Sony’s site has an absolutely hilarious page explaining how Intel’s Core 2 Duo chip helps you multitask with cartoons featuring two odd, party-hat-wearing elfin caricatures. Read on for my analysis, with the caveat that I speak not a word of Japanese.
Kids these days, with their baggy jeans and their MTV and their fancy networked booming boxes, they don’t know the joy of sitting around the old-timey radio and listening to the soothing stories. The Areaware 2B radio just might be the bridge to these whippersnappers: its visible vacuum tubes have a cool retro feel, not to mention a warm sound, and the minimalistic design is hip with the Apple generation. And thank god, this radio is only a radio, without any wifi, 3G, DRM, or any of those other scary acronyms. The 2B will ship in November for a price of $US550, but what’s a few hundred dollars for such comforting simplicity? [Apartment Therapy]
One of the croissant-snarfing editors at Gizmodo France passed along this article that alleges the Mac Pro’s gives off toxic vapors. Translating from the language of love to the language of guns, soccer mums and hot dogs results in a bit of discombobulation, but the gist is that a CNRS lab researcher got a Mac Pro, and after his eyes and respiratory tract were repeatedly agitated by a “stench,” decided to break down the noxious vapor coming off the Mac Pro. They found “seven volatile organic contaminants.” Though the worst they do inhaled is cause skin, eye and respiratory irritation—ingested is another story—benzene is the most troublesome, since inhaling it eight hours a day over could affect one’s bone marrow. Apple’s response?
If you were thinking about pre-ordering the T-Mobile G1 and just didn’t get around to it yet, it looks like you’re out of luck, since they’ve sold out. While there definitely won’t be anything like iPhone launch day madness, don’t be surprised if the launch supply is exhausted by demand and they’re a bit scarce in the immediate aftermath. How many of you guys pre-ordered one? Update: Looks like it’s back up. [Android Community]
Like Yahoo and MSN before them, Walmart is turning off its DRM servers on Oct. 9, effectively putting any DRM’d songs you bought from them into a cold stasis they’ll never wake up from, since they’ll become totally unmovable unless you circumvent the DRM. Walmart went through this earlier with their video store, though it didn’t matter since no one bought anything from it. Walmart’s music store is DRM-free now, though I doubt that’s any consolation to people who actually paid for music that’s now nigh useless.
Microsoft has scheduled simultaneous service outages for its Xbox Live and Zune platforms this Monday, September 29th, starting at 12:01 PST. These “regularly scheduled maintenance” outages will take up to 24 hours for Xbox Live and up to 48 hours for Zune. Read on for the details.
You might think that the entire history of personal computing is too complex to explain in a reasonable amount of time. Too bad Canadian animators Superbrothers teamed up with singer-songwriter and all-around awesome dude Jim Guthrie to prove your reasoned point wrong with this badass music video. The story: two heavily pixelated scientists decide to have a dance battle that echoes the transition from primitive ’60s machines all the way up to today’s cloud computing. The video is after the jump.
3M’s new Mobile ID Reader scans MRZ and RF chip data from passports and visas and immediately checks them against local or international watch lists by using wifi or GSM/GPRS EDGE networks. It seems like a great tool to further make you feel like you’re living in some scary dystopian sci-fi novel, especially when you hear that dastardly monopolist Bill Gates got his little-loved Windows Mobile 6 OS onto the device.
