CrunchGear |  |
- Review: EOS wireless speaker system
- xkcd charts characters from LOTR, Star Wars, Jurassic Park & more, I waste my morning
- Video: Strange Japanese hamburger vending machine
- In Soviet uTorrent, bandwidth throttles you!
- NSA to store yottabytes of surveillance data in Utah megarepository (update: not so much)
- CrunchGear Week in Review: Monster Mash Edition
- Texting and driving now banned in New York State
| Review: EOS wireless speaker system Posted: 02 Nov 2009 05:30 AM PST
The Core System Aside from the line-in jack, the back of the base station has a power port, a toggle switch for the Range Extended feature, and a link button which is used to set a unique ID for your Eos base station. In the unlikely event that your neighbor also buys an Eos, you can use the link button to make sure that your wireless speakers only play music from your base station. The remote control is small, and the kind of thing I’d lose pretty quickly. I confirmed that the remote would operate a docked iPod, and then never touched it again. Maybe I’m an anomaly, but I usually just listen to my music on “shuffle”, and don’t have any need to interact with the iPod once the music starts playing. The speakers in the base station were good. Speaker reviews are always a little tricky, because listening to music is such a subjective experience. So I won’t linger too longer here other than to say that I was entirely satisfied with the audio quality and the richness of the sound produced. Expansion The speakers sounded as good as the base station: no complaints on audio quality. The wireless speakers are billed as an all-in-one design, such that you plug the whole thing into the wall. You can certainly do that, but I find them to be a little too big for that kind of use. The power plug can be removed from the speaker, allowing you a little more flexibility with placement. I found that to be a really handy feature, though the power cord was, in most cases, just a little too short to allow me to place the speakers where I wanted. Also, removing the power plug from the speaker is a somewhat daunting process. The instructions — and a sticker on the speaker itself — says to “press down hard”. They’re not kidding. You have to really exert some force to get the plug free. Also, the power plugs are gigantic wall warts. Don’t expect to share an outlet with any other device, regardless of whether you use the all-in-one design or remove the plug from the speaker. GigaWave Technology
I didn’t notice any interference or static, despite the countless WiFi and Bluetooth devices I have on at any one time. The speakers inside the house all worked fine, and it was fun to rock out to music through my abode without having to make any single source obscenely loud. The range is listed as 150 feet. I put a speaker in my garage, which is maybe 75 feet from where I had the base station. In the default configuration, the signal would drop out pretty frequently. There was no static, and no faded signal: either it played, or it didn’t. I then enabled the Range Extender feature, which was surprisingly well-explained in the user manual:
The Range Extender feature didn’t make for a perfect transmission to my garage, but it did make it noticeably better. There were still brief outages in my music playback, but there were far less and they were far shorter than when the Range Extender was off. Uses If you want to manage your music, you’ll either need to deal with the ergonomics of using an iPod in the dock, or use the remote control. And remember, there’s no volume control with an iPod. As the manual states, “iPod volume jog wheel changes the headphone volume only and has no effect on the Eos base station volume.” So you’ll need to manually adjust volume on a per-room basis. Perhaps a better solution is to connect the Eos base station to your Apple TV, or that home media PC that stores all your music. If you’re using iTunes, you can use the iPhone Remote app to control the music and the master volume from your phone. The Bottom Line The retail price for the Core system (base station + one speaker) is $249 USD. That strikes me as a little much. It looks like there’s a sale going on right now, though, making that Core bundle only $199. I’m still not sure that’s a good price, but hey, it’s $50 you get to keep.
|
| xkcd charts characters from LOTR, Star Wars, Jurassic Park & more, I waste my morning Posted: 02 Nov 2009 05:19 AM PST
Damn, xkcd comics. I got up early this morning – with a little help from the time change – with good intentions. That was until I saw the new xkcd comic that charts character grouping throughout some of the most epic movies. I wasted my morning looking at this damn thing and you probably will too. Don’t blame me though. I warned you.
|
| Video: Strange Japanese hamburger vending machine Posted: 02 Nov 2009 03:01 AM PST
Everybody knows Japan loves them vending machines. And even though machines selling panties don’t exist over here, you can still find strange models from time to time. Case in point: A hamburger vending machine in Tokyo [JP] that sells one burger at a time because it’s operated manually. The machine is owned by a guy running a restaurant right behind it. Insert a 100 Yen coin ($1.10) and you’ll get a so-called “Tateishi Hamburger”, but don’t expect a second coin to get you another one. In that case, you need to walk into the restaurant and directly order from the owner who says all of his burgers are handmade. Here’s how the machine looks from behind:
There’s also a “Royal Tateishi Burger”, which costs 300 Yen and comes out of a second vending machine that stands right next to the 100 Yen model. According to the owner, 20-30 people order a burger through the machines per day. This picture shows the 100 Yen burger:
This video shows how the mechanism works: Via Japan Probe
|
| In Soviet uTorrent, bandwidth throttles you! Posted: 01 Nov 2009 08:15 PM PST
The uTP protocol is an extension of the bittorrent protocol, and essentially times packets being transferred and calculates if there is any serious delay. The idea is that this would only kick in when the network is being stressed. We’ll see how this turns out, but who knows what other implementations of this sort we’ll be seeing. The net neutrality battle is likely to be marked by compromises on both sides. Expect to see measures taken in other areas like VoIP. It’s progress… I guess.
|
| NSA to store yottabytes of surveillance data in Utah megarepository (update: not so much) Posted: 01 Nov 2009 06:28 PM PST
There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet? As for the medium on which the data might be stored on, that’s anybody’s guess. Whoever’s making the estimates is probably playing a bit fast and loose with exponential curves, but if any of the alternative storage technologies we cover here on CG are any indication, yottabytes won’t seem so big a few years from now. We can be sure, however, that despite their better dollars-per-gigabyte cost, spinning hard disks won’t be in use as a main medium. The electricity required, mean time before failure, and other maintenance issues are probably unacceptable for an economy-minded government agency — interestingly, it seems that lack of electricity is one of the NSA’s primary concerns. The article mentions that the NSA’s equivalent in the UK, the Government Communications Headquarters, asked that all telecoms providers store and hand over a huge amount of customer data for an entire year. They refused, citing “grave misgivings” and noting that at any rate the level of data collection expected was “impossible in principle.” Tut tut! Those Brits lacked the American can-do spirit. Thus it was that AT&T and other telecoms instantly complied with US mandates following September 11. The extent of the government’s meddling with switches, routers, antennas, and so on may never be fully known, but I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone reading this article isn’t on the record somewhere. Storage capacity of this magnitude implies a truly unprecedented amount of subjects for monitoring. There is talk of the NSA shutting down altogether or being rolled into another agency, but I suspect that the “too big to fail” idea, as well as the “our safety is worth any price” dogma, will prevent that eventuality. It’s more reasonable to ask when or if its expansion will cease being sustainable. These datacenters, and the yottabytes they will hold, are extremely expensive as well as practically having bulls-eyes painted on them to the enemy (whoever he is) — though at under $10bn the NSA’s budget is a footnote compared to other programs and agencies. So is the increasingly (to use a semi-word that is only rarely usable) tentacular NSA a necessary evil of the digital age, or a cancerous money sink born from the colossal intelligence competition of the Cold War? The answer will only be visible in retrospect years from now, perhaps when a sequel to the book being reviewed (The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, by Matthew M. Aid) is released covering the heavily-redacted records of the early 2000s. In the meantime, it’s probably best to assume that the walls have ears. (Updated with a note on storage medium) Update 2: A commenter points out that in the study cited, yottabytes are only one possible estimate for total storage requirements. The more realistic estimates are in the hundreds of petabytes, which is much easier for a datacenter to accommodate. That said, I’m leaving the post as it is because the speculation still stands with “only” hundreds of petabytes being stored in these datacenters. However, adjust your tinfoil hats accordingly. [via Metafilter]
|
| CrunchGear Week in Review: Monster Mash Edition Posted: 01 Nov 2009 12:51 PM PST
Here are some stories you might have missed this week on CrunchGear. All about the Motorola Droid
|
| Texting and driving now banned in New York State Posted: 01 Nov 2009 11:35 AM PST  Residents of New York State, beware: texting and driving is now 100 percent banned. No, it's not the first state to enact such a ban—far from it, actually—but sometimes things don't register till they happen in your backyard. The law goes into effect today, and infractions carry a maximum fine of $150.
|
Apologies for the headline, but it was too appropriate to resist. It seems that there is a feature of uTorrent 2.0 now in beta that automatically detects network congestion and 
The more salient question is, of course, what are they storing that, by some estimates, is going take up thousands of times more space than all the world’s known computers combined? Don’t think they’re going to say; they didn’t grow to their current level of shadowy omniscience by disclosing things like that to the public. However, speculation isn’t too hard on this topic. Now more than ever, surveillance is a data game. What with millions of phones being tapped and all data duplicated, constant recording of all radio traffic, 24-hour high definition video surveillance by satellite, there’s terabytes at least of data coming in every day. And who knows when you’ll have to sift through August 2007’s overhead footage of Baghdad for heat signatures in order to confirm some other intelligence?
| You are subscribed to email updates from CrunchGear To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment