Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, May 02, 2008

All of the sites, none of the smells

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/yankodesign/~3/281567566/

Let’s face it, we live in a nearly virtual society. Just the fact that you are reading Yanko Design right now and experiencing objects of design through the magic of the intertubes is proof positive. Most of the items featured here on Yanko Design may never actually touch or be near in real life. Same goes for most places on this vast planet. I have been around the world many times and still have only seen a tiny fraction of it. Enter this truly amazing step in virtual tourism called “GeoSim” www.geosimcities.com. It is the largest virtual model of a city and the singular representation mirroring real-life Philadelphia, their first test city. Great for city planners, architects wanting to see how a property integrates into the local landscape or just monetarily challenged tourists. GeoSimCities has managed to render out nearly the entire city for you to explore and virtually travel through. From the current store fronts and exact architecture, even down to the garbage cans on the street, you can wander around cities with other live virtual tourist and get a pretty good idea of (at the very least) what that place looks like. They are set to launch in a dozen more cities very soon, until then, welcome to Philadelphia.

[ Product Page ]

GeoSim

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Western Digital's VelociRaptor drive gets reviewed

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/281070154/

Filed under: Storage

We already had some early benchmarks of Western Digital's speedy new VelociRaptor hard drive the day it was announced, but the folks at Extreme Tech have now had a bit more time to spend with the drive, and they've churned out a full review of it for those that still haven't made up their mind. As with others, they found the drive more than lived up to its promise of being the "world's fastest SATA disk," with it even beating out many solid state drives in terms of write performance. The biggest downsides, as you might expect, are its relatively high (but not unreasonable) price to gigabyte ratio, and its maximum 300GB capacity, although that's nothing a second (or third) drive can't solve. Of course, they don't stop there, and you can find plenty of charts and comparisons to quench your curiosity by hitting up the link below.

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Demand for Intel's Atom already outstripping supply?

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/281228781/

Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops

There's a ton of upcoming laptops and devices based around Intel's Atom processor, and it looks like all the early interest is causing that best of all possible problems for the chipmaker: it's gotten too many orders. Intel told the WSJ that it's planning on producing "millions" of Atom chips this year, but that it's "seeing better-than-expected demand" as production begins and that it's "we are working quickly to address it." Still, it looks like manufacturers are expecting a shortage to last for a while -- ASUS predicted that supply would be constrained until the third quarter during its quarterly conference call, for example -- and various Chinese trade publications have reported the same. That's definitely not encouraging news, and with AMD's Puma and VIA's Isaiah nipping at Atom's heels, Intel might want to kick things into a higher gear.

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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

HTC Launching Most Important Product of the Year Next Month [Cellphones]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/280206022/htc-launching-most-important-product-of-the-year-next-month

The Taipei times quotes HTC's own financial executive Cheng Hui-ming at an investor's conference as saying they will launch "the most important product for HTC this year" at an event on May 6. Cheng wasn't too forthcoming with details, but it seems like it's going to be a "Touch" phone—as in one of the HTC Touch models—and be called the "Diamond". He says that it's going to be so good, he's "confident of landing orders from most major carriers," but warned about possible delays because they haven't gotten certification for the phone yet. Sounds very interesting. Could it be this phone? [Taipei Times via Engadget]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/280319032/samsung-glyde-aka-u940-ne-f700-pops-up-in-verizons-database

Samsung's long-linger F700/u940, has been rumored to hit the big V for a while, but Phone Area's reporting that it's now locked and cocked in Verizon's internal InfoManager as the Glyde, though sans date or price. Spec sheet confirms cam's cut to a paltry 2MP but all the old specs look otherwise intact, but with added goodness of EV-DO, and Verizon's usual scarlet bag of tricks like VCAST and VZNavigator. [Phone-Arena]