Comment His Real Inspiration (Score 1) 208
"He came up with the design after he [saw A Clockwork Orange]"
There, I fixed that for you.
There, I fixed that for you.
Breaking Down the Dropping Parts Cost for Sony's PS3 302
will_die writes "The people at iSuppli have taken apart an October 2008 version of the PlayStation 3 to create a bill of materials, along with providing a comparison to original PS3. The article provides information about the changes Sony has made. One of the big ones was that the hardware has gone from costing $690.23 to the current price of $448.73. This was done using a combination of removing parts (currently 2,820 vs. the original 4,048), cutting the cost of the CPU ($46.46 vs. $64.40), and cutting the cost of the graphics processor to $58.01 from $83.17."
Tales From the Support Crypt 855
An anonymous reader writes "Talking viruses, infected physical devices, and lights that go out are some of the 'problems' Panda Security's tech support service has had to face. Many of them were not a result of computer viruses, but of confused users. This proves once again, that antivirus manufacturers must make a special effort to increase user knowledge regarding computer security and malware effects." For anyone who's been on the receiving end of such questions, now's a good time to tell your cathartic tale.
What's the Problem With iPhone 3G Reception? 322
CWmike writes "Apple's iPhone 3G was just a couple of days old when reports began trickling onto the company's support forum from dissatisfied customers complaining about poor reception. Although no one outside of Apple and AT&T — and maybe a chipmaker or two — really knows, that has not kept others from speculating, or in a few cases, making claims based on unnamed sources. What's going on? We may not have all the answers, but we do have questions. Gregg Keizer put together everything we know in a FAQ on the griping about iPhone 3G reception."
Feed news.com: Cubicles that crush the soul (news.com)
Wired News holds a contest for the saddest cubicles, and the winners are damn depressing.
Former Intel CEO Rips Medical Research 484
Himuanam writes "Former Intel CEO Grove rips on the medical research community, contrasting their lack of progress with the tech industry's juggernaut of breakthroughs over the past half-century or so. 'On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.'"
Comment Re:Starwars: the series: The Holiday Special! (Score 1) 178
I think the proper phrasing in Yodese (Yodaese? Yodeese?) would be:
Easy being green, it is not
Sony Developing Gigapixel Satellite Imaging 101
holy_calamity writes "Sony and the University of Alabama are working on a gigapixel resolution camera for improved satellite surveillance. It can see 10-km-square from an altitude of 7.5 kilometres with a resolution better than 50 centimetres per pixel. As well as removing annoying artefacts created by tiling images in Google Earth and similar, it should allow CCTV surveillance of entire cities with one camera. 'The trick is to build an array of light sensitive chips that each record small parts of a larger image and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system. The camera would have gigapixel resolution, and able to record images at a rate of 4 frames per second. The team suggests that such a camera mounted on an aircraft could provide images of a large city by itself. This would even allow individual vehicles to be monitored without any danger of losing them as they move from one ground level CCTV system to another.'"
First 'Quantum Computer Chips' Demonstrated 171
holy_calamity writes "The first quantum computer chips have been made by two US groups, New Scientist reports. Both NIST and Yale have demonstrated chips where information was transferred between two superconducting qubits using a 'quantum bus'. The bus is made from a cavity that traps a single microwave photon as a standing wave — the NIST group also managed to use the bus to store data from one qubit for a short time. 'After encoding information in one qubit, they transferred it into the cavity for 10 nanoseconds before transferring it to the other qubit. Yale's chip used qubits around 1-micron square built on silicon, while NIST used larger 10-square-micron qubits on top of sapphire. In both prototypes, the bus between the qubits was between five and seven millimeters long.'"
Feed The Register: Dawn on its way to the asteroid belt (theregister.com)
Lift off, at last
Dawn, NASA's mission to the asteroid belt, has at last launched successfully. At the time of writing, NASA mission managers were still waiting for the Delta II's second and third stages to fire, but so far it is all looking good.
Feed Engadget: Best Buy's secret intranet site to get a disclaimer; customers to get shaft (engadget.com)
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
So after all the uproar and lawsuits over Best Buy's secret in-store intranet, which looked exactly like the external bestbuy.com site but lacked sale prices and other discounts, the company has responded in the lamest way possible: by putting a warning label on the in-store kiosks. The warning will say something like "THIS KIOSK DISPLAYS IN-STORE PRICES - WHICH MAY DIFFER FROM NATIONAL INTERNET PRICES," and advise customers to see a sales associate if they have any questions. It's still unclear why the company won't just do the right thing and match its own listed prices, but we're willing to bet the suits are patting themselves on the back for their innovative, out-of-the-box solution. Martinis for all!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Firefox Working to Fix Memory Leaks 555
Christopher Blanc writes "Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been
helping to reduce Firefox's memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours." Here's hoping. Frequent restarts of things on my computer make me furious. I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.
Meet Korea's Gaming Rockstars 64
PC Gamer has up a short piece looking at some of the big names in Korean gaming. The piece describes an event, and discusses the training regimen these console contestants go through. "I visited the A-team house, which is in a residential street in northern Seoul. Fourteen pro gamers live here, together with their team coach. It's half frat house, half sweatshop. Upstairs are the dorms. The team's top two players, Ma Jae Yoon (handle sAviOr) and Seo Ji Hoon (handle XellOs) share a room that's not much bigger than two single beds. The others are crammed into bunks in two other rooms. Ma, aged 21, is currently South Korea's number one Starcraft player and, according to Sean Oh, a millionaire. You wouldn't be able to glean this from looking at his bedroom."
Which Lost/Stolen Laptop Trackers Do You Like? 572
saudadelinux writes "I was held up at gunpoint in July, and my laptop was stolen. There are companies out there which, for a fee, install tracker software on your laptop. If it's stolen or lost, they track its whereabouts whenever it gets on the 'Net and work with local law enforcement and ISPs to find the machine. I'm wondering: has anyone used one of these services? Does anyone have a recommendation for which company to go with? My new laptop is a a dual-boot Ubuntu/XP machine, and the couple of companies I've looked at do Windows-only. Are there Linux options?"
Feed Engadget: Archos's Generation 5 players are now available worldwide (engadget.com)
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
Yeah, we already knew the 605 and 405 had been loosed Stateside, but Archos is finally ready to unleash the whole family on the world -- pictured above, with convenient comparisons to other players you-may-have-seen-around courtesy of Archos. Unfortunately, the Archos 705 WiFi and Archos TV+ won't actually be available until early next month, but the Archos 105, 405 and 605 WiFi are all out today. The players aren't terribly expensive either, with the 2GB 105 at $89; 2GB 405 at $149; the 4GB, 30GB, 80GB and 160GB 605 WiFi at $199, $299 and $349, $399, respectively; 80GB 705 WiFi at $399, 160GB at $499; 80GB Archos TV+ at $249, and finally the 250GB TV+ at $349. As for those curious about content partnerships, the WiFi models connect wirelessly to the "Archos Content Portal" for PC-free purchasing of premium content, and there are currently over 15 partners worldwide -- with CinemaNow doing the honors in the US.[Thanks, Peter L. Warning: PDF link]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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