Say goodbye to hours of shoveling and plowing snow out of the streets!
The brutal winters that America has been facing cost the government as well as the public billions of dollars in damages, repairs, and snow removal. We also can't forget about all of the horrible accidents that happen when our roads are filled with ice and snow.
One innovative electric engineer, Scott Brusaw, came up with a solution. Brusaw has accumulated a large amount of interest and support for his
Solar Roadways. The concept involves replacing our typically asphalt or concrete roads with an ultra durable glass.
Drawing its power from solar cells inside of the glass' surface, Solar Roadways generate their own energy to power heating elements installed within the glass. Ideally these roads will be able to produce enough heat to melt away snow and ice, making our roads safer and snow plows unnecessary.
The heating elements are designed to work much like a rear view window defroster and the temperatures will be experimented with in the next phase of Brusaw's development plans.
In addition to the cold fighting, Brusaw's ambitious roads will power LED lights and warning signs on the roads themselves. If the roads become widely accepted and implemented, Brusaw believes there will be an abundance of clean electricity created, taking the strain off of fossil fuels and saving the planet.
Although we may not see these roads any winter soon, Brusaw is confident and says, "I'm looking out the window now at about a foot of snow, so if we can make it work here, we can make it work anywhere in the country." He also added that, "I'm hoping this spring we'll start laying the foundation for it right outside our building here."
Source:
Tom's Guide
Sony Ericsson finally unveils Xperia Play
by Kent German
BARCELONA, Spain--After months of rumors, a
slew of leaks and
one creepy commercial, Sony Ericsson's worst-kept secret is now a reality. On Sunday, the day before
Mobile World Congress officially opens, Sony Ericsson finally took the wraps off of the Xperia Play.
Long billed as the "PlayStation Phone," the Xperia Play is very much the handset that Sony Ericsson highlighted last week during the Super Bowl. In the United States, it will arrive as a Verizon Wireless exclusive later this spring.
The four-inch (854x480 pixel resolution; 16.7 million colors) display is up to usual Sony Ericsson standards. Colors were bright and vibrant and graphics showed up well. From our brief hands-on experience, the display also appears to do the gaming features justice. Below the display are four physical controls for the usual Android functions (back, menu, home, and search). On the left spine you'll find a 3.5mm headset jack and a Micro-USB port, while the power control, a volume rocker, and shoulder gaming controls sit on the right spine.
Sony Ericsson Xperia Play
(Credit: Sony Ericsson) Of course, what the phone
can do is the real story. At the top level, the Xperia Play runs on Gingerbread (Android 2.3), so you'll get the new text selection tool, a Wi-Fi hot spot, and new options in the Settings menu. And like on the Xperia Arc, you can pinch your fingers to see all five home screens on one page. As we said when the earlier handset made its debut at
CES, it's very much like HTC's Leap feature.
Slide up the face to reveal the gaming controls, which are very similar to those on a
Sony PlayStation DualShock controller. Instead of joysticks, however, you'll find two round touch pads. And as mentioned, the handset has only one set of shoulder buttons.
Game downloads will be available from an online Sony Ericsson store. Once you purchase a game, individual icons for each title will sit in the phone's main menu.
The Xperia Play also has a 5.1-megapixel camera with autofocus, a flash, image stabilization, geotagging, and video recording. Other features include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a personal organizer, a speakerphone, Assisted-GPS, messaging and e-mail, 400MB of internal memory, Sony Ericsson's Timescape interface, a music player, and a full HTML browser with Flash Lite. It also supports the usual Google apps and you can download additional titles from the Android Market.
Read more:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-20031432-78.html#ixzz1DvjzWUNr
Salingsapa.com Islamic social networking sites
Salingsapa.com Quite Social networking sites now widespread in the enthusiast created by the virtual world, one of the successful social networking site is FB , And yesterday the work of city children koprol.com Also already in the acquisition by Yahoo, and now present a social networking site created by young people Indonesia www.salingsapa.com address at the which the site is equipped with a variety of different features of Islamic
John Harlan youth is the birth July 25, 1998 are still sitting on the bench smp is the inventor of this salingspa.com site, On this social networking site, John Harlan made a feature Khazanah and the Koran. Two recent feature was much loved by its users. Within two weeks after launch Until today has reached 5400 users.
"On the features of Khazanah, the user cans listen to the lectures darai many Cleric. While the features of the Quran, the user cans read Al-Qurang from Juz 1 to 10, complete with its translation as well. Or just to listen to The verses of the Koran, cans Also be clicked on this feature, the "bright students WHO like tinkering with computers and play this guitar.
Besides these two features, Yahya Also features radio lists several cans That Played for 24 hours. That and other features are similar to general social networking Such as wall (wall), photo , friends, and others.
However, John said, he Had to work extra with the father to monitor social networking as well as delete user tries to insert content into Salingsapa.com-negative content.
"Another constraint is less powerful servers. Server We Were kids once, but must accommodate more users to join in Salingsapa.com," said the student WHO intends to make games Islamic education is nuanced.
For those Interested please just register on the site www.salingsapa.com
New Samsung DRAM Boasts of 12.8GB/s Transfers
Samsung’s been pretty busy with its successful Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets, along with the Nexus S, but the company this morning reminded us all that it’s not been resting on its laurels when it comes to hardware.
Samsung today revealed that it’s developed a 1GB DRAM for mobile devices that boasts a wide I/O interface and low power consumption to boot. The new mobile DRAM is capable of transmitting data at 12.8GB per second, an eightfold increase in bandwidth when compared to mobile DDR DRAM, and it’s made possible by the use of 512 pins for data input and output compared to the last-gen mobile DRAMs’ 32 pins. All this comes with a reduction in power consumption amounting to roughly 87 percent.
"Following the development of 4Gb LPDDR2 DRAM (low-power DDR2 dynamic random access memory) last year, our new mobile DRAM solution with a wide I/O interface represents a significant contribution to the advancement of high-performance mobile products," said Byungse So, senior VP of memory product planning and application engineering at Samsung Electronics.
"We will continue to aggressively expand our high-performance mobile memory product line to further propel the growth of the mobile industry," he continued.
Samsung’s next move is to provide 20nm-class 4Gb wide I/O mobile DRAM sometime in 2013.
AMD: DirectX Comments Taken Out of Context
AMD is performing damage control, announcing its full support for DirectX after last week's interview with Richard Huddy.
Just over a week after AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy, spoke out against DirectX and other APIs, the company now says that it supports DirectX and that the previous comments were taken out of context and exaggerated. While that may be true,
Huddy's latest interview with CRN-- along with senior director of ISV relations at AMD Neal Robison--also comes across as damage control.
"The [Bit-tech] interview started off being about OpenGL, and the way APIs are developed," Huddy said. "Obviously there’s pressure from Microsoft on hardware vendors to develop DirectX in a variety of ways. We spend a great deal of time getting feedback from game developers in the early phase of our hardware development, for products that are two or three years away from going to market."
The previous interview claimed that developers want the API to "go away," that it's getting in the way of creating some truly amazing graphics. Huddy himself was even quoted saying that developers have admitted this in conversations. But in this latest interview, he said that only a handful of high-end gaming developers were looking to bypass DirectX and code directly to hardware.
"It’s not something most developers want," he said. "If you held a vote among developers, they would go for DirectX or OpenGL, because it's a great platform. It’s hard to crash a machine with Direct X, as there’s lots of protection to make sure the game isn’t taking down the machine, which is certainly rare especially compared to ten or fifteen years ago. Stability is the reason why you wouldn’t want to move away from Direct X, and differentiation is why you might want to."
"We saw some of the chaos before DirectX coalesced the industry,” Robison added. "In the past there were all kinds of APIs developers had to worry about."
Later on in the interview, Huddy revealed that there's a division starting to take place in the gaming industry: those that want to stick with DirectX and other APIs, and those that want to move on in another direction. He even provided an example, saying that developers like DICE have highly-tuned, efficient rendering machines that rely on DirectX. Then there are developers like Crytek who literally sell hardware because they seemingly develop for technologies in the future, and could actually bypass an API.
"Many people are still shipping DirectX 9 games, which is still a perfectly reasonable way to go," Huddy admitted. "As hardware vendors we want to keep bringing out new hardware that produces something visually exciting. We want to be able to innovate. In the feedback we’re getting, some say 'move on from Direct X' and some say 'DX is absolutely the right place to play.'"
He also said that the comment about developers wanting the API to "go away" shouldn't be taken literally. Instead, APIs and middleware need to be innovative and adapt with evolving software code as well as GPU hardware, essentially taking "a different form."
Unlike the first interview, Huddy's follow-up to the Bit-Tech interview is rather lengthy. To get the full four-page dose,
head here.
