Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Mitsubishi’s i MiEV electric car has spent some serious time on the streets of Japan, but before long, the fuel-shunning vehicle will be roughin’ it here in the US of A. The auto maker is teaming up with Southern California Edison and PG&E in order to see how it fares in LA traffic and how to best integrate it with the power grid. As of now, the whips should be cruising down the carpool lanes in Q4, though a few modifications may be needed in order to comply with US laws. Plans are to test the i MiEV for three solid years, and hopefully the $30,000 ride will be made available for purchase shortly thereafter (or earlier, if we’re fortunate). What now, MINI?

[Via Wired]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Cellphones

We’re just four days away from WWDC, so the rumor mill is churning at a fever pitch — and the latest context-less bits of info to emerge from the churn are these purported photos of the 3G iPhone’s touchscreens over at iLounge. Yeah, that’s touchscreens, plural — if these are to believed, Apple’s got two sizes of iPhone in store for us on Monday: a 3.2-inch model, and a smaller 2.8-inch model. Note that both of those sizes are smaller than the current iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen, which seems slightly implausible — but kinda-sorta matches up with other rumors we’ve heard, including those persistent “iPhone nano” whispers from last year. We still really doubt that Apple will shrink the iPhone’s screen size, however, and there are literally hundreds of touchscreen iPhone KIRFs these panels could have come from, so we’d say there’s a better chance this is just more hype — but we know y’all have your own ideas. Let us know in comments!

[Thanks, Sleuth]

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Gaming

Remember when you discovered that you could check out your Xbox 360’s heatsink without voiding the warranty? Yeah, fun times. Now, we’re getting a closer look at the third-generation PlayStation 3 heatsink — and this time, you won’t be required to perform any strange feats of inverted photography in order to take a peek. Furukawa Electric recently showed off the next-gen sink at Techno-Frontier 2008 in Japan, and aside from ditching the copper pipes used in the first two iterations, this one has also split in two in order to cool the Cell and RSX processors separately. Additionally, the latest version sucks down up to 70 fewer watts than the first-gen model, yet manages to still keep your precious console from spontaneously melting. Three cheers for progress, we say.

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Shoebox servers using Microsoft’s Windows Home Server software provide easy networked access to photos, music, video, and all other data files throughout the house or small business office. If you want more performance and versatility for less money than, say, the HP MediaSmart Home Server, check out the Synology CS407e Cube Station.

The CS407e runs $500 street (bare, no drives) and is a small box with four bays, just like HP, and, unlike HP, a hardware RAID controller that handles RAID 0 (data striped into one big volume), RAID 1 (data mirrored, thus protected from drive failure), or RAID 5 (data striped, survives the failure of a drive). HP stops at RAID 1. HP has four USB jacks for adding additional external drives; Synology has two for external drives or a USB printer. The Synology advantage is affordable capacity: up to 3TB with the data protection of RAID 5 (using 1TB drives) vs. 2TB for HP with its RAID 1. With RAID 5, your secure data capacity is N-1 (N is the number of drives), meaning if you have four 1TB drives, you’ve got 3TB. With WHS/MediaSmart, capacity is N/2, or 2TB in the same scenario. Either can survive the loss of a drive.

The Synology CS407e and its harder-to-find big brother CS407 with a faster RAID controller ($650 street), can store and serve up media files on your network, has built-in services for the Web, FTP, iTunes, photo sharing, backup, and Bit Torrent downloads. It’s easy enough to set up as a file server. But there are two downsides compared to HP’s offering: Synology’s remote access that allows distant relatives to see your photos (PhotoStation), for instance, is trickier to implement and may be beyond the abilities of some casual users. While the elegant WHS photo viewer looks like a Media Center PC, Synology’s is cruder. Synology says it’s working on better documentation and wizards along with a less geeky PhotoStation display.

The price/performance math is pretty compelling. A Synology CS407e at $500 plus four 500GB drives at $100 each runs $900 and gives you 1.5TB secure capacity. An HP EX475 with two 500GB drives is $700 and two more drives would be the same $900 total but with 1TB total secure capacity. You’ve got to buy the HP server with at least one drive and your only choice is 500GB. To match Synology’s 1.5GB capacity you’d need to buy the EX470 with one drive ($600), set aside the 500GB drive, then buy four 750GB drives ($200 each), for a total cost of $1,400. Ka-ching. That’s about what I spent for a Synology CS407 system with four 750GB drives giving me 2.25TB total capacity. I’ve had it four months and it’s already half full.

Original post by Bill Howard