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]
CERN’s scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn sites web pages, are now hard at work building the Massive Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter, which could bring us closer to understanding how the Universe works:
Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the “force.” The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics–but no one’s ever found it.
In theory, when physicists turn on the tons of machinery inside the Akira-like LHC 17-mile-long ring in 2008, they’ll be able to produce the Higgs boson. Observing it could confirm many physicist predictions and “missing links” in the Standard Model, which is a physics theory that aims to describe how elementary particles interact with each other. It’s either that or destroy the planet. We have the ability to go either way (actually, although it was a joke, CERN just wrote back saying that they don’t want to destroy the planet. Thankfully, Jeff Vader doesn’t work there.)
The existence of the Higgs particle, also called the God Particle, has only been predicted so far. It was first proposed by University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs in 1965, after coming from a walk on the mountains. If confirmed by the LHC, it could bring scientists closer to the Grand Unified Theory, “which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces.”
The Force can also explain why the fourth, gravity, is weak compared to the other three: electromagnetism, strong force, and weak force. I guess the strong force is the good one and the weak force is really the Dark Side. I don’t know. I’m lost now, so I’m just going to list other of the cool stuff that the LHC will produce: strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.
Now, the only question left after they discover the real Force that bind us all is: do they have a canteen at the LHC? And if so, is it run by Jeff Vader or Mr. Stevens? [CERN, Wikipedia, National Geographic via The Force.net — all pics copyright CERN and Flickr]
Yes, again. Because I can’t have enough of that clip.
Microsoft held the inaugural Xbox LIVE Arcade Awards at this year’s GDC in San Francisco where 26,000+ users voted for their favorite XBLA games. There were 10 categories wherein finalists were determined by industry journalists. The winners for the first six categories were chosen by popular vote. The last four categories were determined by sales, […]
Microsoft held the inaugural Xbox LIVE Arcade Awards at this year’s GDC in San Francisco where 26,000+ users voted for their favorite XBLA games. There were 10 categories wherein finalists were determined by industry journalists. The winners for the first six categories were chosen by popular vote. The last four categories were determined by sales, gameplay data and by Metacritic score or staff vote. Without further ado, I present to you the winners:
· Best Overall Arcade Game: “Bomberman Live” (Hudson Entertainment)
· Best Classic Game: “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night” (Konami Digital Entertainment)
· Ideal Original Game: “Pac-Man: Championship Edition” (NAMCO BANDAI Games)
· Best Family-Friendly Game: “Pac-Man: Championship Edition” (NAMCO BANDAI Games)
· Best Competitive Multiplayer Game: “Bomberman Live” (Hudson Entertainment)
I find it extremely ironic that the Fonz makes an appearance in this installment of the YSAP. Why? Well, after episode 6 a few people muttered something about it having jumped the shark. I personally think it’s still funny. How Donnie ends this episode is proof that it hasn’t jumped the shark. I’m still laughing. […]
I find it extremely ironic that the Fonz makes an appearance in this installment of the YSAP. Why? Well, after episode 6 a few people muttered something about it having jumped the shark. I personally think it’s still funny. How Donnie ends this episode is proof that it hasn’t jumped the shark. I’m still laughing. What do you guys think?
The Register’s Bill Ray has an article about what we might expect from Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Danger, maker of the popular Sidekick operating system. It seems that, according to Ray, Microsoft’s looking to shift away from Windows Mobile as a user interface towards Windows Mobile as a platform upon which developers can overlay their own […]
The Register’s Bill Ray has an article about what we might anticipate from Microsoft’s current acquisition of Danger, maker of the popular Sidekick operating system.
It seems that, according to Ray, Microsoft’s looking to shift away from Windows Mobile as a user interface towards Windows Mobile as a platform upon which developers can overlay their own shell-like user interfaces, a strategy evidenced by Microsoft’s interoperability announcement earlier today. He likens it to how Windows 3.1 gave way to a host of alternative interfaces. I clearly remember Packard Bell Navigator as one such shell. That oughta date me. Anyone else use Packard Bell Navigator?
Microsoft might leverage Danger’s expertise in the proxy browsing and messaging areas that work so well on the Sidekick. I used the original Sidekick and the Sidekick II for quite a while and I miss the seamless synchronization of my e-mails and contacts to T-Mobile’s site. We might see something like that out of Microsoft in the near future.
Does Flash Video need DRM? Adobe thinks so, and is making a push for just such technology for the Flash Player 9 and Server 3 software suites. Using encryption and a licensing system, licensed viewers would be able to watch content in their subscriptions, but nobody else. This type of DRM isn’t for YouTube, at least […]
Does Flash Video need DRM? Adobe thinks so, and is making a push for just such technology for the Flash Player 9 and Server 3 software suites. Using encryption and a licensing system, licensed viewers would be able to watch content in their subscriptions, but nobody else.
This type of DRM isn’t for YouTube, at least not yet. It will likely first show up in corporate communications to rival Windows Media Server’s DRM and Real’s Helix DRM, but later “premium” subscribers to sites like YouTube could get DRMed streaming content at a small price, or something like that. We’ll see what happens.
I tend to have a cup of tea and some cereal before I do anything in the morning, but Nicholas Paul Johnson swears by his Turing alarm clock. Powered by an PIC16 microcontroller, Johnson used a four-buck LCD display and has, very sweetly, made the whole thing free and open-source. [cheaphack via MAKE]
That space survival horror (wha?) game by EA, Deadspace, will have its own comic book series starting next month. Personally, I know tiny about the game (other than what’s on Wikipedia) and even less about comic books writ massive. The guys behind the comic, Ben Templesmith and Antony Johnston, are famous in the comic book […]
That space survival horror (wha?) game by EA, Deadspace, will have its own comic book series starting next month. Personally, I know tiny about the game (other than what’s on Wikipedia) and even less about comic books writ large. The guys behind the comic, Ben Templesmith and Antony Johnston, are famous in the comic book world (again, thank you, Wikipedia), with Templesmith being the artiste behind such works as Fell and 30 Days of Night and Johnston writing Wasteland.
This media cross-polinization leads me to believe a few things. One, EA sees the game as being popular with the comic book crowd, which, to my knowledge (with friends into that whole scene), is a very picky bunch; they’re hardcore gamers prone to own obscure games like Rez and Mario Paint. Two, EA is confident enough of the game’s universe and story that it licensed it out to be turned into a comic book. That’s a positive signal about the game’s quality. Plus, survival horror, when executed well, is pretty great, probably my favorite genre after fighting games. I was a Tekken 3 addict, pretty much.
Nice. This is an adaptation of VNsea called “Touchpad.app” that allows you to use your iPhone as a computer touchpad by leveraging VNC remote networking technology. I’d guess it’d work with an iPod Touch as well but mine’s not jailbroken and nobody on the source site seems to have tried it, so your mileage might […]
Customer number forty to the Genius Bar. Customer number forty? Forty-one? They didn’t announce anything. They played some hard rock. It apparently wasn’t very secret — we all just don’t listen to the right FM stations. End of story. Linkin Park played the Apple Soho store [DailySwarm] ShareThis
Customer number forty to the Genius Bar. Customer number forty? Forty-one?
They didn’t announce anything. They played some hard rock. It apparently wasn’t very secret — we all just don’t listen to the right FM stations. End of story.
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.
CERN’s scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and 
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