By Shane McGlaun The netbook is one of the most popular categories in the notebook market right now. According to recent numbers form DisplaySearch netbooks accounted for 20% of the total notebook market in Q1 2009 and sales keep growing. Asus sired the netbook category with its Eee netbooks back in 2007 and some of those early [...]
By Shane McGlaun
The netbook is one of the most popular categories in the notebook market right now. According to recent numbers form DisplaySearch netbooks accounted for 20% of the total notebook market in Q1 2009 and sales keep growing.
Asus sired the netbook category with its Eee netbooks back in 2007 and some of those early machines have tiny SSDs for storage. Super Talent has announced a new line of upgrade SSDs for owners of the Eee 900, 901, 901A, 901 GO, and S101 netbooks.
The SSDs are offered in MLC and SLC flavors with the MLC variety coming in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. Read speeds for the MLC drives are up to 150MB/s and write speeds are 100MB/s. The SLC drives offer better performance with read speeds of 170MB/s and write speeds of 130MB/s. The MLC 16GB drive sells for $85.99, the 32GB version is $125.99, and the 64GB version is $219.99.
By Andrew Liszewski Heart rate monitoring is an important part of training for any athlete, and while there are plenty of compact devices for those who stay dry during a workout, the Aqua Pulse is the first heart rate monitor designed specifically for swimmers. Besides being waterproof, the Aqua Pulse also features an infrared sensor that [...]
By Andrew Liszewski
Heart rate monitoring is an important part of training for any athlete, and while there are plenty of compact devices for those who stay dry during a workout, the Aqua Pulse is the first heart rate monitor designed specifically for swimmers. Besides being waterproof, the Aqua Pulse also features an infrared sensor that clips to the earlobe and measures the light pulses from the capillary blood flow in the skin, which can then be used to calculate the heart’s beats per minute. But it’s also important for a swimmer to be aware of their heart rate while training, so that they can stay in their ideal heart-rate-zone. So the Aqua Pulse cleverly uses bone-conduction technology allowing the swimmer to ‘hear’ their hear rate even while they’re under water.
The Aqua Pulse will supposedly be available sometime in May of this year for $139.99 from the FINIS website.
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just released a draft of its proposed new Payments Terms, which will dictate how transactions will be conducted going forward. While the updated terms are in line with Facebook’s recent trend towards using simplified language in its legal documents, the company’s blog post also notes that the new terms will “give us the flexibility to try new features”. This isn’t particularly surprising - there have recently been reports of Facebook planning to begin testing payments some time soon, after months of delays. Facebook is using the same community commenting process it used during its site-wide Terms of Service fiasco before it officially rolls out the new terms, giving users three days to voice their thoughts on the site’s Governance site.
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just released a draft of its proposed new Payments Terms, which will dictate how transactions will be conducted going forward. While the updated terms are in line with Facebook’s recent trend towards using simplified language in its legal documents, the company’s blog post also notes that the new terms will “give us the flexibility to try new features”. This isn’t particularly surprising - there have recently been reports of Facebook planning to begin testing payments some time soon, after months of delays.
Facebook is using the same community commenting process it used during its site-wide Terms of Service fiasco before it officially rolls out the new terms, giving users three days to voice their thoughts on the site’s Governance site.
You can read through the proposed list of rules here (there’s also a FAQ). Most of them are pretty straightforward - Facebook basically says that it licenses all of your virtual goods and credits to you (you don’t own them), and it can do whatever it wants as far as changing the price of credits. It’s also not responsible for anything you buy (aside from ensuring that your Facebook Gifts are delivered), and there are no refunds (though the company says that it may intervene in disputes betwen users concerning payments, but that it is under no obligation to do so). Some of the language refers to transactions between users and third parties, which is indicative of the upcoming payment system.
There are a few interesting tidbits worth looking through. My favorite is this one, which seems to indicate that Facebook can randomly disperse virtual gifts to friends if you fail to use your credits in three years (which could have some potentially hilarious consequences, depending on who receives those virtual bikinis and cans of Coors Light):
3.6 If you leave a balance of credits unused for three years, we may redeem those credits by sending virtual gifts to your Facebook friends or donating the credits to a nonprofit organization of our choice (and charging standard redemption fees for those transactions).
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By Andrew Liszewski Growing up I had a nasty habit of bouncing my leg under the table during dinner which I’ve since solved by simply eating my meals on my living room couch instead. But seeing the Constant Shaker chair created by Alice Wang as part of her Chairs for the Dysfunctional exhibit, I have to [...]
By Andrew Liszewski
Growing up I had a nasty habit of bouncing my leg under the table during dinner which I’ve since solved by simply eating my meals on my living room couch instead. But seeing the Constant Shaker chair created by Alice Wang as part of her Chairs for the Dysfunctional exhibit, I have to wonder if all my fidgeting wasn’t a good thing.
According to her site, researchers think that the unconscious muscle movements might be intentionally triggered by our brains to burn additional calories when we’re inactive. So Alice’s Constant Shaker chair features a sensor that will actually calculate the amount of calories you’ve burned while not sitting still, and will display the results on a simple LCD.
Everyone knew today was the day that Microsoft was going to launch their new search engine. Everyone’s been talking about it for months, and the press and marketing efforts were carefully tailored to maximize the impact. Thursday, May 28, 2009 was supposed to be Microsoft Bing Day. A little after 8 am this morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself took the stage at the exclusive All Things Digital conference near San Diego, California and announced to a few hundred elite executives that Microsoft would soon be releasing its new search engine, and that it would be called Bing. One problem right off the bat: the Bing.com site wasn’t live. And since press didn’t know the name until Ballmer said it, it took a while for the news to spread. Another problem: A team of Google engineers based in Sydney was simultaneously announcing a stealth project 4+ years in the making called Wave. And it wasn’t being announced to a select few top business executives. Instead, the team that created it was showing it to 4,000 developers at the Google IO conference in San Francisco, California.
Everyone knew today was the day that Microsoft was going to launch their new search engine. Everyone’s been talking about it for months, and the press and marketing efforts were carefully tailored to maximize the impact. Thursday, May 28, 2009 was supposed to be Microsoft Bing Day.
A little after 8 am this morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself took the stage at the exclusive All Things Digital conference near San Diego, California and announced to a few hundred elite executives that Microsoft would soon be releasing its new search engine, and that it would be called Bing.
One problem right off the bat: the Bing.com site wasn’t live. And since press didn’t know the name until Ballmer said it, it took a while for the news to spread.
Another problem: A team of Google engineers based in Sydney was simultaneously announcing a stealth project 4+ years in the making called Wave. And it wasn’t being announced to a select few top business executives. Instead, the team that created it was showing it to 4,000 developers at the Google IO conference in San Francisco, California.
You know that scene in the Lord Of The Rings movie where the huge eye of Sauron on top of that mountain swings its view from the alliance troops massed at the Black Gate of Mordor over to the real action, Frodo with the Ring at the Cracks of Doom?
That’s basically what happened today. The eyes of the world, and the press, swung from San Diego to San Francisco as they realized what was happening. And what was happening was this: Google stole Microsoft’s thunder with one of the most ambitious and exciting products the tech world has seen in a long while.
At the end of the Google Wave presentation, 4,000 developers stood up and cheered like nothing we’ve seen outside of a Steve Jobs keynote. That picture above isn’t the crowd of gray haired execs cheering Bing. It’s a mass of engineers going wild over a new open source communications platform from Google. And yes, that guy on the right was literally waving his laptop in the air in excitement.
The fact that everyone in attendance was still glowing from a free Android G2 phone that was handed out the day before didn’t hurt, either.
So what happened? Well, the company that will do no evil will certainly engage in a little stealth black ops mission when its required. Google knew full well exactly when Bing was going to launch. And they carefully planned the Wave launch to occur just minutes afterwards. They knew the crowd was ready for something cool. Not only did they have that free phone, but the day before Google VP Engineering Vic Gundotra told the crowd that there would be a big announcement the next day. People were ready and willing to be wowed.
And while Wave certainly deserves every bit of positive attention it got today, the fact that it’s an open source project didn’t hurt, either. San Francisco engineers love open source like east coast liberals love Obama.
Microsoft never stood a chance. As far as the San Francisco developer crowd is concerned, Bing stands for “But It’s Not Google.”
Photo credit: I have no idea. If you know, please tell me in the comments so I can ask forgiveness for using it without permission and give proper credit. Update: Chris Campbell took the photo, per the comments below. Thanks Chris!
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This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net For 10 to 12 hours a day during the week I work in a small office with wooden floors and a low ceiling and every noise is amplified, not the least of which being my pc with it’s 6 fans (not including the fan on my graphics card [...]
This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net
For 10 to 12 hours a day during the week I work in a small office with wooden floors and a low ceiling and every noise is amplified, not the least of which being my pc with it’s 6 fans (not including the fan on my graphics card which beats them all). It’s not until a power outage, or re-arranging the office when everything is shut off do you realize just how much racket a PC can make and that it’s time for a change. Enter NZXT’s WHISPER Classic Series chassis, engineered from top to bottom to provide a quieter computing experience.
Assembling an ultimate gaming rig or digital audio workstation based on the WHISPER chassis is an enjoyable task thanks to its smart layout and a pre-drilled wire management system that makes routing cables a snap. One thing to keep in mind when putting a system together is the length of the cables coming from the power supply and the positioning of the power connections on the motherboard, some motherboards have their power connections placed towards the top which can for an impossible reach for some power supplies.
Today’s games and digital media take up a lot of space and with the price-per-gigabyte of storage space falling all the time, it’s not uncommon to have several hard drives in a pc. The WHISPER provides plenty of room for stuffing terabytes worth of storage space with its nine hard drive bays, even including brackets to support newer 3.5″ SSD drives for those that can’t be bothered with balancing their sensitive data on spinning plates. It also provides six 5.25″ bays with front facing panels for media drives and expansion cards.
So how does NZXT’s WHISPER keep quiet? It uses 10mm noise-dampening foam pads on the side and top panels to deaden noise before it exits the case. Rubber grommets on the hard drives and a padded PSU holder reduce the amount of vibration within the case.
Does all that effort really make a difference? Speaking as someone who’s been cooped up in this small office for long periods of time I was amazed when I turned on the machine, half-expecting just to hear a dulled version of the “BEEP whhooooooOOOOOOOOOOSSSSHHH” of my motherboard and video card on bootup all that came from the box was a mulled “beep.”
In all, after two weeks of working in much quieter environment I would have to say that on a day to day basis it’s made my workspace a much more peaceful and enjoyable place to get things accomplished. The NZXT WHISPER manages to deliver on it’s goal of a quiet PC and manages to do it with a simple and no-frills design that (silently) screams elegance. The WHISPER carries an MSRP of $139.99.
By Evan Ackerman If there’s one thing that scares me more than sharks, it’s this: sharks with guns. I’m relieved to report that Armor of America has seen this problem coming leagues away and has developed a bulletproof vest that also, somehow, floats. The ArmourFloat vest uses lightweight hard plate armor that can stop most assault [...]
By Evan Ackerman
If there’s one thing that scares me more than sharks, it’s this: sharks with guns. I’m relieved to report that Armor of America has seen this problem coming leagues away and has developed a bulletproof vest that also, somehow, floats. The ArmourFloat vest uses lightweight hard plate armor that can stop most assault rifle rounds, and includes shotgun shell holders and plenty of pockets for ammo clips. It’s available now in all kinds of colors including, for some reason that I can’t fathom, desert camo.
And in answer to your question, yes, the only reason I’m posting about this is so that I had an excuse to photochop a picture of a shark with a gun.
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like voicemail and hand shakes, we’re officially declaring war on any middleman component required to pump audio from a cell phone, along with the phones that require them. There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace. Phone manufacturers can no longer afford to implement media playback as an afterthought - but if they insist on requiring headset adapters, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like voicemail and hand shakes, we’re officially declaring war on any middleman component required to pump audio from a cell phone, along with the phones that require them.
There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace.
Phone manufacturers can no longer afford to implement media playback as an afterthought - but if they insist on requiring headset adapters, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Since launching in late 2007, Hulu has done one one thing very well: it lets you watch your favorite TV shows and movies from your computer, free of charge. But aside from improving the user experience with assorted niceties like smart thumbnails, improved navigation, and social features, the site hasn’t really done anything extreme to expand its functionality. That changes today. One of my only long standing gripes with Hulu was that it could never really replace the TV watching experience simply because you had to sit in front of your computer to control it. Boxee was the perfect solution to this, as it allowed you to control Hulu via remote through a very snazzy media center interface. But Hulu has repeatedly killed that functionality, largely at the behest of its major network investors.
Since launching in late 2007, Hulu has done one one thing very well: it lets you watch your favorite TV shows and movies from your computer, free of charge. But aside from improving the user experience with assorted niceties like smart thumbnails, improved navigation, and social features, the site hasn’t really done anything extreme to expand its functionality. That changes today.
One of my only long standing gripes with Hulu was that it could never really replace the TV watching experience simply because you had to sit in front of your computer to control it. Boxee was the perfect solution to this, as it allowed you to control Hulu via remote through a very snazzy media center interface. But Hulu has repeatedly killed that functionality, largely at the behest of its major network investors.
Now Hulu is releasing its own desktop application, allowing you to browse through the site’s content using your computer’s remote control (both the Windows Media Center remote and the Apple Remote are compatible). Both applications are native too, so you won’t have to deal with any quirkiness from Adobe AIR.
Hulu has posted an intro video for the Desktop application, which you can watch below. The app itself doesn’t seem to be live yet (oddly enough, the URL for the application that’s shown in the video is located on the company’s QA server, which requires a password). But we can probably expect an update later todayUpdate: It’s now live, download it here.
Of course, most people aren’t going to ditch cable in favor of Hulu, simply because they don’t have their computers hooked up to their TVs. They’ll just use it to make their Hulu experience at their computer even better. But for those of us who have been toying with Boxee and similar solutions to replace our cable boxes entirely, this is a very welcome addition.
Update: Looking back on the Boxee fiasco, the news is a bit strange. I (and a number of others) believed that content owners were against giving users this ‘lean-back’ experience entirely, but now Hulu has done just that. Given the change of heart, Boxee is reaching out to Hulu once more to give things another shot. It won’t be surprising if they get turned down though - Hulu may well want to keep all of its content contained in its own application.
Hulu is also planning to launch a new Labs section today, though details on this are still scarce. The new Labs site has just gone live as well.
Thanks to eagle-eyed TechCrunch alum Nick Gonzalez for the tip.
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Here’s the full video of the Google Wave demo from this morning at Google’s IO conference in San Francisco. Our full review of Google Wave is here. Exclusive interview with the founders is here, and our video and notes from the press conference is here.
Here’s the full video of the Google Wave demo from this morning at Google’s IO conference in San Francisco.
Our full review of Google Wave is here. Exclusive interview with the founders is here, and our video and notes from the press conference is here.
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just 
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just 
Everyone knew today was the day that Microsoft was going to launch their new search engine. Everyone’s been talking about it for months, and the press and marketing efforts were carefully tailored to maximize the impact. Thursday, May 28, 2009 was supposed to be Microsoft Bing Day. A little after 8 am this morning Microsoft CEO 
You know that scene in the Lord Of The Rings movie where the huge eye of Sauron on top of that mountain swings its view from the alliance troops massed at the Black Gate of Mordor over to the real action, Frodo with the Ring at the Cracks of Doom? 
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like 
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like 
Here’s the full video of the 
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