Lithium-air batteries are the coming thing. They have the potential to hold ten times the capacity per unit volume of lithium-ion batteries and are lighter, since one of the charge-carrying materials is ambient air. These air-breathing monsters look great. But, as with all monsters, they have their vulnerable spot. In this case, the vulnerability is something akin to asthma—the inability to get enough air into the battery. Medical scientists don`t seem to be too interested in making inhaler products for batteries, though, so scientists have been trying to come up with ways to keep the air flowing...

(Reuters) - Taiwan's Acer Inc expects fourth quarter sales to fall as much as 10 percent from the previous three months and will raise prices as flooding in Thailand disrupts supplies of hard disk drives for PCs.

The company told an investor conference on Friday that it hopes to see some improvement in the supply of hard disks in the first quarter of next year, but added that with prices for disks rising up to 20 percent, it needs to take action....

Prices of large-size flat panels are expected to stabilize in November at the earliest as flat panel makers are unwilling to further cut product prices due to mounting losses, according to panel makers.

The deteriorating finances of Taiwan's panel makers has caused them to become reluctant about further cutting large-size panel prices, they said. 32-inch LCD panels for TVs have reached cash cost. Makers said they would rather not take orders than buy materials to produce products while still losing money.

Despite still harsh economic conditions in the fourth quarter, panel makers said there will be no further cuts in large-size panel prices so they can deal with their financial situations. Large-size panel prices are expected to stabilize as early as November and no later than December 2011,...

Forty-one percent of enterprises do not allow employee-owned Macs access to any company resources, even Web-based e-mail, according to the results of a new Forrester survey of IT executives at North American and European companies.

Forrester asked 590 IT executives and technology decision-makers if employee-owned Macs are granted access to resources like Web-based e-mail, hosted applications and virtual desktops, internal networks, and native e-mail applications. Forty-one percent answered “none of the above.”...

China has once again been accused of commit acts of cyber-warfare, with a congressional commission claiming evidence of interference with US government satellites.

According to the annual report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, due to be released in its final form next month, Chinese hackers used a ground station in Norway to interrupt the operation of the Landsat-7 and Terra AM-1 satellites in 2007 and 2008 for reasons unknown....

Summary: Now that HP is officially keeping its PC division in the company, maybe the TouchPad is next in the revival line.

Updated: The web is reverberating with news from HP today that is will keep its PC division. The official release from HP makes it clear it will stay behind the Personal Systems Group (PSG):

“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”...

Federal regulators on Thursday approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation's $8 billion fund that subsidizes phone service — instead targeting money to finance the spread of high-speed Internet to an estimated 18 million Americans who don't have it.

The FCC voted 4-0 on the makeover of the Universal Service Fund, which helps provide phone service to rural America and to those with low incomes. Regulators approved the new Connect America Fund in a bid to boost U.S. broadband to rural America. The FCC also started a new Mobility Fund to build out mobile broadband....

Well here's a bit of a shocker. A company called LSI has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SandForce, makers of all those high-speed solid state drive (SSD) controllers that are so popular in the performance category. Most people assumed it would be a company like Intel, or even Corsair who would eventually swoop in and scoop SandForce up, just as OCZ did with Indilinx.

But it was LSI who made the move, agreeing to pay approximately $322 million in cash and assume in the neighborhood of $48 million of unvested sotck options and restricted shares held by SandForce employees. In recent years, LSI has focused most of its attention on networking and storage solutions for the enterprise....

Windows Media Center has finally made its appearance in Windows 8.

Users at the My Digital Life forum apparently discovered the application in the latest pre-beta build of Windows 8, dubbed 8141. One poster said it seems to be the old Windows 7 version, while WinRumors noted that it appears to be a standalone desktop app.

The debut of Media Center in the latest Windows 8 build should comfort users who noticed that it was missing from the earlier builds. In response to concerned feedback sent to Microsoft, Windows Live President Steven Sinofsky confirmed in an early September blog that Media Center would indeed be part of Windows 8....

(Reuters) - Asian chipmakers, including the world's top contract chipmaker TSMC, reported sharply worsened quarterly earnings and braced for another uncertain quarter as a weak global economy hits demand for computers, though roaring growth of smartphones and tablets offered a bright spot. On Thursday, Taiwan's TSMC reported a worse-than-expected 35 percent decline in profit to T$30.4 billion ($1 billion), its fourth straight quarterly drop.

South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc, the world's No.2 computer memory chipmaker, reported its first quarterly operating loss in two years.

In Japan, Hynix's rival Elpida Memory Inc also tumbled to a quarterly loss....

Microsoft and Mozilla have announced a special release of Firefox that integrates with the Bing search engine. The build, which is called Firefox with Bing, is available for users to download from a Microsoft-hosted website.

When Firefox 4 was released last year, it added Bing as one of the available options in the browser's built-in search box. Google remained the default, but Bing became easily accessible to users who prefer Microsoft's search engine. Microsoft and Mozilla also took the opportunity to establish a revenue-sharing agreement around the search integration....

Asustek Computer and Gigabyte Technology, facing weak market demand in Europe, the US and China, are expected to fail to achieve their motherboard shipment goals for 2011 and only ship 22 million and 17.5-18 million units, respectively, about one million units less than their original targets, according to sources from motherboard players.

Although Intel is already set to launch its upcoming Sandy Bridge E-based CPUs and X79 chipsets for the high-end market in the middle of November to help attract consumers, due to leaked information that Intel will launch upgraded Sandy Bridge E C2 CPUs and upgraded chipsets only two months after, consumers are likely to wait until the upgraded models are launched....

Corning, the developers of Gorilla Glass, announced the launch of a new display material named Lotus Glass for use with LCD and OLED screens today in a press release. The company says Lotus Glass has more "thermal and dimensional stability," which will allow it to better withstand the process of attaching high-resolution displays and implementing “tighter design rules.”

LCD glass substrates can require intense heating and cooling cycles to create screens, particularly for higher-resolution displays, Corning says. Lotus Glass has a higher annealing point than Gorilla Glass, meaning more heat is required for the material to relax internal stresses and forces....

Visitors to the Rockstar Games website likely received a huge jolt when hopping onto the home page.

That's where the studio has confirmed through a simple logo the existence of Grand Theft Auto V.

The only other detail featured is a Nov. 2 launch of the game's first trailer.

To say Grand Theft Auto V is a highly anticipated game is perhaps a gross understatement. The open-world action title serves as a follow-up to the successful 2008 release of Grand Theft Auto IV, where players watch Niko Bellic strike it rich after leaving Eastern Europe for the U.S....

NEW YORK – Although tablet owners spend more time consuming news than poking around on Facebook, they're reluctant to pay for news content.

That's according to a study from the Pew Research Center's Project for the Excellence in Journalism, due out on Tuesday. It found that 11% of American adults own a tablet of some kind, and a majority of them spend 90 minutes a day using the device.

Consuming news is one of the most popular activities, up there with e-mail and more popular than social networking. Only general Web-browsing proved more popular on tablets than news and e-mail....

While Nvidia and AMD are poised to use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC's) 28nm technology to produce the GPUs Kepler and Southern Islands respectively, most Taiwan-based graphics card makers hold a conservative attitude about the new GPUs with some makers cautiously watching the market status before making any further decisions, according to industry sources..

Compared to the makers' eagerness for the previous-generation GPUs, graphics card makers are rather conservative about the upcoming 28nm chips due to concerns such as TSMC's weak 40nm process yield rate issues may re-occur in its 28nm process and weakening demand for graphics cards and lower-than-expected gross margins....

(Reuters) - Nokia unveiled two sleek new Microsoft Windows phones Wednesday, a first step in the ailing cellphone maker's fightback against Apple and Google.

The flagship Lumia 800 and more basic Lumia 710 will go on sale in key European markets by the Christmas holiday season.

They are the first fruits of Chief Executive Stephen Elop's big bet on Microsoft software that spooked investors earlier this year. Analysts said the pairing remains well short of finding an iPhone killer....

(Reuters) - Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's No.2 PC maker, said on Wednesday that it expected some constraints on hard disk drive supplies through the first quarter of next year after severe floods in Thailand crimped global supply.

Asia's PC makers have been suffering from a double whammy of an expected weak demand during the year-end holiday season and concerns over components shortage in coming months as the floods submerged Thailand's industrial parks,...

When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy — the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research — didn’t see it that way.

As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the “Drosophila of artificial intelligence” — a reference to the fruit flies biologists used to uncover the secrets of genetics — and McCarthy believed his successors in AI research had taken the analogy too far. ...