USB 3 and eSATA may be the king and queen when it comes to external speed, but no technology is more promising than Intel’s Light Peak. While USB 3.0 was a marginal, linear progression from USB 2.0 and 1.0 before it, Light Peak is exponentially faster. For example, USB 3.0 has a theoretical top speed of 5.0Gbps. Though real-world speeds tend to hover around 100-130MB/s. Still, that’s a helluva lot better than their previous technologies. Light Peak on the other hand has a theoretical top speed of 10Gbps, which will obviously offer at least double the real-world transfer speeds. But what’s slightly surprising is that Intel showed off the successor to Light Peak — mind you, Light Peak still has 3-5 years before we actually see it in mainstream products.
If Light Peak is all the rage in geek world currently, the successor has to be something special, right? Right! Light Peak tops out at 10Gbps. Ok, awesome. But Intel’s even faster laser-based technology will allow data transmissions of up to 12.5Gbps across (4) laser beams, netting nearly ~50Gbps of total bandwidth. That’s inane! But that’s just the beginning…
I fancy myself a nice pair of headphones. Hell, when I was at CES I was like a kid in a candy store, There were tons of high-end personal audio manufacturers there, all with working display models which resulted in me killing several hours not reporting. But it was all good clean fun.
What I didn’t see at CES, however, were these — the LEGO headphones. As you can imagine, these DIY miniaturized music boxes are pretty easy to make as long as you can grasp the basic concept of a LEGO, have a steady hand with the glue, and have an eye for design. With the countless colors, shapes, and sizes one can find LEGOs in, building yourself a unique pair shouldn’t take too much thought.
[Instructions: Instructables]
Rumors of an iPad competitor by Canadian-based Research In Motion just got a lot more serious tonight with the discovery of “blackpad.com”. Registered by RIM on July 8th, 2010, the new domain name signals that a tablet from the longtime BlackBerry maker is in fact approaching. For now however, the hardware itself is still wrapped in a shroud of mystery. But it doesn’t take much to assume a large touchscreen, snappy processor, and some tweaked version of the BB OS will ship.
One thing that I hope does change is the name — if it is taking after the registered domain name that is. “Black Pad” sounds kind of…um…stupid. I’d hope RIM has something a bit more unique and original. But such deep thought is best left to another day. Instead, take it a bit easier, relax, kick back, and speculate the night away…
I realize that music is a rather subjective thing. Everyone has their own personal taste. Whether or not the Dancing Pigeons tickle your fancy, I highly encourage you to give their music video, “Ritalin”, a look. If it’s really that irritating to you, just put it on mute. The most geeky part that has me so intrigued is the slomo flamethrower vs. fire extinguisher scene. Correction, *Super* flamethrower. You see, a typical flamethrower only casts out flaming strands of death a mere 2-3 meters. The band wanted something a bit more…cinematic. So, a new one was built from scratch. The result? A new, 10-15 meter slinging apocalypse in your hand. So step to it and hop inside. It’s pretty intense.
It seems that in todays world, everyone can have their own personalized flash drive. Whether it be in the shape of a stick, car, or decapitated teddy bear, flash drives literally come in every shape and size. And now, they come in the form of a poker chip. Gamblers make note, this is one chip you don’t want to throw away. Whataya say? $19 for 4GB worth? All you have to do is hit the link below…
[Product Page: Gadget4All]
Matthew Reyes, self titled “Freelance scientific molecular evolutionary biological videographic NASA microgravitational & space education specialist”, decided to strap a couple N1s to a model rocket and have it capture the entire ride up…and down. The laws of physics don’t bend for anyone or anything. The first phone went up naked, unprotected by such physics defying contraptions like a parachute. The end result was a painful death. The second one however was attached to a parachute. In the end, it is the second phone that survives and brings back the sweet footage of the whole trip. Hop inside and check it out!
I’d like to point out that I flubbed this one. I wasn’t careful with distinguishing two different phones and tests, resulting in a factually flawed article. For that, I apologize. The phone that was smashed and destroyed as originally posted was actually the first of two phones. The latter of which you see in the video inside, blissfully twirling down to earth compliments of its parachute.
Well if this turns out to be as serious as it sounds, it’ll be a massive blow to Intel’s image (in my book) and give plenty of people reason to switch to AMD. As the story goes, Intel’s upcoming Sandy Bridge platform will completely switch up the current Core i3/i5/i7 way of overclocking. As it stands now, overclocking enthusiasts ramp up the base clock (which starts at 133MHz) in order to speed up the processor itself and RAM — those are the two biggest goals anyway. But Sandy Bridge ties everything — And I mean everything! — into the base clock: USB, SATA, PCI, PCI-E, CPU cores, Uncore, and RAM.
“Awesome” you say? On the surface, it simplifies things by having less clocks to keep track of and in theory makes things cheaper for motherboard manufacturers. The only negative side effect is that early testing of said platform has revealed overclocking is severely neutered. So much so that even a mere 5MHz overclock can cause system instability…
Firefox 4 beta 2 may be the latest talk of the town in browser land — No joke, it’s pretty awesome! — but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other important matters to talk about. On that note, some curious Droid-Life readers started poking around Mozilla’s FTP site and found a freshly updated version of Fennec that was uploaded on July 24th 2010. I went ahead and downloaded the update myself and have found it to be more or less a crap shoot on my Moto Droid running Froyo. Looks like they haven’t really grabbed the Froyo bull by the horns yet, as plenty of FC’s wreaked havoc on my little plastic bundle of love. Of course, this is an unofficial ganked copy, so I won’t complain too much.
I’m just glad they’re still working on it. It seems like f. o. r. e. v. e. r. ago that we heard about Fennec coming to Android. Anywho, go on ahead and get the Fennec update yourself and let us know how it goes for you…
For Windows users, Apple’s Safari browser is borderline garbage. It seems they ported it to Windows simply because they felt “they had to”. Mac users on the other hand enjoy a much more polished and refined browser that among other things, doesn’t crash every five minutes. Speaking more-so to the latter, if you’ve managed to keep laser focused on Apple’s in-house browser in the age of Chrome 6, Chrome 10.5, and Firefox 4 beta 2, the new Extensions Gallery which just went live will make your browsing experience much, much better.
Much like Firefox and Chrome’s extensions portfolios, Safari’s will seek to bring untold amounts of added productivity, connectivity, and entertainment to the browser. After taking a brief spin through it myself, I must say that there are some pretty notable players already jumping in. For myself, I’m finding the Twitter extensions to be pretty handy, displaying relevant/trending tweets alongside the page I’m currently in — nice!
The Bing extension is another nifty one that incorporates robust search, mapping, social information, and statuses (read: flight updates) right within the page by simply highlighting text.
Clearly, Safari just became a much more useful browser. Go on ahead and give it try. Just make sure to come back and let us know what you think?
Think you’re computer is fast? How much do you think it would sort in any given minute: 1GB, 10GB? 100GB? Scientists at University of California, San Diego have managed to conquer the old world record for data sorting by reaching rummaging through a full Terabyte in a mere 60 seconds. Remember, 1TB is a 1,000GB. That’s a huge amount of 1′s and 0′s!
Besides competitions such as the 2010 Sort Benchmark Competition — The so called “World Cup of data sorting. — it may seem rather frivolous to have such power. But when you’re dealing with multiple petabytes of data (1 petabyte = 1,000 terabytes), even 1TB/minute isn’t exactly “fast”, as it would take roughly 3-4 days to work through 1PB of data. Companies who make their livelihood on the data pool provided by consumers (Think: Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Google, etc.) surely can’t get enough speed.
How soon until our own computers on our desks, (and even our smartphones) have the power sort 1TB/minute?
The next time you’re in the Santa Cruz mountains, be sure to swing by the Submarine house. Home owner Harry Neal used an old grain solo to build the staple piece of his unique house. Though that’s not the only notable design choice. Instead of your typical wood or metal frame, Harry made use of the mountainside for said purpose, giving the house a much more eco-friendly design and simply looking a lot cooler too boot.
I absolutely loathe the wooden boxes that have proliferated subdivisions today, as I long for some unique character in a house. Lucky for Harry, he lives in a dream house more or less. What would you build your dream house out of?
Couple ‘o shots after the jump…
The worst idea I’ve ever heard: US Gov’t to slap 5% tax on all electronics…to “save journalism”.
on June 7th, 2010
You don’t go to the store and buy a new computer with Windows 2000. Why do it with your smartphone? [Android fragmentation]
on April 14th, 2010
$1,800 Klingon Death Ray (UV Spotlight) unearths hidden oil in the gulf.
on July 27th, 2010
Aerate your yard with these wheels of death.
on July 23rd, 2010
USB Mailbox remind you about pending messages.
on July 8th, 2010
Quite possibly the greatest flash drive ever: The Teddy Drive
on May 27th, 2010
SimCity iPhone App Review
on December 29th, 2008
WordPress 2.0 for iPhone released! [Review]
on October 29th, 2009
A week with the Droid
on November 14th, 2009
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