http://www.thetechlounge.com Recent News en-us Thu, 3 Jul 2008 20:01:16 -0500 Thu, 3 Jul 2008 20:01:16 -0500 General general Copyright 2008, TheTechLounge, Inc. 60 http://www.thetechlounge.com/templates/thetechlounge/images/88x31_ttl.png http://www.thetechlounge.com 88 31 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12985/Judge+Delivers+World+Of+WarcraftInspired+Decision/ "All I can see is a man in a business suit with a yellow exclamation point over his head. " Honorable William B. Chandler III totally pwned some fools in his decision for the Wayne County Employees' Retirement System case seeking an injunction in the Activision-Blizzard merger. I would almost consider being judged by this guy the be a privilege. If he told me that the hit-and-run I performed back in January was akin to one ganking some n00b in the Badlands, I'd totally accept his judgment. No questions asked. Actually, I'd probably ask him what ...]]> Thu, 3 Jul 2008 17:48:05 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12985/Judge+Delivers+World+Of+WarcraftInspired+Decision/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12984/The+SSD+Power+Consumption+Hoax/ "Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren’t there: in fact, battery runtimes actually dec...]]> Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:28:32 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12984/The+SSD+Power+Consumption+Hoax/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12983/DPReview+Hands+On+with+Nikon+D700/ "The imaging side of the D700 is pretty much the same as the D3; it shares the acclaimed 12.1MP full frame ('FX') sensor and has the same processing engine, so we would presume output to be almost identical. The main differences (aside from being considerably smaller) are physical; there's a different shutter (good for 150,000 exposures rather than 300,000 on the D3), different viewfinder prism (with 95% coverage) and a slower burst rate. You also lose the rear LCD info panel (there's no room for it) and one of the D3's two CF card slots, but you do get a co...]]> Tue, 1 Jul 2008 20:22:21 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12983/DPReview+Hands+On+with+Nikon+D700/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12981/ATI+Makes+Super+RV770+Beats+GTX+280+OEM+Only/ "AMD GPG (ex-ATI) is binning the parts to a lowest denominator required for good yields and a level of performance that reaches or sometimes overtakes Nvidia’s GTX 260. But this time around, the company developed an AIB/OEM-only product codenamed "Super RV770", which will be much more powerful. The "Super RV770" will arrive with pre-installed water-cooling and features unlocked BIOS, which enables the GPU to be pushed all the way to 950 MHz, while the memory can be pushed to 4.8 GT/s (1.2 GHz QDR). According to our sources, you may be able to push the GPU even beyond 1 GHz, if ...]]> Tue, 1 Jul 2008 20:00:39 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12981/ATI+Makes+Super+RV770+Beats+GTX+280+OEM+Only/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12979/Chronotopic+Anamorphosis+Video+from+the+4th+dimension/ "The image is digitally manipulated by fragmenting it into horizontal lines and then combining lines from different frames in the display. The result is a distortion of the figures caused by their motion in time, or, as Brazilian researcher Arlindo Machado calls it: chronotopic anamorphosis. The effect was completely based on Zbigniew Rybczynski's "The Fourth Dimension", but transposed to Processing programming environment and performed in real-time." Like they said at Gizmodo, this would be a killer filter in OS X's Photo Booth or any other video manipulati...]]> Tue, 1 Jul 2008 16:54:09 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12979/Chronotopic+Anamorphosis+Video+from+the+4th+dimension/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12977/The+Brains+Behind+the+Image+Fulgurator/ "The device is a modified camera -- in this case, an old manual Minolta SLR. A flashgun fires through the camera in reverse, from the back. The flash picks up the image of a slide inside and projects it out through the lens and onto any surface. The trick is in the triggering. The Fulgurator lies in wait until an unsuspecting photographer takes a picture using a flash. When the device's sensor sees this flash, it fires its own unit, throwing up an image which is captured by the hapless photographer's camera while remaining unseen by the naked eye." When I first ...]]> Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:24:28 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12977/The+Brains+Behind+the+Image+Fulgurator/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12976/Diablo+III+Announced+At+Blizzard+Worldwide+Invitational/ "Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Morhaime formally announced Diablo III during the WWI’s opening ceremony this morning, not that this will come as a surprise to anyone with the Diablo III forums already active on the official Blizzard site and rumours running rampant for nearly a fortnight. After recapping on the success of the previous Invitational held in Korea, Morhaime premiered a trailer and then demoed a level playing as a Barbarian and a Witch Doctor, showcasing some of the improvements over the original game as well as giving attendees a hint at what they can expect...]]> Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:32:56 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12976/Diablo+III+Announced+At+Blizzard+Worldwide+Invitational/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12974/Why+Recycle+When+You+Can+Make+Power+Tools/ "This time we have something not-so-serious for all the modders out there with broken HDD(s). I had some dead HDDs lying around and I started wondering what could I do with them. After opening one and testing if it still run, I couldn't resist scratching the spinning disk with a screw driver..." This is one step away from being a weapon. Gads, I have at least three dead hard drives; there's got to be a way to harness their neodymium power and produce a spinfusor! I mean, they probably won't explode on contact, but they gotta at least be able to put ou...]]> Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:06:20 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12974/Why+Recycle+When+You+Can+Make+Power+Tools/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12972/A+Shrimp+on+a+Treadmill+Newsworthy/ "Researchers measure activity of an exercising shrimp by time, speed and oxygen level." Please don't ask me to justify this for it's newsworthiness. It just is. I'm in public, so I'm not going to listen to the video, and really, I have no idea why there's this little dude in his aquagym, and yet, shrimp on a treadmill! So here, have some real news, but please, watch that shrimp go. Mystery Molecule Leads To Quantum Discovery @ scientificblogging.com "In a Nature Physics journal paper currently online, the researchers describe how...]]> Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:49:44 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12972/A+Shrimp+on+a+Treadmill+Newsworthy/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12971/Six+Months+with+ATI+CrossFire/ "Eighteen months ago when nVidia's GeForce 8800 GTX was king of the hill, a multi-GPU setup was either ostentatious and reserved only for the most die hard gamer if you were using a high-end card, or downright silly if you were pairing up midrange and lower. NVIDIA's SLi initiative, started back with the GeForce 6 series, was basically a kludge designed to wring that last ounce of performance out of the cards of the era for the deep-pocketed enthusiasts. ATI's CrossFire, when it debuted up until the release of the Radeon X1950 Pro, was an embarassment, offeri...]]> Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:57:42 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12971/Six+Months+with+ATI+CrossFire/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12969/Netflix+Recommendation+Engine+Mysteries+Solved/ "Ah, Netflix. Killer of brick-and-mortar video stores; red-jacketed savior of people having a crappy day who come home to find that at least there's a decent flick waiting for them. These days, the rent-by-mail company offers around 100,000 tiles, sends out some 1.9 million discs per day (another 10,000 movies are available for instant download) — and passed the billion-discs-shipped mark last February. And the outfit is quite efficient: According to the company, some 96% of customers clicking around the site receive their movies the next day. This basically means, barring...]]> Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:42:18 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12969/Netflix+Recommendation+Engine+Mysteries+Solved/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12968/iPhone+20+might+go+gold+master+tomorrow/ "According to a sources inside the Cupertino's iPhone software development effort, it is "highly probable" that the iPhone 2.0 Golden Master will be done this Friday. The final version could arrive to developer hands two weeks before the introduction of the new iPhone 3G and well in time for the promised July 11 release to the public." I can't wait to get in touch with the App Store and the other fun stuff that will come along with the new firmware. I have been an iPhone owner since day 1. I think I will be just fine without the new hotness that is 3G. Native app...]]> Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:25:30 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12968/iPhone+20+might+go+gold+master+tomorrow/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12966/Inflight+broadband+softlaunches+on+American+Airlines/ "American said Tuesday that they'd be ready to go live with all 15 of its Boeing 767-200 planes in a few weeks. They run these planes only on cross-country routes to and from JFK, flying to San Francisco International, LAX, and Miami's airport. When the service branded as "Gogo" launches, it will cost US$12.95 per flight. When Aircell starts to serve Virgin America with Gogo later this year, it will charge $9.95 for flights of three hours or fewer." 2 Mbps up and down sounds like plenty to check your e-mail or get your lolcat fix while cruising at 500+ mph. A data...]]> Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:48:30 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12966/Inflight+broadband+softlaunches+on+American+Airlines/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12965/From+the+Rumor+Mill+Microsoft+Will+Allow+3rd+Party+XBOX360+Manufacturers/ "EGM's Quartermann has been in the business of rumor mongering for 20-odd years, but his latest tip-off has to be one of the more interesting we've seen yet. According to the Q-Man's most recent EGM column, Microsoft is set to announce that it will be licensing the core Xbox 360 tech to other companies. Meaning that they can then build their own 360 consoles, or other home electronics (TVs, Blu-ray Disc players) with "360 inside."" You might want to get your salt shaker's ready for this one, but it's not totally implausible. I'd love to see a 3...]]> Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:24:12 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12965/From+the+Rumor+Mill+Microsoft+Will+Allow+3rd+Party+XBOX360+Manufacturers/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12964/Dynamic+Tower+Skyscraper+Every+Floor+SelfRotates+Powered+by+Wind+and+Sun/ "Fisher was inspired to design the Dynamic Tower during a visit to a friend's top-floor Midtown Manhattan apartment. "I had a view of the Hudson River and East River at the same time, it was beautiful and I wanted to make that feeling accessible to more people." He loves the idea of seeing the sun rise and set in the same room, and considers the building to be four-dimensional. "Time is always changing the shape of the building," he told me." In addition to rotating floors(!), the building will be powered by solar and wind energy - supposedly, these systems can power th...]]> Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:35:52 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/12964/Dynamic+Tower+Skyscraper+Every+Floor+SelfRotates+Powered+by+Wind+and+Sun/