Tunisia shares 'Star Wars' set

MATMATA, Tunisia — I have never been a "Star Wars" aficionado, to tell you the truth. The closest I ever came to appreciating the movie was singing along to the "Star Wars" ring tone on my colleague's cell phone.

That is, until I took a trip to the planet Tatooine itself — a real place in the middle of the north African desert, a well-kept secret of Tunisia.

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Sun puts 16 cores on its 'Rock' chip

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems, already an aggressive advocate of multicore processing, will try to stay a step ahead of the game by putting 16 cores in its high-end Rock chip.

With overheating capping chip speeds, chipmakers have been scrambling to improve performance instead by packing multiple processing engines onto a single slice of silicon. Sun got an early start with its UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor, which has eight cores, and it looks like Rock will keep the company a step ahead of the competition.

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The 10 Gadgets That Changed the World

Here is an excellent article on Wired which lists (in their opinion) the top 10 gadgets in the modern era that changed the world.

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Microsoft trying to find its voice

Microsoft is dipping its toe a little further into the world of telephony.

The software maker, which has high hopes that the convergence of voice and data networks will allow it to get into the unified communications market, is ready with its first test software for running business phone systems.

In June, Microsoft touted its plans for the market. This week, Microsoft is launching a private beta, which will allow about 2,500 people to try out its call-handling software, known as Office Communications Server.

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Study: Most Arctic sea ice could disappear by 2040

A new study says that the predictions that most of the ice in the Arctic could disappear by 2060 was optimistic.

A paper from the National Center for Atmospheric Research predicts that the erosion of the sea ice in the Arctic could begin to rapidly accelerate starting in 2025. By 2040 or 2045, roughly 80 percent of the ice in the Arctic could be gone. Only about 2 million square kilometers would be left, said Marika Holland, lead author of the paper. Two million square kilometers is about the size of Alaska.

"The ice is quite stable until 2025 and then, boom, it just goes," Holland said Monday during a presentation at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union taking place in San Francisco this week.

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