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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?
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/
"...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
The real technology being given the award isn't the bubbles. It's the dyes themselves, which are as close to a programmable pigment as we're going to get. From the sounds of it, the pigments are even non-toxic, making it a rather amazing invention for someone who just wanted to make colored bubbles.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If you'd RTFA, you might find your answer.
The colored bubbles are cool because no one's successfully done it before, getting the dye to spread uniformly over the entire bubble (as opposed to just flowing to the bottom) isn't trivial, and it took the guy about 10 years to actually get it done.
But my guess is the grand award part comes in because of the specific dye they developed in the process. Specifically, this dye disappears after at most half an hour - faster if it's subjected to friction (eg. you can just rub it off your skin, out of your clothes, or whatever it lands on). The article claims (I'm not a chemist, so I don't know how true it is) that this is an entirely new type of dye.
One of the applications they listed was toothpaste that colors the inside of a kid's mouth a bright color until they've brushed the necessary 30 seconds.
All in all, to me it sounds like it deserves it - it's a new concept that opens up entirely new fields of innovation, rather than an iterative improvement over previous technology.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
?? 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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Great. Ass dye. We have attained the singularity.
actually, the Xbox360 gets the Grand award for Home Entertainment ... getting accolades before it's out and tested by the masses.
No kidding. Could they have written a more sensational piece?
the Xbox 360 easily maintains the cred the original Xbox earned in 2001 when it crushed rival PlayStation with superior graphics and performance.
*Crushed* the Playstation? I hope someone told Sony, because last I heard they were still dominant.
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.
Do these guys need to work on their copy, or what? 3.2 GHz is impressive, but hardly "three desktop computers". And what's this "fueled by"? Is a processor a consumable? If so, can I turbo-charge it with silicon aditives? I mean, these guys have been writing way too many car reviews.
Besides, the only reason why the X-Box is on top is because they beat Nintendo and Sony to market. Which is kind of funny, because it's sounding more and more like all the console makers will be using many of the same technologies. Which suggests that this could be the least impressive lineup of game consoles ever to hit the market. We'll see how it pans out, though.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
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.
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.
Except that it's not actually three processors. It's three processor cores. Just like on the IBM Power and PowerPC chips, AMD64 X2, and the late-model Intel Pentiums and Xeons.
Which isn't to say that the multicore SIMD design of this chip won't be impressive. It will be. But three desktop computers? I don't think so. Even the 1 teraflop claim is suspect. Just like how graphics card manufacturers can pump 3 trillion triangles a second, right? (*cough*underlabratoryconditionsmaybe*cough*)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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
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.
Never sing this song around a girl. I did that once, I got a slap in the face, for obvious reasons..
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