Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, April 19, 2013

Facebook launches real-time graphs to highlight its data center efficiency

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/19/facebook-pue-real-time-charts/

Curious as to the effect that your poking wars are having on the planet? Facebook is outing power and water usage data for its Oregon and North Carolina data centers to show off its sustainability chops. The information is updated in near-real time, and the company will add its Swedish facility to the charts as soon as it's built. The stats for the Forest City, NC plant show a very efficient power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.09 -- thanks, in part, to that balmy (North) Carolina air.

Filed under: Internet, Facebook

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Via: GigaOm

Source: Facebook, Open Compute Project

Ridiculously thin and light laptop unveiled in Taiwan: the 10.7mm, 1.9-pound Inhon Blade 13 Carbon

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/19/inhon-blade-13-carbon/

Never heard of Inhon? That might change with the Taiwanese computer maker's Blade 13 Carbon laptop, which it claims is now the world's thinnest and lightest. Tipping the scale at 870g (1.9 pounds) and 10.7mm, the company says it undercuts NEC's 12.8mm Lavie X by a whopping 2mm, while nipping the 875g LaVie Z by 5g. There are still weighty specs crammed into the package, however: a Core i5 or i7 CPU, 1080p screen, 128GB or 256GB SSD and 4GB of RAM. If you're looking for that kind of unencumbered power, the Carbon will also lighten your pocketbook to the respectable tune of $1,350, while a dialed-back 1,600 x 900 fiberglass version -- still radically lean at 12.6mm and 1,195g (2.6 pounds) -- will run a grand or so. These models will arrive in Taiwan in June, with no sign that it'll come to relieve us overburdened laptop users stateside.

Gallery: Inhon Blade 13 Carbon

Filed under: Laptops

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Source: Engadget Chinese

Thursday, April 18, 2013

drag2share: Butt-On With the Magical Machine That Finds the Perfect Pair of Jeans

source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/vip/~3/5NQaCi3GM3M/butt+on-with-the-magical-machine-that-finds-the-perfect-pair-of-jeans

Butt-On With the Magical Machine That Finds the Perfect Pair of Jeans

Apr 18, 2013

Butt-On With the Magical Machine That Finds the Perfect Pair of Jeans Anyone with legs and a butt knows finding a pair of pants that fits just right is challenging. No two bodies—or jeans for that matter—are alike. But Me-Ality is a magical machine that takes just 10 seconds to tell you exactly which brands, styles, and sizes are your perfect match.

Bloomingdale's recently installed Me-Ality sizing booths in the women's denim departments of several of its locations. I made a trip up to the 59th Street store in Manhattan this morning to give the virtual tailor a try. And it might have changed my life.

Here's how it works: You stand still inside a big white, glass-windowed booth that looks like an adapted version of the elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with y! our hand s by your side. A big wand passes by you twice to collect 200,000 measurements. The booth uses light radio waves (the equivalent of 1/1000th of a phone call, says Me-Ality's PR head) to detect the moisture in your skin to sniff out your size. You don't have to strip down or wear any special suit or anything, but if you're wearing heels, you'll have to slip them off because it will throw the height detection off.

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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Archos dips into smartphones with the 35 Carbon, 50 Platinum and 53 Platnium

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/18/archos-dips-into-android-smartphones/

While Archos has long held dreams of expanding into smartphones, we've seen it run into its fair share of roadblocks along the way. Thanks in part to a sharpened corporate focus, that vision is at last becoming real with the company's first, honest-to-goodness smartphone range. The 35 Carbon, 50 Platinum and 53 Platinum all cater to the budget, carrier-independent crowd with common foundations of unlocked 7.2Mbps HSPA 3G, dual SIM slots (only one being 3G) and stock Android. We also see a rather skimpy 4GB of storage, although a microSD slot on each phone helps make up for the difference.

What you're mostly paying for is performance and screen size. The 35 Carbon ships with an HVGA 3.5-inch screen, a single-core 1GHz Snapdragon S1, 512MB of RAM, VGA cameras and Ice Cream Sandwich; move up to the 50 or 53 Platinum and you'll get their respective 5- and 5.3-inch qHD screens, a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Play, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front camera and Jelly Bean. No, we're not bowled over by the performance any more than you are -- but the respective contract-free prices of $100, $220 and $250 may have at least some trying Archos' first effort, even if the company's late May launch will only include Europe at first.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Archos (1), (2), (3)

PanaCast brings panoramic HD video to conference calls in the palm of your hand for $599 (hands-on)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/17/panacast-panoramic-hd-video-conferencing/

Video chats have become quite popular these days, whether you're using Facetime, Skype or are attending a Google Hangout. One problem with those platforms is that they provide a limited field of view and that view is static for attendees. PanaCast solves that problem with some unique hardware and software that provides a 200 degree FOV and a virtualized camera for each viewer. Its camera has six imagers, an SoC with dual ARM11 cores and a custom-built multi-imaging video processor (MIVP), along with an Ethernet port and a USB 2.0 port.

The MIVP, with an assist from some custom firmware, stitches all of the input images together to form a single 2700 x 540 video stream. That feed has enterprise-grade encryption and can run at up to 60fps over faster connections, but streams lower framerates over 3G as well. It works over the open internet and streams using a high-speed codec developed by Cavium Networks that needs only 350kb of bandwidth to function. After you're done perusing our gallery below, join us after the break to learn more about how the PanaCast system works.

Gallery: PanaCast panoramic HD video conferencing camera hands-on