Facebook boss short of answers

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg painted a benign portrait of his company in a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit.

He countered both the concerns about how it handles users' personal information, as well as its increasing power to muscle out other companies in an apparent quest to dominate the Web, reports CNet.

"I'm not sure we're 100% right on this," Zuckerberg said of Facebook's recent spat with Google in which the latter forbade Facebook users from importing their Gmail contact information because Facebook doesn't let them do the reverse. “The correct answer isn't completely obvious. I'm not sure that we're completely right, but I think it's not completely black and white."

Research In Motion (RIM) co-CEO Jim Balsillie has renewed his attack on the Jobsian way, once again pitching the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as a much-needed alternative to the Apple iPad, says The Register.

At the Web 2.0 Summit, in downtown San Francisco, Balsillie was asked what he would say to Steve Jobs if the Apple CEO were in the room. "The first thing I would say," Balsillie replied, "is 'you finally showed up'."

With that quip out of the way, he reiterated RIM's longstanding criticism of the world according to Jobs.

A camera that can shoot around corners has been developed by US scientists, according to the BBC.

The prototype uses an ultra-short high-intensity burst of laser light to illuminate a scene. The device constructs a basic image of its surroundings - including objects hidden around the corner - by collecting the tiny amounts of light that bounce around the scene.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team believes the camera has uses in search and rescue, as well as robot vision.

Computer scientists at the US Sandia National Laboratories have developed a new standard for rating supercomputers, based on the system's ability to solve complex data problems, which it is hoped will lead to supercomputers better equipped to deal with problems such as cyber-security, writes Computing.

Currently, Linpack, the main benchmark for supercomputers, focuses on how fast a computer can perform basic calculations - its floating point computing power - but this has little relationship to the actual problems that the machines are used for, says Rob Leland, director of Sandia's computations, computers, and maths centre.

The Graph500 benchmark tests a computer's ability to analyse large volumes of linked data points.