Monday, March 09, 2009

Boat Made From Plastic PET Bottles To Sail on 11,000 Mile Ocean Voyage [Recycling]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/gg_l990cOB8/boat-made-from-plastic-pet-bottles-to-sail-on-11000-mile-ocean-voyage

Last year, a 22-year old failed to sail down the Mississippi in a boat made from juice cartons. Now, an even more ambitious eco-adventurer will attempt a 11,000 mile journey in plastic bottle boat.

Currently 12,000 to 16,000 2-liter soda bottles are being collected to fill in the twin hulls of their Plastiki vessel. Each bottle with be pressurized using dry ice powder that will sublimate into carbon dioxide gas. If all goes as planned, the vessel will carry four crewmembers on a 11,000 mile journey starting this April from San Francisco to Sydney only to be broken down and recycled at the end of the trip. Apparently, only the masts of the ship are metal, leaving the remaining 90% as recycled material.

Sure it's dangerous, but the design is obviously more professional (and less risky) than the paper bottle boat that his 22-year old predecessor cobbled together with his father. My guess is that it the outcome will be much better this time around. [CNN and Architecture for Humanity]



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VMWare Fusion vs. Parallels Desktop for Mac: Which Is Faster? [Windows On Mac]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/NWA7sKUemSU/vmware-fusion-vs-parallels-desktop-for-mac-which-is-faster

Ironically, it's one of the biggest decisions you make when you get a Mac: How should I run Windows on it? Parallels or Fusion? An exhaustive battery of benchmarks by MacTech reveals a clear winner.

The short story is that in most cases, Parallels runs a solid 14-20 percent faster than Fusion, except in the rather limited scenario of running Windows XP 32-bit on two virtual processors.

Overall, running 32-bit Windows OSes with a single virtual processor, Parallels is 14 percent faster; with two virtual processors, Parallels is 20 percent faster with Vista, while Fusion is 10 percent faster with XP; and for 64-bit Vista, Parallels is 15 percent speedier. Depending on the task, the numbers vary—like transcoding MP3s can be up to 30 percent faster on Parallels.

MacTech's tests are ridiculously comprehensive, spanning multiple machines with tons of different applications—the whole them took a couple months—so if you want the full, chart-heavy breakdown, head over there: [MacTech]



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Apple touch-screen netbook in Q3?

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/apple-netbook-in-q3/


Boom: Apple netbook in Q3 -- that's the rumor being spread by the Commercial Times / DigiTimes tag-team of electronics tattlers. Apparently, Wintek will supply the touch-panels to Quanta computer who'll be tasked with assembling Apple's netbook. Take this one with a grain of salt though -- while these two Taiwan-based magazines tend to be accurate with insider info related to Taiwan-based companies like Acer and ASUS, they can often be wide of the mark with rumors related to foreign companies. Unless of course we missed the launch of the Blu-ray Xbox 360 and G5 PowerBooks.

[Image courtesy of Frunny]

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Apple touch-screen netbook in Q3? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seagate demos world's first SATA 6Gbps hard disk as speed-freaks swoon

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/seagate-demonstrates-worlds-first-sata-6gbps-hard-disk-making-s/


You read that right, 6Gbps. Seagate and AMD will be showing-off a prototype Barracuda hard disk drive with AMD prototype 6Gbps SATA chipset for the first time this week at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans. Yup, a world's first. Fortunately, the third generation SATA interface remains backward compatible with your old SATA 3Gbps and SATA 1.5Gbps disks and devices -- cables and connectors too. SATA revision 3.0 also brings enhanced power efficiency with improved Native Command Queuing for applications with heavy transactional workloads. No update to the official launch timeline was made so we'll assume that the first half of 2009 for retail devices is still in the bag. Hey, you weren't planning to purchase a new laptop or desktop before then anyway were you. Were you?

[Via CNET]

Read -- SATA 6Gbps demonstration
Read -- First half of 2009 launch

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Seagate demos world's first SATA 6Gbps hard disk as speed-freaks swoon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Philips Master LED light bulb set for US release in July

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/philips-master-led-light-bulb-set-for-us-release-in-july/


Philips has been hitting us with some out-there lighting concepts lately, but the company's Master LED light bulb is actually already on sale in Europe and is set to brighten up Stateside lives around July. The 40W-equivalent bulbs should run between $50 and $70, and expected lifetime is set at 45,000 hours -- just slightly more than a CFL's 10,000 or a standard bulb's 750 hours. The Master is certainly a damn sight nicer looking than the other mutant LED bulbs we've seen, but we'll see if consumers are ready to jump on another more-expensive-upfront lighting tech so soon after CFLs have hit the mainstream.

[Via Core77]

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Philips Master LED light bulb set for US release in July originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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