Category: News (Page 124 of 130)

Japanese Dictatorship Starts with Ninjas, Coke Machine

Vending machines will save us all!You’re walking around Tokyo, headed for the subway. You make your way underground when you hear a rumble that can only mean one thing – earthquake. As the ground starts to shake you see exits to the surface blocked by masses of people and tumbling buildings. What to do? You could be trapped here for days! No water, no food, and thousands of people sharing your plight.

Good thing Coke implemented their emergency vending machine system just weeks earlier. This is just the sort of pickle they planned for; potential victims of dehydration will be saved by vending machines that dispense delicious soda for free in the event of an emergency. You make your way toward the glowing box, but what’s this? A stately business man guards your path, surrounded by ninjas, mercilessly beating back the masses and rationing Cokes to the highest bidder. The clever soda company didn’t see this one coming, now did they?

Thin-Film Speakers Could Revolutionize Flat Panels

Say Goodbye to Speakers.When you buy a new TV it almost goes without saying that you’ll need new speakers. LCDs and plasmas gave back the 5-7 square feet that was once dedicated to cathode-ray tubes, but they pushed big built-in speakers out the door. The result: a gorgeous picture with tinny trash for sound.

Commercial and academic researchers are looking to change all that by putting the speaker in front of your screen. Emo Labs, a startup from Massachusetts, has created transparent membrane that could replace traditional cone speakers. The transparent film lays over your TV display and is then “driven” by two piezo-electric actuators. The actuators create the motion usually produced by a magnetic voice coil to create sound waves.

As you might imagine, laying a membrane over your picture does have its drawbacks. In its current form, the membrane nets a 4% loss in picture brightness. To be honest, that doesn’t seem so bad, especially as we get closer to the OLED revolution. With a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 4% should hardly be noticeable.

As for price, you early adopters will see the worst of it. Emo Labs estimates their membranes will add a 10-15% premium onto existing flat-panel prices. For larger TVs, you’d probably be better off putting that money toward a powered subwoofer. For smaller sets, under 27″ perhaps, the membrane could be another way to save space.

Source: Wired

Super Camera Nabs 6M Frames/Second!

Pew Pew Lazorz!Wouldn’t you love to have a camera with a .0000000005 second shutter speed? You could shoot anything in the lowest light imaginable. That’s exactly the speed of the STEAM camera, a new super camera in use by scientists reporting in the journal Nature.

How does it work? You guessed it, LASERS!!! (Seriously, what can’t lasers do.) The Serial Time-Encoded Amplified iMaging (you see the STEAM, yes?) essentially detects the reflections of lazorz micropulses that are less than a millionth of a millionth of a second long. By reading the 2-D rainbow these reflections project, a detection device can then create an image. The best part of the camera, though, is that the ‘shutter’ can fire continuously, allowing researchers to capture events that are apparently random, or at least so freakishly rare you couldn’t plan for them. One possible application? Watching neurons fire. Awesome.

Source: BBC

Merlin Offers Remote Health Monitoring

The St. Jude Medical Merlin.net.What do you do when you’re healthy enough to go home but still in need of monitoring? You could turn to an in-home nursing service, but that’s more invasive than most people care to get. St. Jude Medical’s Merlin.net offers a nice solution. The device can remotely monitor any implanted medical device, like a pacemaker.

By sending updates of an ‘event’ or emergency via text, fax, or email, your doctor could know you’re in distress within seconds, allowing faster response to potentially life-threatening occasions. Merlin also allows medical staff to send short messages to patients. Things like medication reminders and appointment schedules can be sent straight to the device. Merlin has been approved for use in Europe.

Source: Medgadget

Sneak Peak: Windows 7

Gizmodo has a peak into Windows 7 and so far, I like what I see:

Windows 7

Stream Your Library Over the Internet With Windows Media Player

This is hot—it’d be hotter if it was easier to set up. Windows Media Player’s Remote Media Sharing will let you access your media library from anywhere over the internet. You need a Windows Live ID that you associate with your Windows 7 user account using a tool you have to download. (This could grow to include other “online identities,” like Facebook I’m guessing, but I wouldn’t hold your breath for your Gmail account.) You also need the same version of Windows Media Player running on both computers. After everything’s all associamated, then your home library you wanna stream from should show up just like a local library under the “Other Libraries” section in the side navigation pane. Can’t do this in iTunes, buddy.

Windows XP Mode
To encourage enterprise people to let loose and rock Windows 7, it runs a full-fledged Windows XP virtual environment using Microsoft’s Virtual PC. It requires an additional download (booo), but you won’t have to worry about your applications breaking like with Vista.

This is really good stuff and smart on Microsoft’s part. I have a feeling that Windows 7 is going to be much, much better than Vista is. I hope they’ve learned a lesson from Vista and won’t release such crap again in the future. Although it does seem to be a trademark of Microsoft to released good product followed by horrible product followed by good product again.

So now to the details. Streaming your home library from anywhere is awesome. Come to think of it, why hasn’t Apple or Microsoft done this sooner? There are applications out there that can do that now, but it will be nice to have it built into Media Player.

No matter what anyone tells you, adding XP mode is genius. XP is their most stable, most reliable, and most used operating system. Most business and corporations have not purchased Vista because pretty much nothing works on it. Now corporations can purchase Windows 7 and not worry if their employees be able to run the applications they need to do their jobs. This is great for the end user and even better for Microsoft as it should dramatically increase their Windows 7 sales.

Definitely some welcome changes from Microsoft. I can honestly say that I was never looking forward to Windows Vista. However, I am looking forward to Windows 7.

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