The Ariel Atom has shown that interest exists for a top secret purist roadster concept and Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen, showed the three-wheeled CX3 concept that marries the principles of a motorcycle with the form factor of a car. Here we have renderings of what a possible Audi/KTM collaboration might look like as sprung from the pen one dutch artist by the name Michiel Van Den Brink. These images are based on unsubstantiated rumors and hearsay, so don't cancel your order for an Elise just yet.
Tyan Typhoon's 16 cores in "desktop supercomputer"!
Soon you may able to get the power of a supercomputer in a convenient little box, and without resorting to daisy-chained Macs or quantum trickery. Tyan was showing off a desktop-ish sized box at CeBIT,called the Typhoon, that can hold as many as four blade servers of the Opteron or Pentium varieties, with a maxed-out configuration of 4 blades x 2 sockets per blade x 2 cores per chip = 16 cores possible in one enclosure. These so-called Personal Super Computers, or PSCs, can handle up to 64GB (the B2881YDS4T Opteron) or 32GB (the B5160YDS4T Pentium 4) of RAM, sport one SATA hard drive per blade, and address heat and noise issues with a rack full of quiet-running fans. Quibbles with the configuration seem minor, such as the lack of integrated KVM support for direct keyboard/video/mouse access to the individual servers, if necessary, and the use of Gigabit Ethernet interconnects. So far we've heard nothing regarding price, availability, or whether it can play Games.
We're still a little dubious about this one, but word is out that one narf2006 has successfully installed Windows XP on an iMacIntel, has gotten it to boot (despite the EFI issue, and apparently after extensive hacking), and is now asking for volunteers to test his process on other Intel-based Macs. And that last bit is really what has us thinking this may be more than just the latest Photoshop art project. Sure, narf may be hoping that a share of the $12,000 he stands to win in the XP on Mac contest could convince some other Mac owners to help him perpetuate a fraud. But this is starting to look like it just might be real, blurry pics and all.
Is there a reason for Sharp to boast that its DC2J1DZ115 is the world's smallest WiFi module, after all this isn't a product consumers can actually buy. However, smaller WiFi modules mean smaller, cheaper (we hope), lower-power WiFi devices, so as far as we're concerned, the smaller the better. Now let's get these modules into cameras, phones, PDAs and DAPs ASAP!
Mega Man vs. Ghosts 'n Goblins, is a masterpiece. It's a Flash game that seamlessly blends the original Mega Man and Ghosts 'n Goblins, into something that looks like it came right out of the basement of a bored NES programmer in 1987. It's just a few levels, but extremely fun and surprising challenging.
GoNintendo posted this video, which was originally uploaded via War Pipe forums' poster Kirbutashi, of a couple eager Japanese consumers letting their desire for the short-supplied DS Lite cause them to drop the gloves and engage in some fisticuffs.
Gabbly is a breath of fresh air. For starters, it requires zero setup--just put the address of the target site after gabbly.com/, e.g. gabbly.com/digg.com--making it super-easy to get other people to join your chat (just send them the URL). Gabbly is easy to use and looks good, and it has a variety of docking options to keep it out of your way. Behind the scenes, it works by capturing the target web site in a frame, which has some drawbacks, but apart from that Gabbly is great for informal real-time chat. It even has built-in RSS feeds. For web site owners there's also a Gabbly component that you can embed in any of your pages by simply copying and pasting a bit of code into your pages. At the moment Gabbly is under the heavy load of the Digg effect, but it's definitely worth checking out if you can.
Lambretta watches take their inspiration from the mod stylings of the Lambretta scooter which was popular in the 1950s and 60s. The watches are generally in the $100-$200 range and have stainless steel cases and rubber or leather bracelets. The Target model shown here sells for $145.
Long Tran (the "electro" half of blogging-duo "electroplankton") has posted a thoughtful writeup of industrial designer Jaren Goh's PS3 design concept. He writes, "[Goh's] iteration of the PS3 is slick, seems balanced, and takes that age old design philosophy that less is always more."
He discusses the details of the concept, focusing on design elements like the logo, the drive location, the foot, and the chrome grill elaborating, "The mesh grill that all of the next generation game consoles have has a chrome plate on it, making it a part of the design as opposed to an afterthought. I'm sort of yes/no on that one, but nonetheless, Goh's design is far superior than the real PS3." Pair one of these up with Adam Portilla's "Ball Controller" and PlayStation 3 is the new Revolution.
Ever wanted to take a bootable OS with you in your pocket? AltHack.com has a cool guide on getting Linux running on a USB flash drive, and it looks remarkably simple. It uses the 50MB distribution Damn Small Linux and in about 10 steps you should be up and running.
I like watching videos of people doing tricks. Not the stupid human kind; more like the type that, if any of us non-gymnasticky, non-martial artsy mortals were to ever attempt any of these stunts without proper training or supervision, we'd find ourselves bleeding and groaning on the sidewalk.
For all the kids in the back scratching their heads, Parkour (or Free Running) has a whole sub-culture of philosophical-minded individuals behind it who also happen to have no compunction about throwing themselves off high places onto concrete.
KeepVid beats other sites that let you directly download videos from sites like Google and YouTubethe, with its nice design, easy-to-remember URL, and its ability to download not only from the big guys but also with about three dozen other video sites like iFilm, Vimeo, Putfile, Revver, and MySpace. It's also got a handy FAQ that offers some help in dealing with those pesky FLV files and streaming (mms://) videos.
Kodak Scan Station 100 transmits hard-copy docs over net
The Kodak Scan Station 100 does one thing that is somewhat useful: it can transmit documents over the internet without requiring a computer. Plug it into a network, and it can send hard copy documents just about anywhere, from a local computer's drive to a NAS to an office across the country. From our perspective, that makes it sort of an IP fax machine (though, of course, Kodak doesn't call it that; they've got enough problems being associated with another 19th Century technology).
Thumbstacks: Create and show presentation slides online
Thumbstacks would be a good start, if you're going to build an Office-killing web-based suite with a PowerPoint killer. But, Thumbstacks is a serious lightweight compared to its older cousin, but still slick and easy to use. Some of the functions are a bit hard to find (themes and images, for example, are hidden in the right-click menu), but people used to PowerPoint's WYSIWYG interface will find themselves more or less at home. Presentations created with Thumbstacks are hosted on Thumbstacks' servers, which makes accessing them from anywhere easy, but also raises a few concerns about lock-in (what, no PDF export?). On the upside, it does support printing in a variety of layouts and even has an "Add photo from Flickr" option.
This YouTube video shows a glitch that affects gameplay whilst prone on night maps in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. Also having experienced this bug we tried to reason with Major Scott Mitchell, telling him it was physically impossible to attempt to fly from a prone position, but he kept trying anyway.
On a more serious note, this is a pretty blatant bug that should easily have been spotted by the QA (quality assurance) guys. SRSLY? Did not one of the testers go prone on a night level?
PortalPlayer, best known for creating the guts of the iPod, looks to be making good on their intentions to take on work with Microsoft. Apparently they've got chips on the way to power those Vista-enabled external / auxiliary laptop displays (aka "personal media displays"), which are basically small, independent embedded systems, not too different from an iPod, we'd imagine.
The Japanese have managed to wow us again with the amphibious ACM-R5 snakebot that takes mechanized snakery to a new level. Looking somewhat like one of the creepy alien tentacles, the ACM-R5 sports the obligatory snout-cam, and one-ups the OmniTread that we spotted last year by slithering rather naturally underwater, along with the crawling, climbing, and logrolling expected from robotic serpents these days. The eight-kilogram reptile is powered by a 30-minute lithium ion battery, during which time the remote operator sets its general direction while sensors feeding a 32-bit microprocessor guide the actual underwater acrobatics and terra firma terrain negotiation. Like most technology, this will initially be used in a humanitarian capacity to help locate victims of earthquakes and other disasters. Follow this link for a rather amusing vid of the ACM-R5 in action, complete with enthusiastic play-by-play by the clearly-impressed commentators.
Intel has just come out swinging to announce its entry into the sub-$300 PC category, with Vice President and General Manager of the Channel Platforms Group Bill Siu seemingly taking more shots at the MIT Media Lab's Hundred Dollar PC than providing details of his own company's offerings at last week's Intel Solutions Summit, Siu showed off one example of Intel's planned lineup of barebones machines for developing nations (with India and Latin America mentioned as specific markets), claiming that unlike other low cost PC initiatives, the Intel machines provide users with access to the huge library of existing Windows software. What this fails to take into account, however, is that folks in the market for super-cheap computing probably don't have the resources to buy the "latest and greatest" software, which wouldn't even run that well on such "entry-level" configurations anyway.
USRobotics USR9620 USB adapter VoIPs analog phones
USRobotics have enlisted their most talented engineers in a Manhattan Project of telephony that has resulted in a USB adapter which allows you to use corded or cordless phones as VoIP handsets. The USR9620 was shown off as USRobotics technicians made several Skype calls using one of Alexander Graham Bell's original telephones borrowed from the Smithsonian. Although Bell's model chintzed out on the Caller ID, the 9620 allows your CID-enabled handsets to display Skype names as well as dial SkypeOut numbers directly from the phonebook or keypad. Currently no price or release date has been set for this handy adapter.
Google has launched Google Mars which allows you to pan and zoom around the red planet's surface. It gives you three different views: visible, color-coded elevation, and infrared. There's also a bunch of markers for locating landmarks (including the legendary "face" and the less well-known Happy Face Crater) and landing sites. Google Mars and the mars-themed logo at Google.com commemorate the 1855 birth of astronomer Percival Lowell.
-Lytir1
