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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Volkswagen Caddy Van Features a Wooden Boat Deck For Sunbathing [Cars]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/377590989/volkswagen-caddy-van-features-a-wooden-boat-deck-for-sunbathing

The designers at Volkswagen brought out the big guns for an upcoming recreational vehicle show in Düsseldorf, Germany by crossing one of their small commercial Caddy vans with a sailboat. While the Caddy Topos Sail design is not capable of traveling on water, it does feature a sailboat style deck on the roof that can be modified for relaxation and sunbathing. It even features a wooden ladder built into the glass to grant easy access to the roof. I suppose that it is clever in a stupid sort of way, but no matter how you feel about the quirky design, it is only a concept.

[Jalopnik]

(Presumably) Very Cheap Tablet PCs by NEC [Laptops]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/377581422/presumably-very-cheap-tablet-pcs-by-nec

See this tablet? It's new from NEC and features the same monotonous specs (1.6GHz Atom, 512MB-1GB RAM and 80GB HD) that we see in those cheapie mini-notebooks like the Asus Eee. Running XP or Vista and loaded with a 12 or 15-inch touchscreen, it's by no means beautiful, but this NEC could be the forebear of a new netbook-tablet market. We don't have pricing or release details at this time, but we'll keep a lookout, just for you. [Akihabara News]

Graff Luna: The Samurai Sword of Faucets [Sinks]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/377615608/graff-luna-the-samurai-sword-of-faucets

We are in the midst of a sink design Renaissance folks—crazy new designs seem to pop up all the time. The latest comes to us via Graff in a form that bears more than a passing resemblance to a samurai sword. Plus, the faucet itself is 3 feet tall, so I wouldn't be surprised if visitors to your bathroom linger a bit admiring this masterpiece of plumbing. You even have the option of wall mounting the handles depending on which style you prefer. [Graff via HDF]

Jesus Tries to Save Your Soul But Windows Stops Him [Windows]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/377622675/jesus-tries-to-save-your-soul-but-windows-stops-him

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder: One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see." And I saw. And behold, there was the other Jesus, the Bible character, calling me from a big screen saying "Jesus is the Reason for The—V-Sign this program-and will be shu-whaaa?" Clearly, Jesus is good with all this saving Humanity and making water into wine tricks, but I'm afraid he's no match for Windows errors. [Fail]

CPU vs GPU -- totally misleading, but totally AWESOME

Source:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/28/mythbusters-gpu-vs-cpu-demo-2100-paintballs-make-the-mona-lisa-in-275ms/

Mythbusters’ GPU vs. CPU demo: 2100 paintballs make the Mona Lisa in 275ms

By Devin Coldewey
August 28th, 2008
5 Comments

Well, this really is awfully misleading, but it sure is awesome. The idea is that a normal CPU processes things one at a time, like the single-paintball robot, and a GPU has parallel processors that can do (in this case) 2100 times the work in a single stroke. Well, considering CPUs are moving to serious multi-core architecture and GPUs are being used to do CPU work, the whole demonstration is a little dubious. Still, how filthy was that? [via TGDaily]

Source:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39112/135/

Mythbusters duo launches new GeForce, codenamed Mona Lisa

Hardware

By Theo Valich

Thursday, August 28, 2008 16:03

vote nowBuzz up!

San Jose (CA) – Even though Nvidia’s Nvision tradeshow did not achieve its goal of 10,000 visitors, more than a thousand gathered at the Center for Performing Arts to witness the ending of the event. The duo behind the popular Mythbusters showed the results of six months of work, demonstrating the difference between a CPU and a GPU, following the conventional wisdom of parallel computing. Dubbed Smiley and Mona Lisa, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman presented two robots that represented the difference between a CPU and a GPU. Smiley was given a task to draw a smiley using conventional CPU techniques, doing one thing at a time. Smiley was a relatively simple robot, while Mona Lisa consisted out of "1100 massively parallel barrel processors", dwarfing the 240 shaders offered by a GeForce GTX 280 chip. These 1100 "shaders" painted a picture of Mona Lisa in a matter of a few hundreds of a second, resulting in lots of stunned faces, laughter and a big round of applause for the Mythbusters crew. We won't dwell into the specs of these two, but Mona Lisa's fill-rate is quite interesting: 1100 (paintball) balls travelled eight feet onto wood-enforced canvas in just in just 275 ms, creating a picture of Mona Lisa within three quarters of a second. We guess you could say Nvision ended with a bang (sorry, we couldn’t resist.) There was no information if and when these barrel processors will be available for sale.

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