Recently in Technology Category

Read more: HP Ink Costs More Than Human Blood, Booze - Gizmodo

WASHINGTON - Scientists are boldly going where only fiction has gone before — to develop a Cloak of Invisibility. It isn't quite ready to hide a Romulan space ship from Capt. James T. Kirk or to disguise Harry Potter, but it is a significant start and could show the way to more sophisticated designs.

In this first successful experiment, researchers from the United States and England were able to cloak a copper cylinder.

It's like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky.

"We have built an artificial mirage that can hide something from would-be observers in any direction," said cloak designer David Schurig, a research associate in Duke University's electrical and computer engineering department.

For their first attempt, the researchers designed a cloak that prevents microwaves from detecting objects. Like light and radar waves, microwaves usually bounce off objects, making them visible to instruments and creating a shadow that can be detected.

Cloaking used special materials to deflect radar or light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. It differs from stealth technology, which does not make an aircraft invisible but reduces the cross-section available to radar, making it hard to track.

Read more: Scientists create cloak of invisibility - Yahoo! News

Google is buying video-sharing website YouTube for $1.65bn (?883m) in shares after a weekend of speculation that a deal was in the offing.

The two companies will continue to operate independently, Google said as it announced the news on Monday.
YouTube, launched in February 2005, has grown quickly into one of the most popular websites on the internet.
It has 100 million videos viewed every day and an estimated 72 million individual visitors each month.

Read more: BBC NEWS | Business | Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn

For transferring heat, liquid is better, period. The only thing better than liquid is chilled liquid. CoolIT products do not use a radiator, but rather a patented technology called MTEC. By using MTEC technology, the liquid is actually refrigerated (using multiple TECSs or Peltiers) then used to cool even the hottest processors in today’s computing devices. The result is unparalleled overclockability, reduced system level noise and increased reliability. In addition to providing superior performance to water cooling, the CoolIT products are pre-plumbed, factory sealed and maintenance free allowing for very simple installation and worry-free.

Check it out: CoolIT Systems - Home

iRobot® Dirt Dog™ Shop Robot

iRobot Dirt Dog picks up what you throw down. Command it to clean and it gets to work sweeping under workbenches, cars and other hard-to-reach places. It picks up the nuts, bolts, dirt, and other debris from your shop floor. You've done enough; leave the cleaning to a robot. iRobot Dirt Dog's oversized dust bin and high-speed, counter-rotating brushes keep your workspace clean. Use on hard floors, shop carpets or industrial floor surfaces only.

Check it out: iRobot - iRobot? Dirt Dog™ Shop Robot

Claudia Mitchell, the world's first bionic woman, listens as Dr. Todd Kuiken, Director of the Neural Engineering Center for Artificial Limbs and Center for Bionic Medicine at the Rehabilitation Center of Chicago, and developer of the bionic technology, speaks during a news conference at the National Press Club, Thursday, Sept. 14, 2006, in Washington. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

Read more: Meet the $4 million woman - Yahoo! News

Mitsubishi delivered the behemoth in 35 pieces and assembled it on site, with the whole shebang taking up 8,000 square feet. If you’re looking to upgrade from that 19-incher you’ve had since college, start investing now, as this thing cost a cool $28 million

They call it the Powder Room Player...

For the iPod lover who needs the music player within reach at all times, here is iCarta's dock with bath tissue. The device boasts four waterproof speakers and a universal toilet-tissue holder.

HOLMDEL, N.J., — For 44 years, a six-story, two-million-square-foot structure nestled here in a 472-acre exquisitely pastoral setting was a habitat for technological ferment.
The vaunted Bell Labs, whose scientists invented the laser and developed fiber optic and satellite communications, touch-tone dialing and cellphones, modems and microwaves, was housed in the glass building, set far off the road, providing the community with some luster — not to mention a tax bonanza.
But now, the building has been sold, and the public will be invited in for at least one date while it remains, which may not be much longer. The developer who will create a future for the property says the structure will have to be demolished.

Everybody who owns a cell phone needs to read this.

This post is dedicated to the teenage girl that sat one row ahead of me at the movie theature last night. As much as that movie sucked and I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to listen to your 28 minute conversation about "how Ryan broke up with Sara."

Just for the sake of society cell phone users should follow these 10 easy rules...

A Japanese company called Morito has launched a new business to sell stereo headphones that don't actually produce sound and don't go in your ear. They produce vibrations that RATTLE YOUR SKULL, which vibrates your inner ear, creating the illusion of sound.

AN ALARM clock that will not switch off until the slumberer has shown they are fully awake has been invented by a student at Strathclyde University.

The puzzle clock, created by Liam Hastie for his engineering degree, is designed to overcome "sleep inertia" - the groggy feeling which, scientists say, can impair mental faculties for ten minutes, but sometimes for up to two hours after waking.

The wall-mounted alarm clock can be switched off only when its user climbs out of bed, stands directly in front and repeats, by pressing coloured buttons, a sequence generated randomly each morning. If the user fails to repeat the sequence swiftly, the alarm will continue to blare until the task is completed correctly.

Research into "sleep inertia" has discovered the pre-frontal cortex - the area of the brain which is responsible for problem-solving, emotion and complex thought - is among those that take longer to operate properly after sleep.

Mr Hastie, 23 - who designed a prototype as part of his degree course in design, manufacture and engineering management - was inspired by his own experience of repeatedly pressing the snooze button on his alarm as many as 20 times rather than getting up. He said: "Alarm clocks are good at waking you - what they are not good at is actually getting you out of bed.

"Then I read about the concept of 'sleep inertia' and decided to invent an alarm clock that not only got you out of bed, but would only go off when you demonstrated that your pre-frontal cortex was actually online."

Dr Neil Stanley, a past president of the British Sleep Society, described the new invention as "a good idea". He said: "What is interesting is that we don't know exactly how long sleep inertia can last. Some morn-ings I leap out of bed and others I'm much more sluggish."

New materials that can change the way light and other forms of radiation bend around an object may provide a way to make objects invisible, researchers said on Thursday.

Two separate teams of researchers have come up with theories on ways to use experimental "metamaterials" to cloak an object and hide it from visible light, infrared light, microwaves and perhaps even sonar probes.

Their work suggests that science-fiction portrayals of invisibility, such as the cloaking devices used to hide space ships in Star Trek, might be truly possible.

Harry Potter's cloak or The Invisible Man of films and fiction might be a bit harder to emulate, however, because the materials must be used in a thick shell, informs Reuters.

Professor John Pendry, from Imperial College London, said that it may not take long to develop an invisible fabric - assuming there is sufficient research into the technology.

"If there is adequate funding, I'd have thought it would take in the order of five years," he said.

The list is pretty impressive, a transparent toaster, an oragami DVD player, a urinal video game, self cooling beer can and more. I think I could put the urinal video game to good use.

A rundown of 10 extraordinarily expensive and over the top gadgets, from $4,000 iPod speakers to a $24,000 gaming PC. Some of the shit on this list is amazing. My mouth was watering looking at some of it, but some of them are just stupid. I guess if you got $24,000 to drop on a GOLD computer you don't care.

Don't worry, I know the picture sucks!

Macy's to add iPod vending machines
CINCINNATI, May 20 (UPI) -- Macy's plans to install 180 iPod vending machines -- made by a San Francisco company -- nationwide by fall, its chief executive said Friday.

"This brings most-wanted merchandise into our stores in a unique new way," chief executive Terry J. Lundgren announced at the annual meeting.

Macy's has signed an agreement with Zoom Systems, an iPod vending machine company in San Francisco, to supply the machines, called Zoom @ Macy's.

Todd Jones, a retail analyst at PNC Wealth Management in Philadelphia, said the price of iPods could make that area of Macy's one of the most profitable, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

"This is not a real big risky proposition and is probably a move to become more relevant with a host of age ranges," Jones said.

Purchasing an iPod out of a vending machine could probably be categorized as an impulse buy, Jones said.

Want to play your XBox 360 games head-to-head with your friends playing the same game on their PCs? Soon you might be able to.
Microsoft is paying around with the idea of using Microsoft Live services to tie all their on-line services together, including gaming.
With the release of Vista, plans are in the works to allow gamers using Microsoft Live to play together regardless of whether they are plugged in through their XBox 360 or their Vista PC.
Read More

The Palm® Treo™ 700p smartphone delivers everything you need in one go-anywhere, Palm OS® device. It combines a smarter phone with wireless email and messaging, built-in web browser, and rich media capabilities — all at blazing fast broadband-like speeds.

Let's see...
PalmOS 5.4.9
128 MB memory
Bluetooth 1.2 (Finally) w / DUN
EVDO support
SD, SDIO and MMC card support
Great 320x320 screen
1.3 MP Camera
And so on...

This is a good move forward. Unfortunately for us GSM carrier users, the wait is going to be longer. The current phone that has been announced is CDMA only. Damn!

Read More....
http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo700p/index.html?creativeID=HmPg_BB|treo700p_announcement

Not very long ago, China saw itself as a nation on the verge of a high-tech breakthrough.

But today, China appears shamed at a scandal that has already begun to tarnish that vision. It involves a computer scientist named Chen Jin who became a national hero in 2003 when he said he had created one of China's first home-grown digital signal processing computer chips, a sophisticated microchip that can process digitized data for mobile phones, cameras and other electronic devices.

His milestone met with breathless excitement and held the promise of closing the enormous gaps with the West in science and technology.

On Friday, however, the government announced that it was all a fraud. Chen, the government said, had faked research conducted at Jiaotong University and simply stolen his chip designs from a foreign company. Chen was fired from his university posts and stripped of his government honors and privileges.

After a Something Awful denizen took apart his MacBook Pro and discovered that Apple had slathered on far too much thermal grease, he found that using a more modest amount dropped his MacBook Pro's temperatures by several degrees. Now the forum has recieved a threatening letter from Apple's legal staff, requesting a link to this image [pictured above] be removed because "The Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple's intellectual property and is protected by U.S. copyright law."

Of course the real problem isn't the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple's $2,500 laptop but by Apple's own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple's mistake.

via: Gizmodo, The Gadget Blog

Sounds pretty damn cool if you ask me!

Yahoo! Go

Key Features of Yahoo! Go for TV

Photos
View photos from your Yahoo! Photos account or local hard drive.
View friends' and family's shared online albums.
View photos from communities around the world.

Video search
Watch featured and most popular searched video content from Yahoo! on the big screen.
Find videos using Yahoo!’s industry-leading video search technology.

Movies
Watch the latest movie trailers.
Get movie info and Yahoo! recommendations and ratings.
Find listings for local theaters and show times.
Play DVD movies or video stored on your hard drive.

Music
Listen to LAUNCHcast® radio stations with all your preferences.
Watch music videos in stereo on your TV.
Listen to music stored on your local hard drive.
Play music CDs.

DVR (Digital Video Recorder)
Use your built-in DVR for recording and managing TV shows and movies.
Check integrated TV listings to find what you want to watch:
Browse by channel or time.
Customize guides to preferred channels.
Search for TV shows, movies, or sports.

This guy plays Frankenstein with a Pentium 4, pretty ingenious stuff...

http://http://www.stupidcollege.com/items/5-GHz-Processor

Video: VW's vision of the dashboard - CNET Reviews

Thanks Raj!

I was talking to my Dad about cleaning spyware and he accidentally put in skybot instead of spybot. Anyway, this cam up and it's very cool!

Skybot

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

As elegant as it gets
Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.(1) Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don't have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

Optional alt. At startup, hold down the option key (alt) to choose between Mac OS X and Windows.

Run XP natively
Once you’ve completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (That’s the “alt” key for you longtime Windows users.) After starting up, your Mac runs Windows completely natively. Simply restart to come back to Mac.

Get it now! Apple - Boot Camp