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Apple Opening Pop-Up Store In Austin For SXSW

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 04:49 AM PST

Apple is setting up a pop-up store at West Sixth Street and Congress, a few blocks from SXSW proper, in order to abate the fears of the hordes of hipsters who will arrive in the city this week and find themselves far from the comforts of their hometown Apple store. The store will sell iPads 2 and the like and last for the duration of the event.

According to the American-Statesman, SXSW believes that the move is in Apple’s favor:

“There’s a huge opportunity to get brand recognition to a large audience during” SXSW, Wilemon said.

That’s right: with Apple so under-represented in the world of SXSW, I think it’s important for them to really take a stab at just showing up. It is, in short, a start. By offering a place for people to comfortably purchase their wares, they can, perhaps, take a bit of the mindshare at the event from Lenovo, Microsoft, and, most important, old school makers Wang Computer, long a perennial favorite with the creative set.

Incidentally, we TC/CG/TUAW are holding a reader meet-up in Austin and you can RSVP right here. I’ll be sure to bring my Thinkpad and Toshiba Windows Slate so we all can play Minesweeper.


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Sony Radically Reorganizes Company, Promotes PlayStation Business Head Hirai

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 03:05 AM PST

Big news from Sony: big S announced a radical internal reorganization of the entire company today, essentially “dividing” Sony into two different groups as early as April 1. At the same time, Kazuo Hirai, the head of Sony’s PlayStation segment, will be promoted and is said to have good chances to succeed Howard Stringer, the company’s current CEO.

Sony plans to combine its consumer electronics and and video game businesses, its two biggest segments, into a single new division, the “Consumer Products & Services Group”. That group will be led by Hirai who can then call himself executive deputy president as well as representative corporate executive officer.

The second new division, the “Professional & Device Solutions Group” will oversee Sony’s digital components and business-facing products. It will be led by executive deputy president Hiroshi Yoshioka (who is currently in charge of the consumer electronics segment).

What happens to Stringer? In the official press release, Sony says:

Sir Howard Stringer, Representative Corporate Executive Officer, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President, Sony Corporation, has extended his commitment to lead the Company through the next stage in its transformation.

But Japanese media are now speculating that the realignment has paved the way for Hirai to become Sony’s next CEO soon.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal however, Stringer himself said today that even though Hirai is the “leading candidate” for the job, the race isn’t over yet.

Video: Futuristic Smart House

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 01:37 AM PST

It’s not the first “next-generation home” we have covered so far, but major Japanese housing manufacturer Sekisui House‘s so-called “Smart House” is definitely one of the coolest concepts so far. Apart from Sekisui, telecom giant NTT Docomo, NEC, and Namco Bandai Games have been involved in the creation of the prototype house that was recently showcased in Japan.

In a nutshell, the idea is to combine different technologies in order to create an integrated concept that makes it possible to save energy, monitor the location of electric vehicles, store the “maintenance history” of the house, keep track of the health of the people around you, and so on. Everything can be managed with a smartphone – there are no switches in the house.

For instance, the Smart House allows people to monitor the well-being of older relatives: if he or she switches on the lights in the morning and then drives to the super market in a connected electric vehicle, you know where they are and that they’re OK (you can even get bio-signals collected by the house sent to you).

More in this video (in English, provided by Diginfonews in Tokyo):

Burton Makes A Serious Camera Backpack: The F-Stop

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 07:11 PM PST


You don’t have to only make photo gear in order to make decent photo gear, it looks like. This multi-purpose F-Stop pack would be great for the sports photographers and documentary filmmakers who spend a lot of time on the mountain.

It’s got a compartmentalized main cargo area, with room for a large SLR camera, a few lenses, and a few filters, batteries, and so on. There are the usual big-backpack luxuries, like load-balancing straps and a padded back, and this one, being a Burton bag, actually has a big strap system for mounting your board as well.

Looks solid to me. Costs $225, but they’re out of stock now. Check back later.

[via Doobybrain]

The iPad 2: Yeah, You’re Gonna Want One.

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 06:51 PM PST

In January 2010, shortly after its unveiling, I first got my hands on an iPad. My initial reaction? “The iPad is like holding the future.” And that’s funny because here we are, just a little over a year into that future, and something new has come along that makes holding the iPad 1 feel like holding the past: the iPad 2.

A week ago, after its unveiling, I got some hands on time with the new hardware and my initial assessment was that it pushed a device that already had no true competition even farther ahead. But now I’ve had the chance to actually use the thing non-stop for a week. Is my feeling the same?

Actually, it’s even stronger.

Read more…


Somebody Named Peter Ha Reviews The iPad 2

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 06:36 PM PST


I don’t know who this hippie is, or who he thinks he is, but he’s got an iPad 2 and wants you to know about it. He’s recorded this video for a publication called “The Daily,” whatever that is, and uploaded it to some video sharing service.

Wait, is that Peter? I made this guy.

Oh yeah, we reviewed it too.

Purdue Research Cracks Both Of Solar Energy’s Roadblocks, Road Opens In 2013

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 05:52 PM PST

Whenever I overhear conversations on the environment, the common consensus is always, “why don’t they just put solar panels everywhere?” As much as that would be the most optimistic scenario, there have been and still are some serious road blocks to widespread solar panel use: efficiency and cost.

The theory of lowering cost is easy. Increase production efficiency, and panel cost will lower — this is mostly straightforward, but of course, takes some time. Increasing solar efficiency (the amount of the sun’s photons that convert to electrical energy) doesn’t have such a straight forward process.

Nonetheless, humans have prevailed and it seems a few scientists at Purdue University have completed some research to improve both the cell and production efficiencies of solar panels. By using lasers to scribe microchannels in the cells, the researchers were able to improve the efficiency of inter-cell power transfer, thereby increasing overall efficiency of multi-cell thin-film solar cells.

Current solar panels are made in ways not dissimilar to microprocessor production: evaporating metals onto semiconductor substrates. The Purdue research found that cell-interconnects, made of the evaporated metals, were found to be a large source of energy loss. In order to find better materials for these cell-interconnect, the researchers turned to conducting polymers; which are getting very popular.

Conducting polymers can be made thin, transparent and flexible; perfect for solar cells as they require less material and lower costs. However, this theory required a new process to create the cells. The Purdue research purportedly is the first time lasers were used to successfully to create the interconnects. Yung Shin, professor at Purdue who led the study said, “The efficiency of solar cells depends largely on how accurate your scribing of microchannels is. If they are made as accurately as possibly, efficiency goes up.”

The ultra-fast lasers are able to create pulses lasting only picoseconds without overheating the material, creating silky smooth and sharp channels. “It creates very clean microchannels on the surface of each layer. You can do this at very high speed, meters per second, which is not possible with a mechanical scribe. This is very tricky because the laser must be precisely controlled so that it penetrates only one layer of the thin film at a time, and the layers are extremely thin. You can do that with this kind of laser because you have a very precise control of the depth, to about 10 to 20 nanometers,” said Yung Shin.

Expect to see this research make its way into the private sector in order to increase thin film cell production from 20% today to 31% in just two years.

The team has published a paper on their work at the 2011 NSF Engineering Research and Innovation Conference in January.

[via dailytech]

OS X And Safari First Casualty At Pwn2Own Hacking Contest

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 05:20 PM PST

The annual “Pwn2Own” contest has just kicked off at CanSecWest, and Apple was the first to fall. A fully-patched Snow Leopard machine running Safari was made to launch an application (Calculator) and write a file, just from visiting a specific web page. It didn’t even crash the browser!

The exploit is in Webkit, meaning it could potentially apply to iOS browsers as well, though that has yet to be demonstrated. And to be fair, most of the other browser/OS combos will get taken down over the next couple days as well.

China Switches To Homegrown CPUs For Supercomputers, Cites “Dependence On Foreign Technology”

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 04:34 PM PST


We’ve had a few editorials here lately regarding China. I wrote about our moral hypocrisy in disapproving of factory conditions there, and John wrote how the lowest-price-possible culture still extant in much Chinese manufacturing is harmful in a number of ways. Throughout, I think there has always been a sort of grudging admiration for the way that country is capable of single-mindedly pursuing certain difficult goals via public-private alignment, investing billions in infrastructure in order to be a market leader ten or twenty years down the line.

One development I wasn’t aware of was their effort to separate themselves from western companies in the computing field. While many of the chip manufacturers and specialized factories used by Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and ARM are located in China, the design work is largely done internally, and in this respect Intel et al. are literally decades ahead of the “competition,” which really is nothing of the sort. This is something China wants to fix — and they’re taking concrete steps towards doing so.

They’re now in the process of a big switch to Chinese-made processors in their supercomputers, the kinds of room-filling machines you find at research centers, universities, military facilities, and so on. Currently, the National University of Defense Technology’s “Tianhe-1A” (Milky Way/Sky River) is the world’s fastest supercomputer, and it runs on Intel and Nvidia chips — 21,522 of them, comprising around 2.5 petaflops of data-crunching power. But the new “Dawning 6000″ is to be built entirely from “Loongson” chips, designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and built, ironically, by a European company, ST Microelectronics. It will have less than half the processing power of Tianhe-1A.

The chief designer of the new chips, Hu Weiwu, told the People’s Daily regarding the chip’s origins: “Our information industry was using foreign technology. However, just like a country’s industry cannot always depend on foreign steel and oil, China’s information industry needs its own CPU.” Admirable! But, as I mentioned in Our Great Sin, many in American industries are loath to take this step. The benefits of a global manufacturing economy are too convenient, and the prices too competitive, for us to cut ties.

Imagine the US and China are playing with a bunch of toys. The US is mad that many of the toys belong to the China, but we’re unwilling to invest in a toybox as big as the other guy’s. China, on the other hand, sees the toys the US has and starts building new ones to replace them, so if the US packs up and leaves, China won’t have anything to play with. Is this metaphor too much? Probably.

This isn’t a recent development, and it isn’t a “hobby.” China’s been making CPUs for almost 10 years now, though it’s only recently that they’ve even begun to approach the level of effectiveness provided by western systems. And even then, Hu cautions that “it still needs another decade before China-made chips meet the needs of the domestic market. Hopefully after two decades, we will be able to sell our China-made CPUs to the US just like we are selling clothes and shoes.” Still, they’re on track to reach their goal of converting their supercomputers to domestically-developed CPUs by the end of 2011.

In other words, they may be able to manufacture our chips at a 20nm level, but their CPU design and software are still pretty much in the dark ages. Tianhe-1A runs a Linux-based system (which, although it has largely American origins, should really be considered the first post-national OS) and uses a MIPS architecture that emulates x86. I’ll give the computer scientists reading this a moment to clean the coffee off their monitors. But yes, this is where they’re at, and although they’re a decade from producing a world-friendly laptop or mobile that’s Chinese from processor to case to OS, make no mistake: they’re taking dead aim.

The point is they’re cutting the global cord when it comes to CPUs, a very difficult thing to do when the entire world runs on just a few brands, and those brands spend billions every year to maintain market dominance. Splitting off from the majors and declaring independence, no matter the cost. Sound familiar? Yeah, for a long time that was kind of the American way. We still maintain a huge advantage in internet-based properties, IP, biotech, and culture, but in areas we’re trailing, it seems we don’t have the backbone to say “your product may be better and cheaper, but we’re going to build our own, because dammit, that’s what we do.”

Perhaps we’re reaching the end of a period of natural Chinese ascendancy (as they emerge from industrialization hell and mobilize their billion-strong human resources on the world more efficiently) and perhaps not, but tech is notoriously difficult to predict, and a few breakthroughs and funding rounds might put the US on top in growing fields like battery tech or low-carbon manufacturing. It’s too late for us to lead the world in the areas China specializes in, and if we’re not careful, their sovereign writs of bootstrapping will only increase the number of those areas.

It sounds a bit jingoistic, but it’s really not (though I’m aware my saying so doesn’t make it so); I’d feel the same way if it were France, Brazil, or Canada opting out of the microprocessor hegemony. It’s just that nobody likes the kid with all the toys.

Update: Many commenters seem to think (I don’t know why, it’s not implied by this article) that China is copying or ripping off Intel &c. That is not the case. The latest Loongson processor is the result of ten years of research. We’re not talking about some sweatshop churning out cloned Core 2 Duos. This is hundreds of millions in R&D producing an original product to replace foreign technology China was uncomfortable relying on.

[via MIT Technology Review]

Power Pod, A Practical, Pellet-Shaped Power Strip

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 04:00 PM PST


Let’s be honest for a second. Our power strips are things we chose based on either price or functionality, not elegance or design. That’s okay! They sit behind our desks, quietly and modestly routing electricity and preventing surges. But what if you want one in plain view? Wouldn’t you like it to be… just a little bit sexy?

Coalesse has you covered. Their Power Pod is a circular power strip (or power pellet) with room for six grounded plugs. It’s got surge protection, an on-off switch, and it looks nice enough to put on your desk.

When not in use, you can use that sectioned thing to make it into a pen and paper clip holder. Maybe it’s just me, but storing metal paper clips inside power plugs just doesn’t sound like a good idea. You don’t have to do that, though, it’s just an option.

The Power Pod will be available on March 21st for $99. Yeah, it’s expensive. Good design costs money. Or maybe you should cry about it!

[via NYT Gadgetwise]

Yamaha Creates Voice Masking System To Quiet Discrete Conversations

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 03:52 PM PST

If you’ve ever been in a situation where discretion is important when speaking, then you may want some help from this guy. It’s the Yamaha VSP-1 and it is a little speaker device that plays sounds to cancel speech — up to 89% effective — allowing secret “deals” to be made while thwarting eavesdroppers.

There are 8 different sounds that cover conversations and they’re all earthy (Forest, River, Beach and more). Price is near $1,200 when Yamaha releases it in April.

1 yamaha_vsp1-thumb-550xauto-58643 Screen shot 2011-03-09 at 6.41

[via dvice]

So We’re Not Using Facebook Comments Anymore

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 03:40 PM PST

I didn’t like them all that well either. We’re due for a redesign in the next few months so we’ll see what happens then. Until then, we’ll suffer with Disqus for a while longer.

Metal 3DS Case Is Metal

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 02:35 PM PST


Not much to say here except that you just spent a lot of money on your 3DS and you should protect it. Sure, you could get some weak plastic shell, but real men use a solid metal case… while they play with their Nintendogs & Cats. Hey, real men can play whatever they want.

[via i4u]

Video: Hack Turns Kinect Into Home Automation Assistant

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 02:00 PM PST

Ja! A gentleman known to the Internet as Nitrogen has put together a type of Kinect do-it-yourself project that’s certainly worth a moment of your time. The "hack" uses the libfreenect library to turn the Kinect into a home automation sensor. So, you walk into your room, the Kinect camera sees you enter, then libfreenect turns on your lights. Leave the room, out go the lights.

Thankfully, there’s a video that shows the hack in action. I actually think it’s quite neat, not to mention useful, and we all know quick I am to call something silly.

Blackbird’s Travel French Press For Good Coffee In The Woods

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 01:40 PM PST

I say if you can’t make the coffee you love while on a camping trip in the woods, you should re-examine your priorities. I’ve been doing simple no-electricity coffee for a long time and you should consider it — especially since it means you get a great brew that’s equally available at home or over a campfire.

One thing, though: french presses tend to be glass. There are other options, but I like this travel press from Blackbird, a local designer goods aggregator.

It’s your normal 10-ounce french press in function, but it’s vacuum sealed like a thermos to keep your drinks hot and it won’t break if you drop a tent pole on it. Plus, if you’re around Seattle, people will say “Oh, Blackbird? Nice.”

[via Selectism and The Awesomer]

Zero Punctuation on Bulletstorm

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 01:32 PM PST

With a name like Bulletstorm you know Yahtzee is going to use the word “penis envy.”

Video: Epic Games’ Samaritan Real-Time Demo: How Long Will We Be Waiting For Graphics Like These?

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 01:15 PM PST

Epic Games showed off a video last week at GDC that reminded people just how much the ancient Xbox 360 hardware is holding back the development of shiny graphics technology. And even though Microsoft has seemingly begun work on its next console, in the near- to medium-term we'll be looking to the PC for any sort of development when it comes to improvements in graphics technology. (Or did you think the likes of the Nvidia GTX 590 and AMD Radeon 6000 series are stressed by games like Call of Duty: Black Ops?) Anyhow, embedded here is the video in its entirety in reasonable quality.

The video’s a little on the violent side, so you might want to wait until you get home if such things are frowned up at work or in class or whatever.

The idea is to have games running in real time looking like that. Current console hardware clearly won't be able to render that type of scene at any sort of modern resolution, but the hope is that today's over-powered GPUs can at least start approaching that level of realism.

Now all we need is a developer to not go for the low hanging console fruit, like what Crytek did with the first Crysis. Battlefield 3 will probably be the first came in a long, long time to make you say, "Wow…"

Keep in mind I have just as much fun playing isometric RPGs like Planescape: Torment and Arcanum (which just so happen to be available on Good Old Games), or even the old Final Fantasy games, so it's not like I'm a graphics mark or anything. It's just frustrating to see the technology's development strangulated by current console hardware. Excelsior, and so forth.

10 Million Kinect Devices Sold

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 12:55 PM PST

At CES, Kinect sales were already at 8 million, and now they just hit 10 million units sold. That’s a huge number considering the Kinect has only been on sale since November. There are even a tons of uses for the Kinect that don’t even involve gaming. It’s just one of those devices that you have to try out just once, even if it’s not perfect.

10 million in four months makes it the fastest-selling gadget of all time. iWhat?

Sharp Releases Three New Blu-ray Players

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 12:22 PM PST

Sharp plans to release three new Blu-ray players this month starting at $249. All players will be 3D and WiFi ready (BD-HP25U with optional wireless dongle), and will support Netflix, YouTube, VUDU, and Pandora. Also, video playback streamed from home DLNA servers. The two higher models, the BD-HP75U and BD-HP35U feature IP control to take advantage of mobile apps.

Press Release

Sharp Ships Three 3D Blu-ray Disc Players in March

  • BD-HP75U, BD-HP35U, and BD-HP25U offer maximum picture resolution and full
  • Enjoyment of 3D/2D Blu-ray™ content with advanced installation and control features
  • HD 3D 1080p/24 fps video output with Dolby® True HD and DTS® HD audio format decoding
  • Wireless LAN Ready for Netflix® / VUDU™ / Pandora® / YouTube Streaming
  • Playback video content streamed from DLNA® servers throughout the home
  • BD-HP75U and BD-HP35U feature IP control
  • All models are ENERGY STAR® qualified
  • BD-HP35U (MSRP $299.99) and BD-HP25U (MSRP $249.99) are available now, and the BD-HP75U (MSRP $329.99) ships March 14

Sharp Electronics Corporation is shipping all three of the 3D wireless Blu-ray Disc™ (BD) players it introduced at CES in March. Each model offers full HD 1080p/24 fps video output, the maximum picture resolution available, for superior 3D and 2D home entertainment experiences, as well as advanced installation and control features. In addition to 3D Blu-ray discs, the BD-HP75U, BD-HP35U and BD-HP25U provide consumers access to content from a wide variety of Internet sources, including Netflix®, VUDU™, Pandora® and YouTube via Wireless LAN. (The BD-HP25U requires optional Wireless LAN dongle VR-WL25). These models also enable consumers to take advantage of the latest surround sound formats such as Dolby® TrueHD, with lossless 7.1 channel audio reproduction that is bit-for-bit the equivalent of the master recordings, and DTS®-HD Master Audio.

Each new model plays standard-definition DVDs and files stored on USB drives, as well as AVCHD, DIVX Plus HD, JPEG and MP3 files. The HDMI® upscaling capability of each model even enhances the picture quality of standard definition DVDs by upconverting content to 1080p pixel-by-pixel, not just frame by frame as is the industry standard through Sharp Super Picture function.

When paired with a Sharp AQUOS® LCD TV, the BD-HP75U, BD-HP35U and BD-HP25U enable consumers to take advantage of exclusive performance and convenience features. Sharp AQUOS LINK and AQUOS PURE Mode provide seamless interoperability between Sharp AQUOS TVs and these Blu-ray Disc™ players via a simple one cable HDMI® connection as well as enhanced image accuracy.

The wireless LAN compatibility of each model also enables BD-Live™ access to real-time content from the Internet such as movie scene extras, new previews, games, chat and more. The Bonus View function delivers picture-in-picture special features, allowing for viewing of favorite movie scenes and added bonus features simultaneously on compatible Blu-ray discs. Each model in the line can playback video stored on DLNA® servers located anywhere in the home.

All models also provide two USB ports, one each in the front and rear, which enable easy playback of still and video images recorded in Divx Plus HD, JPEG and MP3 audio files. All models can perform auto software updates over the Internet to quickly enable the latest features and enhancements.

The flagship BD-HP75U model features home theater control via an RS232 port. Both the BD-HP75U and BD-HP35U feature IP control.


20 Percent Off All Direct2Drive Games During Spring Break Sale

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 12:15 PM PST

Direct2Drive, the IGN-owned digital distribution service, has yet another sale. This time it’s a big one: the Spring Break Sale. Every game from now until March 16 is 20 percent off.

The discount can be obtained by using the checkout code HANGOVER.

Maybe now I’ll finally get Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines?

And again, the sale applies to all 3,000-ish games on the catalog, including the just released Dragon Age II, which, as you can see here, is diving opinion. Hm.
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