Sony’s Japanese Web site calls it a “Sound Entertainment Player.” It’s a device that will be equipped with 1GB of flash memory, two speakers to its sides, and Bluetooth capability. It will only have a power button and the rest will be controlled by specific hand movements. Since it has motion sensing capabilities, there’s no screen anywhere on the device. It will come with a motion editing software that apparently will let you program specific moves into the device. No idea on how this device will encourage you to “dance along” with it.

We will have to wait for more details in order to give a decent opinion on this device. It’s not small and it certainly is not intended as an mp3 player. It will probably be some kind of device that will “teach” you some dance moves or allow you to do some sort of Aerobics. The Bluetooth capability will allow you to stream music from the PC into the device. From a video here, you can actually see that the device moves on its own, too.

Anyways, whatever this is, it sure is weird and has left many of us wanting to know more. What do you think this will be? Comments welcome.

Official Japanese Rolly Web site: Rolly.

[tags]Rolly, MP3 Player, Sony[/tags]

Recently some manufacturers like Alienware have started to include Solid State Drives (SDD) in their notebooks. SDDs are a new approach to Hard Drives taken by manufacturers. They are simply flash drives with a large capacity. Current SDDs can come in sizes as big as 32GB. Alienware currently offers a RAID 0 configuration of 32GB SDDs to give you a total drive space of 64GB. Why would you want to have one of these drives? Let’s face it 64GB isn’t enough for most consumers now a days, most Laptops come with at least 120 GB of Hard drive space. Well SDDs offer a lot of advantages to users, obviously, because flash drives don’t have any mechanical parts. One of the biggest problems with regular Hard drives is that they use mechanical parts that slow down the reading and writing process.

The advantages would be:

• Increased OS boot up speed by up to 2 times. Application launch and runtimes are also enhanced.
• Faster writing and seeking times.
• No noise given off by the Hard drive since there aren’t any mechanical parts.
• Increased battery life, again, since there are no mechanical parts.
• SDDs give out a lot less heat than conventional hard drives.
• Performance remains constant throughout the entire drive even when it starts to fill up.

Some disadvantages:

• Price. Getting a RAID 0 64GB drive configuration will go for around $900 dollars whilst you can have a 400GB RAID 0 configuration for about $300 dollars.
• Storage Capacity. This is a big downside. Around 32GB on a single drive configuration.
• Vulnerability to things like abrupt power loss and magnetic fields is greater than with regular hard drives.
• About 200 times less write cycles than regular hard drives. Flash drives allow for around 100k to 300k write cycles whilst regular hard drives allow up to 5 million write cycles.

So there you have it. Is it worth it? Well in my opinion it’s not. There are some configurations that allow you to have an SDD and a regular hard drive, allowing you to have the benefits of both drives. Using the SDD to store things like the OS and your applications and the regular hard drive to store your regular files sounds like a good, although expensive, option.
Users that find the need to run their applications faster (providing they depend on HD speed to run smoothly) should find this as a good solution. Gamers could probably get a lot out of this if the game needs to constantly read from the hard drive to load everything it needs.
For users that require portability and need their battery to last as much as possible, this is also a great option.

I guess it’s all about if you have the money to spare :). Comments welcome.

We found a method to change the perceived location of the body in space even if that means that one is located outside the physical body,” cognitive neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm says. “They see themselves sitting in the middle of the room, but they feel themselves sitting in a corner of the room.”

It’s amazing how the brain can be tricked in such a way. This obviously takes us back to the ever popular question, “What is real?”. If the brain can be tricked so easily with a few cameras who knows what else is hiding out there that we can’t perceive. The brain takes thousands of pieces of information per second and it interprets all of that as best as it can, leaving out most of the information it gathers. How much is out there that our brain simply chooses to ignore? Have a read at the full article here.

Comments always welcome!

[tags]Out of body experience[/tags]

Fans don’t seem to cut it anymore. Water cooling seems a viable solution but for PC users only; there really isn’t anything to help laptops dissipate heat more efficiently.

Luckily, researchers at Purdue University in Indiana and Intel have come up with a new way to Cool computer chips. They have developed an “ionic wind engine” that in conjunction with a fan it is able to Cool a computer chip from 60 to 35 degrees Celsius while with out it, the fan could only Cool it down to 55 degrees Celsius. You can find the full article here.

I think this is an amazing breakthrough. Heat is such an important issue when it comes to electronics. Heat will mess everything up. This “ionic wind engine” if it ever becomes a viable solution (currently the engine is too big and uses too much power to work on small devices) it will not only help laptops to remain Cool but any electronic device that you can imagine that currently only is Cooled with fans. This will obviously mean more efficient systems and presumably quieter systems. What do you think? Comments welcome :).

[tags]Overheating, Cooling, Ionic Fans[/tags]

Square Enix released a study about its online game Final Fantasy XI, which shows that gamers spend at least two to three hours daily on that game. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for four years now. There were times where I would spend more than eight hours logged in.

Why is this? Why do people become so addicted to this kind of games more than others? The online community is what makes the difference in my opinion. People feel that they are a part of something big. Everyone has something in common in these games. They can be anyone they want and they can talk to anyone without the usual prejudice that you find in real life. This makes it so easy to start a “friendship” with anyone. I say “friendship” because most of the times the conversations don’t go past what’s going on in the game, people rarely talk about themselves. Feeling like you are a part of something is a good excuse for some people to forget about their friends in real life. A good excuse to forget their responsibilities. I’ve seen people miss work because there was an event in the game. A guy in one of my social groups in Final Fantasy almost missed the birth of his child because a big event was being held.

Since there is usually a lot of things you can do in these games you rarely feel bored, and when there is nothing to do you can always just talk to your in game friends.

In spite of having played the game for four years I still can’t figure out the exact reason why I’ve done so. Many times I’ve felt like quitting but I just can’t do it. That is the main reason I’m writing this. I just think it’s really wrong for people to forget about everything in life and make a game their number one priority. Now I’ve learned to balance real life with playing the game. I’m not into it like I was two years ago. I sit and think how many people are trapped in this type of games. And it’s not only games. Kids growing up with an Internet connection are turning into something I cannot put easily into words. Now instead of going out or talking on the phone they spend hours on an IMS. We can all find everything on the internet and every day we find less of a reason to go out. In the end I think it all ties in with games. It’s all about communication and freedom to do so with anyone we please.

Technology is meant to help us be more efficient to make things easier for us yet we misuse that technology and it turns out to be a problem. Games are constantly including more online elements now that the new generations of consoles allow this. I’m sure that the average time people, specially teenagers and young adults, spend playing online games will increase shortly. Do you think the problem will grow in the future? Do you know anyone or are you addicted to these games?

[tags]Online RPG[/tags]