Hardware

Crave visits the Cray-1, a true museum piece

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Many great masterpieces reside in museums. There's the "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre. "Nighthawks at the Diner" graces the wall at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the Cray-1 sits at the Bradbury Science Museum here in Los Alamos.

The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 at a cost of $8.8 million. It set a new world record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second and boasted 8MB of main memory. According to the museum, it was the first computer to break the megaflop barrier.

By today's hardware standards, the Cray-1 is a great lumbering beast. The dramatic lighting shining on it at the Bradbury exhibit shows off its curves and hulking size. But by 1976 standards, it was a svelte creation whose circular shape kept the complex wiring compact. … Read more

1920s folding camera + Canon 5D = awesome

The other day I was in a museum dedicated to environmental conservation and it had one of those old black rotary dial phones from way back when, surrounded by dozens of junked cell phones. It was trying to make the point that before manufacturers inflicted planned obsolescence on us, they made goods that would last.

Filmmaker Jason Bognacki's recent experiments with vintage cameras make that point very effectively. In case you missed it, shutterbugs have been drooling over his hybrid camera, a masterful blending of analog and digital technologies.

Bognacki took a battered old Piccolette camera from the 1920s that he bought on eBay years ago. He decided to unite it with his Canon EOS 5D Mark II by having the Piccolette act as a lens for the Canon. … Read more

Elektro: 1939 smoking robot saved from oblivion

You can walk into any toy store and buy a robot these days. No big deal. Back in 1939, a robot was an incredible oddity. That's why crowds flocked to see Elektro, a robot built by Westinghouse Electric for the New York World's Fair.

The talking Elektro described himself as a "smart fellow" with a "fine brain" consisting of 48 electrical relays that worked like a telephone switchboard.

Elektro was a bit of a smarty-pants, making lame jokes, smoking cigarettes, and blowing up balloons. Elektro could walk (slowly), move his mouth, and turn his head. This was pretty advanced stuff for the day. The 7-foot-tall creation took voice commands via a telephone handset.

Elektro lies low Elektro disappeared into obscurity after touring the country and then passing time as a minor attraction at a California amusement park. Elektro's story could have ended there, but the big metal guy is now in line for a revival. Elektro's head turned up in a basement and his body in a barn. … Read more

Have you backed up your data today?

Today is World Backup Day, and though it's not a recognized holiday celebrated with praying to the cloud or gifting loved ones with hard drives, it does serve as a good reminder to back up your data. (Not to sound like a nagging mom telling you to eat your vegetables, but backing up your data is good for you. Really. And I'm reminding myself as much as I'm reminding you here.)

Now in its second year, World Backup Day was created by Ismail Jadun, a biology student from Youngstown State in Ohio who saw the need for it after reading comments on the lack of backup awareness on social news site Reddit. "I was just a college student who was looking for something interesting to do," Jadun said. Turns out there was a need for it, too.

A recent Harris Interactive online survey found that only 7 percent of respondents backed up their data on a daily basis, while 23 percent said they performed backups every month. Considering that people create and generate 1.8 zettabytes (!!) of data per year, that puts a lot of info at risk. … Read more

Next PlayStation to lock out used games, report says

Buckle up, Sony enthusiasts. A tipster has told Kotaku that the PlayStation 4 is named "Orbis," and that it will feature an anti-used-game system, offer no backwards-compatibility with PlayStation 3 titles, and ship in holiday 2013.

As for the first part of the rumor, multiple sources told the blog that the Orbis will sport some sort of anti-used games measure. Full Orbis games will be available via Blu-ray disc or as a PlayStation Network download, and will be locked to a single PSN account. Players will not be able to circumvent the system by remaining offline, as the source said users will be forced to be connected to the PSN to boot up their games.

Read more of "Next PlayStation to lock out used games, report says" at Gamespot. … Read more

Australian agency taking Apple to court over iPad '4G' label

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said today Apple is violating the Australian Consumer Law by misleadingly labeling its new iPad as 4G-capable, and it will try to get a court to impose fines and an injunction against sales.

The commission will apply to the Federal Court in Melbourne for orders tomorrow morning against Apple, it said in a statement:

The ACCC alleges that Apple's recent promotion of the new "iPad with WiFi + 4G" is misleading because it represents to Australian consumers that the product "iPad with WiFi + 4G" can, with a SIM card, connect … Read more

Amiga Mini wants to relive Commodore glory days

Moooo! Grrrrr! Smash! Crash! That's the sound of a curmudgeonly cash-cow being dragged out of retirement to see whether there's a drop or two of milk left in her wizened udders. The name of this cash-cow: Amiga.

Amiga's maker Commodore -- remember them? Congratulations on being as old as me, but bad news: it's not the same company, it just owns the name -- has reintroduced the Amiga brand, slapping it on a high-end gaming PC that looks suspiciously like a Mac Mini.

It's even called the Amiga Mini, so Apple's lawyers are presumably getting ready to fire forth a barrage of cease-and-desist letters claiming it patented smallness.

Read more of "Amiga Mini high-end PC wants to relive Commodore glory days" at Crave UK. … Read more

Windows 8 will support Retina-class displays

If manufacturers follow suit, Windows 8 tablets and hybrids will sport displays that rival, or exceed, the Retina Display on Apple's newest iPad.

Writing in Microsoft's Building Windows 8 blog, David Washington, a senior program manager at the company, directly addressed the new iPad's screen and discussed upcoming tablets with dot-per-inch (DPI) densities of at least 135. "Much higher than many of us are used to," he wrote.

Key tablet-display related points from the blog post:

135 DPI and up: Many Windows 8 tablet PCs will have pixel densities of at least 135 DPI. Washington … Read more

Windows 8 PC-tablet 'mesh' to go slowly, says IDC

Global PC shipments are expected to pick up in the second half of the year, but Windows 8-based ultrabooks will go through a period of trail and error, market researcher IDC said.

The launch of Windows 8 on ultrabooks should drive stronger second-half PC shipment growth after a weaker first half, IDC said today.

For the whole year, worldwide PC growth will be a modest five percent with most of the growth occurring in the latter half of the year.

"Many consumers are holding off making PC purchases at the moment because tablet devices like Apple's iPad are … Read more

Survey: Android programmers shifting toward Web apps

Android is gradually slipping down mobile programmers' priority list, with Web apps stepping in to as an answer to development difficulties, a survey released today concludes.

Appcelerator, maker of cross-platform programming tools used by 280,000 programmers to create 35,000 apps, tallied the changes in its quarterly survey. In it, the number of programmers who said they were "very interested" in programming for Android phones declined for a second quarter in a row, this time from about 83.3 percent to 78.6 percent. Android tablet interest also continued a decline for a second quarter, from about … Read more