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Best of What's New 2005
mmoyer writes "Begin the onslaught of year-end roundups. Popular Science takes the early lead with their Best of What's New awards, a roundup of what they consider the top 100 products and technologies of the year. In addition to the obvious awardees like the PSP and perpendicular magnetic recording, there's interesting asides like the world's first programmable wave pool and colored toy bubbles made from disappearing dye."
So how fun is that fiber-reinforced polymer bridge in Wisconsin?
Ohhhhh no. You won't get me to RTFA by refusing to post witty comments.
Nice try.
Magnetogravitaional Space Crafts?
Comparing a PSP or a Jeep to Neuro-controlled bionic arms and perpendicular magnetic recording?!
haha!
Excuse me for being a cynic, but the PSP/Jeep portion of the 'grand awards' just feels like advertising...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Unfortuantly the xbox 360 came in at 101....
Somehow, I'm thinking the Versareef won't be quite that big!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"...a toothpaste that turns kids' mouths bright pink until they've brushed for 30 seconds."
If there's one things kids HATE, it's bright pink mouths...
One of the more bizarre products I've heard of. Should do well in Japan.
Then Sony's new Rootkit with DRM goodness should get a prize in 2005. It helped dozens or thousands of WoW cheaters to evade The Warden. Now that's cutting edge gaming technology!
Oh You POS
"Best of Whats New.... Sponsored by Microsoft" And I thought it was the XBox's slim and compact design that won it the Grand Award!
For those of you that don't know what perpendicular magnetic recording is, it is basically a new technology recently introduced by Toshiba into their line of MP3 players which is a way of stacking the bits perpendicular to the hard disk rather than laterally. Conventional HDD can hold up to 400 GB while this new technology allows for 10 times the storage per square inch. Many of the hard disk drives plan to introduce a new hard disk in pc's by 2007.
In my opinion, with this new jump in technology, the future is secure with HDD of similar size, yet 10x the capacity.
46487 466780 252994 376409 96920 39622 205366 244315 622115 512361 668040 63608 259203 955314 811176 652718 166330 23922
I can think of a few. Cellphone spam, Sony DRM, the EU trying to take over the internet, T.O. What else?
And of course Small Town Misfit (plug for my website)
tcd004
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html
a very informative animation explaining how to do Perpendicular Magnetic Recording
FTA "Xbox earned in 2001 when it crushed rival PlayStation with superior graphics and performance."
Last I checked ps2 still held the largest market share?
?? As opposed to colored military-grade bubbles.
"Its one-teraflops processing speed, fueled by three 3.2-gigahertz processors (think: three desktop computers), may make the 360 the most powerful computer you've ever used. Now all those flying chunks of decimated buildings and exploding monster heads can be uniquely generated based on your actions, delivering the most realistic console-gaming experience ever--and in a full 1,080 lines of high-def resolution. The 360 is also the first Media Center extender that receives and plays back HDTV from Media Center PCs. And it comes with a free lifetime subscription to the Xbox Live online service. $300"
What's wrong with this description?
Kiss of Death awards.
;~)
Honestly now, how many Best of What's New features have YOU seen in real life? Bet you can count them on one hand.....
Not one listing for Digital SLRs just some crappy point and shoots with superfluous features, printers and camcorders. Why not a video section instead of the camcorders? 2005 has unleashed some great SLRs from Nikon and Canon. The Nikon D200 and Canon 20D are two great examples of consumer level Digital SLRs that will blow the doors off a Kodak Easyshare-One or Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-R1 in image quality, speed, CMOS/CCD size and focal range. I would talk about the Canon EOS 1Ds but I would short out my keyboard from the drool.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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in addition to the obvious awardees like the PSP and perpendicular magnetic recording,
Ohvious, eh? What's so great about a perpendendicy-magneto-recordotron anyway? 400k floppies are all I need!
Disclaimer: I build and race turbocharged race cars http://farnorthracing.com/
To oversimplify a complex subject, when you burn fuels in a spark-ignited engine, it is possible to get a kind of explosive combustion called "detonation" instead of a nice smooth rapid burn.
Detonation is also sometimes called "knock" and it is an engine killer. Detonation is Not Your Friend.
The things that tend to increase the liklihood of experiencing detonation are a lean fuel/air mixture, excessive ignition advance, localized hotspots in the combustion chamber, excessive static compression ratio, excessive intake temperature, or excessive intake boost pressure.
The measure of a fuel's ability to resist detonation is its "octane" rating. The derivation of the term is an article in of itself... bottom line is the higher the octane, the lower the probability of detonation.
My race car drinks 118 octane, because it uses a ton of turbo boost and a lot of ignition advance to make power. Most regular pump gasses are 87-89 octane, and premium runs about 91-94 octane.
Ethenol is an octane booster (Sunoco's 94 octane fuel has a lot of it) so all else being equal, it is safer to run higher boost levels when there is ethenol present in the fuel.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
...was the best product of 2005, in my opinion. Cellphone with 2 Mp autofocus Sony camera and MP3 player with support for MemoryStick Duo cards.
:)
Granted the W800 is (though the same phone, really) a bit better with minijack for headphones and, apparently, better MP3 software. Still, the K750 was the first _good_ MP3 cellphone
ObDisclaimer: I have one, of course.
I mean, c'mon, how can you call it "What's New" and not have Phil & Dixie hosting it?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
But my guess is that it will be solely Toshiba until around - and I'm just guessing here - September 13, 2022.
US Patent No: 6,942,936
My guess is that every HDD manufacturer that it's Toshiba realizes that if they can't keep pace with Toshiba's increases in data density, they are going to go out of business, and therefore open their wallets wide and license the technology for their own products.
My guess is also that due to these licensing costs, you shouldn't expect desktop drives to drop much below 50 cents per gigabyte for the next two or three years.
Manufacturers regularly license patents from one another. I wouldn't be surprised if Toshiba actually licenses it out to the highest bidder first rather than directly develop a product.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So what. They are just ads in disguise. They awarded the lame ROM exercise machine ($14000 a pop) a few years back. It does nothing that you can't do for free or with $500 in equipment. Their basis for choosing the "best" things is pretty skewed.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The accomplishment of being able to turn wheels independantly with great power transfer makes it worth mentioning.
What should take it out of the list in my mind is not that it's like advertising - it's that you can't buy one! No fair comparing prototype cars with realy working stuff that you can actually buy.
It's almost like anti-advertising as I'm annoyed with Jeep now for not actually producing one. And yes I'd actually use it for real off-road travel, not just trips to the mall.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where's my flying car?
This is the future, and I was promised a flying car, not some Jeep.
Seem to me that declaring the XBox360 as a "best of" is a little bit early, as not a single unit has yet been sold, afaik.
If it turns out that it has any "minor" defect, like an exploding power supply that causes thousands of homes to burn down, then it will likely need to be dropped from this list.
I wonder if such an occurance is covered by their EULA? (873. Explosions and/or fires, including those involving lethal casualties, caused by this device, or any other devices supplied by MicroSoft, are the responsibility of said purchaser. Said purchaser hereby absolves MicroSoft, and its affiliates, from any legal action.)
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I still remember them showing you how to simulate typical D&D battle damage by strapping live cats to yourself and taking a cold shower...
There's a web comic that could thrive!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Funny, I submitted this same story on November 7th.
Anyone know where I can get this outlet? Google reveals nothing.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
The counter-rotating blade concept isn't new by any means.. Many early helicopter designs used the concept to cancel torque, but tail rotors proved to solve the issue of torque while also adding a high degree of control.
In helicopters, 180MPH is generally the speed limit, because that's when the aircraft's airspeed approaches the angular velocity of the rotor on it's rearward sweep. If the aircraft is traveling forward at roughly the same speed that the rotor is sweeping backward, it can't generate any lift on that side. It seems like increasing the rate of rotation would solve the problem, but the short answer is that that introduces even more problems.
Most twin-blade craft use tandem or intermeshing props, like the Chinook or V22. I'm guessing the coaxial counter-rotating design hasn't been popular because it's orders of magnitude (Score: 5, Used "orders of magnitude" in a sentence) more complicated than a standard prop. One of the main concerns in warfare is equipment reliability -- things working when you need them most. If coaxial designs are significantly less reliable in practice, that's a tremendous offset to any possible tactical advantage.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Am I the only one that gets angry at comments like this? (from TFA)
..."
"Sony PlayStation Portable The introduction of Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) was the moment portable game consoles stopped being toys
Movies, Music, Gaming . . . Is There Anything the PSP Can't Do?
Beat its only rival?
Life imitates Star Trek yet again. Hope they can use this for other things besides vaccines. I Can't stand shots. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown2005/personalheal th/8407ee82ea447010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
You can picture up the Nikon D50 or Canon 350D (Rebel XT) with "kit lenses" for less than the Sony or Kodak camera. You miss out on some of the higher end features but they will still spank both those point and shoots in quality. Both cameras have settings that do most of the work for you so you don't have to understand shutter speed, aperture or focus. Just point the camera and shoot but with much better results.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
P.S. Though I am a Canon man, the 18-200VR lens rocks. I have tried it out on a friends D70.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
We finally have a decent stereoscopic 3d Head mounted display under a thousand dollars and nobody takes note?
The emagin z800 is 20 years of geek dreams finally made a reality and not even a nod from Popular Science?
This article seems poorly written to me. These pop science magazines used to be appealing to me but now I'd rather read real research or go to colloquiums even if I don't completely understand everything.
From the article on the "Emissions Neutral Vehicle..."
"It breaks down hydrogen into electrons, which power the electric motor, and protons, which interact with oxygen taken in through the ENV's nosecone and are released as Earthfriendly water vapor and heat."
They make it sound like fuel cells actually rip the proton from neutron, or like the electrons get "used up," or that the electrons are actually flowing through the motor like water flows through a straw. Something about the way these articles are written makes me feel uncomfortable. It's like they are saying "well, you and I will never completely understand, but at least someone out there does..."
The worst thing is that explanations of more complex ideas might be botched even greater and I would never know if I trusted this magazine. I think this kind of writing promotes dogmatic science. Potential is hyped but details are not; existence of great ideas is mentioned but the ideas themselves are completely ignored.
I'll put $100 on Sep 14th, 2022.
But really, I'm sure they'll license the technology to other companies.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No iPod Nano? *gasp* Heresy!!
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Never sing this song around a girl. I did that once, I got a slap in the face, for obvious reasons..
I almost read TFA! But you saved me from that!
Well, in most cases it's better to get a little money from everyone's sales than all the money from your own. I mean, theoretically Phillips (or whoever patented CDs) could've chosen not to license their patent too. The advantage of licensing is that other people can sink their own money into product production and marketing, and whether or not they sell, you still win. Most patents in the media sector (no pun intended), with the exception of iOmega, have licensed their technology. Let me rephrase that... the most succesful media formats have been licensed. While that might not be as important in fixed media, since interoperability isn't much of a factor, it can be beneficial for other reasons.
I'm not sure who runs the SATA, but as a hypothetical: if all media companies are involved, they may vote not to license SATA to Hitachi, who would then be up the proverbial creek. What good is a HD if you can't attach it? It would only be useful in proprietary devices. While they've only used the tech in 1" drives so far, it's pretty reasonable to assume that desktop implementation will arrive in the near future.
Aside from that, there's reciprocity. We get to license your tech; in return when we develop Tech X, we'll license it to you.
Hitachi could always opt to go the monopoly route, but it's not without risk. It forces other companies to come up with competing solutions, which might end up being better or cheaper than your own.
That's all just speculation, of course, but I would be very surprised if they didn't license it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
2.88MB 3.5" floppy drives used perpendicular recording.
s /7281.htm
Although they were done by Toshiba also, there's no way this 2005 patent is the canonical patent for perpendicular recording, as there is obvious prior art.
http://www.intel.com/design/archives/periphrl/doc
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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ou can picture up the Nikon D50 or Canon 350D (Rebel XT) with "kit lenses" for less than the Sony or Kodak camera.
It's still vastly higher than most consumers are willing to spend though. I just recently bought a Canon A610 -- it's certainly not a DSLR, but I'm very pleased with it, particularly for the price.
I do find the inclusion of the Canon SD550 odd, as is Adobie Elements. And I think a Wifi enabled camera is more "gimmick" than goodness.
doh. somebody obviously made a error putting up these pages as the have forgotten to include the really big news from 2005, that emacs now supports images
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea