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Hardware Hacking

Combining Two Kinects To Make Better 3D Video 106

suraj.sun sends this quote from Engadget about improving the Kinect 3D video recordings we discussed recently: "[Oliver Kreylos is] blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive."
Handhelds

When You Really, Really Want to Upgrade a Tiny Notebook 104

Benz145 writes "The famous Sony VAIO UX UMPC may have been cancelled a few years back by Sony, but the community at Micro PC Talk won't let it die. Modder Anh has carefully removed the relatively slow 1.33Ghz Core Solo CPU and installed a much faster Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 (a process which involves reballing the entire CPU). On top of this, he managed to install an incredibly small 4-port USB hub into the unit which allowed for the further instillation of a Huawei E172 modem for 3G data/voice/SMS, a GPS receiver, and a Pinnacle HD TV receiver. All of this was done without modifying the device's tiny external case. Great high-res pictures of the motherboard with the modded hardware can be seen through the link."

Comment Works for Halo - So find another reason. (Score 1) 315

The formula seems to Work for Halo.
Americans love FPS... especially on their consoles.
And that's what they get... the same regurgitated crap over and over...
Its working and has been working here for over 10 years.

How many FPS's has Japan created in the last 10 years?
How many of those have been mega hits in the US?

I hate when "experts" say crap like this.

"When asked why, he responds, 'A lot of designers, if they find a genre that works for them, they stick with it. A lot of designers just stick to a set formula. That doesn't work any more. You can't just tweak the graphics, work just on image quality. You can't compete on that."

Comment How Bizzare (Score 1) 665

With the costs involved in an Alienware system you would think that it would be been reported stolen immediately to Alienware.
I know I would have... and I have for some Dell laptops that where eventually recovered.
Is also very strange that Dell doesn't have a transfer of ownership program for one of their Premium products
but they do for their average systems.

Comment A long time ago it was possible but no longer (Score 1) 541

Possible before the big bang fully crystallized the laws of nature.
And was possible before dark energy took over and expansion started.
Only possible today at subluminal speeds... at least that's what the brain slugs keep telling me.
We are going to need generation ships and the ability to live a lot longer.

Comment Re:VM's are easy and fun... I'll take a free licen (Score 1) 364

Your are correct.
However I am not sure that there are not still situations where extremely high I/O is better served by hardware.
The lines are blurring much more now between virtual and purely hardware driven systems.
If you have worked with virtual machines as much as I have then you know this.

VM's are great sandbox's...
I will take a freely destructible and instantly restore-able virtual XP license anytime.
Thank you very much.

Instantly restore-able?
I have built a fully restore-able Virtual Machine network using a torrent based file sharing system.
The system was built for a computer school that uses terabytes of Microsoft VM's to teach the classes they offer.
They had a need to restore\reload\update hundreds of clean VM's every week, even daily.

This system uses every computer and network resources available at peak effectiveness.
It was free to implement with the exception of a high capacity filer.
A gigabyte network was not necessary.

The system was designed to "restore" all VM's accross hunderds of machines or a -single machine- very quickly by referencing clean copies of the all VM's on a separate hidden and locked hard drive located in all the machines on the network.
The Primary tracker, uTorrent, also references its only clean copy. (until an updated torrent \ VM image is made)

The system uses two components
1. uTorrent as both a client and server
2. a simple securely hosted web page to host the torrent files across all machines.

Restoring hundreds, adding or updating VM's is very easy.
(updating is as simple as creating a new torrent with the same name and sharing the new torrent out to all machines)
Restoring is as simple as logging in to each machine as the admin and launching uTorrent which does a CRC check and only downloads the changes made in the VM image file. (usually less than 20%)
Restoring or updating a 12GB VM to a clean state takes less than 15 minutes. (only re-downloading the broken or changed pieces)
Adding Virtual Machines across multiple machines reduces P2P copy\restore\update time and is 100% error free.

This took a job, that was prone to error becuase P2P file transfer is not 100% error free, that could take 4 hours down to about 20 minutes.
And it is 100% perfect because of the torrent systems built-in error correction...
Outside of Hardware failure every student gets a perfectly working set of VM's to work from every time and anytime... about 500GB worth.

Comment VM's are easy and fun... I'll take a free license (Score 1) 364

A free pre-built and licensed WindowsXP_SP3 Virtual machine being included with Windows7 sounds good to me.
I wont be using their free VM to migrate my old XP OS, yet it will be a fun free toy to play with.
I will be restoring my current XP OS to a Virtual Machine running on a physical drive using Acronis Universal Restore.
Its easy enough to move almost any Windows OS from a VM to Hardware and Back again if needed using various software's like Acronis.
If its not a graphics driven or extremely high I/O machine VM's work work good.

     

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