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Get Your Own Street Legal Tron Legacy Lightcycle

Now you will be able to get your hands on a street legal exact replica of the Tron Legacy Lightcycle.

Parker Brothers Choppers are now offering five street legal Tron Legacy Lightcycles.

Check Your ISP Plan(Connection speed)

Have you ever wondered what speed your Internet Service Provider should be delivering to be compliant with the contract? Do you get confused regarding the nominal speed of your connection and how it translates into an effective downloading speed? If so this guide should suit you, I will try to clarify the most frequent doubts Internet users face regarding the speed of their connection.

Back to the basics

Remember that a bit (binary digit) is the single piece of information in digital systems, it is either a 0 or a 1. A byte, instead, is a group of 8 bits. When we talk about computer memories or data storage 1 kilobit refers to 1024 (2^10) bits, 1 megabit refers to 1024 kilobits (or 1024 x 1024 bits), 1 kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes and so on.

Hyundai unveils its first sedan-style FCEV in Seoul

Hyundai unveiled its new mid-size hydrogen powered fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) concept this week at the 2011 Seoul Motor Show. Powered by a 90 kW (120 hp) electric motor that delivers fuel economy of 34.9 km/L (82.1 mpg), the Blue² (pronounced "Blue square") is intended as a "blue" print for the automaker's future sedans.

Panasonic 100GB Rewritable BD-RE XL Disks Start Shipping

Panasonic have now started shipping their 100GB BD-RE XL disks. The new large capacity Blu-ray disks are set to arrive in Japan on the 15th April.

The 100GB BD-RE XL is Panasonic’s first triple layer Blu-ray Disk and provides enough space for 20 standard DVDs, 100 hours of standard definition television, tens of thousands of music recordings on one disc. The disks are already supported by the latest burners from both Pioneer and Buffalo.

iPad And Kinect Hacked To Steer RC Car (video)

Now That's what surely a B.Tech student would like. However the converse isn't true.
Imaginative ways to use Microsofts Kinect keep appearing daily and another worth a mentioning today is the is this hack that uses either an iPad or Kinect to take control of a remote control car.
The project has beed setup to show how hand gestures can be used to control R/C vehicles and one uses a Kinect and the other a HTML5 web application, with use of WebSockets, DeviceMotionEvent, Canvas.  Watch a video of the hack after the jump, to see the iPad and Kinect hacks in action.

Control the mouse with your eyes, Don't touch!

Tobii has announced the released of a stand-alone eye control device for Windows PCs called PCEye, which is mounted to a display and translates eye movement into mouse commands.

Pneumatic thought-controlled prosthetic arm created by students

Two undergraduate students from Toronto's Ryerson University have created a prosthetic arm that is controlled by its wearer's brain signals, and powered by compressed air. Not only is the Artificial Muscle-Operated (AMO) Arm said to offer a greater range of movement than traditional prostheses, but it also doesn't require the amputee to undergo invasive surgery, is easy to learn to use, and it is relatively inexpensive to make.

The AMO Arm was designed and built by Ryerson biomedical engineering students Thiago Caires and Michal Prywata. While it took them a year to create the custom software, the prototype itself was assembled in just 72 hours.

Need A Brain Upgrade? Scientists Think They Know How

The human brain is a wonderful thing to taste er, test. That’s why a new paper explores the possibilities of improving memory by manipulating a specific enzyme. Why is this important? For starters, it could potentially open a new frontier of brain-specific medication.

India’s first tidal power plant gets the go ahead

The Asian giant is on course to build a first in its region: a massive tidal power plant capable of producing 50MW. The name of the company tasked with such a grand undertaking is quite ironic too: Atlantis Resources Corporation, a UK engineering firm specializing in underwater turbines.

Say Hello To Parrot Asteroid: The Android Car Stereo

The Android powered Parrot Asteroid car stereo. It’s got a ton of juicy specs too. More after the jump.

Ahem! First, as indicated by the pic above, the Parrot Asteroid is a DIN-receiver with a detachable faceplate. See the physical control panel beside the touchscreen? Yup, that’s detachable.

New Samsung ZX310 9 Series Mobile Performance Laptop

Samsung unveiled its latest ZX310 9 Series premium lightweight laptop last week at CES. The new ZX310 9 Series is thinner than the Mac Book Air and is constructed from duralumin that is double the strength of aluminium and is used in the construction of aeroplanes.

At just 16.3mm thick and 1.31kg in weight, the ZX310 is one of the slimmest and lightest (for its size) laptops in the world yet there's still plenty packed inside.

Beneath the duralumin case lyes an Intel i7 processor, up to 8GB memory, a 256GB solid state drive and it has a 13.3 inch display. The Samsung ZX310 9 Series has been specifically designed with power users and mobile professionals in mind.

Intel promises DirectX11 for Ivy Bridge processors

Intel's latest Core processors feature integrated high-def graphics...but folks will have to wait for the next generation for DirectX11.

Intel’s big technology introduction for CES his year is its latest Core processors with integrated high-definition graphics capabilities designed to give AMD and Nvidia some competition in the performance graphics market. However, AMD has managed to steal some thunder with its low-powered Fusion chips that take on Intel’s Atom line and offer DirectX11 graphics support. Now, Intel is saying its integrated graphics controllers will get DirectX11 support too—but folks will have to wait until the next generation of CPUs, dubbed “Ivy Bridge.”

In an interview with IDG News service, Intel VP and PC Client group general manager Mooly Eden said Intel plans to offer DirectX11 support in the next generation of its processors for notebook and desktop computers, which should start shipping to OEMs and system integrators late in 2011—meaning they aren’t likely to get to consumers until 2012. The current Sandy Bridge chips offer support for DirectX10.1; Eden characterized the decision as timely, noting that it gives times for more applications to integrate support for DirectX11 and comparatively little software supports DirectX11 today. However, popular PC games are already supporting DirectX11…and the fact that AMD’s low-power Fusion chip was able to bring DirectX11 to the table now doesn’t make Intel’s graphics solution seem all that great in comparison.

In addition to providing more advanced graphical capabilities for games and other media-centric tasks, DirectX11 includes methods that enable everyday applications to tap into the parallel computing capabilities of graphics chips for everyday tasks.

Intel says the forthcoming Ivy Bridge chip line will be manufactured using a 22nm process, making them smaller and even more power-efficient than the Sandy Bridge chips, built using a 32nm process.

Android 3.0: Coming In March?

In the world of Android, things can move pretty fast.

Case in point: Just weeks ago, Google took the wraps off of Android Gingerbread, the latest and greatest version of its mobile operating system. Aside from the newly launched Samsung Nexus S device, no phone even has the software yet -- heck, plenty of users are still waiting for the Android 2.2 upgrade -- but that's not stopping people from looking even further ahead.

They're looking, of course, toward Honeycomb -- the next major stop on Google's Android development track. All signs point to Honeycomb bringing some significant changes to the Android OS; if everything goes as expected, it'll be the first version of Android to be fully optimized for tablets. And if a report published this week is correct, it'll make its way into the world in March.

Synology releases NAS server for the budget-conscious

Synology has released latest NAS storage addition to its DiskStation range, the DS211+. Designed to cater for the budget-conscious business user or power user, the device includes two hot-swappable drive bays with support for the latest 3TB drives. Depending on whether a users chooses to set it up in a RAID configuration, the DS211+ offers up to 6TB of storage.

It ships with Synology’s DiskStation Manager software that offers users the ability to automatically back up data whether it is attached to a PC, Mac or Linux network. Users can access data stored on the device wirelessly over their network or via the internet. It also offers support for streaming media to UPnP enabled devices. The DS211+ includes an SD card slot that allows users to directly import photo to the device.

The Synology DS211+ is shipping now for $400.

Unique Eyelid Branding Technique Used By BMW In Advertisement (video)

If you think marketing and advertising campaigns already consume to much of your daily life from TV, magazine and the Internet. You might be interested to know that BMW has started experimenting with an even stronger way to make sure you remember their advertising message using a new flash projection technique that brands the BMW logo onto viewers eyelids for a short time.

 

Their new advert was shown at a movie theater in Germany, and managed to leave viewers with an image of the BMW logo on the back of their eyelids. Watch the video after the jump to see how this new advertising method was achieved.

This new type of advertising worries me as in a flash of light any company could now affect your perceived thoughts of a product and make you part with your hard earned cash even easier. What are your thoughts, should this type of advertising be used on consumers?

Hitachi Ships Thin 7mm 500GB HDD

Hitachi has announced that it is now shipping its new and very thin 500GB HDD called the Travelstar Z5K500. The new HDD is a single platter drive that is only 7mm thick. The average 2.5-inch HDD is a 9.5mm form factor.

The new and thin form factor allows the Hitachi HDD to be used in standard 9.5mm devices and it can be used in ultraportable devices that need a thinner HDD as well. The drive is not only thin, but it has low power needs too with 1.8W in operation and 0.55W at idle. The drive is also very quiet with 1.9 bels idle and 2.1 bels when in use.
Hitachi has also shown off a new G-Drive Slim external storage drive that is the thinnest external storage drive on the market. It has 500GB of storage and will ship early in Q1. Pricing for the external drive and the 2.5-inch HDD alone are not announced at this time.

And the winner is...

The next revision to the web document creation language has generated a lot of excitement in web circles, the most headline-grabbing change of course being the option for creators to choose how audio and video are delivered to a user's computer. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has just announced the results of a browser test where all of the top players were pitted against each other to see how well they cope with HTML5. And the winner is...

The W3C put the very latest builds of Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer through a barrage of over 200 tests to determine HTML5 compatibility. While none of the browsers managed 100 per cent support for the whole of the forthcoming web specification, one of them did better than any of the others – Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 9 Platform Review 6 managed full marks in all but a couple of the main feature tests, with only Opera notching up a zero in the foreigncontent department. Chrome scored full marks in four of the seven feature categories, Firefox and Opera managed three and Safari just two.

The test suite consists of challenges agreed to by the HTML Working Group, and testing is ongoing. Current results can be viewed at the HTML5 test suite conformance page.

So, it's a "well done" to Microsoft and a "must do better" to the others. There's still a bit of time to work on problem areas, though, as the specification is still in working draft format.

break-even fusion reactions?

Even with all the developments taking place in the areas of alternative energy such as solar and wind power, nuclear fusion still remains the holy grail of clean electricity generation. However, after decades of worldwide research costing billions of dollars, the goal of achieving “net-gain,” where more energy is produced than is required to trigger the fusion chain reaction, still remains elusive. Now researchers at Sandia Labs are claiming a breakthrough that could see break-even fusion reactions in as little as two to three years. Research into producing energy from seawater using controlled nuclear fusion is taking place on a number of different fronts. To bring two light atomic nuclei together with enough force that they fuse, resulting in a heavier nucleus and a large amount of energy, some approaches are looking at the use of powerful lasers, while others are focusing on superconducting magnets called tokamaks, in what is known as Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF). Z-pinch Yet another approach involves Z-pinch – a type of plasma confinement system that uses an electrical current in the plasma (essentially a cloud of ions) to generate a magnetic field that compresses it. The pinch method, which Sandia calls a dark-horse contender in the fusion race, contracts plasma so suddenly and tightly that hydrogen isotopes from seawater, placed in a capsule within the plasma, should fuse. Until now, instabilities known as magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instabilities, which arise wherever electromagnetic forces are used to pinch plasma, have proven an impediment to the process. This instability rapidly crimps the cylindrically contracting plasma until it resembles a string of sausages or some other equally useless shapes, thereby causing a loss of the perfect symmetry of forces necessary to fuse the material. So although fast Z-pinches, which take place in less than 100 nanoseconds, have already proven successful in creating fusion, (as evidenced by the production of some neutrons), MRT instability has been a major reason that not enough neutrons have been produced to provide a source of reliable electrical power. Wires vs solid aluminum liner Traditionally, scientists would use an array of spidery wires to create a compressed, X-ray generating ion cloud. The X-rays were then used to compress the fusion fuel. The wires were known to be the source of the MRT problem, because even minute dips in a current carrying surface – imperfections merely 10 nanometers in amplitude – can grow exponentially in amplitude to millimeter scales. Because it was impossible to reliably reproduce such imperfections with the wires to allow them to study the instability, Sandia researcher Steve Slutz suggested that the magnetic pinching forces could be used to directly fuse fuel by compressing a solid aluminum liner around fusion material preheated by a laser. Whereas accurate etching wasn’t an option for the fragile wire arrays, the researchers could etch the aluminum liner, creating instabilities to whatever degree they desired, thereby allowing them to measure the growth of MRT instabilities. This new data could then be used to create more accurate simulations and enable the researchers to better tweak the conditions of future Z firings, more effectively combating the effect of the instability. The researchers believe that with thick liners and control of the MRT, the Z machine could achieve an output of 100 kilojoules to match the 100 kilojoules input in as little as two or three years. “That would be scientific break-even,” said project lead Daniel Sinars. “No one has achieved that.” The Sandia Labs research is reported in a paper in the October 29 issue of Physical Review Letters.

the computer's in the wall!

Jack PC technology enables the conversion of any standard LAN port into a desktop computer solution. The patented modular layered construction is claimed to give the device the world's smallest thin-client core and comes with either a 333MHz (800MHz x86 equivalent) or a 500MHz (1.2GHz x86 equivalent) RMI Au processor. There's also up to 256MB disk-on-chip storage , which may not seem like much, but most of the data storage needs will be taken care of by the data center. Similarly, the onboard memory options run from 64MB to 128MB DDR.

The Jack PC can be installed into walls, floor or users' desks where only the connection plate is showing. This effectively protects the internals from any accidental damage that might be caused by well-meaning self-fixers, as well as deterring would-be thieves from making off with the company's computer assets.

Connectivity comes courtesy of four USB ports for attaching peripherals such as the keyboard and mouse, with support for wireless connectivity possible via an optional USB adapter. Optional PS/2 and serial port connectivity is also available. Either VGA or DVI versions are offered, providing support for up to 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution and dual display setups and backed up by 128-bit 3D graphics acceleration with separate SDRAM display memory of either 4MB or 8MB.

The Jack PC can either run on power-over-ethernet or via a separate power source and offers low power benefits to business (max 5W/0.35W in sleep). With a U.S. mount, it has maximum dimensions of just 2.78 x 4.56 x 1.58-inches (6.96 x 11.4 x 3.95cm), weighs in at 12 ounces (350g) and works with Xcalibur Global Management software that caters for data center management and monitoring of the entire network.

As well as providing end users with desktop computers, the solution can be used for other office functions such as running a printer, terminal emulation and various ICA/RDP/VDI applications.