speed
Gadgets
Pocket Radar Is “World’s Only Pocket-Sized Personal Speed Radar”
5:40AM Sean Fallon | Catching speeders and clocking pitches just got a whole lot easier now that a radar gun has been developed that’s about the same size as an average mobile phone. More »
Design
Sperm-Shaped Snowmobile Concept Would No Doubt Finish Fast
4:30AM Jack Loftus | Apparently British designer Evangelos Gicas took one look at those old, bulky snowmobiles we’re riding around on today and said to himself, let’s go faster, shall we? More »
Gadgets
Speed Limit Sign Displays Days In Hospital Based On Your Car Speed
9:40AM Jesus Diaz | These 40km/h speed limit signs are equipped with a speed radar and a number display. Nothing strange about that, really. Until you notice that the billboard displays horrible figures—like days in hospital or crash bills—based on your speed. More »
Science
World’s Smallest Laser Paves Way For 100 Terahertz CPUs
9:20AM Jesus Diaz | Technically, it’s not a laser, but something called spaser. Instead of photons, it uses plasmons, a particle only 44 nanometres across. It could push CPUs’ speeds to hundreds of terahertz, according to Mark Stockman, professor of physics at Georgia State. More »
Hardware
Lexar Media Crucial SSDs Will Force Some Speed Into Your Netbook
7:25AM Dan Nosowitz | Well, we were impressed by Corsair’s 240/170MB/s read/write speeds, but the new Crucial line tops it with a 250MB/s read and 200MB/s write. Even better, the Crucial SSDs are available right now. More »
Games
Xbox 360 DVD Vs. Hard Drive
6:45AM Mark Wilson | The New Xbox Experience will provide 360 gamers with the option to preload entire games onto the system’s hard drive. Because of its faster data transfer rate, this should translate to faster load times, especially for earlier generation titles. In this clip, we see a side-by-side of GTAIV loaded on DVD vs. the hard drive. The result? The game loads, according to our unscientific counting, about 12 seconds faster from the hard drive. If you’ve got the space, we’re guessing it’s worthwhile. But our 20GB model only has about 3GB free at a time. [via Maxconsole] More »
Software
Mobile Safari vs. Opera Mobile vs. Skyfire: Who’s the Fastest?
11:00AM Matt Buchanan | Three of the best mobile browsers that act like grown up ones are Mobile Safari, Skyfire and Opera Mobile 9.5. Even though the latter two (both for Windows Mobile) are still betas, Laptop Mag decided to toss them all into a race anyway, seeing which could deliver piping hot content the fastest. They ran Opera and Skyfire on an AT&T HTC Tilt, so everyone was surfing on the same 3G network with beefy hardware. Spoiler: Skyfire delivered pages in one third of the time it took Safari or Opera. It’s because Skyfire cheats. More »
Cameras
British Vauxhall Cars Have New Camera That Scans Signs, Displays Current Speed Limit
5:30AM Jason Chen | Although various GPS units already have the ability to display the current speed limit (they’re pre-programmed in) of the road you’re on, this Vauxhall Motors invention seems even better. There’s a camera on-board that takes 30 snaps per second, then recognising speed limit signs and translating that to a number to display on your dash. More »
Networks
Comcast Increasing Upload Caps By 2x/3x Tomorrow
11:24AM Jason Chen | According to leaked docs, Comcast is officially bumping up their previously tiny upload caps on two of their plans tomorrow. Their 6Mbps/384Kbps plan is becoming 6Mbps/1Mbps, and the 8Mbps/768Kbps plan is becoming 8Mbps/2Mbps. Some people might think they have this rate already because of Comcast’s recently rolled out PowerBoost feature, which eliminates bandwidth caps on files of 10MB or less, and gives you a peak speed of about 2Mbps. This explains any extraordinarily high results you’ve been getting when using a bandwidth test site–which usually test uploads with files less than 10MB. Look out for this to hit tomorrow. See the official release after the jump. More »
Online
