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Where the U.S. government researches a nuclear future

July 9th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Tech News

Where the U.S. government researches a nuclear future
tiny town, which might otherwise have forever escaped notoriety of any kind, was put on the map for a very historic reason: It became the first place in the “free world” to be powered by “electrical energy developed from the atom.”
The power was generated by the Experimental Breeder Reactor run by the nearby Nuclear Reactor Testing Station, and the flipping of the switch seemed to usher in a new era for the United States and the world: the nuclear era. More »

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Engadget’s recession antidote: win a VTech IS9181 WiFi radio

July 1st, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Audio & Video, Conceptual Gadgets

Engadget's recession antidote: win a VTech IS9181 WiFi radio

This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff / companies stop sending things. Today we’ve got a boomin’ VTech IS9181 internet radio on offer, ready to stream jams from the world wide web when not playing back your MP3 collection. Read the rules below (no skimming — we’re omniscient and can tell when you’ve skimmed) and get commenting! Check after the break for some photos of the prize! More »

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Palm says licensing webOS “not a religious issue”

June 26th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Mobile Phone

Palm says licensing webOS "not a religious issue"

Palm had its quarterly results conference call yesterday and although CEO Jon Rubinstein and CFO Doug Jeffries kept a pretty tight lid on the future product talk, they did say that licensing webOS to third parties isn’t “a religious issue for us.” That’s pretty vague, sure, but we can’t help but immediately think back to the golden age of Palm OS, when licensees like Sony put out amazing devices like the Clie PEG-NZ90 that we’ve lovingly mocked up with a webOS screenshot above — we’re sure Palm’s upcoming handsets will be interesting in their own right, but we’d love to see a manufacturer like HTC riff on webOS the way it’s tweaking Android. Of course, Jeffries also said Palm has “no plans at this time to even talk about” licensing, so this is all just a pipe dream for now, but let’s not ruin the moment, okay? Hit the read link for the full call transcript.

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Shuttle’s H7 5800 packs Core i7 and all the trimmings into a small form factor PC


These days, Shuttle’s particular brand of small form factor PC isn’t as exactly stunning as it once was, but it’s still fun to see just how much they can cram in there. Shuttle has taken its barebones SX58H7 Core i7 kit and is now offering it preconfigured with Core i7 Extreme processors, 6GB of RAM and GeForce GTX 285 graphics (With support for SLI or ATI CrossFireX). Unfortunately the base price for the H7 5800 is a silly high $2,149, and once you actually get to any of those previously mentioned trimmings, you’re looking at around $4k for a computer. It might be slight technical feat, but we can’t imagine More »

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InnoDisk’s 128 GB NanoSSD Is the Size of a Matchbox, but Still Zips Around

InnoDisk's 128 GB NanoSSD Is the Size of a Matchbox, but Still Zips Around

The InnoDisk NanoSSD amazingly packs 128-gigabytes of storage into a form factor not much bigger than a matchbox. And to top it off, InnoDisk claimes the drive still reads and writes at around 150 MB/s. Wow.

As part of the testing process, InnoDisk says they test the NanoSSD by hitting it with 20 Gs of of “accelerative force” while plugged into a motherboard, and TweakTown says it’s designed to survive this. There’s been no mention of when this will be available, and I’m sure More »

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Fedora 11 packs a next-gen file system, faster boot times, all the joys and pitfalls of Linux

Fedora 11 packs a next-gen file system, faster boot times, all the joys and pitfalls of Linux
It is more secure operating System :
Linux just gets sexier and sexier, and Fedora 11 just joined Ubuntu 9.04 in the ranks of super modern Linux distros released this year. Fedora doesn’t have all the desktop refinements of Ubuntu, or the wild popularity, but it does act as the underpinnings of Intel’s Moblin, and the Sugar OS, and doesn’t shy away from the future. Fedora 11 makes the bleeding edge ext4 filesystem the default for installs, which speeds performance and improves data integrity — Ubuntu offers ext4 as an option, but some application incompatibilities have caused data loss More »

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130-Megapixel Camera Made From a Run-Of-The-Mill Scanner and an Ancient Lens

June 9th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Audio & Video, Digital Cameras

130-Megapixel Camera Made From a Run-Of-The-Mill Scanner and an Ancient Lens

The idea of a scanner-made camera is nothing super new, but concocting one which snaps photos at 130-megapixels is pretty amazing. That’s exactly what some Japanese dude with a touch of tech know-how accomplished.

Spyuge, the amateur photographer responsible for this DIY gem, says that he took a 1200 dpi Epson GT-S620 scanner, and an old Canon FD 50mm lens, fusing the two together to produce this. He said he chose that particular scanner because it has a CCD sensor, uses a camera-like lens of its own and uses LED lighting. In some of the shots, there’s obviously noticeable noise even at 800 or 1024 res, but all things considered, these photos are more than respectable.
Bouncing Red Ball also has a close-up zoom to show what kind of detail the camera setup can produce (SPOILER: it’s not shabby at all). For the few brave ones out there, you can also check out a full-resolution image for yourself. This is not for the faint of heart. In case you don’t want to do the (relatively basic) math, a 130-megapixel image calculates out to roughly a 13,000×10,000 resolution image.
Read more on Gizmodo

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