Monthly Archive for April, 2008

First Look: Asus m70 1TB Laptop

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Well looky looky what we have here. Some say storage = snore-age. Know what? Those people are mostly right. Except when you get in the world’s first notebook that contains a grand freaking total of one terabyte (!) of hard disk space .

Asus_m70034
First impressions? The m70 comes with Vista Home Premium (Meh.) and weighs a bone crushing 9-pounds. Seriously, it’s pushing the limits of portability. Asus still hasn’t gotten back to us yet about how much the unit’s price. Our IT guru said it’ll probably cost about $2500-$3000 considering the specs.

To give you an idea of what it would take to fill up the hard drive, hit the jump to see the breakdown on how much porn, MP3s, DVDs, games, and pictures would be needed to fill the roomy storage.

1 terabyte of storage by the numbers:

1TB = 1,024 GB = 1,048,576 MB = 1,073,741,824 KB

Porn: Debbie Does Dallas (838 MB in AVI format) =
1,251 porn flicks

DVD Rips: Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back  (4.36 GB) =
235 copies.

Pics: 1.3 megapixel stills from the integrated webcam ( recorded as 516 KB jpgs) =
2,080,895 images.

Games: Crysis (6.03 GB) = 169 copies of Crytek-crippling craziness.

MP3s: Stars are Blind, by Paris Hilton (7.3MB) =
143,640,256 brain damaging tracks. Interestingly, this is the soundtrack they play in Hell.

Additional reporting by Nate Ralph.

(Photos by James Merithew for Wired.com.)


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First Look: Asus m70 1TB Laptop

Published
by
admin
on April 30, 2008
in News
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Asus_m70010

Well looky looky what we have here. Some say storage = snore-age. Know what? Those people are mostly right. Except when you get in the world’s first notebook that contains a grand freaking total of one terabyte (!) of hard disk space .

Asus_m70034
First impressions? The m70 comes with Vista Home Premium (Meh.) and weighs a bone crushing 9-pounds. Seriously, it’s pushing the limits of portability. Asus still hasn’t gotten back to us yet about how much the unit’s price. Our IT guru said it’ll probably cost about $2500-$3000 considering the specs.

To give you an idea of what it would take to fill up the hard drive, hit the jump to see the breakdown on how much porn, MP3s, DVDs, games, and pictures would be needed to fill the roomy storage.

1 terabyte of storage by the numbers:

1TB = 1,024 GB = 1,048,576 MB = 1,073,741,824 KB

Porn: Debbie Does Dallas (838 MB in AVI format) =
1,251 porn flicks

DVD Rips: Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back  (4.36 GB) =
235 copies.

Pics: 1.3 megapixel stills from the integrated webcam ( recorded as 516 KB jpgs) =
2,080,895 images.

Games: Crysis (6.03 GB) = 169 copies of Crytek-crippling craziness.

MP3s: Stars are Blind, by Paris Hilton (7.3MB) =
143,640,256 brain damaging tracks. Interestingly, this is the soundtrack they play in Hell.

Additional reporting by Nate Ralph.

(Photos by James Merithew for Wired.com.)


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iLuv kicks out i168 and i169 HD Radio alarm clocks

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Something’s really wrong with the world if more than a few months pass by without a new iPod alarm clock from iLuv, so we suppose everyone’s a-okay for a few more months now. Announced today, the firm has introduced its first pair of HD Radio clocks, and sure enough, one of ‘em plays nice with Cupertino’s darling. The i169 would be that player, which offers up a mostly black motif, dual stereo speakers, remote, iPod dock, AM / FM / HD Radio reception, an auxiliary input and dual alarm settings for good measure. As for the currently available i168, it provides most everything you read up there sans the iPod compatibility, but then again, it only demands $89.99. What about the i169, you ask? It’ll set you back a cool $169.99 when it lands in “early May.” Full release waiting after the break.

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Wall*E Robot Toy to Debut This Weekend at Maker Faire Event

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Ultimatewalle

If you’re going to the Maker Faire this weekend, you’ll be treated with the first of what could be a cool new line of robotic toys from Disney, starting with a Wall*E robot from the upcoming movie of the same name. And if you know anything about the pioneering history of robotics from the company, from Walt himself on down to the current Imagineers, you have a right to be pretty excited . . . to be able to show it to your kids. Maybe you could juice him (it?) up, hack it up, and make it speak a few special un-PG words. The little kids will love that. 

The robots will come from the Disney Consumer Products (DCP) outfit in collaboration with Pixar, Thinkway Toys, and WoWee. They are also working on bringing a Tinkerbell-inspired robot dancing boombox later this fall. The Wall*E is scheduled to come in the summer, presumably around the date of the movie, and be priced around $24.99.

At that price, the robotics inside of it probably won’t be groundbreaking at all, but the market for this is more in line with the Tickle Me Elmo/Ernie/Cookie from recent years. Still those Tickles are great fun at parties.

Still, it might be the beginning of a nice line and Disney has the
pedigree to come up with some good robots if the company decides to go
that way.

I went to the Magic Kingdom recently, and I checked out the sad little
area near the entrance of the park that no one visits anymore,
featuring a robot Abe Lincoln. Those audio-animanotrics are tame by
today’s tech standards (even within the same park), but it’s good to
remember that the creaky wood-like Abe was many people’s first
introduction to robotics. If there’s a little robot Abe in Disney’s
future, you can be sure we’ll be all over it, feeding it cookies and
pushing the Wired Gadget Lab podcast through its metal pipes.


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Wall*E Robot Toy to Debut This Weekend at Maker Faire Event

Published
by
admin
on April 30, 2008
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Ultimatewalle

If you’re going to the Maker Faire this weekend, you’ll be treated with the first of what could be a cool new line of robotic toys from Disney, starting with a Wall*E robot from the upcoming movie of the same name. And if you know anything about the pioneering history of robotics from the company, from Walt himself on down to the current Imagineers, you have a right to be pretty excited . . . to be able to show it to your kids. Maybe you could juice him (it?) up, hack it up, and make it speak a few special un-PG words. The little kids will love that. 

The robots will come from the Disney Consumer Products (DCP) outfit in collaboration with Pixar, Thinkway Toys, and WoWee. They are also working on bringing a Tinkerbell-inspired robot dancing boombox later this fall. The Wall*E is scheduled to come in the summer, presumably around the date of the movie, and be priced around $24.99.

At that price, the robotics inside of it probably won’t be groundbreaking at all, but the market for this is more in line with the Tickle Me Elmo/Ernie/Cookie from recent years. Still those Tickles are great fun at parties.

Still, it might be the beginning of a nice line and Disney has the
pedigree to come up with some good robots if the company decides to go
that way.

I went to the Magic Kingdom recently, and I checked out the sad little
area near the entrance of the park that no one visits anymore,
featuring a robot Abe Lincoln. Those audio-animanotrics are tame by
today’s tech standards (even within the same park), but it’s good to
remember that the creaky wood-like Abe was many people’s first
introduction to robotics. If there’s a little robot Abe in Disney’s
future, you can be sure we’ll be all over it, feeding it cookies and
pushing the Wired Gadget Lab podcast through its metal pipes.


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MacBook Air users still faced with overheating problems?

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We’re still hearing reports of MacBook Air overheating woe, well after an EFI update in April that was meant to address some of those problems. While hot computers are nothing new, the MacBook Air starts shutting down cores and offloading processes when things get bad, which means users are faced with aggravating stop-start freezing until they can manage to cool the computer off — or just put it to sleep and let it “rest.” Apparently some people have traced this back to the age-old misapplied thermal grease problem, but that’s hardly a solace for the average consumer trying to convince Apple to fix this thing for them. We took a MacBook Air that was acting up into the Genius Bar and Apple claimed it couldn’t reproduce the problem, though we have heard cases of Apple replacing the computer for users. We’d be curious to know just how many Air users are having trouble, and if the X300 is experiencing anything similar, so let us know in the comments.

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Western Digital’s VelociRaptor drive gets reviewed

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We already had some early benchmarks of Western Digital’s speedy new VelociRaptor hard drive the day it was announced, but the folks at Extreme Tech have now had a bit more time to spend with the drive, and they’ve churned out a full review of it for those that still haven’t made up their mind. As with others, they found the drive more than lived up to its promise of being the “world’s fastest SATA disk,” with it even beating out many solid state drives in terms of write performance. The biggest downsides, as you might expect, are its relatively high (but not unreasonable) price to gigabyte ratio, and its maximum 300GB capacity, although that’s nothing a second (or third) drive can’t solve. Of course, they don’t stop there, and you can find plenty of charts and comparisons to quench your curiosity by hitting up the link below.

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For Real: Man Regrows Finger With Pixie Dust

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Lee Spievak cut his finger off and then regrew it using pixie dust.

“I put my finger in,” Mr. Spievak says, pointing towards the propeller of a model airplane, “and that’s when I sliced my finger off.”

Wow, Lee, wow. Reminds me of the time I stuck my tongue in an oscillating fan.

Today though, you wouldn’t know it. Mr Spievak, who is 69 years old, shows off his finger, and it’s all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print. How? Well that’s the truly remarkable part. It wasn’t a transplant. Mr Spievak re-grew his finger tip. He used a powder - or pixie dust as he sometimes refers to it while telling his story. Mr Speivak’s brother Alan - who was working in the field of regenerative medicine - sent him the powder.

The pixie dust, or more appropriately “pigsy dust”, is actually made by scraping the cells from the inside of a pig’s bladder, treating them with acid, and turning them into a powder. In addition to smelling like urine, the magical substance can regrow fingers lost in the propellers of model airplanes. Scientists hope that within 10 years we will be able to regrow arms and legs. Cool, scientists, but let’s think outside the box for a second. How about you grow me a sweet pair of wings or a tail? That’s what I want. Seriously though, I’m a little skeptical about this whole thing. I smoked a little angel dust once and I didn’t grow a penis out of my forehead. I just felt like there were worms burrowing under my skin.

An uncensored picture of dude’s severed finger (GRAPHIC), along with a link to the BBC article (which includes videos), after the jump.

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Psystar Open Computer notes, benchmarks and video

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digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Psystar_Open_Computer_notes_benchmarks_and_video’; Okay, so we’ve been playing with the Psystar Open Computer for a few hours now, and we’ve formed some early impressions and put together a short video of it in action. We haven’t really tried to stress the system yet, but based on our other experiences with OSx86 machines, we’re expecting things to generally go smoothly. That said, there are some definite rough patches and issues, all mostly having to do with the fact that OS X isn’t really built for this hardware. Here’s what we know so far:

Continue reading Psystar Open Computer notes, benchmarks and video

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T-Mobile to debut 3G as voice-only. No data. We’re over it.

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Well screw us — T-Mobile’s 3G network debut tomorrow? It’s going to be voice only. That’s right, you heard us, VOICE ONLY. So trepidatious is this company to actually get their 3G data rollout, um, rolled out, they’re launching first with kneecapped voice-only service, keeping only EDGE for those demanding data. Here’s the snippet from the memo we received:

“3G is the next generation of our wireless network, following our current GSM network. In this early phase of our network evolution, 3G is a new technology for carrying wireless voice calls and supporting existing data capabilities on our network. In future phases, this next generation network will power ‘high-speed’ (3G) products and services that connect customers in new and exciting ways. … Inform customers who are interested in high-speed data that the first phase of our 3G roll out supports voice only.” [Emphasis ours]

No word on when T-Mobile actually plans to turn on the faster data, but for everyone who was hoping he wait continues — for those that haven’t already jumped ship, anyway.

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