Monday: July 6, 2009
- Soon you'll be able to grab a Big Mac while charging your electric car.
...a new North Carolina McDonald's will include electric vehicle (EV) recharging stations, part of the ChargePoint network. While you stuff your face, your car could be stuffing its battery.
Tuesday: May 18, 2010
- Brand new computer algorithm actually capable of detecting sarcasm.
...the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.
- Everything you never knew about ball lightning hallucinations.
For hundreds of years eyewitnesses have reported brief encounters with the golf ball- to tennis ball-size orbs of electricity. But scientists have been unable to agree on how and why ball lightning forms, since the phenomenon is rare and very short-lived.
Monday: April 26, 2010
- Sony ceases production of floppy disks. In other news, Sony was still making floppy disks.
Most other floppy disk manufacturers had long since pulled out of the market, and Sony itself has already ceased sales to most of its overseas markets. With the release of the iMac in 1998, Apple was the first computer maker to take the plunge and eliminate the floppy completely.
Monday: April 12, 2010
- Starbucks giving away free coffee on April 15th, bring your own mug.
The free coffee giveaway is an effort to raise awareness that we should all be ditching paper cups in favor of switching to a more reusable environmentally-friendly coffee container. This container would probably be a cylinder mug-like type of object - most likely a mug. More info (and a short flick) over here.
Tuesday: April 6, 2010
- Blu-ray discs will soon be capable of holding a whopping 128 gigabytes.
The new BDXL specification describes High Capacity Recordable and Rewritable discs which will write up to 128GB of content on each disc. These are write-once capacities, with the rewritable discs allowing for 100GB of storage.
Wednesday: March 24, 2010
- Easter Egg hunts to go high-tech this year with the addition of GPS devices.
Nothing says Easter Egg hunt quite like finding that lone lost egg via means of it's latitude and longitude. Of course (and obviously), a GPS device is required is you so choose to participate in one of these said hunts.
Monday: March 22, 2010
- Palm not doing so well these days thanks to poor sales and lagging stock.
Analysts and news outlets already seem to running a countdown on just when exactly Palm will go belly up and call it day. I wonder which major company will rise to the occasion and snatch up Palm for themselves should that event arise.
Thursday: March 18, 2010
- Disgruntled employee disables hundreds of cars from the comfort of his PC.
I wouldn't call this so much of a 'hack' (or hacker according to Wired) but rather a disgruntled employee who happened to know his way around a most-likely poorl y designed online security system. If you put functionality like this online without proper security this is just an accident waiting to happen.
Tuesday: March 9, 2010
- Eleven of the world's craziest roads for you to gawk at.
Enjoy this collection of wild and in most cases ridiculously dangerous modes of travel. Maybe it's because I usually have video games on the brain but after seeing these pictures I really want to go play some Mario Kart.
- Your computer may one day operate at the speed of light thanks to laser technology.
An electrically powered, room-temperature, infrared laser for laptop computers is still years away, however, cautioned Michel. If and when those laptops do arrive, they will be powerful -- more powerful in fact than even today's supercomputers.