Developages - Development and Technology Blog

murphee ends along a report from InfoQ: “Gemstone demoed [MagLev,] their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM, to an ecstatic audience. Gemstone’s Smalltalk VM allows OODBs of up to 17 PetaBytes, with none of the old ActiveRecord nonsense: the data is persisted transparently. The Gemstone OODB also takes care of any distribution, allowing the Ruby VM and data to scale across many servers (Cheerio, memcached!). There’s also an earlier quite technical interview with Gemstone’s Bob Walker and Avi Bryant about MagLev.”

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

While we of course rock oh-so-very-hard on Rock Band’s drums, the pedal just never felt right under our weakling calves. The problem is naturally exacerbated for folks in wheelchairs, since there’s no way to avoid the kick drum or re-route it to another button — at least out of the box. Some folks at Kinetic Communications modded up a doorbell to work as the kick drum button and screwed it to a drum stick. Not the prettiest mod in the world, but it got their wheelchair-bound buddy drumming for about $20, and it shouldn’t be hard to replicate their instructions.

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Original post by Paul Miller

Ken E. writes “Asus has backed down in the face of complaints from UK Eee PC 900 owners about the ultra-portable’s low-capacity battery. Confusing statements posted in online reviews led buyers to believe that they would get a larger capacity battery than they actually did — and they weren’t happy. Asus has, however, made a conciliatory gesture by extending a £10 high-capacity battery upgrade offer. Mobile Computer has the full announcement, plus quite a bit of background on how this fuss all got started. The batteries will be available June 10 and in the meantime Eee PC owners can download a BIOS update that Asus claims will add half an hour to battery life.”

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Chalk another one up for Sharp. The company has landed yet another partner willing to utilize its solar panels in order to make news, wow onlookers and give Mother Earth a modicum of a break. Napa Valley winery Far Niente has flipped on its self-coined Floatovoltaic installation, which was developed by Thompson Technology Industries and installed by SPG Solar. Nearly 2,300 Sharp solar panels were secured for the job, and we’re told that the array generates 400 kWs at peak output, which “significantly offsets the winery’s annual power usage and provides a net-zero energy bill.” Don’t expect that coveted bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon to be any cheaper as a result, though.

[Via CNET]

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Original post by Darren Murph

MAKE hit the World Science Festival in NYC today, packed with tons of people - the event took over Washington Square park and parts of NYU. For the kids there were lots of hands on exhibits and for adults (and kids) lots of sessions/events/talks - it was so popular the ticketed events were sold out or standing room only - events like this and our own Maker Faire seem to indicated there is more demand than supply for science and that.. is a good thing! Great event, hope to see it happen each year in NYC! - more photos here & check out their site for additional day/evening events on Sunday.

Related:
World Science Festival.
Interview with Brian Green co-founder.

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

MojoKid writes “A little over a week ago Netflix unveiled the Netflix Player, developed by the team at Roku, a set-top box for watching on-demand movies and TV. This interview with Tim Twerdahl, the VP of Consumer Products for Roku, goes into some detail about the guts of the box and the future of the set-top box. Of course the system runs an embedded Linux OS but interestingly also runs on a Nexperia (Philips) media processor.”

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Wearables

This day and age, there’s really no excuse to have too little room in your average pair of cargo shorts for all the gadgets needed in a day. Convergence and shrinking PCBs have left us with do-it-all handhelds that can fit in the rear pockets of size 2 jeans on a size 4 gal, so really, you have exactly zero reasons to actually buy that abomination pictured above. If you must know, the FreeHand is a wearable neoprene pocket that keeps your keys, flash drives, RSA token and chump change within easy reach, and if you’re lucky, you may be able to convince the boss it’s being worn to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Folks who haven’t listened to a word we just said can ignite a Jackson right now — or spend $19.95 on this, same difference.

[Via Coolest-Gadgets]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Lucas123 writes “IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced it has developed a 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip that is expected to enable the production of cheaper solid-state drives with twice the storage capacity of today’s products. The 34-nanometer, multi-level chip is smaller than Intel’s latest CPUs. Samples will be available in June with production by the end of the year.”

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Frighteningly enough, this isn’t the first (or second) time that we’ve seen scientists pat themselves on the back for creating a mind-reading machine, but a dedicated team from Carnegie Mellon has just announced a computer that “has been trained to read people’s minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words.” In a completely unsurprising move, gurus familiar with the development are suggesting that the breakthrough could be used to better understand how the brain organizes knowledge, and eventually, treat language disorders and learning disabilities more effectively. That’s all gravy from here, but when this stuff starts passing as evidence in court, you’ll know it’s time to seriously investigate a relocation to Mars.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Enigma2175 writes “CNN is reporting that videos from the Coachella music festival showing Prince covering Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ have been removed by Prince’s label, NPG records. Thom Yorke of Radiohead, when told of Prince’s action, said ‘Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our… song.’ No comment from YouTube or Prince yet. Under the DMCA, YouTube is not required to verify the entity making a request is actually the copyright holder and this seems to be just another example of DMCA abuse.” As the article points out, Prince seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Interwebs.

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: GPS

First things first: considering the huge amount of press garnered by a recent position art scam, this here could indeed be just another spoof to get your hopes up. That being said, we’re pretty sure no one with any level of decency would do such a vile thing on Easter Sunday, which is precisely when the above bunny was purportedly created from waltzing about with a Magellan GPS and a digital camera. The artist himself admits that what you see above is a slightly cleaned-up version of the actual path, but we’re told that any edits that occurred had no huge bearing on the outcome of the piece. You be the judge.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Another excellent entry for the Make a Cylon contest - this Lego figure turned Cylon mini, complete LED visor action - Lego Cylon on DVICE

Don’t forget - There’s still time to enter the Make a Cylon contest. The deadline is 6/14/08 - so polish off / finish up those BSG projects and submit them to our Flickr pool!

Related:

Star Wars minifig Joule Thief

- Cylons draw near

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Original post by Collin Cunningham

Alexader Gurko’s “Begging Bot” plays music just by synching up the sounds a floppy and hard drive makes when spinning their motors. After the song is done, the CD drives opens up and the bot asks for donations from the public. The sound is actually pretty interesting if you watch the above video.

[via]

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Original post by Jonah Brucker-Cohen

mikesd81 sends in a report from Newsday about radiocarbon dating of cremated bones excavated from Britain’s Stonehenge that, an archeologist said, has solved part of the ancient mystery surrounding the 5,000-year-old site: It was a burial ground for what may have been the country’s first royal dynasty. No word on how this work relates to the “Neolithic Lourdes” theory we discussed earlier. “The new dates indicate burials began at least 500 years before the first massive stones were erected at the site and continued after it was completed… The pattern and relatively small number of the graves suggest all were members of a single family. The findings provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least a portion of southern England during this early period. They exerted enough power to mobilize manpower necessary to move the massive stones from as far as 150 miles away and [maintained] that power for at least five centuries, said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, leader of current excavations at the site… His findings will also appear in the June issue of National Geographic and in the television special “Stonehenge Decoded,” to be shown Sunday.”

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Cellphones

Hah, did you really have the nerve to doubt CraigIX? The iPhone gamepad add-on that we heard about just last week is already inching closer to reality, and there’s a video to prove it. In the somewhat unexciting clip posted up after the jump, you’ll see a PCB mockup of the device doing its thang, though it’s quite inelegant in its current form. If you just needed one more something to boost your interest / confidence that this critter was real, you know where to head.

[Via zodttd]

Continue reading Prototype iControlPad proves itself on video

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Original post by Darren Murph