Items tagged with rain
Need a new storage device? Who doesn't, right? Rain Computers has delivered the StormDrive multimedia external hard drive, a pocket-sized device that's all-black and just slightly larger than a deck of cards. It's a USB 3.0 unit, and tucked within is the same hard drive architecture used in Rain’s popular LiveBook Mobile Audio Workstation and the amazing new LiveBook V2 Mobile Video + Graphics Workstation. Users are offered a choice of conventional 250GB, 500GB or 750GB high performance drives which spin at 7200 RPM and use a larger than average 16 megabyte cache to prevent bottlenecks and dropouts. A Solid State Drive, or SSD, is also available. The newer SATA III SSD drives are available...
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"Making it rain" has never seemed so appropriate. Rain Computers has just introduced their new multimedia workstation, the Nimbus M2. It's detailed as a "powerhouse" for audio and video production, which -- we guess -- could end up making you enough cash to seriously make it rain. This is the follow-up to the original Nimbus, replete with a 6-core processor, NVIDIA Quadro 600 Workstation Video Card and 8GB or 16GB of memory right out of the box. The Nimbus M2 is built, in part, on the success of the Phenom II X6 6-Core processor developed by AMD, as well as 32GB of memory, an external HDD bay and a new cooling system developed by NZXT that combines modular cooling fans with advanced acoustic...
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It was really annoying, despite all the snazziness of the iPhone 3G, that it didn't include a voice dial application built-into the OS. After all, most of the smartphones we had been using of late (mostly Windows Mobile) had voice dialing built-in.And while some never use voice dialing, in reality, for safety reasons, voice dialing is the only way to go --- at least while driving. And sometimes, for legal reasons, too, if the state you are in requires a hands-free setup while driving. If a cop catches you holding up your cell phone to dial, he may feel you are violating the hands-free law.When we first bought the iPhone 3G, there were some voice dialing apps available through the App Store, but...
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Gaming controllers, be it a gamepad, joystick, wheel or mouse, are some of the central defining elements of any gaming experience. Any gamer with a modicum of experience knows how a bad controller or control scheme can completely ruin the experience of playing an otherwise excellent game. Judging from the huge variety of input devices available, we put a high value on the kind of immersiveness that a good controller-to-game match can create. While game controllers come in all shapes, sizes and colors, the input technologies they feature are surprisingly universal. Nearly all game controllers receive some or all of their input from various switches of some type. More advanced controllers...
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OCZ lays claim to being the first company to bring a "brain-computer" interface to the retail market and they have aimed it squarely at the gamer. The device is called the NIA, which is an acronym that stands for Neural Impulse Actuator, and instead of buttons, sticks, gyroscopes or motion sensors, it reads the body's natural biosignals and translates them into commands that can be used to control PC games. No question, it's a pretty wild product. Go now and see....
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Back in the day, it looked like Napster was going to bust the digital music business wide open. They were sued back to the stone age over copyright infringement, and more or less dropped from sight. Apple leaped into the breach, offering legal but locked music for their iPods through their own online store. Well, zombie Napster is back in a big way. They're now offering the world's largest library of digital music in the MP3 format for just 99 cents a track, or about 10 bucks for an album. And it's all DRM-free. Napster's download store is more than 50% larger than any other MP3 store and boasts not only the largest major label MP3 catalog in the industry, but also the largest library of...
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Doctor Irving Biederman is a neuroscientist at USC. He's been studying volunteers' brain activity while showing them a series of pictures of various subjects. His human guinea pigs had the greatest brain activity when shown a scene that "presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted," and were offered in the format of a "good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery." Viewing such images literally releases pleasure-causing chemicals in your body, and work on the most primitive parts of our brain. Behold: it's the reason you can't stop reading the Internet.When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more...
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Man certainly has done some amazing things pushing the boundaries of technology but what really gets our groove on here at HH is marveling at the might and muscle of human achievement in computing technologies. Take for example, the 7th fastest super computer structure in the world, Tera-10, that is commissioned for service by France's Atomic Energy Commission. Built on 544 Bull NovaScale servers, each featuring eight dual-core Intel Itanium processors and offering 42.9 Teraflops in performance, they better be putting it to use solving energy problems because running the thing definitely has light-dimming ramifications. On the other hand, get a load of this. Little ol'...
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This announcement has the makings of a future scandal written all over it. First it was BALCO. Then Marion Jones had to give up her gold medals for doping. And now Barry Bonds is under federal indictment for allegedy using HGH. Next up, Johnaton "Fatal1ty" Wendel is locked up for cheating for using FpsBrain... The First Neural Accelerator for Computer Gamers FpsBrain supports the mental performance of players No matter if you talk about track and field, cycling or swimming - if there is money involved in athletics, performance improvement is an important matter. Electronic sports is becoming more and more professional. The most evolved e-sports industry in South Korea...
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Last Friday Nintendo announced a raincheck program, exclusive to GameStop. This program is for those of you desperate for a Wii, willing to wait until January, and willing to shop at GameStop. Today GameStop outlined the details.A limited number of reservations will be available at each store and only one reservation can be made per household.The reservation process requires payment in full at $249.99 plus tax, to guarantee delivery in January. Customers will receive a custom-designed DVD case emblazoned with a Wii and the iconic Mario character wishing a "Happy Holidays! Your Wii is on the Way!" Inside the DVD case is a guarantee slip that provides gift-giver guidelines and an explanation...
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Still can't get a Nintendo Wii? Join the club. However, there might be a possible solution, if you don't mind putting a piece of paper under the tree, as well as a somewhat fuzzy delivery date.Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime told a telephone news conference that shoppers who pay the full price of about $249 for an out-of-stock Wii on December 20 and 21 at retailer GameStop Corp will get a certificate promising a Wii "sometime in January."The program is exclusive to GameStop. The executive declined to say how many units would be available, but noted that the video game specialty retailer had "many tens of thousands" of rain checks.Instead of a large box under the tree with a Wii...
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It's no secret (at least, by now it'd better not be!) that the iPhone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery. In fact, lawsuits have been filed over it. But the firm Exradia thinks not only was this an oversight, it is a health risk.Exradia has launched a range of replacement batteries for popular models of mobile phones which incorporate its special magic circuit to interfere with the bad RF coming from your handset, but iPhone users, with their non-replaceable battery, will just have to suffer.According to the release Exradia are "...surprised Apple has chosen to ignore this potential health issue", though the company admits there's no evidence that mobile phones cause problems...
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Given a choice, pay or don't pay? Which would you choose? Or would you at least give a token amount? That's the question asked by a study by comScore. Of those who downloaded Radiohead's digital album, In Rainbows last month, about 62 percent walked away with the music without paying a cent, reported ComScore, an Internet research company. About 17 percent plunked down between a penny and $4, far below the $12 and $15 retail price of a CD. The next largest group (12 percent) was willing to pay between $8 and $12--the cost of most albums at Apple's iTunes is $9.99. They were followed by the 6 percent who paid between $4.01 and $8 and 4 percent coughed up between $12 and $20....
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Who would have thought of a cell phone that could double as health monitor and inspirational trainer? Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc., that's who.So what all does a cell phone/fitness trainer do for you?It's probably a shorter list of things it won't do for you:“The sensor can tell whether you're walking, running, climbing stairs, or resting, and counts the calories accordingly to tally daily totals, Tobita said."It's with you wherever you go, like a portable personal trainer," he said.Like Nike Inc.'s +Nike technology, the handset also keeps track of jogs, letting users set targets and keeping track of time, distance, and calories burnt — all while listening to music through headphones.Hold the...
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And your kid thought it was hard enough beating that gym boss on Pokemon Diamond. Soon the machine will read their mind too and really start messing with 'em. "A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber. But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology. Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling...
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Gaming freaks desperately want to believe that blasting their way through the universe is not just an interesting waste of time. Well, researchers from the University of Rochester are about to give them more....er... ammo for their arguments. The idea that gaming influences visual performance appears non-controversial; the authors cite seven papers indicating that gamers outperform nongamers in a variety of visual tests, including the ability to track a large number of objects at once, and to process a stream of objects that only appear briefly. But success in visual resolution tasks, such as picking a single object out of a set of nearby distractors,...
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Canon and Toshiba found two old men to shake hands like they hate each other in front of a big old newfangled SED flatscreen TV, and everybody took their picture. They also found $1.7 billion dollars in one of their desk drawers and decided to build a great big factory in Japan and crank out enormous cheap flatscreens by 2008. Canon Inc. and Toshiba Corp. are developing a new type of flat panels, which they say are thinner and consume less energy than the existing liquid crystal display (LCD) and plasma televisions. The production of the new surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) TVs would start at the end of 2007, and expand into...
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More brilliant conjecture from the mind of a politician. It seems that Hillary Clinton is concerned with the rate at which technology is advancing and thinks that "people" will be planting chips into kids' brains to promote their products. Wildly intelligent opinion, Hil. First let's assume parents will have no control on what gets implanted into their children's bodies, and then let's stop technology's advancement and prevent people from advertising so the government can tell us all what to buy while addressing the nation on AM radio. "At the rate that technology is advancing, people will be implanting chips in our children to advertise directly into their...
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