Say what you will about Hewlett-Packard’s consistently terrible corporate management and laughable failures in tablets and smartphones, HP still knows a thing or two about amazing peripherals. Witness the just-announced HP TopShot LaserJet Pro M275, an impressive web-connected printer/scanner that can scan 3D objects and still comes in at a reasonable $399.99. Of course this doesn’t mean the kind of 3D for which you probably spent way too much money on a 3DS. The function is intended to streamline the process of photographing objects and getting the images online, for people who make their living from boutique sites or on eBay.
The scanner works by using the camera mounted on the crane arm to take 6 individual images from different angles and exposure levels. Those photos are then combined into a single image that HP claims will be seamless. Pretty cool, but in addition to the whole “wow, it scans 3D images” thing, the HP TopShot will also come with some useful features, like apps for posting the images directly to online storage sites and auctions, and the ability to print directly from your smart phone or devices like iPad and iPod Touch. Scans are able to get up to 245 dpi, which isn’t bad unless you consider the HP TopShot prints up to 600 dpi. Assuming HP doesn’t experience yet another management shuffle that veers the whole company sideways, future incarnations will likely have higher quality scans.
The HP Topshot also has support for HP ePrint and AirPrint, connects to the internet without a computer and will also work on a wireless network. All in all it looks like a shockingly affordable gadget for small businesses. No release date has been announced though, so keep your fingers crossed this won’t go the way of Microsoft’s Courier tablet.
Lamborghini is much like Porsche. They don’t make many cars, but they come up with insane numbers of special edition. Both companies keep on churning out more and more special editions and limited editions of their one particular models, and yet however many edizione specialalzes they cooks up, the world always seems hungry for more. And here it is, its latest treat: the Gallardo LP570-4 Super Trofeo Stradale, a 150-copy uber-Gallardo that will be unveiled officially in Frankfurt, just before the Gallardo gets a replacement.
Based on the Gallardo race car, the LP570-4 STS has a maximum dry weight of 2,954 lbs., about 160 lbs. lighter than the standard Gallardo thanks to repeated visits from the carbon fiber fairy, giving it a 0-62 mph time of 3.4 seconds thanks to the 570-hp V10. Painted here in a shade Lamborghini calls “Rosso Mars;” the other colors of “Grigio Telesto” or “Bianco Monocerus” can be ordered from the Italian translation of the Harry Potter books.
Looking rather fetching in its flawless coat of Rosso Mars paint, which the automaker proudly claims recognizes Italy’s famous red racing cars, this latest version of Lambo’s V10-powered supercar is based on the LP570-4 Blancpain Edition that was unveiled at last year’s Paris Motor Show. That means it weighs 2,954 pounds and makes good use of its 570 horsepower to hit 0-62 miles per hour in 3.4 seconds.
That massive rear spoiler is manually adjustable to help keep the wheels on the ground, and both it and the car’s hood are crafted from carbon fiber. Lamborghini will happily plaster the interior with carbon goodness in place of the standard black and red motif, surely for an extra charge.
Only 150 of these special Gallardos are earmarked for production, so good luck if you’re interested, coz I’m pretty sure they’re all booked.
What can you get for $300 these days? A bunch of stuff, probably, including the latest soundbar from Yamaha. The YAS-101 Front Surround System offers up 7.1 sound, a built-on 60-watt subwoofer and support for Dolby Digital and DTS. The UniVolume feature, meanwhile, helps maintain a constant level through loud volume increases during commercials. IR codes can also be sent through the speaker bar, so you don’t have to worry about it blocking the set. Seemed like one sweet sound bar for the living room to me.
Watch the above video closely, because you might just miss the moment: according to the latest post on MSDN’s Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft’s next-gen desktop OS will see a hugely improved boot time thanks to a clever technique. Rather than closing both the user session and the kernel session like in a traditional shutdown, Windows 8 will preserve the kernel session on the disk, thus creating a “hiberfile” that’s much smaller than that of the usual Windows hibernation — see the diagram after the break for a clearer idea. The result? An amazingly fast system bootup — even with the battery removed to begin with — that claims to be 30 to 70 percent faster than most systems tested by Microsoft. We’re itching to test this feature on an SSD ourselves, but until then, you can head over to MSDN’s blog for the full technical explanation.
Dell is tweaking some of the options offered on its Precision M6600 and M4600 mobile workstations. You can now choose to add 512GB SATA3 SSD drives and (in the case of the M6600) a 4GB NVIDIA Quadro 5010M card. The interesting thing though, is that the 6600 has space for three drives: two full size and one mini-card slot. That means you could outfit this 17.3-inch beast with a pair of 512GB SSDs and one 128GB SSD, for a grand total of 1.1TB of solid state storage. Of course, with each half-terabyte drive adding a whopping $1,120 to the price of this professional lappy it’s not exactly for those on a budget. But, we wouldn’t be shocked to see this trickle down to high-end, portable gaming rigs relatively soon.
The jump from teaser rendering to metal was kind to the new Audi A2 concept, which debuted in Frankfurt today. The sketch looked good, but the real thing is even better, with elegant lines that flow from the headlights and then around the side. Of course, we know that what’s really important here is the laser…
Audi acknowledges that the A2 is nothing more than a “concept technology study,” which meant that the designers were able to go a bit crazy with this all-electric vehicle. This includes a built-in internet connection, steering and braking by-wire systems and, yes, a rear fog light laser that projects a warning triangle on mist behind the car when visibility is compromised.
One of them is being conscious of your greenhouse gas emissions as cloud systems can be much more energy efficient, says Google.
For example, the company claims that using Gmail instead of your average enterprise email system is up to 80 times better for the environment. The reason? Cloud servers are leveraged 100 percent while average enterprise servers never use their entire capacity and have processing overhead wasted. Google says using Gmail for an entire year uses less energy than is required to manufacture a bottle of wine, drink the wine, “stuff a message in the bottle and throw it in the ocean” (about 1.2 kg CO2).
Similarly, one minute of watching YouTube videos uses 0.00002 kWh of energy on Google’s side, without counting the client PC that actually displays the video. So, if you want to move certain services to the cloud, but run out of arguments to support such a strategy, greening your IT may be an interesting angle.
Recent Comments