Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Computers
Folding@home Recognized By Guinness World Records
11:48PM Mark Wilson | Guinness World Records has acknowledged Folding@home as the world’s most powerful distributed computing project. On September 16, 2007, months after the program was first distributed to PS3s, Folding@home hit 1 petaflop—setting the record. But just a week later (September 23), PS3 users alone reached the petraflop mark. While Kaz Hirai revealed some of these numbers at his Tokyo Game Show keynote last month, it’s good to see gamers who are fueling Folding@home immortalised in the same context as marathon teeter-totterers and that guy who ate an airplane. Because they deserve it. [image] More »
Hardware
Western Digital Ships 320GB 2.5-Inch Drives for Laptops
11:41PM Wilson Rothman | It’s official: you can now buy a 320GB drive from WD for your laptop, and for just $200. The WD Scorpio SATA drive spins at 5400rpm and has a 8MB cache. The press release says it’s “extraordinarily quiet while running at cool operating temperatures.” I hope that doesn’t mean it’s extremely loud while running at super high temperatures. The important thing is, this timing coincides with the arrival of Mac’s Time Machine and the Windows Home Server, two easy ways to offload your laptop’s entire contents, swap out the internal drive, then restore your old image without a lot of tinkering. I know some of you like tinkering, but this is the future. [WD] More »
Home
LCD-Equipped Hot Tub Goes for the Subtle Luxuries
11:35PM Adam Frucci | We’ve certainly seen some ludicrous hot tubs with gigantic TVs attached before, but this “Extreme Spa” seems to be gunning for nuance rather than hitting you over the head with a gigantic screen. It’s got a modest 17-inch LCD screen installed which is connected to a Sony sound system, Boss controls, and a DVD player. It also has such niceties as a towel warmer, LED-equipped headrests, and fancy underwater lights. Sure, there’s no 60-inch TV attached, but come on, that wouldn’t even be that cool. Although for $16,000, you might expect something that over-the-top. [Product Page via Crave] More »
Home
Inax Bidet Toilet Seats Spray Your Butt in Living Color
11:15PM Charlie White | If you want to look into the future, go to Japan, where it’s impossible to market a new toilet seat without a bidet attachment inside (otherwise known as a washlet) that squirts water all over your delicate nether regions. Now you can do away with toilet paper in colorful style with these limited-edition toilet seats by interior design company Inax, the company that figured out how to add an SD card reader to a toilet. These colorful seats are available in Japan for around $1400, but if you wanted one badly enough, you could probably import one of these thrones, install an electric outlet near your toilet, hook the water pipes up to the seat, and you’re good to go. So to speak. While the whole idea of a telescoping, self-cleaning magic wand spraying your arse clean seems gross, it sure beats the equivalent of a spreading peanut butter around on a shag carpet with a piece of toilet tissue. [Tokyo Mango] More »
Home
Crealev Floating Lamp Leavens Any Room
11:13PM Wilson Rothman | In the future, everything will levitate. Take for example Angela Jansen’s floaty lamp, shown by the Netherlander firm Crealev at a show during Dutch Design Week. (Oh, you don’t attend?) It’s actually the shade that hovers using magnetic levitation over the light-up lamp base, but it’s enough to make you truly believe in magic. Or at least in all those other maglev products on the market, like the photo frame, computer mouse and $90,000 limited-edition sculpture. (And let’s not leave out the SkyMall star, the floating globe). After the jump, there’s a short video clip of the spinning Crealev lamp—and its kid sister, the levitating candy dish—shot by Moco Loco. More »
Home
Toshiba RD-A301 HD DVD Recorder with HDD
11:01PM Mark Wilson | Last night I had a dream about soba noodles in which I explained the enjoyment of sitting at a noodle bar beside otherwise silent, hungry salarymen and slurping away in harmony. I explained that the experience would never be quite the same outside of Tokyo, much like how this new Toshiba Vardia RD-A301 is not yet available outside Japan. A beefy home theatre media component, the A301 can suck in content through HDMI or a variety of other inputs, or rip standard DVDs on its 300GB hard drive. Any of this content can then be burned to HD DVD, offering a simplish way to store HD content. If the $865 A301 just had a few slots for CableCARDS and a decent program guide, we’d be sold—especially since it looks to be about half the size and a quarter the cost of its big brother predecessor, the Varidia RD-A1. [akihabaranews] More »
Design
12 Best Jack-o’-Lanterns in the World
10:38PM Charlie White | It’s that time of year again, and we’re getting shivers down our spines just thinking about it: Halloween, the time of harvest, parties, carving gourds and getting drunk out of your gourd. To celebrate the auspicious occasion, we have here the dozen best carved up jack-o’-lanterns we found, some of which are classics you may have seen in years gone by, and some entirely new. Our favorite? The jack-o’-lantern starring Jack Nicholson. Let us know what your favourite is, and please, don’t everyone pick the goatse one. [MMOABC] More »
Hardware
I-O Data HDH-USR2 External Hard Drive Stops Its Rockin’ When You Come A-Knockin’
10:28PM Wilson Rothman | Previously seen mainly in laptop technology, shock sensing is making its way to external drives. I-O Data’s new drive (with 3.5″ disk) is available in sizes up to 1TB, and its G-Sensor stops any read-write activity when the drive is jostled. The thing is, it’s not bus-powered, so it’s not something you’d lug around with your laptop, presumably. Maybe it’s designed more for earthquakes than for manquakes. [Akihabara News] More »
Press
Garmin Buying Tele Atlas?
9:57PM Wilson Rothman | Garmin says it will outbid TomTom for ownership of map provider Tele Atlas. Ironically, Garmin has always used data from Navteq, which is now being purchased by Nokia. Soooo Days of Our Lives. [Garmin] More »
Networks
