On The Tech Front

"The Microsoft Windows Engineering Team has announced that the Metro interface web browser in Windows 8 will not support plug-ins — Adobe Flash included. Users will still be able to open a traditional browser interface to make use of legacy sites that rely upon plug-ins. This news follows a recent blog post by the Internet Explorer 10 team pushing the use of HTML5 video as a replacement to Flash video. With Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and other major players already backing HTML5 — is Adobe Flash finally dead?"
 
"For the IDF keynote, Intel showed an experimental processor that is solar powered (incandescent light shining on a solar panel). The whole computer itself still runs on regular power; only the processor itself is solar. From the article: 'The concept processor, code-named Claremont, can run light workloads on solar power by dropping energy consumption to under 10 milliwatts, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, during a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. That is low enough to keep a chip running on a solar cell the size of a stamp.'"
"Microsoft will release a Community Technology Preview of a new type of compiler its researchers have been building — code-named Project Roslyn — a company executive announced Thursday. Roslyn is a compiler for C# and Visual Basic with a set of APIs that developers can use to fine-tune their code. It resembles a model developed by the Mono Project, in which the information the compiler generates about a program can be reused as a library."

"Intel's Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect technology could be years away from getting optical technology, an Intel executive said this week at IDF. Originally introduced in February on Macs, Thunderbolt was pitched as being optical technology but currently uses copper wires. Dadi Perlmutter of Intel's Architecture Group said copper wires are working much better than expected, and that fiber was expensive. 'It's going to be way out,' Perlmutter said. 'At the end of the day it's all about how much speed people need versus how much they would be willing to pay.'"

"While drug cartels in Mexico are disemboweling people they accuse of blogging about drug violence, Anonymous busies itself taking down Mexican government websites. With all the problems facing people in Mexico right now, including drug cartels extorting teachers for 50% of their pay and killing schoolchildren (thus shutting down the school system), Mexico's biggest oil field in terminal decline and drug cartels kidnapping busloads of people and forcing them into gladiator-style contests to the death, Anonymous' actions appear particularly petty."