Bill Gates was recently giving a speech at Canegie Mellon and said the following: “We say that there’ll be more searches done through speech than through the keyboard five years from now.” That’s five years from now. 2013. We’ll have jet packs and flying cars and push-button girlfriends by then, too. At least I will. Bill, as your […]
Bill Gates was recently giving a speech at Canegie Mellon and said the following:
“We say that there’ll be more searches done through speech than through the keyboard five years from now.”
That’s five years from now. 2013. We’ll have jet packs and flying cars and push-button girlfriends by then, too. At least I will.
Bill, as your neighbor and friend, I must recommend you stop buying the cheap crack. Go to Belltown and get the good stuff.
In related news, Logitech has been accused of hiring a hitman for an anonymous murder in an affluent Washington State neighborhood. (No, not really.)
We love us some big ass glass. Here’s an amazing set of the homemade variety, a 400mm binoscope (a honkin’ set of binoculars basically) painstakingly hand-crafted over the course of three years by a hardcore French dude. The detail on it really makes this thing a DIY engineering marvel. [MAKE]
Ken-ichi Horie, a 69 year old Japanese sailor, is planning a solo 4,350 mile trip from Hawaii to Japan using the most advanced wave powered boat on the planet. If successful, the trip would earn him a Guinness record while simultaneously proving the viability of wave powered propulsion. His boat, the Suntory Mermaid II, turns wave energy into thrust using two fins mounted beneath the bow. These fins move up and down with the waves and use them to generate “kicks” that propel the boat forward.
The problem is that all of that new fangled technology will only manage to scrape together a top speed of 5 knots. Therefore, it will take about three months to accomplish what a diesel powered boat can achieve in only one. Plus, all of the radios and electrical equipment are solar powered. Sounds pretty dangerous, but this is the same dude that made a solo trip across the Pacific in 1999 on a catamaran made from recycled beer barrels. In other words, he’s a rugged dude. [Popsci]
Fly has a new handset, the MC100, that has built-in support for NES, SNES, and Gameboy games, along with built-in game downloading. It’s saying this is the first phone to ship with the support built-in, and we don’t doubt it. Really, though, shouldn’t all cell phones have built-in NES? Shouldn’t everything, really? I want it on […]
Fly has a new handset, the MC100, that has built-in support for NES, SNES, and Gameboy games, along with built-in game downloading. It’s saying this is the first phone to ship with the support built-in, and we don’t doubt it.
Really, though, shouldn’t all cell phones have built-in NES? Shouldn’t everything, really? I want it on my fridge.
Giz reader Ed Hernández is at it again with his wireless audio iPod modifications. This time he hacked a fifth generation 30GB iPod video to include a Bluetooth module for audio output but, since the 30GB model is so thin, Ed had to do extra hacking. He told us his shopping list and some impressions, after the jump.
To make space for the audio Bluetooth module he had to take out the hard drive to replace it with a Compact Flash. He also changed the front white plastic for an iVue clear panel to let the Bluetooth LED to shine through. “One of these days Apple will finally take the hint…” Ed said to us in an email. Hopefully they will, because doing this looks quite difficult:
It took me about a month of part time research, but If I were to do it again today, just the labor would only take about a couple of hours. Total cost of just the BT mod is only about $50 but if you break it down it would be like this:
$50 BT module $30 Clear faceplate $35 Flash adapter $30-120 Flash card (depends on your budget)
According to Ed, the “sound quality is very good, on par with an external module anyway. I use the Motorola S9 headphones and I’m very satisfied. Not audiophile quality mind you, but more than adequate for the gym.” [iPod Hackers]
I told you SSDs would be plummeting in price this year, and here’s Samsung coming along making me look like some sort of genius for finding an article that said that and then writing about it. I rule! Anyhow, Samsung is looking to double the size of its SSDs not once this year, but twice, ending up with a 256GB SSD by year’s end.
Samsung already has a 128GB drive on deck for the third quarter of this year, doubling the size of the drives we’re seeing in high-priced laptops like the SSD flavor of the Macbook Air. And while there are plans in place to bump that up to 256GB soon after, it’d be done using “Multi Level Cell (MLC) storage, which is slower than a Single Level Cell (SLC) drive but stacks multiple bits of data per cell to reduce the overall cost of the disk.” That kind of sucks, as the SLC drives aren’t exactly blowing us away with their blistering speed, so it doesn’t really seem worth it to jack up the capacity if the performance will take a nosedive as a result.
In any case, the good news is that SSD prices are expected to drop 35% to 45% yearly. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine that Samsung is playing around with large, high-priced, inefficient SSDs as long as it’s also working on smaller, faster, cheaper versions that, you know, people would actually buy. No one is clamoring for a 256GB iPhone, after all. We’re not that greedy. [CNET via Electronista]
Ken-ichi Horie, a 69 year old Japanese sailor, is planning a solo 4,350 mile trip from Hawaii to Japan using the most advanced wave powered boat on the planet. If successful, the trip would earn him a Guinness record while simultaneously proving the viability of wave powered propulsion. His boat, the Suntory Mermaid II, turns wave energy into thrust using two fins mounted beneath the bow. These fins move up and down with the waves and use them to generate “kicks” that propel the boat forward. 
Giz reader Ed Hernández is at it again with 
I told you 
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