If the toe mouse just wasn't grand enough for you, how about an entire floor to practice your foot-based inputs on? Researchers at Potsdam's (that's in Germany, yo) Hasso Plattner Institut have put together a multitouch floor that recognizes individual users by their shoe pattern and responds to such universally familiar actions as stomping your feet and tapping your toes. The so-called multitoe project works on the basis of frustrated total internal reflection, which allows it to ignore inactive users while being precise enough to recognize foot postures. Follow us after the break to see this back-projected proof of concept in action. Four Letter Words consists of four units, each capable of displaying all 26 letters of the alphabet with an arrangement of fluorescent lights. The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence, derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association.
The algorithm's tendency towards scatological or "dark" subject matter is influenced by a variety of language and perception studies, especially Elliot McGinnies' 1949 study "Emotionality and Perceptual Defense." While the piece was conceived with idea of displaying algorithmically generated lists, it was designed with flexibility and expandability in mind. The individual units can be connected ad-infinitum, and are theoretically capable of displaying any length of text. While Four Letter Words deals with a specific range of content, the technology can be easily expanded for future textual experiments If you've been hankering to get your hands on that stamp-sized 48-core processor Intel introduced last year, you'd better brush off your doctorate -- the chipmaker says it will send samples of the CPU to researchers and academic institutions by the end of Q2. Clocked between 1.66GHz and 1.83GHz like Intel's Atom netbook chips, the 48 cores won't boost your framerates in Crysis -- rather, they're intended for linear algebra, fluid dynamics and server work -- but what we wouldn't give to try. Oh well -- suppose we'll just have to make do with puny 8- and 12-core chips for now. Source: Engadget Written by Kate Bevan @ guardian.co.uk My iPad arrived yesterday afternoon via a friend in the US, and yes, it largely lives up to the hype: it's shiny, elegantly realised and above all potentially very useful. Well, apart from a few wrinkles, which range from a mere raise of the eyebrows to an exasperated WTF? First, Apple: why on earth did you leave out the Clock app? That omission alone means I can't ditch my iPod Touch on my travels because my iPad won't wake me up. The iPod Touch has a built-in Clock app which will set off an alarm at a given time; the iPad doesn't. Sure, there are loads of third-party clock apps, free and paid-for, available via the App Store, but none of them run in the background/when the device is asleep as the native app does, which means if you want your iPad to be an alarm clock, you'll have to leave it on all night and your chosen clock running. On the subject of missing apps, what has Apple done with Calculator? That's a basic functionality of even the dumbest smartphone these days. And no Voice Memos either. Nor Weather. I'm more annoyed by that than I expected, as Weather is a simple but nicely executed app that I rely on more than I realised. And yes, again, I know you can get third-party versions, but it would be nice if Apple had included them (or the original) with the iPad. I'd also like haptics (that's touch feedback) for the onscreen keyboard, please. It's a very good stab at a virtual keyboard, and you can toggle keyboard click sounds on and off, but the very fact that the screen is finally big enough to touch-type on means that the absence of tactile feedback when you hit a key is a big omission. I don't think I'd like to type for long periods of time on the iPad. Other annoyances: it doesn't charge while it's syncing – which could mean you go off leaving it to suck in your huge music library and equally huge photo library only to come back and find that it's died in the middle of the process. Make sure it's charged up before you start syncing. Next (though this could be me being useless, but I don't think so) I couldn't get it to exchange files via Bluetooth with my Macbook Air, which means that you can't dump a few photos on to the device on the fly – you have to fire up iTunes and go through the whole syncing process. Mostly, the size is about right – though I can't see myself reading ebooks in bed as it's a bit weightier than I expected. However, it is too big to be just an iPod: I felt like Dom Joly with his oversized mobile when I dug it out of my handbag on the underground to fire up some music; plus you can't manage it single-handed as you can with an iPhone or iPod Touch. In fact, the need to use both hands when doing stuff is something I'll have to get used to – one of the things I love about the iPod Touch is being able to everything with just one hand. Still with the iPod app, the interface has been revamped, as indeed have the other native apps such as Mail and Contacts, but in this case I'm not convinced it's an improvement. It feels busy and harder to navigate, and if there's a way to turn off the Coverflow view, I haven't found it yet. And of course the usual gripes about the lack of Flash apply, but it is even more infuriating on the iPad than on its smaller siblings; on those you're more often going to pick a steamlined mobile version of a site. Websites look gorgeous on the iPad, especially in portrait orientation, but all too often there's a big black hole where content should be. Presently - though I'm hoping this will be fixed as soon as it lands - that also means that the mobile streaming version of the BBC iPlayer doesn't work. I'm hoping this is just a browser recognition issue; iPlayer works brilliantly on the iPod Touch/iPhone but for now sullenly refuses to play on the iPad. So no catching up on EastEnders in bed, then. Maybe it will be the ebooks after all. I'm hoping most of those wrinkles will be addressed by the upgrade to iPhone OS 4.0 – due in the autumn for the iPad. Until then, be seduced by the hype – but do bear in mind the flaws. I'm sure you've heard about reverse engineering and industrial espionage -- they are the bread and butter of a competitive tech industry! -- but I had no idea there were firms, such as Chipworks, that specialize in the process. They've just released glorious, revealing details of the Apple iPad's hardware, and a complete breakdown of the new, top-secret A4 processor. For the less-technically-minded, iFixit has a walkthrough for the reverse engineering, too. The pictures and details are juicy -- you can even order a bunch of die photos! -- but ultimately, there isn't anything exciting under the hood. The iPad is merely a large iPod Touch, with almost identical hardware in places. Chipworks calls the iPad 'a giant battery with a tiny [circuit] board attached to it' -- and looking at the picture above, you can see why! So, no real news here I'm afraid, unless you're trying to mollify a Mac fanatic. What you're paying for is a large touch-screen and a giant battery -- you are not buying a piece of 'magic', but simply a large iPod Touch. The devil, as always, is in the software. It would not be the first time that Apple has shoehorned some fantastic software into a shiny, but otherwise lackluster hardware package. In my opinion, the coolest part of this story is that Chipworks tears apart of bleeding-edge technology to produce full, reproducible schematics of a device's circuitry. Nothing is sacred! Source: Downloadsquad We heard some pretty ridiculous estimates over the weekend, but these figures are straight out of Cupertino's mouth: over 300,000 iPads were sold on April 3rd. Specifically, that many were moved in the US as of midnight (PT, we're assuming) on Saturday, though this does include deliveries of pre-ordered units to customers, deliveries to channel partners (such as Best Buy) and sales at Apple Retail Stores. We should point out, though, that just because Best Buy purchased a bundle of 'em doesn't mean that end users have (yet), but still, this is a pretty impressive feat for something that not everyone was convinced that they "needed" in January. If you'll recall, Apple only sold 270,000 iPhones during its first 30 hours on the market, yet it moved over a million iPhone 3GS units during that handset's opening weekend. In related news, iPad users also downloaded over a million apps and over 250,000 ebooks from the iBookstore during launch day, with Steve Jobs himself noting that "iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad." Now, let's see if these guys can keep pace through the first full week. Source: Engadget GameStar has posted this amazing tech video explaining the capabilities and the raw processing power behind Geforce GTX 480. Although the video is not in English, it still manages to give us a pretty good idea about the card. The first products from the GeForce 400 series were launched on March 26, 2010, starting with the GTX 480 and GTX 470. The GTX 480 is the highest-end model from the GTX 400 series and comes with 480 CUDA cores, a 700 MHz core clock speed, 1401 MHz shader clock and 1.5 GB of GDDR5 memory. The GTX 480 is roughly 10% faster than ATI’s HD 5870 and launched with a price tag of US$499.
Not relativly new, but here is a reminder that holograms which you can touch are becoming a new trend. Ofcource, only the Japanese can do this... simply watch this, it's extremely impressive! If you'll recall, Apple had no qualms revealing the iPad Camera Connection Kit at its 'Latest Creation' event back in January, but the solution seemingly dropped from the face of the Earth shortly thereafter. Even as cases, keyboards and all sorts of other iPad accessories surfaced for pre-order, the camera kit remained nowhere to be found. Over the weekend, the $29 adapter bundle finally found a home at the outfit's website (with a "late April" ship date), offering users a pair of dongles to support USB and SD cards. Of course, one could easily argue that the iPad should have native support for both of these widely used formats without forcing users to lug around two extra peripherals, but if that were the case, this thing just wouldn't be an Apple, now would it?
Source: Engadget |
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