News.com Extra

Outside China, where it has home field advantage, Lenovo is in no rush to sell volumes of low-end PCs. For its export markets, the company plans to concentrate for some time to come on hawking its high-end models like the newly introduced, and roughly MacBook Air-skinny, X300 notebook--those products that it says show "the spirit of innovation." That thinking will also determine how and when Lenovo might come out with a laptop based on Intel's Atom processor.

Read more at InfoWorld: "Q&A: Lenovo takes the high-end road"

Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction writer who died last week, inspired and intrigued millions with his "deceptively dry voice of cosmic wonder," writes New York Times science reporter Dennis Overbye.

Clarke was best known as co-creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Overbye has cherished the author's writing since boyhood. Overbye reflects on several of the brilliant stories that poured forth from Clarke's imagination and helped Overbye discover his life's path in science: "I haven't lost my taste for cosmic mystery, for the curiosity about what might lie around the curve of the cosmos that Clarke first instilled in me."

Read the full New York Times essay: "A Boy's Life, Guided by the Voice of Cosmic Wonder"

Bar owner Rufus Terrill has enlisted a rather odd-looking security guard to chase away prostitutes and drug dealers milling about his Atlanta tavern: an R2-D2-like robot called "Bum Bot 2000."

The patchwork device is controlled via remote control and targets law-breakers, reports The Los Angeles Times. But homeless advocates aren't too fond of Terrill's water-squirting Bum Bot.

Read the full Los Angeles Times story: "Robot reports for security duty in Atlanta"

(Credit: U.S. Air Force)

It's arguably the biggest technology success for the Pentagon during the Iraq War era: the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and reconnaissance missions. But could that very success could prove the undoing of the UAV corps?

The U.S. Army wants more of the aerial drones patrolling the skies, and it has the backing of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has ordered the Air Force to dramatically boost the number of Predator aircraft on the front lines (at the moment, there are 22). The Air Force in turn is pushing back, arguing that the scramble could put a severe strain on Predator teams--even up to the point where they break down completely.

To read more about the UAV mission and the interservice bickering between the Army and the Air Force, see this story in the Los Angeles Times: "Pentagon battle breaks out over a spy plane.

The Chinese government, facing ever more international scrutiny, appears to be trying to restrict the gaze of its world audience during the upcoming Olympic Games. It has told broadcasters that it may bar live television shots of Tiananmen Square during the Beijing Olympics this summer. The move looks to be a sign of the government's increasing unease following recent protests among Tibetans.

The ban would affect NBC and other major news outlets that plan to broadcast the games Aug. 8-24. Most broadcasters had expected to include live TV shots of the square.

Read the full AP story: "China Might Bar Tiananmen Broadcasts"

Writers over at CNET News.com's sister site TechRepublic have a highly developed sense of sass, which they're gleefully applying to movie reviews and in-depth commentary on the cultural thicket surrounding tech producers and IT types.

This week they've rounded up remarks on the summer's best movies for geeks. Technologically-updated nostalgia (Speed Racer), favorite video games (Hellboy 2), and adorable post-apocalyptic robots (Wall-E) are all contenders.

Make your own forecast at "Rundown: Geek movies of summer 2008"

Question: What kind of machines do Google's thousands of engineers use? Which OS? And how do they keep a gigantic infrastructure protected from security risks, without impairing their famous creativity?

Answers: Several, numerous, and some sound planning ahead.

Read the interview with Google CTO Douglas Merrill at The Wall Street Journal: "Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff"

Japanese satellite Ajisai

(Credit: JAXA)

Secure quantum communication apparently demands some mighty groovy dance floor decor. With its spherical array of 318 mirrors, the Japanese satellite "Ajisai" looks exactly like a humongous disco ball. ("Ajisai" means "hydrangea," which is a lovely spherical flower. Why it wasn't named "mira bo-ru," or "mirror ball," is unknown; perhaps its engineers had a more refined aesthetic sense than Yours Truly's.)

Ajisai's mirrors aid in mapping the precise locations of isolated archipelagos and other terrestrial features like crustal movement. They have the additional benefit of looking really cool, as you can see in this photo from Japan's space agency.

Wednesday's Ars Technica reports that the disco ball satellite is also proving useful in determining variations in our planet's gravitational field. But its most unexpected application turns out to be in the field of encrypted quantum communications, which requires a satellite to detect (and reflect) packets of single photons sent from Earth.

Read more about those photon packets at Ars Technica: "Mirror balls in space lead to quantum communications advance"

We're wowed by the innovations of today: nanotech, six-core chips, flash-drive notebooks. But the tech of yesteryear is awe-inspiring too.

Silicon.com has posted a video and photos of the reconstruction of the world's first electronic code-breaking computer: Colossus. The machine is housed in England's brand-new National Museum of Computing, which in turn is housed in northern England's Bletchley Park, the secret home to Britain's top code-breakers during World War II.

At the end of the war, Winston Churchill ordered the destruction of most of the Colossus machines and their blueprints. Tony Sale, a computer expert and former spy who spent 14 years rebuilding Colossus in his free time, shows off his handiwork and explains how the mighty machine secretly broke German codes. The National Museum of Computing plans to welcome the public to view some of its first displays this weekend.

The oldest surviving satellite turned 50 years old Monday. It's traveled more than 6 billion miles over the years, it's only as big as a grapefruit, it's solar-powered, and it has played a central role in studying the Earth since its launch in 1958. Should it stay in orbit for sentimental or teaching reasons, or should it be retrieved and installed in a museum?

Read the full report on MSNBC: "Satellite turns 50 years old...in orbit!"