China indicates interest in buying maglev train technology

Beijing - China on Wednesday signalled its interest in acquiring the technology for a German-developed magnetic-levitation, or maglev, train.

"We would greet the sale of the magnetic train technology from the German developers to Chinese firms," said the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency.

It added that it hoped China could win the technology at an "attractive price."

However, the German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp, which developed the Transrapid system with Siemens, rebutted speculation that it might sell the propulsion technology or a license to China after high costs last month killed a maglev track that had been planned between downtown Munich and its airport.

China is home to the only Transrapid track in commercial service. The track runs between downtown Shanghai and the city's airport.

Xie Weida, deputy director of the Railway Institute at Shanghai's Tongji University, who was involved in the development of the Shanghai line, warned that the cost of such know-how would be extremely expensive but would allow China to produce maglev trains itself and market them internationally.

An expansion of the Shanghai line is planned, but it has been put on hold because of protests by residents. Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng recently ruled out a completion of the expansion by the Shanghai-hosted World Expo 2010 as originally planned.

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Security Safer by Design

Every Mac is secure — right out of the box — thanks to the proven foundation of Mac OS X. Apple engineers have designed Leopard with more security to protect your personal data and make your online life safer.

Safe and easy.

The security features built into Leopard are unobtrusive, easy to use, and accessible to everyone. And Apple responds quickly to any threat, providing timely software updates that make installing the latest security enhancements one-click simple.

Secure from the open source.

Apple engineers use a variety of approaches to identify potential security threats and proactively protect the OS against them. Since the core of Leopard is open source, Apple gets the benefit of a worldwide community of security researchers who help to further improve security on the Mac. Apple also works with a number of security organizations, including CERT/CC, FIRST, the FreeBSD security team, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Danger-free downloads.

Sometimes innocent-looking files contain malicious applications in disguise. That’s why files downloaded using Safari, Mail, and iChat are screened to determine if they contain applications. If they do, Leopard alerts you, then warns you the first time you open one. You decide whether to open the application or cancel the attempt. And Leopard can use digital signatures to verify that an application hasn’t been changed since it was created.

DIY encryption.

The Disk Utility tool in Leopard helps you create encrypted disk images using 128-bit or even stronger 256-bit AES encryption. Safely email documents, files, and folders to friends and colleagues, save the encrypted disk image to CD or DVD, or store it on your Mac or a network file server.

Connect with confidence.

The VPN client in Leopard offers increased compatibility with the most widely used VPN servers on the Internet. So connecting to corporate networks securely — without additional software — is fast and easy.

Safe to share.

New sharing preferences in Leopard show you which folders your Mac is sharing and give you more control over who can access shared folders. Add users from your Address Book, create new file-sharing accounts so friends and family can securely access your files, or tie into a corporate directory to add users from your network. Sharing options abound in Leopard.

Sandbox tested.

Sometimes hackers try to hijack an application to run malicious code. Sandboxing helps ensure that applications do only what they’re intended to by restricting which files they can access, whether they can talk to the network, and whether they can be used to launch other applications. Helper applications in Leopard — including the software that enables Bonjour and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed to guard against attackers.

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MultiCore-Fire on all cylinders

Today’s Mac computers offer astounding performance with up to eight cores of processing power. How do you take full advantage? Simple — with Leopard. A rearchitected system, finely tuned key applications, and powerful new tools for developers make Leopard the perfect OS for your multicore Mac.

Why multicore matters.

For decades, faster processors meant better application performance but hotter, power-hungrier chips that were far from mobile-friendly. New multicore processors help solve the power problem, but don’t necessarily improve application performance. That’s where Leopard comes in, providing powerful tools that make it easy to reap the benefits of multicore computing.

Multiple cores, multiple efficiencies.

The new Leopard scheduler is very efficient at allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. So Leopard spends less time managing tasks and more time performing computations. A new multithreaded network stack speeds up networking by handling network inputs and outputs in parallel.

Multicore apps in Leopard.

Apple engineers have updated several applications in Leopard — including Mail, Address Book, and Font Utility — to be fully multicore ready. Each of these apps breaks up processor-intensive actions into a series of more manageable steps that execute one by one on single-CPU computers and in parallel on newer, multicore systems. Cocoa uses the same technology to speed up Spotlight searches and Dictionary lookups.

Smooth operator.

How did Apple engineers pull this off? By using NSOperation, a breakthrough new API that optimizes applications for the world of multicore processing. Independent chunks of computation (operations) are added to NSOperationQueue, which dynamically determines how many operations to run in parallel based on the current architectures. So there’s no need to hand-code the complexities of threading and locking. You simply describe the operations in a program along with their dependencies. Cocoa takes care of the rest.

Pass it on.

To support the message-passing model popular in scientific computation — which has long needed to distribute calculations across multiple processes — Leopard includes the popular open source OpenMPI implementation of the MPI 2.0 standard. OpenMPI works with Xgrid, seamlessly supports both PowerPC- and Intel-based Mac computers, and makes it easy to add drivers for low-latency interconnects. And Xcode for Leopard includes the various MPI “compilers” (preprocessors) that streamline the process of writing MPI-compliant programs.

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Core Animations-Drag and Drop

Welcome to the next level in computer animation. No, it’s not a feature film — it’s your desktop. Core Animation is a framework that makes it simple for Mac developers to add visually stunning user interfaces, graphics, and animations to applications. Without any advanced graphics techniques, you can create fluid, stutter-free effects and experiences as groundbreaking as Time Machine and the new Dock.Order from depth.
Using Core Animation, Mac developers can create snazzy animations in their programs using different media types, such as text, 2D graphics, OpenGL renderings, and video, simultaneously. These items are placed on layers, and a scene can contain a few layers or thousands of layers, each with its own content. Core Animation can add different effects to layers, then composite and render them in real time. When content changes, Core Animation updates it automatically.
Two heads are better than one.

Core Animation performance benefits from multiple cores in the latest Intel-based Mac computers. When developers use Core Animation in an application, the framework can take advantage of processor threads. On a multicore Mac, that means the application runs on one core, and Core Animation graphics tasks run on the other.
Shift from manual to automatic.

No need to create animations by managing individual elements on a frame-to-frame basis. Just describe the start state, the end state, and any interim states or keyframes, and let Core Animation do the rest. You can also describe how your animation should react to user input, and it adjusts accordingly. Core Animation opens up the power of Apple’s graphics technologies and proven aesthetics to every developer. You’ll be seeing its effect in a new generation of amazing apps to come.

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Mobile Phone Signal And Battery Meters

Why does the first bar of the battery life take 36 hours to go away, and the other 3 seem to vanish in 10 minutes? How do my calls get dropped when I CLEARLY have full bars? Read on m'friend.

Battery Meters

We're in a world that sends robots to outerspace, has cured innumerable diseases, and FINALLY allows us to play Super Monkey Ball using accelerometers on a portable device - you'd think we'd be able to measure the amount of charge on a battery. Truth is, we can - and accurately too. But you'd never know it in your every day life...36 hours to dissipate all the power, but plug it in for 10 minutes and miraculously it appears that you're back to full strength? How can that be? We all know it's not actually back to full (or >80% as the bars would suggest), so what is actually going on? Marketing.

Like everything else, that battery meter is controlled by software, and that software is controlled by humans - at least for now. In related news...

Signal vs. Noise

We all know AT&T's pitch, "More Bars in more Places," but what does that really mean? We've also all had calls dropped only to look down at the phone to notice "full bars." The issue is that the meter only tells one half of the story.

When your phone is on standby and you're likely to look at the meter, those "bars" are the combination of two factors: the raw signal strength received from the cell tower, and the signal to noise ratio (the SNR) - essentially, how well the tower can hear your phone based on how much other noise (data) you are competing with. The SNR is by far the most significant component in determining call quality, but because the SNR is constantly changing the phones display a blend of the two measurements, and are set to give far too much weight to the signal strength of the tower.

When you are actually on a call, your phone and the tower are in in two-way communication, and the meter reads more precisely, but you're generally not looking down at the meter at those times.

When you see full bars, what you're seeing is that your phone is hearing the the local signal loud and clear, but what is not shown is if the tower can hear your phone shout back. Throughout your call, the amount of data being sent to your tower can change frequently, and when a deluge hits, it's as though you're pissing into a waterfall. In this case, you're not actually being lied to, just selectively informed. More marketing.

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Homeland Security: We can seize laptops for an indefinite period

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

DHS claims the border search of electronic information is useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws." (Readers: Are you sure your iPod and laptop have absolutely no illicitly downloaded songs? You might be guilty of a felony.)

This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.

Here's a guide to customs-proofing your laptop that we published in March.

It's true that any reasonable person would probably agree that Customs agents should be able to inspect travelers' bags for contraband. But seizing a laptop and copying its hard drive is uniquely invasive--and should only be done if there's a good reason.

Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, called the DHS policies "truly alarming" and told the Washington Post that he plans to introduce a bill that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches.

But unless Congress changes the law, DHS may be able to get away with its new rules. A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that an in-depth analysis of a laptop's hard drive using the EnCase forensics software "was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine."

At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.

The new DHS policies say that customs agents can, "absent individualized suspicion," seize electronic gear: "Documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location, including a location associated with a demand for assistance from an outside agency or entity."

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