AMD-Powered MSI Tablet Finally Arrives in the U.S.

Although the tablet officially shipped early last month, retailers are just now stocking MSI's Fusion-powered Windows 7 device.

In early July, MSI said that it was shipping the AMD-poweredWindPad 110W tablet to North America, but online retailers like Newegg and Amazon have since listed the device as "this item has not yet been released" or something similar. Now just over a month later, reports are indicating that both Newegg andExcaliberPC are finally showing the device to be in stock, but as of this writing, Amazon is still waiting on its supply to arrive.

Xbox 360 is More Powerful Than Space Shuttle Computer

Of course, it is an old computer...

It's the end of a era now that NASA's ended the space shuttle program. The sort of technology needed to send man (and woman) into space must be more advanced than anything we use at home, right? Not exactly.

The Xbox 360 that you have set up next to your TV may be nearly six years old, but believe it or not, it's got more computational power than the computer aboard the space shuttle.

Scientists Develop Software to Animate Face Photos

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a software that can animate a face in a picture and create the impression of a movie.

The software uses source photos to animate a facial expression from a smile to a frown or deliver a visualization how a face ages over time. The basic idea is image morphing, but the project aims for much more sophisticated face-detection software in the same spirit that created research at the same university that resulted in Microsoft's Photosynth 3D photo-stitching software.

Canonical Releases First Ubuntu With Linux Kernel 3.0

Canonical has released the third alpha version of Ubuntu 11.10.

The distribution includes the Linux Kernel 3.0 for the first time, even if Canonical goes its own way and lists the Kernel version as 3.0.0.

Ubuntu 11.10 alpha 3 includes Wi-Fi driver support for Realtek's RTL8192CU, RTL8188CU as well as RT53xx chipsets. The current alpha still integrates Gnome 3.1.4 while the final version is likely to get Gnome 3.2. Other new features include a new task manager for Canonical's Unity Shell, Thunderbird as new email client as well as a new version of the news client Gwibber.

Microsoft Cuts Down Spam By 90 Percent

The company claims that the spam level in Hotmail is just about 2%. The reduction also affected global spam levels to drop by 15% and Microsoft says that Hotmail outbound spam is down 75%.

A declining spam level isn't a bad thing, but I can't help but remember a famous Bill Gates quote from 2004: "Spam will be solved within 2 years." With a slight delay of 5 years, we are almost there, at least on Hotmail -- and I won't complain, given the huge annoyance that spam once posed. Today, it seems that spam mails are far more manageable and the occasional spam mail we receive can be easily moved into a junk mail folder.