NPR reminds us that GPS units, which were a surprisingly large item for Christmas giving, also present an attractive target to smash-and-grabbers. John Roman, a criminal justice researcher with the Urban Institute, says navigation units are the hot new alternative…
NPR reminds us that GPS units, which were a surprisingly big item for Christmas giving, also present an attractive target to smash-and-grabbers. John Roman, a criminal justice researcher with the Urban Institute, states navigation units are the hot new substitute to vehicle stereos for lowlifes looking for swift cash:
[Thieves] probably have to steal six automobile radios to get the return from stealing a GPS…So for them, it’s worth finding one.
Coming soon, maybe: GPS units that share location info with designated celebrations, allowing the unlucky or careless to track a stolen unit. Or a variation on those New York street-parker signs that states “No GPS!”
Police Seek to Crack Down on GPS Thefts[NPR]
Via [wired.com]
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MacBook Meh: Ars Benchmarks SSD Air
If you, like us, have been wondering whether all the fuss about the Solid Say Drive in the MacBook Air was, well, just a fuss, wonder no more. Ars Technica has run benchmark tests on the new machine and found…
If you, like us, have been wondering whether all the fuss about the Solid State Drive in the MacBook Air was, well, just a fuss, wonder no more. Ars Technica has run benchmark tests on the new machine and found that, with the exception of random disk reading and writing, there isn’t much difference between the SSD and a regular hard drive, and in fact the SSD air did poorly on sequential writing and reading.
This is to be expected. The advantage of a solid say drive is that there are no moving parts. Whereas a mechanical drive has to keep the read/write head moving to access data, the SSD doesn’t. This should also translate into longer battery life (no moving parts, remember?) It doesn’t. Ars got the same two and a half hours from both models.
Visit the site for the full and very in depth review. There are also the results for CPU and memory tests, but as the SSD equipped Air has a faster processor, these are slightly skewed.
What does $1,300 extra really get you? [Ars]
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Giz Explains: Why We’re Psyched for Silverthorne [Giz Explains]
Silverthorne is a teeny processor built on the 45nm process (like the much-ballyhooed Penryn), designed for UMPCs, subnotebooks, mystery Apple products and any other smallish gadget that needs real crunching on an ultra-lean power diet.
It’s about as powerful as the first Pentium M chips (Banias), but while those idled at 5W and averaged 24.5W, this tiny guy sips as tiny as 0.1W in its idle state, with peaks up to just 2W on the 2GHz model. It’s really cheap to pump out too, tapped for the $200 OLPC at one point.
It comes in a couple different flavors up to that 2GHz version. To get athletic performance—it’s a full-fledged x86 chip, not a half-baked cutdown—out of an anorexic processor, Intel worked all kinds of design mojo, like a new quick-wake deep sleep state. It’s still a bit too hungry for smartphones, though. So, while it’s a neat piece of silicon, as Ars says, it’s still got a ways to go, especfially with stiff competition from ARM and TI. But that’s a good thing.
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In these shots, a ping-pong ball fired at an unnamed “near-sonic” speed destroys a metal can that, you’ll note, is first dented just by the cushion of air coming from the barrel. Kinda makes you wonder how much devastation the cannon could have gotten done without any projectile at all. If this rings of deja-vu, it’s because yesterday I posted a video series of a tennis-ball cannon that I mistakenly thought was the same device. Consider it a two-fer and enjoy the bonus annihilation. [Make]
Via [gizmodo]
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My Table Is on Fire and It Feels Delicious [Fire]
This kind of reminds me of the table at my first Japanese apartment, which had a heater bolted to the bottom, but Ward Huting and Gerard de Hoop’s version is a lot sexier with its discular luminescence. Its chewy center oozing warmy warms is a built-in candle—not a totally exposed heat source like my old table—which you can warm tea or naughty children over. It’s supposed to be social like a campfire, so it probably works best if you turn your heat off several hours first so people are forced to gather ’round it for warmth. [Huting & de Hoop via Cool Hunting]
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It’s hard to know just what to state about the Wine Rack, a bastardization of the Camelback hydration system that stores a full 750ml of liquid in a sports bra. Aimed at the kind of people who like to sneak…
It’s hard to know just what to say about the Wine Rack, a bastardization
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NPR reminds us that GPS units, which were a surprisingly big item for Christmas giving, also present an attractive target to smash-and-grabbers. John Roman, a criminal justice researcher with the Urban Institute, states navigation units are the hot new substitute to vehicle stereos for lowlifes looking for swift cash:
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