Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

4mm thick speakers

Developed by Finn Magee these speakers are built for posters, are as thick as paper and are flexible. It’s called the flat sound series. © Finn Magee 2011.

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Leaf-spine vs three tier networking

Leaf spine has no tiers and allows data between server nodes to communicate much faster with lower latency. In an age of cloud computing where there is lots of data communication between servers or nodes inside the network, have to go up and down through the tiers is inefficient. No more tiers for flatter networks [...]

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Speed Up Your SSD By Correctly Aligning Your Partitions

Speed Up Your SSD By Correctly Aligning Your Partitions.

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Raspberry Pi | An ARM Linux box for $25. Take a byte!

Wow. tiny tiny ARM PC It runs Quake III too! Raspberry Pi | An ARM Linux box for $25. Take a byte!.

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HP kills WebOS devices :’-(

In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward. via HP Confirms Discussions with Autonomy Corporation plc Regarding Possible Business Combination; Makes Other Announcements | Business [...]

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Wind-turbine Placement Produces Tenfold Power Increase

Wind-turbine Placement Produces Tenfold Power Increase, Caltech Researchers Say – Caltech Media Relations.

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triple battery life with Aluminum-Celmet metal foam

Boffins triple battery life with metal foam • The Register.

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HTC makes androids easier to root

In an announcement on the HTC Facebook page, the CEO has stated that after looking at user feedback, they’re no longer going to be locking up the bootrom. This should create an explosion of creativity for Android phones – iphone will one day sooner be left in the dust! “There has been… (25).

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Tiny 3D Printer for home

at the Vienna University of Technology, a printing device has now been developed, which is much smaller, lighter and cheaper than ordinary 3D-printers. With this kind of printer, everyone could produce small, taylor-made 3D-objects at home, using building plans from the internet – and this could save money for expensive custom-built spare parts. It’s also [...]

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Ultrafast quantum computer closer: Ten billion bits of entanglement achieved in silicon

Scientists from Oxford University have made a significant step towards an ultrafast quantum computer by successfully generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon for the first time — entanglement is the key ingredient that promises to make quantum computers far more powerful than conventional computing devices. via Ultrafast quantum computer closer: Ten billion [...]

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Probability microcips

The electrical signals inside Lyric’s chips represent probabilities, instead of 1s and 0s. While the transistors of conventional chips are arranged into components called digital NAND gates, which can be used to implement all possible digital logic functions, those in a probability processor make building blocks known as Bayesian NAND gates. Bayesian probability is a [...]

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Powercolor hd5970 with 12 display outputs

And using Crossfire, you can make that 24. It has 4GB onboard RAM and can handle full 3D over all the slots at once – make your own cave! Powercolor hd5970 with 12 display outputs – The Inquirer.

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Dupont 50″ printed OLED screen

Dupont has managed to print out a 50″ OLED screen, which tests say should be reliable for around 12 years, in 2 minutes time. This should speed up the production and implementation of OLED, as well as make it quite a bit cheaper. Technology Review: New Inks Could Mean Cheaper OLED Screens.

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IBM develops graphene resistors: allready > 50% faster

The experimental graphene resistor they’ve built goes at 100 GHz, quite a bit faster than the ~40GHz of silicone resistors. They can still improve on the technology, so they’re expecting higher speeds. IBM Press room – 2010-02-05 Made in IBM Labs: IBM Scientists Demonstrate World’s Fastest Graphene Transistor – United States.

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VESA approves DisplayPort 1.2

Display Port allows the data for up to 4 1920 x 1200 monitors to be streamed through one cable, as well as 3D, USB and audio data. DisplayPort 1.2 receives final VESA blessing, grows into a real standard — Engadget.

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Why computers suck at maths

This article explores why computers can’t do floating point maths, which is what makes Excel and all those online calculators such lousy mathematicians – basically because computers are binary, they can’t calculate anything after a decimal point, so the workaround is to put the number including the decimal point in a register of a certain [...]

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Fixing stuff goes faster with AR

Using Augmented Reality goggles, powered on an Android platform, marines are able to maintain their vehicles 46% faster than using a laptop with technical manuals. The AR system provides label names to each object, shows a 3D model of the tool you need and gives instructions for specifica tasks overlaid on the camera view of [...]

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Evolving swarm intelligence in robots

The Lausanne university in Switserland has moved from the software to the reality: they’ve managed to get robots to evolve and learn behaviours, as well as the behaviour to decieve and cooperate through communication (flashing lights) and movement. It’ s a very interesting experiment, showing that robots are getting smarter every day and are now [...]

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85% of Mac users own a PC

Which goes to show – it’s the Ipod / Iphone which is floating the Apple. Nope, Macs just suck and their fanboy users are a teeny tiny minority. And the rest of the I-Have-A-Mac smug bastards are hypocrites. You wouldn’t need a PC if your Mac was so perfect, now would you, mister I’m a [...]

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Melting memory chips in mass production : Nature News

Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM) … Unlike conventional memory, which involves moving electrons around a chip, PCM data would literally be frozen in place, even when the machine [...]

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$38 Linux netbook

This thing has a 300MHz processor and has been hacked to run Linux with mouse and sound support. $38 Zipit Wireless Messenger receives Linux injection, becomes $38 netbook.

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South Africa’s Telkom: faster internet via carrier pigeon

A South African IT firm sent a carrier pigeon 50 miles with a datacard attached to it’s leg. The pigeon was faster than the internet, which after 2 hours had only completed 4% of the transfer. This was in protest at the sucky internet connection available through Telkom. Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s [...]

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Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts

These flowcharts are very very good indeed, with a “Boot Failure Troubleshooting Poster” which encompasses all of the flowcharts in one huge poster. Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts – Troubleshooting Dell, HP, Sony, eMachines, IBM, Compaq and Gateway PC’s.

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1m virtual PCs on one server

MegaTux, the Dell Thunderbird with 4480 Intel processors will run 1 million copies of bots in a limited area botnet over Wine in order to create simulations of differnet botnets on a massive scale. Researchers can then stop the simulation at any point and have a look at the state of the different virtual PCs. [...]

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Homemade Steadicam

This thing is made up from a few pieces of PVC piping, costs around $10,- to make and works really really well. Homemade Steadicam Costs About $24,990 Less Than The Real Thing – Steadicam – Gizmodo.

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