Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: GPS

Though not quite as bad as toting the GPS module around with you, one particular marijuana farmer had to be mighty embarrassed / wondering what he ever did to deserve such bad luck when a GPS-equipped turtle meandered into his crop. As the story goes, a close friend of the police — a box turtle with no fear of Big Brother — just happened upon a pot stash on US park property. Clearly, Mr. Isiah Johnson (the culprit) was heavily stoned when choosing US land to farm his ganja, and now he’s in custody until he’s “extradited back DC to face drug charges.” And you thought all you had to do was dodge those CCTV cameras…

[Via TechDigest]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Tired of the fuzz body-checking you right off your bike during Critical Mass rides? Well lucky you, New York Police Commish Ray Kelly is responding by flipping the switch on user-generated crime reports, enabling ordinary citizens to submit photos and video as evidence of criminal activity. Granted, we think it’s always been the case that people could dial-a-detective if they’ve got a hot lead on a crime, but here Kelly specifically referred to the “fact of life” that nowadays “everybody has a camera in their telephones. When people can record an event taking place that helps us during an investigation, it’s helpful.” Details are not yet clear, like how much manpower it’s going to take to weed through the billions of tattle-tale clips that will inevitably be sent in of Sbux line-cutters, or what codecs the NYPD will support (fingers crossed for motion-JPEG and 3GPP).

[Via The Raw Feed]

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Original post by Ryan Block

Filed under: Gaming

Sure, Wii is great and all, but we’re guessing a man in China who tried to extort $1,400 from his parents by “kidnapping” himself and demanding a ransom after they refused to buy him a “Nintendo computer” was probably a little too infatuated with Ninty’s white box. The man, (who we’re hoping is more of a “boy,”) apparently hired two men to kidnap him, and was arrested after he withdrew his own ransom from an ATM. Genius. Quick tip, kids: real tennis, bowling, golf, and boxing are almost as much fun as Wii Sports, believe it or not — and they involve just slightly less jail time.

[Via Wii Fanboy]

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

If you’re anything like our boy Ryan, you’ve been wearing that Wii Fit out ever since you took delivery. Unfortunately, you’ve probably been doing a bit of unintentional jogging when logging miles back and forth to the local mini-mart for batteries. If you can’t seem to keep your Wii Balance Board charged, Nyko has introduced a novel solution: the Energy Pack for Wii Fit. Our pals over at Nintendo Wii Fanboy were able to get ahold of this very unit and put it through its paces, and generally speaking, they were quite impressed with the $20 peripheral-for-a-peripheral. Head on over for the full writeup and a smattering of pics.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

Yep, we’re mandating that this one be filed in the rumor folder for now, but according to a report from ThinkPanmure, AT&T Mobility is planning to move up to 7 million femtocells acquired from UK-based ip.access. As the story goes, AT&T inked a contract with the aforesaid firm for up to half a billion dollars in femtocells over five years, and it’s supposedly aiming to sell each to end users for “as little as $100.” As expected, spokespeople for AT&T and ip.access weren’t around / didn’t care to comment on the matter, but a dame from the former did admit that it was “examining the potential benefits of femtocells through lab tests and planned to conduct a trial later this year.” Of course, AT&T wouldn’t be the first US carrier to offer the boxes, but it’s not like Sprint’s $49.99 Airave set any sales records or anything when it launched late last year.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Cellphones

AT&T has announced plans to cut 1.5 percent of its workforce of 309,000. Sad times ahead for the company? Not quite. Apparently the 4600 jobs will be harvested from managerial spots in its flagging wired home phone business, so no worries, wireless types. Now here’s where it gets interesting: word has it that AT&T also expects to hire back that same number of employees into the fold — the wireless fold, that is — keeping the total headcount nice and steady. We’d wager that we’ll see more cuts like this in the coming months and years, so if you were pondering that job as a switchboard operator, time to retrain. So yeah, turns out it’s business as usual for the number one carrier after all — unless you happen to be in the 4600-strong group of obsoleted folks, that is.

[Via mocoNews]

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Original post by Sean Cooper

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Although both Microsoft and Intel’s R&D departments have been responsible for some nifty futuristic tech, the two companies got together last week and announced a $20M grant to two universities to “start over” and develop next-gen computing systems based around parallel processing. The grant will fund Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers at UC -Berkeley, which is kicking in another $7M, and the University of Illinois at Champaign / Urbana, which is donating $8M of its own. According to Mark Snir, head of the UIUC lab, the goal is to find a way to make “parallelism so easy to use that parallel programming becomes synonymous with programming” — an increasingly important priority as current multi-core processors aren’t necessarily being fully utilized, and 100-core processors aren’t far off. That leads us to wonder: what to do with all that newly-unlocked processing power? Virtual-reality Facebook? Real-time visual augmentation? Finally being able to run Crysis? We know you’ve got ideas — sound off in comments!

[Thanks, Luke]

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Storage

Fujitsu — a company that hates to be outdone by the competition in any field — has introduced a new line of high capacity, 2.5-inch drives sure to have any space-conservative user hitting the ATM. The 400GB or 500GB “MHZ 2 BT” disk comes in a 4200RPM SATA configuration, and uses a thrifty 1.8 watts of power when humming along, thus allowing it to fall under Fujitsu’s Green Policy Innovation Program. The drives are due to begin shipping in May, though there’s no indication of price. Considering the wild fluctuations in storage pricing, we’ll just say they’ll probably cost less than one million dollars.

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Cellphones

The run-up to 3GSM GSMA Mobile World Congress has begun with the announcement of LG’s KF510 slider. Launching February 11th in Barcelona, the new 10.9-mm thin phone features a metal frame and tempered glass touch interface. LG primarily touts the phone’s “advanced touch technology” (incorporating VibeTouch haptic feedback like their Voyager, we presume), 3 megapixel camera, and MP3 player. Available worldwide in March in Stardust Dark Gray or Sunset Red. How sweet.

[Via AVING]

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Robots

Yeah, we gave you a plethora of hatching photos to ooh and ahh over when we received our first Pleo, but considering our inexplicable fear of needles and prehistoric blood, we never considered taking things any further. Apparently, the folks over at Pleo Dreams completely disregarded our recommendation to not de-skin the dinosaur, and proceeded to remove every square centimeter of Pleo’s covering on video. Believe it or not, things get pretty interesting once the garb comes off, but you’ll have to endure a near-24 minute clip in order to say you saw the entire procedure from start to finish. You ready? It’s waiting after the break.

Continue reading Pleo goes under the knife in astonishingly long video

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Original post by Darren Murph