The contest is now over and we have a winner. Of course we must apologize for the delay but we didn’t expect so many entries (and we had to check them all). But before we announce the winner we must thank all those who entered our contest and inform all of you that in 2 weeks we’re going to have another contest (the big prize will be a Home Cinema System with a Bigscreen Plasma + Blu-Ray player +7.1 sound system).
And now, the big moment… Our $3000 laptop winner is DOMPROFESOR with this entry:
“Yer… look at me, my MP3 player has 30Gb of memory!”
“Pah, I’ve got a new 80Gb I pod, that’s hours of music.”
“Hours??? Mine goes for 3 years.”
And he’s not kidding you know! (Sort of). Our friends at IBM have been developing what they are calling ‘racetrack memory’ which they say will be able to store over 100 times more than what our current storage of mediums can, which means MP3 players could be storing enough songs to play constantly for 3 years.
Using tiny magnetic boundaries to store data, this technology will be able to revolutionize (again) the size of our gadgets and what they can hold, which in the case of an MP3 player would mean half a million songs. It would also use less energy, so battery’s would take less time to go flat, and it would mean that the process would create less heat, good news for the computer industry.
However they predict that it will take them another 3-4 years to produce a prototype, and roughly the same amount of time to develop it so that it will be available for commercial use; so please don’t get too exited yet. However it is another great step into the technologically unknown, and who knows what this will develop into.
As any laptop owner knows one of the worst things to happen whilst on your laptop is for it to break. However the second most irritating thing especially if you have just spent $1500 on a brand spanking new one is for the battery to die thus halting whatever you were doing until you can find a power socket. So news that Asustek (better know as Asus) are having battery problems will have anyone who has bought the recently released Eee Pc 900 twitching slightly and holding their wallet tightly.
Fortunately the batteries in the laptops are 100% fine (yes, you can stop shaking now) and to be fair if you have spent the $800 (ish) then you have a great laptop. However Asus have been having problems getting the batteries to the laptops and are reported to be having quite a few battery shortage problems. This was in no way helped by a fire in March which halted the second biggest South Korea battery maker’s Ochang plant, who (coincidentally) supply Asus.
However Asus say that they are over the hill, and that in fact sales will not be affected which is a relief for any shareholders (who must be rubbing their hands in glee after shares were up 1.9% today). Although this may seem like a nothing story, last month Asus said that they were expecting that battery shortages would affect 40% of sales, so this is good news for customers, Asus shareholders and blog writers alike!
VirtueSphere has been developed over 45 man years, and the end product is essentially a large hamster ball which when coupled with head tracking provides the ultimate virtual reality.
The VirtuSphere platform consists of a large hollow sphere that sits on top of a base
and allows the sphere to rotate 360 degrees. Wearing a wireless, head-mounted
display, users can step inside the sphere to fully interact in immersive virtual
environments. The VirtuSphere enables 6 degrees of freedom – one can move in any
direction; walk, jump, roll, crawl, run over virtually unlimited distances without
encountering real-world physical obstacles. (from the VirtueSphere website).
Basically this means that you can really take part in the game, or simulation, and be a lot more involved as you are really doing the movement, as opposed to just pressing buttons. The same applies to the aiming aspect, as guns etc can be linked to the head tracking, meaning that you can really experience FPS games.
However it is currently designed just for simulation purposes, and gaming is in the pipeline, but not for a while. However it does have the following advantages:
User can move in any direction; walk, jump, roll, crawl, run over virtually unlimited distances
Life-like movements inside cyberspace
Standalone or networked
Multiplatform
Need to change the purpose of use? Just reload the software
Mobile solution, transportation in middle size car, assembled in 4 hour
Obviously this means that potentially you could adapt it for any old game, but it would be extremely difficult, and perhaps not worth the effort.
Anyway, we have the technology, and it is only a matter of time before this can be developed into a real life gaming experience, and imagine what it will be like!
Verdict: At the moment, great for simulation and for ‘exploring worlds’, but watch this space, because this could get big in the gaming world!
For those who find the usual keyboard boring and unimaginative, or those of you who want to save every little bit of space, or just for those who have $170 dollars floating around this is the thing for you. The virtual laser keyboard basically projects a keyboard onto any flat surface and transfers you tapping the space where the key is projected into that key and into any mac, PC, blackberry and most handheld devices.
Its advantage is in its portability, which (at around the size of a mobile) means you can viably use it as a replacement for the fiddle handheld keyboards, or just as a novelty. It ‘behaves’ just like a normal keyboard, so you don’t loose any accuracy, but you do loose the sensitivity that you would otherwise have by pressing keys (although the sensitivity is adjustable).
So all in all, its good for PDA’s, Cellular Telephones, Laptops, Tablet PCs, Space saving Computers, Clean Rooms, Industrial Environments, Test Equipment, Sterile and Medical Environments and Transport.
Verdict: perhaps not for everyone, at 17 times the price of a normal keyboard, but nonetheless a good gadget, it looks cool, and would be great on the move.
Easily the most important thing on any camping/walking trip is knowing where you are, and this has developed over the millennia from a rough guess to the great, but amazingly fiddly OS maps. They are amazing, and the perfect way to navigate, but the come with three problems, 1) you don’t know where you are, 2) you don’t know where your facing and 3) they are big, awkward and the place that you are seems to always be right on the edge of two maps, or on the fold (I swear they do it deliberately). Oh, and I forgot, you cant fit a country’s worth of OS maps in you packet.
So GPS came along, and what a revelation it was to, changing the way we navigate our way around hostile environments making it safer and more accessible. However, as nice as this was, they were damn hard to use, and only showed pathetically simple and hard to use maps. But now, prepare yourself for the ultimate in mapping technology…the satmap active 10.
Easily the best GPS system on the market at the moment, and priced at around $500 you could probably guess that. The naps (which come on SD cards) are to 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 scales, and are brilliantly detailed and really show you the area around you properly. It includes:
Electronic compass
Direction indicator (very quick refresh rate, which is brilliant and something other GPS systems lack)
On board route planning (very easy to use and set up)
Map orientation (again very easy to use)
It also has all the other things that you would expect and some that you wouldn’t, like a bike mount and replaceable screen cover. The battery is also pretty good (rechargeable) and it comes in a waterproof and shockproof casing.
Verdict: The perfect GPS, dont go walking without it!
First of all I would like to thank all the people that entered our contest (they are more than we expected). Second thing, I would like to clarify something:
For all the people who left comments like “I would love to win” or “What a great contest” or stuff like that - these comments are not taken into consideration, you don’t get any points for these. Leaving a comment on this site does not get you any contest points. You only get points for leaving COMMENTS ON OTHER SITES about TheTechDon.
Another question we keep getting about the contest is: Is this contest open to everyone or just for US residents?
There is nothing specified about this thing in our contest registration, so you should assume that this contest is available to everyone, and so it is. If you are from Europe, Asia, Australia, US, Africa, anywhere, we will ship the laptop to your address and we will pay for the shipping.
The contest stats after a week: 22 people are officially entered.
If you have read the previous article you will know that Vista requires high system specifications for it to work, so how does this correspond to the performance of it compared to its little brother Xp? In fact, assuming you have to computers that have the recommended system requirement for each one, you will find that Vista does in fact outstrip (just!) Xp for productivity.
However that comparison isn’t really fair, and if you put the two systems side by side on the same spec PC, you will find that due to the fact that XP is a considerably ’slimmer’ operating system it will run almost twice as fast as Vista in some circumstances. This means that for every CPU cycle wasted with the nice graphics and the over extravagant system, you could be doing something more productive. On the flip side if you just wanted productivity, you could run a very fast version of ‘95 on your good PC which would really be a waste.
So, all in all, one can say that if you are just looking for productivity perhaps Xp is your man, and that Microsoft have obviously sacrificed that for something… but what?
You might want to spend some time thinking about your next mobile smartphone purchase. In a huge push to make sure that all things that are not iPhone will die a lonely miserable death, Apple is getting ready to be the business smartphone of choice.
The other day, the web’s leading site for tech opinions, Gartner, came out and told us all that the iPhone was a good smartphone for business. In fact, it’s going out to say that because of the 2.0 update that is coming soon the iPhone is good enough to be used by very enterprising business people.
Gartner actually gave the iPhone a status of “appliance-level” which means that it is suitable for PIM, email, browsing, and telephony. They went even further to say that that is can be further used in other applications as new software is developed by third party suppliers. When purchasers from the big companies see this announcement they will be more inclined to pick them up for their employees.
Hospitals are actually thinking about the iPhone. A lot actually. It seems that the power of the iPhone, coupled with the new 2.0 update is suitable to giving doctors access to medical information and imagery such as CAT scans and X-rays. Anybody else thinking Apple wants to rule the world?
Anyway, that’s not the scary part. Or the part that regular consumers should be thinking about. In their report, Gartner has said that the new Apple iPhone would match up with their competitors such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices.
The development of the iPhone is revolutionary in that no other single device has made such an impact in the world. Are you ready to buy one yet?
“Ahhhoohhhh” or something like that… Remember how we’d chase the dog as a kid, howling behind him and begging him to do the same? Remember when we heard our first actual wolf howl and the sound send shivers down our spine?
Introducing the Howlbox, it mimics the sound of the wolf and hopes that they will respond in order to track their population.
Howlbox howls, sorta, and the wolves howl back. Spectrogram technology then allows analysis that the human ear could never achieve — how many wolves have responded, and what kind of wolves they are.
Cost:$1,300, including $300 for a solar panel. Howlbox’s has tools of digital analysis and programmed instructions that tell Howlbox when to howl, when to sleep because the wolves are sleeping, and how to store each day’s file on a disk. When and where can I get one? Sir Hunter Toberman, my beloved animal, would like a friend…
The experiment will begin with a pilot project in which four Howlboxes will be placed in remote areas of Idaho in June. This is the month of wolf pack meetings- rendezvous.
Little baby wolves howl at most things, but a test in Montana in Jan. showed that adult wolves can be fooled by a good sound system.
Traditional tracking devices such as radio collars and aerial surveillance used to be used extensively after wolves were brought back into Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s under the Federal Endangered Species Act. But federal protections will end later this month, and so too will the deep pockets needed for flyovers and catching and collaring.
by side on the same spec PC, you will find that due to the fact that XP is a considerably ’slimmer’ operating system it will run almost twice as fast as Vista in some circumstances. This means that for every CPU cycle wasted with the nice graphics and the over extravagant system, you could be doing something more productive. On the flip side if you just wanted productivity, you could run a very fast version of ‘95 on your good PC which would really be a waste.
Ahhhoohhhh” or something like that… Remember how we’d chase the dog as a kid, howling behind him and begging him to do the same? Remember when we heard our first actual wolf howl and the sound send shivers down our spine?
