Gadgetstronics

by Darren Murph, posted Jun 27th 2008 at 12:06PM
Never mind those fancy BD-R critters, how’s about a 42GB DVD? Researchers with a good deal more intelligence than us over at Tohoku University have reportedly figured out a way to “multiply the amount of data that can be stored on a DVD or CD by 9.” Based on our best guess at translating a foreign language (we kid… sort of), the achievement was realized by shaping the pits on a DVD’s surface like Vs, essentially making the disc more capacious in the process. Unfortunately, said project will probably never see any mainstream attention, as existing DVD / CD players won’t recognize the malformed media, and worse still, the process can’t be applied to Blu-ray Discs.

[Via CrunchGear]

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Filed under: Storage

by Donald Melanson, posted Jun 27th 2008 at 4:54PM
It’s hardly the only project out there that’s aiming to detect asteroids on a collision course with Earth before it’s too late, but this effort backed by Defence Research Development Canada and the Canadian Space Agency does take a slightly different tact than most and, despite appearances above, it’s apparently actually close to a launch. Dubbed the NEOSSat, the suitcase-sized satellite packs a 15-centimeter diameter telescope that’s able to look for objects near the sun (something impossible to do from Earth), and it’ll reportedly be able to stay in orbit around Earth for at least five years using no more power than a 60-watt light bulb. If all goes as planned, the satellite will hitch a ride into space sometime in 2010, when it’ll take part in NASA’s efforts to find 90 percent of the 95,000 near-Earth “space rocks” that are at least 140 meters in diameter before 2020.

[Via Slashdot, image courtesy of NEOSSat]

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Filed under: Misc. gadgets

by Ryan Block, posted Jun 27th 2008 at 10:49AM
As part of our ongoing Bill Gates Day coverage, we present to you the Bill Engadgethology. This is by no means every Gates-related story from over the years — just the choicest cuts from Club Bill Gates.

Bill and us
The Engadget Interview: Bill Gates, Part 1
The Engadget Interview: Bill Gates, Part 2
The Engadget Interview: Bill Gates (again!)
Bill Gates, Engadget reader
A lunchtime chat with Bill Gates at CES
Bill Gates: the exit interview

Bill Gates live
Bill Gates: Live at Microsoft’s Digital Entertainment Anywhere Event
In real time: Engadget live from the Bill Gates 2005 CES Keynote at the Las Vegas Hilton
Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote
Live from the Bill Gates keynote
Live at the Windows Vista launch event
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Historic discussion live from D 2007 -> Poll: Jobs and Gates sit down in an alternate reality
Bill Gates: live at his 12th and final CES keynote
Live from D: Gates and Ballmer debut Windows 7

Bill in high society
Bill Gates to get knighted -> Bill Gates getting knighted
Bill Gates the dropout to receive honorary Harvard degree, will finally be able to do something with his life
Bill Gates gets Harvard degree, not at all smug about it

Bill vs. “PC”
“I’m a PC.” “And I’m also a PC.”: Gates vs. Hodgman on Daily Show tomorrow?
Bill Gates on Mac ads: “I don’t even get it”
AdAge asks Gates about Hodgman to ill effect

More Bill after the break. Photo by Brennanator.

Job hunting
Bill Gates quitting day-to-day duties at Microsoft
Video: Bill Gates is looking for a job — fruitlessly
Did Bill Gates find a job?

Say what?
Gates: the end of the iPod is near
Bill Gates sez Blu-ray is “very anti-consumer”
Bill Gates has his say of things
CE-Oh no he didn’t! Part IX - Gates watches pirated videos
Gates praises ipod, labels Zune a “modest” competitor
CE-Oh no he didn’t! Part XVIII - Gates sez Sony “bricks” would sell well
CE-Oh no he didn’t! Part XXI : Gates tells consumers to ditch DRMed tunes, buy CDs
Last week’s keynotes dissected, Steve Jobs wins over the preschooler set
CE-Oh no he didn’t! Part XXIII - Gates: “security guys break the Mac every single day”
Gates sez: “Yeah, we’re early on the video thing.”

Windows
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Limited Numbered Signature Edition (seriously)
Windows 7 to arrive next year, says Bill Gates -> Windows 7 still slated for 2010 says Microsoft, Bill Gates just crazy-talking
2003 Bill Gates email reveals frustrations with Windows XP

Xbox
Even happier ending for “cleaned” Xbox 360 owner: Gates-signed console arrives
Bill Gates gives mother of pearl-clad Xbox 360 to South Korean President

All Bill, all the time
Romanian prez to Gates: Windows piracy built this country
Bill Gates clamps down on daughter’s internet time
Gates to become richest man in space?
Open source protestor crashes Bill Gates’ speech in China
Bill Gates’ sperm: second most-wanted in China
Carlos Slim edges out Bill “Fatty Fat Fat” Gates as world’s richest person
Sarajevo cafe named “Club Bill Gates”
Bill Gates backs Probo, the huggable children’s robot
Bill Gates: philanthropist, nerd, beer baron
Gates and space-ace Simonyi gift $30m for giant telescope
“Study” finds half of Americans want to be Bill Gates
Holographic Bill Gates terrorizes Kuala Lumpur tech conference
Microsoft, then and now

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Filed under: Misc. gadgets

by Ryan Block, posted Jun 27th 2008 at 2:03PM
Hey, if Bill can give away tens of billions of dollars, the least we can do to celebrate his last day is to give away some Microsoft-powered stuff, right? Next up: the full, non-upgrade Office Ultimate 2007 suite.

• Leave a comment below. Tell us about your favorite Microsoft-powered product. Or your favorite Apple product, too, since Bill totally bailed those guys out back in ‘97.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. That winner will get the full, non-upgrade Office Ultimate 2007 suite. Approximate value is $350.
• Entries can be submitted until Sunday, June 29th, 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

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Filed under: Misc. gadgets

With the population growing and the amount of trash piling up from it, we’ve started finding a need to reuse old items.  One new way to do so is to take old discarded plates and create something like this cute little lamp.  This particular design was done by Denis Belenko and Dmitriy Nkolaenko and posted on their site this month.  They created two different styles, one is extremely contemporary and the other much more childlike and playful.  Which just goes to show with these little lamps you can create any style you like.

I know plates are always the one thing at my local flea market that there is always an overabundance of.  Most people get tired of several plates breaking and then having mismatched sets, so they either toss them in the trash or take them to a flea market in hopes that someone will get some use out of them.  Although this is yet another design you can’t purchase, it is another one that wouldn’t be that difficult to remake.  I’m sure there are plenty of tutorials on how to drill a hole into fragile objects.

Source: boingboing

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I’ve discussed the dedicated hosting, benefits of dedicated hosting in the past and this time, I’m going to review a dedicated hosting provider that I discovered on Internet while hunting for a dedicated servers.

Firstly, I was impressed by the punch line – ‘We Understand Your Priorities’ and this made me spend some more time on the website. NetHosting is a sister company of Fibernet and it specializes in providing business-class hosting services. They’ve a data center located in Utah and it was developed in 2002. If you can recall my previous post on dedicated hosting, I mentioned that while selecting a dedicated hosting provider, you should look for a host who’s not new in the industry and the professionals at NetHosting seems to have some good amount of experience as it’s been a while since they’re into the hosting industry. It’s always advisable to go with a host who has established himself and NetHosting seems to be the right choice.

Their data center is a ClassA data center and it has Zone 4 earthquake standards. Climate controlled filtered air, protected power, fire suppression are some of the features that amazed me. The data center also has direct fiber connections to AT&T, Comcast and many other popular names. Data center seems to be a good and this is the thing to be looked for while selecting a web host.

The other thing that impressed me is the price. If you compare their price with other new hosting providers in the industry then you’ll realize that NetHosting is offering great price for dedicated servers. Their dedicated servers are affordable and they’re good enough to take on the load of a busy site. They also offer Rack Space with 100Mb connection and the prices are competitive. Apart from the hosting, they also offer web design, Internet marketing and eCommerce services. However, I was mainly interested in their web hosting. It goes without saying that I’m highly impressed with the information that I discovered.

After going through their site, I searched on Internet so as to look for the reviews for them and I was happy to see that there were no bad reviews for them. While deciding a web host, it’s always advisable to look for the reviews of previous users.

At the end, if you’re looking for a web host that has established himself in the hosting industry and offers hosting services at an affordable price then you should consider NetHosting as they’ve everything that is required in a good web host.

Brother’s MFC-6490CW is an all-in-one color inkjet printer that offers color printing, faxing, and scanning into a single device, supporting extra large printing as well. It won’t break the bank with a $300 price tag, and will help you save lots of dough in the long run since you no longer need to run to the printers if you ever need 11″ x 17″ ledger prints. Great for scanning large amounts of text as well instead of being limited to just A4/letter sizes. Being wireless, it is compatible with 802.11b/g networks, but sadly misses out on draft-N. No idea on when the MFC-6490CW will ship though.

by Thomas Ricker, posted Jun 27th 2008 at 9:05AM var Here we have it, iphone 3G pricing for our better mannered, gun-toting friends up north. All the plans from Rogers Wireless require that lovely, three-year contract and include visual voicemail, free evenings and weekends, and unlimited WiFi at all Rogers and Fido hotspots. The plans start at $60/month for 150 minutes of voice and just 400MB of data before topping out at $115/month for 800 minutes voice and up to 2GB of data. None of these plans offer unlimited data as previously rumored. See the details after the break. #comparechart { border: 2px solid #333; border-collapse: collapse; } #comparechart td { padding: 3px; border: 1px solid #ccc; vertical-align: top; margin: 0; line-height: 1.3em; } #comparechart th { font-weight: bold; text-align: left; padding: 4px; background: #eee; } #comparechart th.mainth { border-bottom: 1px solid #333; font-size: 1.2em; } #comparechart td.red { background-color: #f08c85; } #comparechart td.green { background-color: #b3e2c4;

PriceVoice Data Sent Text Messages
Incoming Text Messages
Visual Voicemail
$60 150 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend
400 MB (up to 200,000 text emails or 3,100 web pages or 1,360 photo attachments)
75
Unlimited
Unlimited

$75 300 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend 750 MB (up to 380,000 text emails or 5,900 web pages or 2,560 photo Attachments)
100
Unlimited Unlimited

$100 600 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend 1 GB (up to 524,000 text emails or 8,000 web pages or 3,500 photo attachments)
200
Unlimited Unlimited

$115 800 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend 2 GB (up to 1,048,000 text emails or 16,000 web pages or 7,000 photo attachments)
300
Unlimited Unlimited

Rogers Wireless will also offer two voice value packs for popular wireless features: a $15 monthly value pack including Caller ID, Who Called, Caller Ring Trax, 2,500 Sent Text Messages and 2,500 Call Forwarding Minutes; and a $20 monthly value pack including Caller ID, Who Called, Caller Ring Trax, 10,000 Sent Text Messages and 6:00 p.m. Early Evening Calling and 2,500 Call Forwarding Minutes.

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Filed under: cellphones, GPS, Portable Audio, Portable Video

As an IT guy myself, I do find it rather telling when a prominent business partner of Microsoft’s, Intel, has decided that they’re not going to ‘upgrade’ to Windows Vista. I can’t say that I blame them. The change isn’t compelling and according to most reports, more of a pain than a benefit.

For those home users buying a new computer, Vista isn’t an absolutely terrible thing to stomach, but for those power users who are now fully acclimatized to XP, Vista doesn’t offer them true advantages.

Posted in Computers

The latest gadgets and electronic items in general are worth a lot of money and therefore a popular focus of thieves. A group in Germany take the stealing of electronic goods a bit further than most, committing their crimes at high-speed.

We all know that goods are shipped from ports and storage via trucks to different retailers or wholesalers. Most thieves will attempt to gain access to these trucks while they are parked-up somewhere, or even steal the truck outright. This German gang didn’t wait for the truck to stop, however, and in a similar fashion to the film The Fast and the Furious used cars to follow them at high speed down Germany’s autbahn road system.

The gang consisted of 6 members and 2 cars. The first car would drive up behind a truck and two of the gang members would get on the bonnet with bolt cutters and break the door lock. When the doors opened boxes of goods were then passed into the car – all while driving at high speed and the truck driver oblivious to what was happening.

The second car was used as a blocker; travelling alongside the first car to stop others from witnessing the crime taking place. Once they had filled the car with stolen goods they would leave the truck for the driver to discover what had happened next time they stopped.

Fortunately, some drivers did witness what was going on and informed the police. They put a watch on the area of road the crimes were happening on and managed to catch the gang in the act. 5 Romanians and 1 German man were taken into custody, but aren’t saying much. Manfred Radecke, spokesman for the Dortmund police said:

It was an extremely dangerous stunt, like an action film … They won’t tell us where they trained, or how often they did this. If any other German police departments have seen odd truck thefts we hope they contact us.

Read more at Vnunet.com

Matthew’s Opinion
A dangerous, but probably very profitable little venture that showed equal parts ingenuity and stupidity I think.

Managing to stay on the bonnet of a car while travelling at high speed, breaking a door lock and passing heavy boxes takes good balance skills and a lot of nerve. I suppose if they were doing it regularly they were used to the process and the car driver must have also been proficient to keep the vehicles close together.

With gadgets like the iphone, PSP and laptops selling for hundreds of dollars, stealing a few boxes containing them is going to fetch in enough money to keep 6 men happy. Their downfall was using a second car for blocking meaning other people could still see the crime.