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The long rumored (and we mean long rumored) Apple tablet has finally arrived. Is the iPad as "magical" as the company hopes? Perhaps not, but there is a lot to this story beyond the obvious: A4 chip? Micro SIM? What's the deal with Flash? Since we know you're looking for the straight dope on the big reveal, and since this is what Engadget does best, we've thoughtfully compiled the last twenty-four hours worth of coverage in something we like to call a "list." Now sit back, put your feet up, and take it all in. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.engadget.com%2F2010%2F01%2F28%2Fapple-ipad-launch-day-roundup-everything-you-need-to-know

If you've never abandoned your 4th grade obsession with the night sky (and who has?), Star Viewer is a web-based tool for peeking at some of the most interesting and vivid sights in the night sky. Star Viewer is not as complicated as, say, the previously mentioned open-source and feature-rich astronomy tool Stellarium

Thirty years ago, Mr. Wallach was one of a small team of computer designers profiled by Tracy Kidder in his Pulitzer Prize winning best seller, “The Soul of a New Machine.”

IBM's future Power7 chip may be just about done as far as the engineering is concerned, and its server designs might also be more or less completed as well. But there is plenty of time yet to tweak the boxes, and I doubt very much that the final packaging and pricing for the future Power7 machinery is anywhere close to being set. Which is a pity, really.

Philip, a new supercomputer-- named after one of the first Boyd Professors (A Boyd Professorship is the highest and most prestigious academic rank LSU can confer on a professor) at LSU -- chemistry professor Philip W. West, is a 3.5 TFlops Peak Performance 37 compute node cluster running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system. Each node contains two latest Quad Core Nehalem Xeon 64-bit processors operating at a core frequency of 2.93 GHz. Philip was delivered to LSU in May, 2009 and is to be open for general use to LSU users.

The New York Times has announced that its increasingly popular Congress API has been upgraded to include additional features and data (more at our Congress API Profile). The latest version of the Congress API includes two new features that give developers access to more information: Retrieval of bills cosponsored by an individual member and all of the cosponsors for a particular bill Compare the voting records of two members of the House or Senate to see how often they agree and disagree

ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn reports today on a new open source navigation project launched by European GPS company TomTom that adds additional functionality to navigational devices, regardless of the make or model. The OpenLR project aims to put navigation data on top of a GPS unit's existing database so drivers can access local traffic, weather, and other useful information as they travel.

Computational photography refers broadly to sensing strategies and algorithmic techniques that enhance or extend the capabilities of digital photography. The output of these techniques is an ordinary photograph, but one that could not have been taken by a traditional camera. Representative techniques include high dynamic range imaging, flash-noflash imaging, coded aperture and coded exposure imaging, photography under structured illumination, multi-perspective and panoramic stitching, digital photomontage, all-focus imaging, and light field imaging.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center has taken a significant step forward for scientific processing by developing the first of its kind High-Performance Computing (HPC) system which utilizes flash memory.  Commonly used in household electronics such as digital cameras and cell phones, flash is generally considered a faster storage medium than traditional hard drives due to the fact that there are no moving parts, as opposed to the traditional drive which stores information on magnetic plates which must be individually accessed.

NIH Research Database Gets a Makeover HDM Breaking News, September 8, 2009 The National Institutes of Health has added funding information for grants and contracts to its NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool, called RePORT. The RePORT Web site is an online repository of reports, data and analyses of research-related funding.

The essential benefit of hNews is that by identifying content more clearly and making more of its key information machine-readable it therefore becomes easier to search for. It also could lead to the development of different ways to search via different applications. Kasi was enthusiastic about the advantages of this for the AP. "AP clearly believes that being able to better identify each piece of content for better search discovery, better linking, better aggregation allows ultimately for the customer to see more content, more trusted content, from editorial sources," he said. "Microformats are a very simple, elegant way to do that on a pretty large scale basis," he added, allowing the AP to "prime the content better for search purposes even before it gets to the publisher."

n a new study released this week found that many of the most successful social media initiatives on company intranets start as underground, grassroots efforts led by front-line workers, and which later are officially sanctioned by the enterprise.