CrunchGear |  |
- New Drobo FS focuses on sharing and cloud access
- PS3 goes portable (kind of) with Hori’s LCD screen dock
- New Hitachi tech to double lithium-ion battery life
- Daily Crunch: Bear Test Edition
- What’s the secret message on the USB drive?
- How can we make MobileCrunch better for you?
- HP Slate specs leak, get compared the iPad
- Don’t buy Lord Of The Rings on Blu-ray (yet)
- Windows 7 market share growing
- Video: Sonic 4 footage has a mine cart (a mine cart!)
- First impressions of Zune firmware 4.5: Video playback works nicely, Smart DJ less nicely
- Remember the Linux wristwatch?
- An Interview with Mike Davey about his Homemade Turing machine
- The 4 signs your HDTV isn’t properly configured
- Joel Johnson on the iPad
- AT&T may have bailed on Tiger, but they still want you to watch the Masters on your phone
- Where a radio controlled Nissan Sentra SE-R is used to sell the real thing
- Zune Firmware 4.5 hits the streets
- There’s a Resident Evil 4 for the iPad?!
- HP Shows Off Their Slate’s Social Networking Features, Wants You To Remember They Have a Slate
| New Drobo FS focuses on sharing and cloud access Posted: 06 Apr 2010 05:26 AM PDT
The files are accessible from Mac, PC, or [enter recent OS here], and the guts are similar to other Drobos. You’ve got five slots for hard drives and Drobo pulls the same old magic of swapping and backing up and making sure you’re safe even if one of your hard drives croaks. They know how much those old IRC Evangelion rips matter to you, and with their tools for remote access, now you’ll never have to be without videos of your ferns to show that girl at the bar so she’ll know you’re totally not weird and are capable of taking care of something and loving even though you’ve been going off on the historical significance of Fist of the North Star for the last hour. But I digress. What cloud capabilities, you say? They’ve partnered with Oxygen to put together a Drobo App called Oxygen Cloud, which creates a nice, secure cloud access protocol. It lets you tunnel securely to your data no matter where you are, and you can set up all the permissions and logins that you might have with a more expensive file server solution. Plus you know you’ve got the data right where you can find it — or destroy it, depending on what circumstances call for. There are plenty of other apps available, too; run a Bittorrent client on there and you can say it was the robot that downloaded those Oscar-winning films, the robot, you villains, unhand me this moment! Here’s their little graphic for that. You can set it up to back up in other cloud storage too, if you don’t trust your office mates to leave the Drobo alone. I like how they used the iPad mockup there.
I can see this as being really handy for media professionals, who don’t care to carry their entire terabyte video or photo portfolio with them, but dare not rely on Flickr or Vimeo either. As for myself, I like my media the way I like my coffee: local. What can I say? I’m just old-fashioned. The FS looks handy, though. It’s available nowish at your favorite e-tailer. Naked it’s $700, but you can get it pre-loaded with drives as well, including a 10TB trim level for $1450.
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| PS3 goes portable (kind of) with Hori’s LCD screen dock Posted: 06 Apr 2010 03:22 AM PDT
This is something gadget modder Ben Heck might have thought about, but if yes, Japanese game peripheral maker HORI (which also sells stuff in the US) was faster this time. The company today announced [JP] a portable LCD screen, which, once attached to the top of a PS3 Slim, makes the console (somewhat) portable. The HP3-87 will be marketed by HORI as a PS3 Slim docking station. It allows users to play games on the go (again: kind of), with images in 720p quality on an 11.6-inch screen with 1,366×768 resolution, 200cd/m2 brightness, 500:1 contrast ratio and 7ms response time. The device is also compatibe with torne, Sony’s Japan-only DVR/TV tuner for PS3.
It’s licensed by Sony and sized at 295×255×55mm. Buyers also get a built-in stereo speaker, two headphone jacks, and component/ multi-AV out interfaces.
Hori is planning to start selling the HP3-87 in Japan on May 27 for $280. No word yet from the company regarding an international release, but Hori says the model announced today is for use in Japan only (it can switch between NTSC and Pal though).
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| New Hitachi tech to double lithium-ion battery life Posted: 06 Apr 2010 02:21 AM PDT
Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, powering small gadgets, cars or even buildings. It’s not a surprise to see a number of companies currently working on improvements. Just a few weeks ago, we reported about Japan-based Eamex, which claimed their prototype battery can be charged and discharged over 10,000 times and can be used for about 20 years. And now Hitachi is claiming a new material they developed could double the life span of lithium ion batteries. The company has partnered up with Shin-Kobe Electric Machinery, saying batteries based on the material could be used in smart grid applications (Hitachi says that segment alone will be worth $32 billion by 2020). The battery’s positive electrode will not use expensive cobalt, but manganese, which is much cheaper. Hitachi claims the “secret sauce” of the new battery is a metal additive, which will boost its life span to 10 years, double that of existing manganese lithium-ion batteries. The company announced it’s expecting to have the new battery and peripheral equipment ready as early as fiscal 2010, which, under the Japanese calendar, will end at the end of March 2011. Hitachi also says the battery can not only be used in smart grid applications but also might find its way into construction machinery and hybrid vehicles in the future (pictured above is a Hitachi-made lithium-ion battery for those vehicles announced last year). Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
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| Daily Crunch: Bear Test Edition Posted: 06 Apr 2010 12:00 AM PDT |
| What’s the secret message on the USB drive? Posted: 05 Apr 2010 08:30 PM PDT
The message is contained in an audio file and text document, and have very little actual information. The person in the audio file reads out the following letters: MOD ZZZ JNQRYD3FRP The text document contains the following words (tags?):
What does it all mean? Well, I’m not good with cryptography, but maybe you are. Of course you could cheat and just highlight the area at the bottom with your mouse to see the solution, but I’m thinking you might enjoy a challenge. Joystiq cracked it, the code translates to http://gknova6.com and looks to be a upcoming game from Bethesda Softworks. The gknova6 site is interesting in an of itself, and worth looking at. [via IGN UK]
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| How can we make MobileCrunch better for you? Posted: 05 Apr 2010 06:55 PM PDT
Hello, CrunchGear reader! So here’s the deal. Our sister site, MobileCrunch, is doing well. Like really, really well. February was MC’s biggest month ever, and then March went and made February look silly. That makes the people upstairs happy – and when they’re happy, we’re all happy, because we get to make improvements. So we turn to you, dear reader, and ask: What do you want from MobileCrunch? Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
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| HP Slate specs leak, get compared the iPad Posted: 05 Apr 2010 05:00 PM PDT
Looking at this, I think I’ll be buying a Slate. HP looks to have a better processor, more ports, and (more) open operating system. I think it just goes to show that while the first salvo in the tablet wars has definitely been fired, it ain’t over yet. Oh, and $549 for 32GB version? Nice!
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| Don’t buy Lord Of The Rings on Blu-ray (yet) Posted: 05 Apr 2010 04:30 PM PDT
Sometimes, I really hate movie studios. This is one of those times, because you know as soon as you buy this release of LOTR, the theatrical version, the studio will release the shiny new extended cut version that you’re going to want to buy. It’s called double dipping, and it’s evil. The extras that are coming out tomorrow aren’t bad, but you know they’ve got another version coming out soon. So I say save your $99 (or $59.99 if you look around) and wait for the version with a good transfer, and the director’s cut. Otherwise you’ll be sorry. Probably in about 3 months, I suspect.
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| Windows 7 market share growing Posted: 05 Apr 2010 03:00 PM PDT
With the popularity of Windows 7, there’s been a noticeable decline in Vista’s marketshare. It’s even impacting Windows XP, with the most popular OS slipping down gradually into oblivion. Windows 7 is expected to surpass Vista sometime in June though, with the much hated OS getting replaced by the new kid. Oh, and where does OS X come in? A gradually increasing 5.3%. [via Computerworld]
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| Video: Sonic 4 footage has a mine cart (a mine cart!) Posted: 05 Apr 2010 02:30 PM PDT
There’s not too much going on out there that doesn’t begin with “i” and end with “will it save the media“, so here’s some Sonic 4 footage. Very reminiscent of a Donkey Kong Country level…
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| First impressions of Zune firmware 4.5: Video playback works nicely, Smart DJ less nicely Posted: 05 Apr 2010 02:00 PM PDT
Great news, everyone! I just upgraded my Zune HD’s firmware to the latest and greatest version, version 4.5, and I’m here to report that everything went smoothly… mostly. I probably shouldn’t have used the word “everything,” then. I can now play Xvid videos just fine, having tested an old SummerSlam 2001 DVD rip that I had in my Zune video folder. (Why I have old WWE DVD rips on my hard drive is a matter for another day.) So no problems whatsoever in that regard. Smart DJ, on the other hand, seems just OK. You touch the little icon and off the Zune goes, trying to find similar artists and genres based on your current artist selection. The thing is, the results are sorta lackluster. Like, I’ll activate Smart DJ when looking at Pearl Jam, and it’ll throw back other songs from the same album, or merely other Pearl Jam songs from different albums. Same thing goes with Jay-Z. I thought the point was new music discovery? Or, even more weird (but in a different way), I’ll activate Smart DJ while looking at Ladytron and it’ll create a playlist including Wu-Tang Clan. What do Ladytron and Wu-Tang have in common? Unless I missed some sort of experimental phase of the Wu-Tang Clan, I’m gonna say they don’t have very much in common! It’s not always like that—I’ll pick Yeah Yeah Yeahs and it’ll make a playlist including Phoenix. That at least makes sense—it’s all indie rock nonsense. Presumably Smart DJ improves the more music you have on your Zune HD, and since I only have a 16GB version… Good thing there’s a 64GB version! So, video playback works splendidly, but Smart DJ is a little iffy. The feature I’d like to see most, especially if Microsoft is pushing the Zune HD as a “higher end” media player? FLAC playback. Surely if the Zune HD can handle Xvid playback it can handle FLAC playback, right? Update I probably should have mentioned that I don’t have Zune Pass. I would imagine Smart DJ would work quite a bit better if it’s able to tap into the Zune Marketplace rather than merely a local library. I can only test what I have, so if anyone out there in Radio Land has Zune Pass be sure to let us know how you find Smart DJ. To be honest, I primarily use my Zune HD to listen to podcasts on the train, so Smart DJ is wasted on people like me. Still, it’s filled to the brim with music (I only keep the most recent podcast on there at all time, out of say five podcasts) and that’s how it worked for me. Your results may vary, etc.
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| Remember the Linux wristwatch? Posted: 05 Apr 2010 01:30 PM PDT
Is it useful? Hardly! Is it cool? Oh yes! Read the whole IBM’s Linux Wristwatch blast from the past at FreeOS.com.
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| An Interview with Mike Davey about his Homemade Turing machine Posted: 05 Apr 2010 01:12 PM PDT
CG: First and foremost, we want to know who is Mike Davey, and what does he do? MIKE: I’ve worked in the printing industry all my life. I’ve never had any formal training in EE, CS, fabrication, machining, or math much beyond algebra for that matter. I strongly believe in Wisconsin’s goal of life long learning though and have picked up many of these things as I’ve needed them. I got my first computer in 1979 and have been programming ever since. Like many people in robots and technology I started taking things apart at an early age. Over the years I’ve built many things like: telescope, metal lathe, CNC router, furniture, RC boats and planes, robots, clocks. I really just enjoy building things, and it’s best if there is no pressure to get it done. I now spend most of my work time developing Web based e-commerce systems for the printing industry. And just to really throw all stereotypes out the window, I’m a partner in a fish farm that raises and sells tilapia fry and fingerlings to schools for use in agriculture training. CG: So what was the motivation for making the Turing machine? How long did it take? MIKE: I love to build things, it’s never been done, and the picture I had in my head of it was just too cool to not build it. When I realized it could be done, I just had to. I wasn’t really keeping track of time on the project but I’m guessing it’s in the 150 – 200 hour range. I know I started the end of last October and I finished the end of February. So that works out to maybe 18 weeks and I can’t get more than about 10 hours a week worth of work into a project, normally it is much less. CG: Reader James Rowland asks on our original post “Why did you not just use dots for your bits. There is a lot of excess involved in drawing out ones and zeroes while hardly any functionality is added.” MIKE: This is something that has come up a few times. For me it was really about aesthetics and not about efficiency. When it come to something like this the real question is where do you stop. My goal was “the” Turing machine that I see in my mind when I think about them. That Turing machine is the one described in Turing’s paper, with numbers and letters written on a strip of paper. Using dots on the tape would have been much faster and more efficient, but if I went that far then why even write on the tape at all, the bits could be written as magnetic fields saved on a ferric tape. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point. For me, in this project, it was all about how it looked and worked. Thinking about it now, I also think that’s why the Turing machine I built hit a nerve with so many geeks, it fit the vision that so many of us have in our minds about what a Turing machine should look like. CG: Our own Devin Coldewey wanted to try to compare the Turing machine with modern-day computer specifications. Namely, “the machine’s memory is limited only by the tape, but how many positions are on the 1000′ roll? How long would a megabyte be? And what is its maximum speed, assuming it is reading one position after another? If each read/write is considered an operation, you could probably extrapolate Hz.” MIKE: I have given some thought to as to how my Turing machines compares to what we now think of as computers. Each cell on the tape is 1.125″ wide, so there are about 9500 cell on the 1000′ tape. The way the machine runs now, writing only two characters, the tape will store about 1150 bytes of data, or just over 1K. You’d need about 870 of these 1000′ rolls to save a megabyte of data. Not really very efficient and as a friend said, I priced infinite tapes and they weren’t in my budget. The interesting part is that while magnetic hard drives are limited to storing ones and zeros only, my Turing machine tape could be written with a larger character set. If you had a character set of 256 symbols to write on the tape, then the 1000′ tape could hold 1150K worth of data. Each operation of the Turing machine takes a different amount of time. Each operation of the Turing machine consists of three parts, reading, erasing, and writing. While every operation requires a read, there are times when the tape is only: written to, only erased from, or both erased and written to. If only a read is needed the operation takes about 1 second. If all three functions are needed in an operation the total time is closer to 9 seconds. Most of the sets of states that make up a Turing “program” are a mix of operations so the speed of the machine is dependent on the program that it is running. The subtraction example I have done averages about 3.1 operations per second. The Busy Beaver programs spend a lot more time erasing and writing so its average is slower at 6.2 seconds per operation. In comparison to even the very first electronic computers this is very very slow. This will be a gross over simplification but here goes, the first PCs ran at 5Mhz and operated on an 8 bit byte. So that’s 5,000,000 * 8 or 40,000,000 bits per second. My Turing machine averages about 0.25 bits per second. So what took one of the early PCs 1 second to accomplish the Turing machine could do in just five short years. (Now there is a lot of rounding in my math there, and I know the PC didn’t do one operation per clock cycle, but the contrast is still remarkable. ) After a round of back-and-forth over email, Mike and I had a chance to chat by telephone for a bit. I don’t take particularly good notes during phone calls, but the conversation yielded some interesting observations, which I’ll summarize here. Any errors or omissions in what follows are strictly mine. Mike was a member of the Chicago Robotics Group for a long time, and even served as the president of that organization for a spell. It’s a four hour drive from his home in Wisconsin to Chicago, IL, and on the long drives to and from ChiBots meetings Mike would engage in lots of idle technical conversation with carpooling roboticists. Mike’s pretty sure that the first idea for building the Turning machine occurred on one of these treks. He really had no impetus to build the thing aside from pure self satisfaction. It’s easy to acribe all manner of secondary benefits — like computer theory education — to the Turing machine, but none of these were in Mike’s mind as he built it. He simply likes to build things! When asked whether any of the educational benefits of the Turing machine resonate with Mike, he responded that he thinks that “people need to just do things! Don’t wait for someone else to build something for you!” We spoke a little about the design decisions Mike made, and how the device might be improved (or built more faithfully, sans a microcontroller, for example). In line with his “just do it” attitude, Mike critiqued the geek fascination with perfection. There are undoubtedly lots of ways in which Mike could have built a better Turing machine, but this effort did what he envisioned, and did it “well enough”. A hard-core perfectionist might build a specific device to cut the gears used in the Turing machine, leading to a kind of factory factory factory situation (see also: yak shaving), and the Turing machine would never get built. This is a very real instance where “the perfect is the enemy of the good”: had Mike waited to perfect every aspect of the machine, he’d never have finished it! Mike, like me, is a technology generalist: he’s not formally educated in any technology disciplines, and all of his programming and hardware skills are self-taught. Mike thinks this generalist attitude make a “good enough is good enough” approach perfectly acceptable for his personal projects. That’s not to say that Mike is a slacker. He admits that he likes a well designed, beautiful product as much as the next geek; but even those beautiful devices have compromises.
I’m with you 100%, Mike! Mike has shared most of the data necessary for enterprising hackers to build their own Turing machines. He’s been in contact with a couple of college professors who are probably going to create their own, based on Mike’s work. As for the original, he’s going to show it off at a couple speaking engagements in the coming months, and then he’s not sure. He’s talking with the Computer History Museum, as well as a couple of other possible homes for his creation. What’s next for Mike?
Thanks a lot to Mike Davey for not only making a very cool Turing machine, but for taking the time to talk to us about it. Now get out there, geeks, follow Mike’s example, and build something cool!!
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| The 4 signs your HDTV isn’t properly configured Posted: 05 Apr 2010 01:00 PM PDT
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| Posted: 05 Apr 2010 12:44 PM PDT “Getting the iPad is like getting a new puppy.” Another beautiful video by Joel of the Johnson Family.
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| AT&T may have bailed on Tiger, but they still want you to watch the Masters on your phone Posted: 05 Apr 2010 12:14 PM PDT
This post was originally supposed to be a nice little summary of how AT&T would be bringing the 2010 Masters Golf Tournament to their wireless customers. Then we remembered that AT&T bailed as a sponsor of Tiger Woods, a Masters golfer, after something from his personal life became public knowledge. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
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| Where a radio controlled Nissan Sentra SE-R is used to sell the real thing Posted: 05 Apr 2010 11:47 AM PDT Car commercials are as old as TV. There’s nothing really exciting about the format anymore because we already know the format. To sell a luxury car, a B-rate celebrity often points out the finer things. Trucks commercials showcase manly men preforming manly tasks. So it’s only fitting really that that an R/C car is the star of a Nissan Sentra SE-R spot. (because they have similar driving characteristic. You got that, right?) Anyway, the clip above is the upcoming commercial, but the real treat is the 7 minute video after the jump that shows the great lengths taken to make the novel spot happen. [via Autoblog]
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| Zune Firmware 4.5 hits the streets Posted: 05 Apr 2010 11:25 AM PDT Microsoft just dropped the Zune 4.5 firmware update, and it looks promising. I mean, who doesn’t want more video codecs and a smart DJ? If you want to update, just plug in your Zune and fire up the software, it should download automatically. Then you can XVid your eyes out.
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| There’s a Resident Evil 4 for the iPad?! Posted: 05 Apr 2010 11:00 AM PDT
My interest in the iPad just went up significantly: For $12.99 you can get Resident Evil 4 [iTunes link], iPad edition? We’re truly living in the future.
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| HP Shows Off Their Slate’s Social Networking Features, Wants You To Remember They Have a Slate Posted: 05 Apr 2010 10:17 AM PDT HP may not have shipping product but by gar they’re going to show you mock-ups. The HP slate may not be shipping and there may be another slate overshadowing it this week but HP wants you to know it runs social networking apps. The slate, which has a 10-inch screen, will run Windows 7 and should cost a little under $600 when it is released this summer. I would love to see other players in the slate space but what I’d really love to see are slate players who are shipping. I think the major manufacturers pussy-foot around too much when it comes to releasing products and then release too much collateral on the run-up to launch, thereby destroying any anticipation. This is definitely a case of poop or get off the potty, HP. Let’s see the goods.
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There were a bunch of USB keys sent out to gaming outlets today, with no return address and only a cryptic message. What could it mean? 
Uh oh! Sounds like someone is going to be in trouble. The word is out on the probable spec and pricing on the HP Slate, and HP is definitely aware of the iPad. Obviously an internal document, it’s very interesting to see exactly what HP considers a threat, and what they consider to be an advantage. 
So Lord of the Rings (hereafter called LOTR) is coming out on Blu-ray tomorrow. Cool, having it in HD will nice. Better sound and 
Don’t look now, but Windows 7 is taking over. And while Vista is still in the number 2 spot overall, Windows 7 has reached that critical 10% milestone almost a year earlier then Vista. Having used both version of the OS, it’s pretty obvious why.
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