Our good friends over at Kotaku have posted this nugget of gold – Apparently the US Air Force has put in a requisition for 300 40GB Playstation 3 consoles.
Rather than actually use it for good, like playing GTA IV, watching Blu-ray movies or Folding at Home, the Air Force’s Research Laboratory plans on “conducting a technology assessment of certain cell processors”. In other words, using them for evil.
According to the Presolicitation notice found online, the PS3 is the only cell chip on the market that can be acquired at an acceptable cost. So obviously they won’t be buying their PS3s from Australia, then.
Sony always said that the PS3 wasn’t just a games machine. Now it’s a military research device as well. Hopefully future wars won’t all be controlled by a DualShock though.
According to Flight Global, DARPA is close to awarding a contract to build an unmanned aircraft that can stay in the air for up to 5 years at a time. DARPA describes the “Vulture” project as a “persistent pseudo-satellite capability in an aircraft package.” In other words, the aircraft can hover over a single area, narcing, communicating, or surveying for years at a time.
After purchasing a $300 hard drive from Best Buy, a customer was understandably shocked when she and her husband opened the box at home to reveal nothing but three bags of dried beans. Naturally, they immediately called Best Buy only to find that they were absolving themselves of all responsibility. After calls to both the manufacturer and Best Buy’s corporate office resulted in similar denials, they decided to contact a CNN consumer watchdog group that managed to score them a $300 gift card to cover the drive.
Just days after becoming official, JKK Mobile has unveiled a short video hands on with the Asus Eee PC 900. It is not definitive by any means, although they were generally impressed. Specifically, they were happy with the larger size and increased resolution (1024 x 600) on the 8.9-inch screen. And the 1GB ram, 1.3 megapixel camera and 8GB SSD (up to 12GB) is definitely an improvement over the original. Available in mid April for 399 Euros ($653) with Linux [jkkmobile]
From afar, Dubai is the most exciting place on earth, almost every day shaping up to be more like the utopic sci-fi fantasy city we had in our heads growing up. Its latest architectural stuntwork/masterpiece is the 1.5-billion-square-foot Waterfront City designed by Rem Koolhaas, an entire self-contained city resting atop an artificial island that mixes inspirations from ninth-century mosques to Koolhaas’s own ideas about the THX 1138-esque generic city.
What are the odds? Google cameras are taking aerial photos of Sydney Harbour when… Boom! Two ferries collide, sending smoke, fire, splinters and ash to the bottom of – um – nowhere?
Obviously, the photo is a composite of several images where the ferries just happen to overlap. But considering the iconic nature of Sydney Harbour, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that somebody would check for overlaps like this?
Logitech has been dying to get into wireless whole-house audio like Sonos and not a whole lot of others. Now that CNet has favourably reviewed the US$400 Squeezebox Duet we told you about at CES, it may well have a shot.
One of the hottest products from Sony’s CES stand has just received an Australian release: The Vaio VGX-TP2G home entertainment PC. What’s that, you ask? You don’t recall this from our CES coverage? That’s because it was unveiled at CES last year.
Well, that’s not entirely true. This model does have significantly improved specs: There’s an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T8100 (2.10GHz), 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 500GB HDD, Windows® Vista® Home Premium, NVIDIA® GeForce®8400M GT GPU with 256MB dedicated video memory and a Blu-ray Disc Combo Drive inside.
Sadly, there’s no TV tuner built in, although a USB HD-tuner is included when you purchase it. There’s also a HDMI port on the back for plugging into your TV, so this can be the centre of your home entertainment setup.
It will set you back $2,399, if you are so inclined to have a PC in your loungeroom. But how many of you are actually interested in dropping that kind of coin on a PC for your loungeroom? Especially when you have to run Vista? Is there really a big market for this kind of product?
I suppose it goes without saying, but the “Backpack House” concept is probably the most ill conceived design idea ever. Basically, the idea is that the square footage of an apartment can be increased by hanging a 2-ton add on from the roof or the facade of a building. That means that users would have to crawl through their windows to enter a room that hangs precariously over the street below. Fortunately, the idea was intended as a work of art—not an actual means of increasing living space. Let’s just hope it stays that way. [Convertible City via Freshome]
In case you missed the last one, Ezy DVD is clearing out their old HD DVD stock with some pretty awesome savings. The selection isn’t as good as last time, but come on – UnderSiege for $5? How can anybody say no to that?
[EzyDVD]
