If you own a credit card, chances are you’ve heard about Falcon, the all-seeing technology that monitors your purchases and looks out for signs of fraud. Despite the name, it’s not actually a cybernetic bird or the world’s most financially-savvy car. In reality, it’s a complex neural network “held in secure servers at separate, top-secret locations”. More »
Novint, the folks behind that most curious Falcon peripheral, are back again with yet more hardware curios. This time, it’s the ability to turn your arm into a motion-controlled rumble pack. More »
We LOVED the Novint Falcon and pistol grip attachment in September, but non-PC, console-owning chaps were left out in the cold. If Novint is successful, that could all change by the end of the year.
According to Cnet test labs, the Falcon Northwest Mach V is the fastest PC on the planet, beating the Alienware Area-51 ALX. How fast you ask? How about being the first PC ever to hit 60 frames per second running Crysis on the highest graphics preset? Yes. That fast.
Now that SpaceX has finally sent a rocket into orbit successfully, the Elon Musk-headed company is now focusing on its next goal–hauling cargo for NASA on the Falcon 9, sending people to the International Space Station with its Dragon capsule, and possibly a moon landing as well! Quite a list for a company that only recently scattered Scotty from Star Trek’s ashes all over the ocean by accident.
This is the on-rocket video of SpaceX’s successful Falcon 1 launch. The Earth gets smaller, the sky gets darker, the engines burn cleanly, all systems remain nominal, and 10 minutes later the little rocket that finally could is in orbit…as simply as that. Check out the jubilant cheers from the SpaceX team at about 2:40 onwards when the main engine cut-off is reached, and the first stage is jettisoned. The only moment of drama is just before secondary engine cut-off, when the rocket’s video feed glitches—and then comes back. Historic stuff, and hopefully all the future Falcon launches will be this smooth. [Pointniner]
After three failed attempts, one scattering of Scotty’s ashes over the Pacific Ocean, and a few mid-air explosions, the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket has finally reached orbit. The achievement marks a major milestone for Elon Musk, whose visions of a privately-funded rocket program appeared just out of reach until today’s success.
It has been almost a year since we first heard that Novint would add a pistol grip accessory to their 3D Haptic Joystick—but the update has yet to hit the market. Nonetheless, Wired got a chance to play a few FPS games with the add-on and were blown away by the level of feedback and control, saying that it completely changes the experience. Targeting was precise, and each gun used in the game takes on a different recoil intensity—which can sometimes be violent when dealing with high calibre weapons. There is also a steep learning curve with the haptic controls.
After three fiery failed test launches of its Falcon 1 rocket (the last one carrying NASA’s first solar sail craft and Scotty from Star Trek’s ashes), Elon Musk’s SpaceX is setting up shop at a new launch site–Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40, which is just south of SLC-39A/B, from which the Space Shuttle and Apollo moon missions have headed skyward for decades. There they hope to prepare the first test of their Falcon 9 vehicle, the bigger and badder version of the Falcon 1 rocket that just can’t stop going BOOM.
