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If you’d participated in the previous event, then you should already have received an email about it. This is a puzzle-solving game held at colleges across North America by alumni who work at Microsoft; teams of four strive to solve the largest number of puzzles within a twelve-hour time frame. Each year, the puzzles are solved in the framework of a different theme.

New schools have been added this year, as usual, so sign up if your school’s participating! Though it’s not easy to win recognition, most participants have immense fun. If you do well, you might also land a job at Microsoft, but that’s not the main reason people play. This would be the third time I’m participating at Columbia.

More information is available at the Challenge’s official website.

Recently, revision 0.9 of the Extensible Host Controller Interface was announced in support of the USB 3.0 architecture. USB 3.0, also known as Super-Speed USB, will be 10 times as fast as USB 2.0 (High-Speed) due to the addition of a fiber-optic cable. Various groups, including AMD, Dell, NEC, and Microsoft, support a common xHCI specification and are likely to adopt Intel’s standard.

The draft specification is available under a royalty-free license in accordance with an xHCI contributor agreement. This should help promote the success of the new standard, and we should be seeing USB 3.0 devices within a year or two.

Intel’s press release is available here.

Okay, so I watched The Dark Knight at an IMAX cinema with a few friends yesterday morning. It was my first viewing, so I found the immersive experience rather overwhelming. I thought it was on par with the earlier Batman Begins, but most of my fellow viewers thought it totally blew them away. I must say that the characters were very well played and the progression of events was both rapid and fluid. However, the movie was less than fulfilling in some ways, and I had been trying to put my finger on it all day.

Something Batman Begins had that The Dark Knight is missing is sufficient character development. I understand that the sheer number of action scenes in the movie makes it difficult to completely flesh out each major character, but I feel that the movie might not have needed so much action. As such, The Dark Knight presents a moment frozen in time. To have a thorough understanding of the story, one must have additional information and processing time. There were scenes in the movie that exposed the workings of human nature quite well, and I would have liked to see more.

The Dark Knight had huge ambitions; for a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie, I think it made the best of its tight time budget. Nonetheless, I felt the movie was worth watching, and the IMAX presentation does it justice; so instead of exposing its details, I’d recommend interested readers to watch the movie personally.

Word is on the street that motherboard manufacturer Foxconn was sabotaging its BIOS to break Linux ACPI support. While Foxconn claims ACPI-compliance, its motherboards only work with select versions of Windows. When used with non-Windows operating systems such as Linux, ACPI-related activities caused the system to crash or freeze. Ubuntu Forums member TheAlmightyCthulhu disassembled his BIOS for clues, and was horrified at what he found.

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To celebrate Timex’s 150th anniversary, Timex and Core77 ran a contest to design a concept watch. In the year 2154, one would be able to tell the time simply by looking at one’s thumb. While this design is a runner-up in the event, the idea is pretty fresh.

The disposable device is designed to be clipped to the wearer's thumbnail. Pressing the tip of the nail would activate a luminescent time display.

[via: CNET] [winners] [nail watch]