News about what is happening in technology today!

Of all the Xbox 360 launch titles, the one I was most looking forward to playing was Sega’s Condemned: Criminal Origins. Which makes it kind of odd that I only got the game yesterday. But I sunk a few hours in last night and I am sufficiently creeped out.

The first fifteen minutes of Condemned saw me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was scared out of my mind walking down the incredibly detailed darkened hallways, wondering if every little noise I heard was a crazy two-by-four-wielding madman sneaking up on me from behind. On the other hand, I was grinning from ear to ear at just how atmospheric the game was. The hell with King Kong’s wet shiny rocks; the HD era really arrived in my home with Condemned’s dilapidated crap-filled hallways.

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University of Michigan scientists have created the first quantum microchip, which could be a giant stride in the race to produce a new generation of brawny, super-fast computers.

Working with individual ions is key to building powerful computing machines that will exploit quantum physics — instead of transistors — and trump the power of today’s most powerful supercomputers.

So, on a semiconductor chip roughly the size of a postage stamp, the Michigan scientists designed and built a device known as an ion trap, which allowed them to isolate individual charged atoms and manipulate their quantum states.

An ion expresses a positive or negative charge, depending on whether its parent atom has a missing or an extra electron. And ions are the preferred building blocks for a quantum system.

“The cadmium atom that has lost an electron becomes a negatively charged ion, which can then be controlled with an electrical field,” said Daniel Stick, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan’s physics department who participated in the work.

To isolate an ion, scientists confine it in the ion trap while applying electric fields. Laser light manipulates the spin of the ion’s free electron to flip it between quantum states.

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Computerworld has interviewed Kurt Gerecke, an IBM storage expert and physicist who claims burned CDs only have a two to five-year lifespan, depending on the quality of the CD. From the article: “The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data ’shifting’ on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam.” Gerecke recommends magnetic tapes to store pictures, videos and songs.

In an interview over at SearchOpenSource.com, IP attorney Thomas Carey shoots down SCO’s cases against IBM and Novell, but predicts that SCO will fight a losing battle to its last. IT directors shouldn’t worry about SCO Group’s latest sallies in its legal war on Linux vendors IBM Corp. and Novell Inc., Clarey says, and explains why SCO has no case, predicts the open source legal fields of battle for 2006 and discusses SCO’s claims against Novell. Carey chairs the Business Practice Group of Bromberg & Sunstein LLP, an intellectual property law practice in Boston, Mass.

Via PCWorld the news that two new Metafile bugs have been found, just a week after the patching of previous critical WMF issues.” From the article: “All three flaws concern the way Windows renders images in the Windows Metafile (WMF) format used by some CAD (computer-aided design) applications, but these latest flaws are far less serious than the vulnerability that Microsoft patched last week, according to security experts. That vulnerability was serious enough to cause Microsoft to take the unusual step of releasing an early patch for the problem, ahead of its monthly security software update.