Posts for 'Luxury' Category

Every once in a while my seven-year-old daughter will watch a car go by as we're driving and comment, "That car looks angry," or "That car looks sad."It's something we've all thought at some point or another (or at least I have) regardless of age: The fronts of cars look just enough like faces that our brains insist on reading expressions onto them, even though they're just inanimate hunks of metal. (Which, of course, is why the animated movie Cars worked so well.)

Now researchers in Vienna have studied this phenomenon scientifically, aiming to find out if our tendency to attribute personality traits to cars spills over into the ways we interact with cars as both drivers and pedestrians.

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Students in Virginia Tech mechanical engineering Professor Mehdi Ahmadian’s senior design class developed a horizontal light bar to communicate slowing and stopping actions to a driver in a following vehicle. It had several drawbacks, including cost of production. A sensor circuit that will do the same job using the extra lights usually mounted on commercial vehicles has now been developed.

You are driving in heavy traffic. The brake lights on the car in front of you come on. Is the car slowing or is it going to stop? It slows to 25 mph and the lights go off. You drop back. The car in front of you stops suddenly! You stop just in time. The car behind you collects your rear bumper.

“The problem is that brake lights are yes and no – on and off,” according to John Hennage of Montross, Va., a Ph.D. mechanical engineering student in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. “The driver behind does not know the speed at which the car in front is slowing or stopping. The only other signal would be the smoke off the tires.”

The solution is an intelligent brake light system that communicates slowing and urgent stopping – rather than simply that the brake pedal is being touched. “A driver could be tapping his foot in time to music and the brake lights would blink. Or, a driver can rest her foot on the pedal and the lights would glow. It’s not enough information for the following driver,” said Hennage.

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Acer launched on Wednesday its latest creation in terms of high-end mobile computers, easily rivaling to any other product on the market today, and combining a high-quality notebook with the latest entertainment features. Acer Aspire 8920G and Acer Aspire 6920G are part of what the company called the Blue Gemstone series, which will become available on the market within a month, the company said.

The Aspire 8920G comes with an 18.4 inch LCD display and uses the Intel Centrino platform, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor that supports Intel 64 architecture, Mobile Intel PM965 Express Chipset and Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN network connection.

In terms of hard drives, it supports up to 2 hard disk drives, with a maximum of 320 GB each, while offering a DDR2 667 MHz memory that can be upgraded to 4GB, 2x Blu-ray Disc Super Multi double-layer drive and 6-in-1 card reader.

Offering a 1920 x 1080 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio and 8ms high-def response time, the Acer Aspire 8920G operates on an NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS graphics card or NVIDIA GeForce 9650M GS, at the customer’s choice.

As its creators intended, the notebook will offer a complete and exciting entertainment experience, through its 2nd generation Dolby Home Theater audio enhancement, five built-in speakers, high-definition audio support and two built-in stereo microphones.

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When talking about cars, the first thing that comes to mind as far as fuel is concerned is gas or diesel. For some of the more ecologically-concerned citizens, there’s also electricity and even water. One of the lesser known diesel alternatives however, is air. Yep, AIR. The “air” that’s occupying space and everything in between. However, it’s not ambient air that the air cars are running on, but rather, a different kind of air — something like processed air would be more of a correct term.

This MiniCATS three-seater car along with the bigger six-seater sedan called CitiCATS, have debuted in France last 2005. Still, the idea of having air as fuel is still a subject not known to the majority of people around the globe, due to it being a lesser-known fuel option. Due to the ever increasing prices of gas, people are looking for more and more alternatives to help alleviate the pain in one’s pockets for having to spend as much for fuel. All you have to do to be able to use your Air-powered car is to remember to recharge it every night.

As was said, it’s not ambient air that runs these types of cars — it’s compressed air. There’s an electric pump inside the car which compresses the air to up to 300 bars in pressure. That’s why you need to recharge your car for four hours. What runs the car is the escaping air as it moves the car’s pistons. Top speed of this air-fueled car is 70 miles per hour. At full tank and at top speed, the car can travel 50 miles in all. The smaller MiniCATS car initially sold for $9,850 while the larger CitiCATS was priced at $16,000. The number of air-powered cars can only increase in time as it seems to be a worthy fuel-alternative.

To meet the growing storage needs of laptop users, Samsung Electronics on Tuesday introduced a 500GB hard drive that could provide a notebook PC with as much as 1TB of storage.

The Spinpoint M6, a 2.5-inch hard drive, fits into the chassis of commercial and multimedia notebooks, said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales at Samsung Semiconductor. Two drives can be combined for 1TB of storage, he said.

The company was able to fit three 167GB platters in a small frame to achieve 500GB of storage in one drive, Higginbotham said. The hard drive spins at 5,400 RPM.

Priced at $299, the hard drive will ship to PC makers and retail stores later this month. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on which PC makers will be using the drive.

This is not the first attempt to put 1TB of storage in a laptop. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Asus announced the M70S laptop, which combined two 500GB drives from Hitachi.

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We're not exactly sure what the special event is -- Breast Cancer Awareness Month isn't until October -- but we suppose you can celebrate the joy of pink whenever the mood strikes. Iriver is busting out pink versions for a bunch of its players, including the clix, MPlayer, D5 and recently-launched E100. Apparently a set of pink colored pencils is also included as a free "gift" with the purchase of any of these units, which should come in handy for that Precious Moments diptych we were thinking of doing.

Many people while looking at the clouds imagine that they are lying on them, experiencing a great feeling of lightness and liberty. But now due to the new concept of German designer Manuel Kloker your dreams may come true, that is you can have your own cloud.

The gadget that has been just patented represents a rocking bed named Private Cloud. It has such a strange shape that nothing of this kind has been created before. Lying on this original bed is like living in the clouds (that's why it was given such an unusual name). The fact that the bed is made of high quality wood points to its structural strength. Moreover it's quite capacious, so there would be no problem to locate some friends of yours. Thus, due to the main features of this bed it's possible to conclude that it can fit well to almost any interior without spoiling it. As far as the price is concerned no information is available at the moment. Yet, it does not mean that this "cloud" is just a concept, it's real.

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High-definition televisions making their way to U.S. stores are getting bigger, brighter and better -- including Internet connectivity.

Many of the biggest TV makers at the recently ended Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas pointed to Internet connectivity above any other new feature on the sets that will be available this year, The Dallas Morning News reported Tuesday.

Panasonic and Samsung officials tout their respective sets' ability to import videos and images from the Internet.

Sharp televisions, meanwhile, will let viewers visit NBC's Web sites for all programming offered there. The company said it also would use Internet connectivity to allow its technicians to perform repairs remotely.

"A lot of problems that people encounter don't require any hardware fixes. They just require someone to play with the settings or possibly work on the software," said Sharp representative Robin Feldman said.

Right now, though, there's one big drawback: all of the new TVs work with only selected Internet partners, the Morning News said. None of them make it easy for users to transfer video from their computers to their televisions.

But such open technology on the horizon -- probably within a year or two, electronics executives said.

The Nokia 6300 is compact in design with stainless-steel covers and a sleek finish. It is 106.4mm long and 43.6mm wide. It has a thickness of 11.7mm and is a pretty light phone with a weight of 91g. It has GSM operating frequency with EDGE coverage. It has a 2 inch QVGA main display with up to 16.7 million true colors and a new enhanced Series 40 user interface.

The Nokia 6300 has a 2 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom to capture quality images, full screen viewfinder, video recorder and player. It has email client that enables you to access your email on the go and also send messages with attachments, OMA MMS 1.2 for receiving, editing and sending multimedia messages, Push to talk, instant messaging and Nokia Xpress on audio messaging which is a fast and simple way to send voice or sound clips through MMS.

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Olympus Mju 790 SW review :

 The Olympus Mju 790 SW digital compact camera has been available for a few months now, so high time to interrogate this new member of the Mju family. The Olympus Mju 790 is a camera belonging to the successful series of cameras Olympus once entered the film era with. The first analogue Mju cameras were true gadgets; very compact and equipped with beautiful bright optics (Mju II). It was quite logical to take the Mju concept along to the digital era from the traditional one and here we are, a few generations later with the Olympus Mju 790SW camera.

Olympus Mju 790SW - Shockproof camera
This is a one of a kind camera. To begin with it has some very special features that make the Olympus Mju 790 SW stand out from the crowd. The Mju 790 is uniquely shockproof, classified as an MIL-STD-810F standard. You can drop this camera from around a height of 1.5 meters to the floor and you won't have to worry about damaging it. Nearly every camera owner has experienced dropping his camera at one stage of his photographic life. It is also a nice act when entering an event. Just show the beautiful camera and next let it slip out of your hands casually. The shocked and surprised faces from bystanders are always a joy to witness.

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