Brace yourself for the lengthiest, in-depthiest video showcase of Windows Phone 7. At a whopping 22 minutes, suffice it to say that after sitting through this cinematic expedition, you may feel like you’ve gotten your fill of WP7. Then again, suffice it to say that, umm, uhh… maybe not…
via MSDN
Called the “Life Screen”, Panasonic’s largest TV has been the star attraction at this year’s CES. It’s 150″, (that’s 12.5ft diagonally kids!). Now, I’m not exactly sure what has the capability of displaying video on such a large screen, considering it displays in 4X 1080p (2,160 X 4,096-pixels)! This monstrosity is set to be
in production sometime in 2009. I haven’t heard anything about pricing on this beast yet, but considering the itsy bitsy pee wee 103″ Panasonic made a while ago went for about 70k, the price tag on this little number is most definitely gonna give me diarrhea… my favorite side-effect.
Images via Engadget.com
Vehicle manufacturers have been playing around with electricity as a fuel alternative for cars for a while now, but most are impractical, and don’t pack much power under the hood. Then there’s the Lightning GT…
Built by UK’s Lightning Car Company, the Lightning GT has ability to drive 100 miles on a 10 minute charge, and sporting 700hp (holy sh*t!), this electric car may actually stand a chance at being your next vehicle.
The GT has four separate electric motors to drive each wheel, providing, you guessed it, all-wheel drive. And those four motors totalling 700hp, propel the vehicle from 0-60 in 4 seconds, competing with even the fastest gas-powered supercars on the market today.
The Lightning GT doesn’t use your standard Lithium-ion battery either… It uses a battery developed by Altairnano, called NanoSafe. This new battery takes most of the electric car frowns, and turns them upside-down. It only takes 10 minutes, yes you heard right, 10 minutes to fully charge, and take you 100 miles on that charge. The NanoSafe battery will also last longer, about 12+ years as compared to the standard 3-5 years with most current batteries.
Only one problem… the $300,000 price tag… ouch!
The Lightning GT is set to hit the market in 2009. Given its prohibitive price tag, it might take a while to catch on, but who knows, maybe in the coming years we’ll be seeing this car on the roads… and it might even be you driving it.
Nvidia has ushered in yet another line of graphics cards into its GeForce series. The count is now at 9 and better than ever. For the 9 series, Nvidia has introduced four new high-end cards, the GeForce 9600 GSO, 9600 GT, 9800 GTX, and 9800 GX2, each better than the last.
Each card boasts DirectX 10, and high-def capabilities, as well as being able to be doubled-up in an SLI setup like most cards.
As you might expect… these cards don’t come cheap. For the base 9600, you should expect to find them in the $205-$210 range, all the way up to $499.99 for the 9800 GX2. But if you’re a serious gamer, what’s a few hundred Washingtons eh?
Bye bye HD-DVD… Move over Blu-Ray… Holographic Versatile Discs are on the way!
Way back in 2004, many technology companies started toying around with the idea of a holographic disk to usher in a new generation of media. Well in June of 2007, Ecma International revealed a 100GB version, the first of its kind.
It has been estimated that a single HVD will be able to hold a total of 3.9 terabytes of information, which equates to up to 11,900 hours of MPEG-4 quality video, or about the entire text contained in the Library of Congress on about six discs.
Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia.org:
Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) is an optical disc technology that would hold up to 3.9 terabytes (TB) of information. It employs a technique known as collinear holography, whereby two lasers, one red and one green, are collimated in a single beam. The green laser reads data encoded as laser interference fringes from a holographic layer near the top of the disc while the red laser is used as the reference beam and to read servo information from a regular CD-style aluminum layer near the bottom. Servo information is used to monitor the position of the read head over the disc, similar to the head, track, and sector information on a conventional hard disk drive. On a CD or DVD this servo information is interspersed amongst the data.
A dichroic mirror layer between the holographic data and the servo data reflects the green laser while letting the red laser pass through. This prevents interference from refraction of the green laser off the servo data pits and is an advance over past holographic storage media, which either experienced too much interference, or lacked the servo data entirely, making them incompatible with current CD and DVD drive technology.[1] These discs have the capacity to hold up to 3.9 terabytes (TB) of information, which is approximately 5,800 times the capacity of a CD-ROM, 850 times the capacity of a DVD, 160 times the capacity of single-layer Blu-ray Discs, and about 4 times the capacity of the largest computer hard drives as of 2007. The HVD also has a transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s (128 MB/s). Optware was expected to release a 200 GB disc in early June 2006, and Maxell in September 2006 with a capacity of 300GB and transfer rate of 20 MB/s. On June 28 , 2007, HVD standards have been approved and published.
Don’t expect this holographic media to be available any time this year… or the next. The technology is still in its early stages and is very expensive. As of now a drive to read these discs would cost somewhere in the area of USD $15,000, and a single disc around $120-$180.