China 'could reach Moon by 2020'

China has been working on its space programme since the 1970s but in 2003 it sent an astronaut into space, becoming only the third country to launch a person into orbit. Since then, the country's ambitions and capability have grown to the point where the US space agency now thinks China could put people on the Moon within the next decade, if it so wishes.
Dr Michael Griffin, who has been the head of NASA since 2005, told the BBC that China could achieve this milestone before the return mission planned by the United States for the year 2020. President George Bush announced the American Moon initiative in 2004, but Dr Griffin would not be drawn on whether it mattered if China got there before the United States. He even hinted that the two countries could collaborate on space projects in future.
Dr. Michael Griffin: "I think we're always better off if we try to find arenas where we can collaborate rather than quarrel and I would remind your viewers that the first first US-Soviet human space co-operation took place in 1975 at virtually the height of the Cold War and it led in the end, you know, eighteen years later to discussions about an international space station programme in which we are involved together today."
Though China has given no timetable, some observers think a manned Moon mission is inevitable. Dr Griffin said humans needed to continue advancing the frontiers of space exploration, regardless of which countries made the breakthroughs.

iPhone 3G sales hit one million mark

A total of one million 3G iPhones have been sold around the world since the handset's much-anticipated launch last week, according to Apple.
And despite the outages, shortages, and related hand-wringing associated with last Friday's iPhone 3G launch and Thursday's release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware, Apple says there were nevertheless 10 million downloads from its new App Store in its first weekend of existence.
"It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world," said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs in a statement.
"The App Store is a grand slam," he added, "with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days. Developers have created some extraordinary applications."

Apple cuts price of flash-drive MacBook Air

Apple has quietly reduced the price of the flash-memory version of the MacBook Air by $500.
Appleinsider tipped us to the new price, which can be found at the online Apple Store. Before today, you would have paid a $999 premium if you wanted a MacBook Air with a solid-state hard drive, but Apple has reduced that premium to $599. It's also now cheaper to upgrade the processor from 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz, $200 instead of $300, on either the flash model or the one with the standard hard drive.
PC companies have been interested in flash memory hard drives for some time, but it's not clear how well they are selling. Using flash memory instead of moving parts to store data improves the reliability of the system; hard drive failures are one of the most common problems experienced by notebook users.
But it's still very expensive to choose a flash drive over a regular hard drive, and potential customers might not be able to justify spending that extra $999, or even $599. Reliability is important, but so is price, and recent news that flash-memory drives are actually a drain on battery life won't help sell them as an upgrade option.

Quarter of the planet to be online by 2012

According to the report by Jupiter Research, the total number of people online will climb to 1.8 billion by 2012, encompassing roughly 25 percent of the planet.The company sees the highest growth rates in areas such as China, Russia, India and Brazil. Overall, the number of users online is predicted to grow by 44 percent in the time period between 2007 and 2012."Even though the emerging economies will have lower online penetration rates compared to the developed countries, Jupiter Research believes that they will ramp up the learning curve in adopting sophisticated online activities compared to the developing countries," said research director Vikram Sehgal.The analyst firm sees Asia as an especially critical market, due to the high rate at which both its physical population and technological markets are growing."Asia will not only have the highest online growth rate compared to other regions in the world, but will also present a substantially large pool of sophisticated online users as a market to tap into," explained Jupiter Research president David Schatsky.

Google Enters Designer, Developer Fray

Although Microsoft and Adobe seem to be duking it out over the issue of developer-designer workflow, Google enters the scene with its own focus on how designers and developers can work together using Google App Engine.
Microsoft has been touting connections between its Expression suite of design tools and its Visual Studio developer tool, and Adobe offers its Creative Suite and Flex tools, along with its upcoming "Thermo" technology, to help designers and developers work better together.
However, at the recent Google I/O developer conference, members of the Google UX team spoke on the need for designers and developers to work better together and said Google App Engine is the place for it. Google App Engine lets developers build and run their Web applications on Google's infrastructure.
To acknowledge how closely the two disciplines need to work together, Lindsey Simon, a developer on the Google UX team, said he was looking for a "design husband." Simon said he was quoting Simon Willison, a co-creator of the Django Python-based Web development framework, who had said, "I need to find a design husband."
Simon said, "I thought that was really funny because here's this guy I admire as a developer and he was saying that he was not looking to find developers or other programmers to work with him, he wanted to find a designer."
Moreover, Simon said, "Working at Google I have the luxury of meeting people like John [Skidgel, a designer on the Google UX team]. I want to work with a good designer, too. If I'm going to work on a project at Google, I'm going to work on it with John. Because I want help with design—it's not something that I'm trained to do."
So, if you were looking for a designer, what would you look for, Simon asked the audience, which was split about 60-40 with developers in the majority.
To answer that question, Simon displayed a slide that was written like a newspaper ad, or even a personals ad, entitled "Coder Seeks Designer."
The core of the ad read: "Seeking an unpretentious, scrappy, well-rounded interaction and visual designer." The qualities listed as being sought after were, "Takes criticism without a hissy fit, willing to entertain rants about back-end/front-end code, knows Photoshop kung fu and not afraid of code."
Added Simon: "I don't want what I imagine is the whiny designer. I want someone I can work with, not someone who's going to give me Photoshop files and I just go implement it from scratch. I want somebody I can work with on a project."
In addition, Simon said, "I don't want an Andy Warhol-type designer; I want someone who's scrappy, who's well-rounded and not afraid to look at code."
Indeed, Simon said he believes, "You can't really have a meaningful design for these kinds of applications anymore if you really want to separate strict visual design and interaction design from the act of engineering it. That's not really a productive workflow." As a developer, "you want to work with your designer, and from the beginning."
Meanwhile, Skidgel, who shared the stage for the May 28 presentation entitled Engaging User Experiences with Google App Engine, displayed his own ad giving what he looks for in a developer.
Skidgel's ad, which was entitled "Designer Seeks Coder," said, "Seeking a sane, customer-focused coding powerhouse with decent communication skills."
Skidgel said, "As a designer, you really want to find someone who is sane and customer-focused." And, "as a developer you should have crocodile skin," he added.
The qualities Skidgel said he seeks in a coder are, "Takes suggestions without going ballistic, appreciates aesthetics, deep and broad understanding of front-end and back-end technology, and not afraid to express himself visually—he can draw [or] chicken-scratch flows."
He concluded, "It's a collaboration. You shouldn't feel that your designer has full reign over the design."
For his part, Simon said, "Most designers are very competent with CSS [Cascading Style Sheets], even better than some developers—so this is where you want them to help you."
Simon said Google App Engine supports workflow and is "a great environment for collaboration." In addition, local testing and deployment are easy and consistent, there is no compilation, the App Engine Launcher provides Mac OS X ease of use for developers, and the SDK (software development kit) auto-update keeps the development environment current, Skidgel said.
Simon said, "The designers I see where I work, they are all Mac people, and they aren't typically people who love the command-line approach." However, with Google App Engine, "getting set up and getting started and having your designer with the same environment you have" is a plus, he said.
Skidgel said things like design flows are important to do with both the designer and developer working together. "It's iterative, and can be informal and quick," he said, noting that the team should capture revisions with a digital camera or cell phone camera to document the design.
"Two heads are better than one when you do this," Simon said. "My inclination is to just go start programming it, but that's not always the best way to do stuff. It's much better to get together with someone and talk it through."
In addition, design and coding should be done concurrently, Skidgel said. The designer works in Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks, and the developer begins writing handlers, he said.
"I go out and start writing all the assets—the mocks, the logos and everything else—and Lindsey is starting to write Python," he said.

Sharp to ship world's biggest LCD display for sale

TOKYO, June 13 (Reuters) - Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp (6753.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said on Friday it would begin shipping next month the world's largest liquid crystal display, a reminder of the once-heated race for size among TV makers.
The 108-inch display, priced at roughly 11 million yen ($102,100), would be made to order and sold mainly to businesses, Sharp said.
Last year, TV makers vied to make bigger displays in a show of technological prowess as they sought to beat price competition with premium big screens.
Sharp's new display is likely to be surpassed next year when Matsushita Electric Industrial Co (6752.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) plans sales of its 150-inch plasma display for use on billboards.
Weak demand for big TVs hurt manufacturers such as Hitachi Ltd (6501.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Pioneer Corp (6773.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), which posted losses on their TV operations because they lacked economies of scale to weather price falls for smaller TVs in high demand.
Sharp, which had originally planned to focus on bigger displays, shifted more weight to 40-inch class displays and smaller in the middle of last year.
Shares of Sharp closed up 1.7 percent at 1,712 yen against a 0.6 percent rise in the benchmark Nikkei average .N225. (Reporting by Mayumi Negishi; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Grandfathers created a special navigator for his grandson autistic

The autistic have difficulties to handle the amount of information, elements and present colors in Internet. For that reason, a computer science one developed a specific navigator for them. In addition it free put at the disposal of everybody in the Red. An American programmer thought that to sail by the Network autist of six years could help in the rehabilitation of its grandson. Nevertheless, the unique thing that obtained was the downheart after stating that for the small Zac the great amount of colors, banners and the strident contents of the Network did not help it in anything.
In order to solve the problem it designed a navigating specific Web for autistic children, whom the search of contents simplifies and eliminates the elements that affect the mind of those who suffers this disease. After to ask to him rehabilitating educators and of autismo, the grandfathers of Zac incorporated numerous benefits to his navigator, as the blockade of some keys and functions of the computer so that the boy does not relax with secondary elements, like the right button of the mouse or the key “Print screen”. Other elements of the navigator, like the simplified icons and their great size, help the small one to accede of direct form to games, mental stories or exercises. On the matter, an investigator of Brown University de Rhode Island Stephen Sheinkopf indicated that “some parts of the Network have much material stranger who can be being relaxing and for a boy who communicates of nonverbal form, there would not be any possibility so that he uses this information”.