South Africa’s Telkom: faster internet via carrier pigeon

A South African IT firm sent a carrier pigeon 50 miles with a datacard attached to it’s leg. The pigeon was faster than the internet, which after 2 hours had only completed 4% of the transfer. This was in protest at the sucky internet connection available through Telkom. Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s Read more about South Africa’s Telkom: faster internet via carrier pigeon[…]

DataSlide reinvents hard drive

DataSlide’s Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD) does not use read-write heads moving across the recording surface of a spinning hard disk drive (HDD). Instead an ultra-thin, 2-dimensional array of 64 read-write heads, operating in parallel, is positioned above an piezo-electric-driven oscillating rectangular recording surface, and delivers 160,000 random IOPS with a 500MB/sec transfer rate. via DataSlide Read more about DataSlide reinvents hard drive[…]

Ice air con system aims for cool on the cheap

The idea is to use cheap off-peak energy at night to freeze a tank of water or “distributed energy storage system” then use that great block of ice to cool your data centre in the daytime. Refrigerant would circulate from the tank to the Data Aire equipment eliminating the need to run the energy-intensive compressor Read more about Ice air con system aims for cool on the cheap[…]

Pre Recovery Tool Leaks Out, Including webOS Root Image(!)

It’s only been a few days since the Palm Pre was released, but one of the biggest breakthroughs for the outside-the-system developer community may have just been made. With this, people can probably tell how the OS hooks into the hardware, which will allow them to hook in themselves – something Palm itself has been Read more about Pre Recovery Tool Leaks Out, Including webOS Root Image(!)[…]

Formula 1 Cars getting KERS

Kinetic Energy Recovery System, stores the energy created by regenerative breaking and stores it in a battery. When the driver presses a button, he gets a turbo boost as the energy store is emptied onto the drivetrain. This system gives him up to 6.5s of turbo boost per lap.

Sony’s FED

Fied Emission Display is the new OLED killing tech Sony is running with. It’s apparently easier to produce and has CRT like qualities (pure blacks and colours, no motion blur) but is as thin as OLED.