Summary: This is our 13th episode. In this episode we discuss: DARPA invisible shoot-through shield, BT new ad-heavy payphones, Joost hardware, Microsoft Mediaroom: IPTV, Archos TV Plus, DARPA Scramjet, Yahoo CEO Quits, Eurocom quad-core laptop, NVIDIA Tesla: GPUs now CPUs and Google vs Microsoft.

The Word for the day: Deuteronomy 28:1-8 - If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God: You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.

The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The LORD will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you.

They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven. The LORD will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The LORD your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.

DARPA invisible, shoot-through shield

In a move seemingly influenced in equal parts by Halo and David Lynch's film Dune, Darpa has announced that it's ponying up $15 million to develop one-way-invisible, self-healing, shoot-through shields for use in urban combat. While the Pentagon's research division acknowledges that there are "significant technical obstacles" in the process, it's fairly gung-ho about developing a technology combining metamaterials, 'coded' obscurant systems, and a bunch of other stuff no one really understands. Trust us, you'll thank them if the Harkonens try and overthrow your spice-mining operation.

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BT new ad-heavy payphones

It looks like the streets of London will soon be getting an extra dash of advertising courtesy of BT, which has begun the roll-out of some fresh new payphones, marking the first redesign the company's done in more than 20 years. Designed in partnership with advertising firm JCDecaux, the so-called Street Talk 6 kiosks boast illuminated scrolling advertisements on the rear and no walls or doors, with only a small plastic hood provided to protect the cellphone-less among you from the elements. Apparently, the payphone's cost BT about £2,000 (or close to $4,000) apiece, although we somehow doubt they'll have much trouble making that back a few times over. Look for the first of the new payphones to hit the Richmond and Ealing boroughs of London this week, with the roll-out presumably set to slowly expand throughout the rest of the U.K. shortly thereafter.

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Joost hardware

Joost, the hard-partyin', beta-stage releasin', streaming TV-service you've been watching on your PC appears to be making baby-steps towards integrating their service with somebody's third-party set-top box. Joost began making public statements this week suggesting that it's already in talks with manufacturers, although we don't know who or where. According to their executive VP of global advertising, "You will see Joost in the living room," which really only makes sense. Paradigm-shifting media delivery platform or not, people still seem to typically prefer to watch TV sitting on their couch and with their TV.

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Microsoft Mediaroom: IPTV

We know Microsoft loves TV, between its UltimateTV and Foundation set-top box businesses, continued commitment to the Media Center platform, impending Xbox 360 IPTV rollout (and current downloadable video content over Live), and its nascent Microsoft TV IPTV biz. In fact, it's pretty clear that connected television is the direction the company thinks the medium is headed, and it seems ready to make another push on its core IPTV platform (Microsoft TV IPTV Edition) to the masses by rebranding it as Microsoft Mediaroom and expanding its functionality. The new version of the platform, announced today, features picture in picture (with "enhanced MultiView"), networked media sharing, interactive services, and finally supplementary digital terrestrial television support. Will it affect you, the end user? Only if you're lucky enough to live in one of the select few markets that has IPTV integration -- none of us are, and we're none too bitter about it, too.

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Archos TV Plus

Not really a surprise that Archos is finally really tying to break into the set-top box business, given its propensity for DVR-recording functionality in its portables line and partial ownership by Echostar, but it looks like the Apple TV has a new device to worry about: the Archos TV. We're still getting details in, but it looks like the 80 - 250GB box will pull content off your home network via WiFi or Ethernet, as well as grab from external storage, in addition to recording DVR-style with component in (and HDMI out). More on this new media streamer we get it.

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DARPA Scramjet

Woomera (AUSTRALIA) – A scramjet fired Friday in southern Australia briefly hit speeds of ten times the speed of sound.  The engine was boosted 330 miles into the air and hit 6800 miles per hour on the way down, fast enough to go from Los Angeles to New York in about 25 minutes.

The entire flight lasted 12 minutes 15 seconds with the scramjet sitting on top of a fairly conventional rocket for much of the ride.  The rocket had two stages with the first stage dropping off after six seconds.   The second stage took the scramjet into space.  Scramjets must first be propelled to supersonic speeds before igniting since it rams (like its name suggests) atmospheric air into hydrogen fuel.  The advantage of such a design is that scramjets don’t need to carry as much fuel and can have relatively few moving parts.

The scramjet was developed as a partnership between the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation.  Both groups hope to do at least ten more flights in five years.

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Yahoo CEO Quits

The chief executive of internet search firm Yahoo, Terry Semel, has quit his position and has been replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang.
In the post since 2001, Mr Semel has been under pressure for some time amid disappointing trading results and the growing dominance of rival Google. The firm suffered a 16% fall in profits in the first three months of 2007. Mr Yang helped launch the business, which now has more than 500 million users worldwide, in 1995.

Yahoo has struggled in recent years, losing market share to rivals such as Google and being criticised for poor technology and a lack of innovation. It currently accounts for about 26% of all online searches in the US, well behind Google which has a market share above 49%.

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Eurocom quad-core laptop

We've definitely seen some shady reports of a quad-core laptop make the rounds, and it looks like geographically misnamed Canadian laptop outfit Eurocom is going to be first off the line with a Intel Core 2 Quad notebook. A Eurocom spokesperson apparently confirmed to Laptoping that the company is prepping a quad-core Phantom D900C -- which probably means that monster-laptop Clevo (or whichever company is their ODM) is working on a quad-core D900C, since the Phantom is yet another rebrand. Laptoping says the 17-inch machine will feature a 2.4GHz Q6600 "Kentsfield" Core 2 Quad and dual SLI-capable GeForce Go 8700 or Quadro FX3500 graphics, an HD DVD drive, and up to three drives that can be run as a RAID 0/1/5 array -- all of which means battery life on this 11.9-pound monster will probably run down faster than a 6-minute mile. Still, the idea of stuffing four cores into a laptop gets us all excited, but the current $3,200 pricetag on the dual-core Phantom doesn't bode too well for the double the power.

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NVIDIA Tesla: GPUs now CPUs

We've seen a couple cautious attempts at leveraging the raw floating-point capabilities of modern high-powered graphics cards, but NVIDIA is taking the gloves off with the launch of Tesla, its new general-purpose computing platform built on the 8-series graphics cards we all know and love. According to NVIDIA, the only way to skirt the inevitable collapse of Moore's Law is to join the GPU and CPU together, so two of the three Tesla configs are in the form of workstation upgrades -- a $1,499 single GPU PCI Express card and a $7,500 dual-GPU "deskside supercomputer" that plugs into a custom PCI controller. The truly crazy can pony up a full $12,000 for NVIDIA's first rack units, the four-GPU Tesla S870, which has a peak performance of 2 Teraflops. We're hearing the card and deskside unit will be available in August and that the servers will start shipping in November or December -- perfect for the Engadget Folding@Home holiday rush.

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Google vs Microsoft

Just when you thought the bickering over Vista's search capabilities were finished, along comes Google to fuel the nearly extinguished flame. Apparently, Microsoft's actual filing that spelled out its intentions to alter the search functionality within Vista wasn't as clear cut as previously understood, and now Google is out for even more blood. Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, called the remedies "a step in the right direction," but also declared that the changes "should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop-search providers." Essentially, it seems like Google will be barking up Redmond's proverbial tree until Microsoft allows users to disable Vista's built-in search (or better yet, choose Google) entirely. Oh, the drama.

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The Word for the day

Deuteronomy 28:1-8 - If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God: You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.

The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out.

The LORD will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you. They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven. The LORD will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The LORD your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.

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