-editing software for tablets. The new app would be a close relative to Adobe's Lightroom software for PCs and serve as a cloud-connected companion to the program.

Tom Hogarty, Adobe's group product manager for Lightroom, demonstrated an early prototype version of the app Wednesday on the Grid, an online show from Photoshop guru Scott Kelby.

Adobe has done a good job with PC-centric photography software, but the company needs to better incorporate Internet connectivity and mobile devices into photography workflow, Hogarty said.

"We need to take that story beyond the desktop. We haven't done a great job of it yet," Hogarty said. "The thing I'd like to sneak today is taking that raw processing and bringing it onto the mobile device."

He wouldn't promise when the app would ship or what exactly it would do, but he did demonstrate some features of the prototype software running on an iPad 2. He also offered several details about its features:

• The ability to edit photos taken in raw photo formats, including Lightroom develop-module parameters like exposure, clarity, shadows, highlights, and white balance.

• Cloud-synchronized editing so that changes made on a tablet arrive on the same photo on the PC.

• The ability to zoom all the way to 100 percent for checking photo focus and details.

Read More: Adobe to bring Lightroom-style photo editing to tablets

Nvidia on Wednesday debuted its GRID Visual Computing Appliance, a device that lets businesses deliver ultra-fast GPU performance to any Windows, Linux or Mac client on their network.

The GRID VCA is a GPU-based system that allows complex applications, sending graphics output to the network and enabling it to be displayed on a client machine. It provides remote GPU acceleration, giving the user on the client machine the same rich graphics experience available from an expensive dedicated PC workstation.

Business End of Graphics

The GRID Visual Computing Appliance starts at US$24,900 and requires an annual software license of $2,400.

"The company is going after the commercial visualization/graphics market, particularly among smaller companies and independent design firms that leverage high-end graphics applications from Adobe, Autodesk and Dessault," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Read More: Nvidia Delivers Workstation Graphics Experience to the Network

Lenovo on Monday announced a new $950 business ThinkPad, the T431. The company launched the Ultrabook into a market that had a dismal showing in 2012; IHS iSuppli had to slash its Ultrabook estimates for 2013 from 61 million units to 44 million.

The device was designed after research conducted over nine months worldwide of the user habits of both people who used ThinkPads and those who didn't.

That resulted in 26 new features for the T431, including a new trackpad with click functionality and a very thin display bezel.

"Lenovo's Ultrabook models have been performing well in the market, and the new Ultrabook design is a natural evolution of the class-leading ThinkPad T series," Lenovo spokesperson Adrian Horne told TechNewsWorld. "The T431 is optimized for business with a new backlit precision keyboard and 5-button glass touchpad, and continues the ThinkPad legacy for ruggedness and durability by meeting Mil-SPEC 8 standards."

The T431's Specs

The ThinkPad T431 is built around Intel i5 or i7 processors with Turbo Boost, has Intel HD Graphics, up to 12 GB of memory and up to 1 TB of disk storage. It weighs 3.6 pounds and is less than 21 mm thick.

It has a carbon fiber top cover and a magnesium bottom shell with integrated roll cage. The device has a 14-inch HD+ display with 1600 x 900 resolution. It also has an integrated 720p HD camera with face tracking for Web conferencing. It has integrated Intel HD Graphics and Dolby Home Theater v4 for improved audio and video performance.

Read More: Lenovo Thinks Up Thinner ThinkPad With Fatter Price Tag

"People are free to come and go," said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. of Miguel de Icaza's departure. "I should thank him, as a GNU/Linux and GNOME user, for everything." Still, it's not really fair to compare the closed Apple ecosystem, which includes both hardware and software, to GNU/Linux, which "is made for 'any hardware.' Rough edges are expected, and every day this is getting smoother, I think."

It seems fair to say that the FOSS community sees its ranks expand just about every day, as new fans of free and open source software join the fold. Just look at the fledgling Linux Advocates site for a shining example.

What's much less common, however, is to see former advocates of Linux and FOSS change their minds and depart.

Sure enough, though, that's pretty much what happened last week, when GNOME cofounder Miguel de Icaza announced that he had abandoned desktop Linux in favor of Apple's Mac platform.

'My Three Mile Island/Chernobyl'

"I purchased a Mac laptop and, while I fully intended to keep using Linux, the dogfooding driver was no longer there," de Icaza explained in a blog post last Tuesday.

"To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl," he went on.

"Without noticing, I stopped turning on the screen for my Linux machine during 2012," de Icaza recounted. "By the time I moved to a new apartment in October of 2012, I did not even bother plugging the machine back and to this date, I have yet to turn it on."
'Apple Killed the Linux Desktop'

Now, dedicated readers may recall that it was none other than de Icaza who made the infamous "Apple killed the Linux desktop" claim last fall.

De Icaza is also known for his past association with Microsoft via the CodePlex Foundation, of course. Then, too, there's the fact that Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has called de Icaza a "traitor to the free software community."

But don't let any of those pesky details prevent you from mourning the loss of this onetime FOSS champion, dear readers! Unless, of course, you're among the many who would rather not.

Read More: Man Overboard: GNOME Cofounder Joins the Mac Side

Taking a page from Opera and Amazon playbooks, then writing on it some more, Google is using its own servers to speed up page loading on its mobile version of Chrome.

The feature, called proxy browsing, is enabled in the Chrome 26 beta for Android, though it must be manually activated through the chrome://flags interface by selecting "Enable Data Compression Proxy." With proxy browsing, a server with a fast Internet connection and more processing horsepower than a mobile device loads the Web page on behalf of that mobile device.

The chief advantage of the approach is that the page can be shrunk down, something Google does with its PageSpeed software. Google compresses images into its WebP format, scales down images that will only be seen on a smaller screen, and compresses text. In principle this is similar to what Opera does with its mobile browsers, in particular with the new Off-road Mode in the overhauled Opera for Android.

Chrome for Android requires Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, or Android 4.1 and 4.2, aka Jelly Bean. The initial releases of the Chrome for Android moved slowly, but now Google has put the browser on the same frequent-release cycle as Chrome for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. That lets it bring new features to the browser sooner -- and Chrome 26 also is getting password sync and early WebRTC support.

Another part of Google's proxy browsing approach emulates how Amazon does it with its Silk browser: using Google's own SPDY technology. SPDY, a variation of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that Web browsers and Web servers use to communicate, can streamline communications by compressing some text and by letting multiple data transfers share the same data connection to the server.

SPDY also encrypts data for a bit more privacy -- though that's offset in a way by the fact that using the proxy browsing makes Google a browsing middleman.

Read More: Chrome for Android gets server-accelerated browsing

The federal government, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is putting $612 million into three projects located in Illinois, Lousiana and Texas. The sites actually have been through a first phase of research and development and were selected from the group as the “most promising carbon capture and storage projects.” Another $368 million in private funding is being put towards these projects, as well, bringing the total investment to almost $1 billion.[

According to the Department of Energy, the three projects will collectively (in theory) take 6.5 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year, storing the emissions underground. That’s the equivalent of taking 1 million cars off the road. The projects also promise progress in the area of oil recovery, which could help improve domestic production of oil by up to 10 million barrels annually, according to the DOE.

With Advanced Micro Devices launching its line of mobile processors, it can be said that real competition on the laptop front can finally start, after a long while during which Intel practically held a monopoly in this area. Already, several notebooks and netbooks based on these parts have revealed themselves. But Intel has not been slacking off either. In fact, not long ago, it presented the first Atom N series chips with support for DDR3 RAM.

So far, netbooks had to make do with DDR2 because the Atom N450 didn't support anything faster. The Atom N455 and N475, on the other hand, can cope with DDR3. In fact, the latter even has a higher clock speed (1.83GHz instead of 1.66GHz). Considering this, it is not so surprising that Acer, being the primary netbook advocate, would use them in a new product.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announces that it has just expanded the area of the Gulf of Mexico that is forbidden for fishermen. Officials at the agency say in a statement that the decision was taken because the situation is spiraling out of control, as oil slicks move in all directions away from the original site of the accident. Between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil are leaking into the water each day, according to the latest estimates.

“NOAA has extended the northern and southern boundaries of the closed fishing area in the Gulf of Mexico to capture portions of the slick moving into waters off eastern Alabama and the western tip of the Florida panhandle, as well as some large patches of sheen moving onto the west Florida shelf and southward to Cuban waters. This federal closure does not apply to any state waters. Closing fishing in these areas is a precautionary measure to ensure that seafood from the Gulf will remain safe for consumers,” the Administration announces in its press release.