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New VAIOs Made of Carbon Fiber
Shawnzyoo noted that Sony has released their new series of VAIO TX laptops. In order to make them stronger/lighter/thinner, they are now
made of carbon fiber. No plans to release it in the US yet, so start learning Korean if you want this one.
First line of TFA:
Sony Korea announced two new VAIO TX series notebooks...
Carbon fiber is used fairly extensively in cycling and we've learned a few things about it. They have lower heat tolerance and abrasion resistance than metal. I'm not sure if those are qualities you want in a laptop which tend to get hot and rub against the table.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start;sid=uat PyV9-gjlPUxwo6HVFwhBwahpn-XnwTyA=?CategoryName=cpu _VAIONotebookComputers_TXSeries&Dept=computers
Carbon Fiber, same specs, goes on sale here next week - no Korean required.
Guys
Maybe you need to fdisk and replace the keyboard.. or stick some stickers along to make the keys english. Not that you need to but makes it easier at times
http://iesucks.org
I'd like to point out that using carbon fibers or nanotubes in consumer electronics has electrical advantages. Using a conductive filler you can achieve electromagnetic interference (EMI) protection or electrostatic dissipation (ESD). Other conductive fillers such as carbon black or metallic powders would work but due to the small aspect ratio of the particles they require large amounts, and this degrades the mechanical properties of the polymer. Some more infomration here http://www.patagon.8m.com/equations/cnt.html
I just dropped $5k AU on a VAIO VGN-A49GP about 2 months ago. I bought it for the spectacular display (17" 1920x1200), but I am a little disappointed with it feeling a little flimsy after not much use. Even the silver paint on the palm rests is already wearing off and showing the black plastic underneath.
Metal or carbon fiber would have been nice, especially at this price point and size.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
it makes it faster by 1ghz, just from the carbon fiber alone
The two biggest mysteries of the world: How morons get modpoints, and how a first post can get marked as redundant.
the sony website is taking pre orders, i'm guessing it'll be released in the US soon.
Isn't that what Babelfish is for?
If you want to order a laptop and end up with six low-grade pairs of headphones and a guide to haircare written by Kim Jong-il, sure!
Most Koreans can't understand anything babelfish says. It's complete unintelligible gibberish to them. Korean->English can be equally nightmarish. Most Koreans don't follow traditional rules for word separation, so the system can't figure out where the words end. In addition, hangul uses a very limited range of pronunciation whereas as its parent language, Chinese, has a variety of different inflections. As such, each Korean character has up to 50 or 60 different meanings. I can get by with most stuff, even technical documents, but talking to a University age student on the Internet is excruciatingly painful. It's like they all use some hyper-evolved form of leet-speak where you can't use spaces.
This was out in Japan first - it's the Type T VAIO.
e x.html
http://www.jp.sonystyle.com/Style-a/Product/T/ind
Depending on how good your Japanese is, they do say it is made of multi-layered carbon fibre.
If it's anything like the latest Asus motherboards, the whole media player thing is handled in the BIOS. All it does is turn on the sound card, set the mixer settings to something reasonable, and send a "play start" command to the CD-ROM. It doesn't need an OS because it's not doing anything sophisticated. The whole thing is probably 200 bytes or so, and most of that is the interface.
I read the internet for the articles.
In Korea, carbon fiber is for old people.
/. inspired cliché or am I late to this one?
Do I detect a new
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
They set up us the carbon!
I agree those thing are unresolved misteries: for instance, I need mod-point now to mod you up, but I have none.
No sig today.
Isn't carbon fibre both flammable as well as electrically conductive?
If it was flammable, it would certainly be a very poor choice for constructing race cars.
As for electrical conductivity, it wouldn't be any more of an issue than metal notebook casings which are already widely used.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Except for the price concern. Not all people need the functionality of a laptop and would rather spend a grand less and get a cheap portable DVD player.....
Just your everyday corporate code monkey.
This AV mode button makes the instant Mode available in 12secs without any booting process.
Is 12secs the new definition for "instant"?
"How do you expect me to see the forest with all these damn trees in the way?!"
Now straying dangerously offtopic, but if the first post just regurgitates a bit of the summary (or article) then surely it could be redundant? :)
Game dev and music blog
...but it was presumably written by someone only familiar with Sony Korea, as Sony (the Japanese parent company) has already released the same model in Japan.
When carbon composites fail, they do so spectacularly, as opposed to Al, steel or Ti which usually just crumple a bit. They are also prone to directional issues. A teammate of mine slammed on the brakes hard in a race to avoid a crash and the lateral forces on his fishtailing rear wheel snapped his Zipp 303 (a carbon rimmed bicycle wheel) in half. The wheel was stronger than an aluminum rim in one direction, but weak under minor lateral forces that an Al rim would easily have weathered. As for laptops on your lap.... Carbon isnt known for spontaneous failure under no load at all... Unless you're sitting on it I wouldnt worry. BTW, what is it with cyclists and good beer? Nothing like a bomber of Dreadnaught to recover after an 80 mi race.
Most Koreans can't understand anything babelfish says
So this is an entirely different Slashdot article now. Ask Slashdot: Can you successfully order a laptop from Korea without actually speaking Korean? I would like to see some of the creative solutions people come up with.
its parent language, Chinese
errr... what makes you think that Chinese is the parent language of Korean? Chinese is Sino-Tibetan language. Where as Korean is considered to be unclassified, or Altaic language or language isolate.
I hate ignorant people...
------ http://timothylive.net
ASUS, one of Sony's main notebook manufacturers (Sony doesn't make their own laptops), already make use of carbon fiber chassis in some of their own ultraportable/thin-and-light models, which have been available in North America for a few years.
One particular model I have is from their M6 series, which has since been replaced by their updated Z70 series, both with CF chassis.
What's even better is that since ASUS notebooks aren't sold retail, they come at nearly half the price for similar functionality, performance, and aesthetic quality as a comparable Sony.
Check out www.asus.com for online reseller links
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Maybe you're trying to chat with Korean students in Chinese over the internet, which would explain your poor understanding of the Korean language...
Drop a Thinkpad and a VAIO and I know which one my money is on...
This is yet another story in the past year that makes me wonder if Slashdot really has just become an advertising venue, willingly, or through negligence.
Likewise, when slashdot repeats a story, a lot of posters will try to repost the highest ranked posts from the previous story in an attempt to get karma, and moderating such posts redundant is an appropriate way to punish this behavior, even if such a post is the first post, or any early post.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
they are now made of carbon fiber
Is this my dream come true? Can I finally use my laptop as a tennis racket?
It was inspired by a story how young people prefer Instant Messaging to email, and old people still used email. Link: In Korea, Email Is Only For Old People
SAILING MISHAP
No, the carbon fiber only adds 500Mhz, you need the aftermarket wing crudely bolted through the LCD to get the 1GHz boost.
Actually I believe it _is_ flammable and _I_ build race cars out of it. (http://me.unm.edu/~fsae/teams/2005/). However, my mind blanked and I forgot how high the temperature has to be before it will oxidize.
It'll oxidize at a very high temperature, but I think the oxidation stops as soon as the heat source is removed so you won't get a sustainable burn (but I Am Not a Materials Scientist). This may be another reason why it's useful in race cars along with strength and weight. Carbon brake pads don't readily ignite either, right?
At any rate, if anything in a laptop shell gets hot enough to oxidize carbon fiber, you probably have other things to worry about!
Nice cars by the way, those things must have a scary power to weight ratio. And I'm drooling over that Ford GT.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Not only are carbon fibre laptops not knew, neither are carbon fibre Vaios.
. php?t=3889&sid=6456be6419d0fc2b769d268570aaeae1 which is an interview with a lot of the designers. The X505 is sort of like what Yamaha did with the NS-1000M monitors way back when -- threw money to make the best/smallest monitors/laptop. I still have no idea how many got shipped but I've not seen more than one or two in use in England.
Certain Vaio X505 models have carbon fibre models, including the X505/CP, which I am typing on right now. I think it's as much a gimmick as anything else, but it does look good.
You can find out all sorts of 505 info at http://www.siliconpopculture.com/sonytr/viewtopic
Some good photos are available at http://www.dynamism.com/x505/index.shtml
I'm ordering mine with a wing and a Type-R sicker.
Having studied both Korean and Japanese for several years, I'd say, yes, Korean is easier to learn. The korean alphabet consists almost entirely of straight lines which are easy to learn and reproduce. Pronunciation is very consistent, and when it varies, it is predictable because character positioning largely dictates pronunciation. Their alphabet is something like 14 consonants and 10 vowels. To make things simpler, they use different vowels for dipthongs and such, so each vowel only has one possible pronunciation (as opposed to our vowel system). So reading their written language is a series of consonant-vowel-consonant structures that are at least easy to read. So if you know 'k-a' and you know 'n', then you can trivially construct 'n-a' as well.
Japanese is also very systematic, having something like 8 primary consonant sounds, and 5 primary vowel sounds, but each combination of consonant vowel has its own character, for 40+ individual characters that seem entirely independent. Learning the character for 'ka' doesn't teach you anything about the character for 'sa' or for 'ko'. They also have a second alphabet, which is a simplified version of the first reserved for writing foreign words, proper nouns, and some names.
Both languages make extensive usage of chinese characters in their written language as well. The challege arrives in that in different contexts, chinese characters are substituted for native characters (either japanese or korean), but can have entirely different meanings and pronunciations depending on context. To further mire the situation, a single chinese character can replace different numbers of native characters, making the translation/reading process rather intense. For instance, the chinese character for mouth is used in japanese in the words for mouth, opening, door, gate, etc... but the japanese words were derived from ancient spoken japanese, so its replacing japanese character(s) with a chinese one of rather unsimilar origin.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."