It's a bit late for a Father's Day gift, but if your dad also happens to be a geek -- or owns a computer -- you can add new life to his vinyl records with the Crosley Radio Revolution CR6002 travel turntable.
Crosley's built a product line of nostalgic looking devices, but this portable turntable is anything but. Sure, it plays those old 33 1/3 and 45 RPM records, but it doesn't look anything like the record players you've seen back in the day. In addition to a modern look and USB connectivity, the CR6002 also comes with few modern amenities. Take a peek:
Software suite for ripping and editing audio content
FM transmitter
Dynamic full range stereo speakers
Crosley says the CR6002A will be available soon for $150. In the meantime, check out this video.
Intel has confirmed the leak of its HDCP master key, but since any implementation would have to be done in hardware, the chip giant claims it isn’t worried. On Friday however they also confirmed that they would take swift and decisive legal action against anyone planning to produce a product that circumvents HDCP in any way.
“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”
The leaked master key is a particularly devastating blow since it is used to create all of the lower level keys that are embedded within devices. It makes creating HDCP compliant recording devices a simple task, and its only a matter of time before black market devices begin to appear.
Intel still hasn’t released how the master key was exposed, or if any criminal investigation is pending. The news is especially painful for movie studios who just a few months ago convinced the FCC to let them remotely switch off analog ports on cable boxes for certain content. It remains to be seen what long-term impact this will have on copy protection for HD content, but Intel is clearly willing to back its mistake with an army of lawyers.
Google Voice is popping up in more and more places these days, and the search giant is finding it increasingly difficult to avoid being labeled as a common carrier. Google on the other hand claims that since it doesn’t charge for the service, they should be exempted from the classification and all the onerous regulations that would apply. Analysts on the other hand are not so sure this justification will hold up, and new features such as Gmail integration and video calling are increasingly blurring the lines.
Google can get away with shenanigans such as blocking calls to rural areas since it is nothing more than a free service at the moment, but if the regulators get involved it could be an entirely different story. It would be interesting to see if Google maintains the same level of commitment if the laws end up turning against them, and they are forced to comply with the same rules as local phone carriers.
Japan's Brother Industries recently showcased a head-mounted transparent display, called AiRScouter, which projects images directly onto the retina, conjuring up a rather “mysterious effect” – that of watching a display hanging in air about one meter in front of the eyes. The head-mounted display, based on the company's propriety Retinal Imaging Display (RID), made its maiden public appearance in 2008. However, it wasn't going to have a proper name until an year later when Brother unveiled a more advanced prototype.
"Firstly, we expect this display will be used in industrial applications. Using the AirScouter, it's possible to look at a manual or the like while working on site. The advantage of this is, it reduces the time lost in moving around. Also, a camera can be attached, so pictures of the work site can be sent to head office. This makes it possible to work in collaboration, while receiving instructions from experts in the office,” the company said in a release.
“Apart from industrial applications, this display could be used in AR technology, combining the real and virtual worlds. In the future, it'll be possible to connect a smartphone to the AiRScouter, so the display of the smartphone can be seen on the head-mounted display.”
Brother plans to begin shipping the AirScouter before the end of fiscal 2010.
It took 14 months, thousands of user protests, and an FCC investigation, but the Google Voice iPhone application has finally been approved. The app enables free phone calls within the United States, along with steeply discounted international calling, a move that likely won’t sit well with AT&T who charges a much higher rate for long distance calling. Google Voice also offers free voicemail transcriptions, the ability to listen to voicemail messages live, and several other indispensable call forwarding and number management tools.
The good news for iPhone users helps underscore Apple’s recent commitment to loosening up the reigns on app store approvals, but its hard to mistake this act of charity as anything less than a move to keep up with the competition. The iPhone platform finds itself increasingly competing for developer time with Android, WebOS, and now even Windows Phone 7.
Has Apple’s recent change of heart convinced you the iPhone is worth looking at? Or did you ditch the Retina display for an OLED long ago?
OnLive's cloud-based gaming service launched in June with Wi-Fi support conspicuously missing from its armory. While OnLive's lack of Wi-Fi support was never really a pressing concern for the vast majority of the world's population, it did matter to both the service's early adopters and detractors, with some admittedly ardent fans even stooping to such abject lows as building Ethernet loopback adapters to pass off their Wi-Fi connection as a wired one.
Such ingenuity is no longer needed as the company has now added beta Wi-Fi support to its cloud gaming service, just as it had promised at the beginning of the month. However, OnLive wants you to ensure that the wired Internet connection to your Wi-Fi router sustains at least 3 Mbps. Please read its Wi-Fi FAQ for more.
We heard news yesterday that Windows Phone 7 would not be available on Verizon until 2011. Now Microsoft has clarified the situation, and the reality is a bit of a bummer. There will be no support for CDMA networks in Windows Phone 7 until 2011. That's why Verizon is not planning for handsets.
A Microsoft senior product manager told Cnet, "We had to make some trade-offs. Even Microsoft doesn't have unlimited resources. We had to prioritize doing fewer things, really, really well." The two major CDMA networks in the US, Verizon and Sprint, will just have to wait. The GSM standard is much more common in the world, which is why Redmond decided to go that route.
This isn't the first time CDMA has been kicked to the curb. Until Android 1.6, there was no support for CDMA. In fact, when HTC launched the HTC Hero on Sprint (running Android 1.5) they had to roll their won code for the CDMA network. If you've been waiting for WinPho7, will you jump ship to a GSM carrier, or wait for it to come to you?
According to some new numbers for iSupply, the total number of wireless subscriptions in the world will reach 5 billion this month. That's the equivalent of nearly three-quarters of the world's population. Of course, some people will have multiple lines, perhaps business and personal, but the number is still huge. “If the importance of an event can be measured by the number of people it affects, then the proliferation of wireless communications stands out as one of the most significant phenomena in the history of technology,” said Dr. Jagdish Rebello of iSupply.
Not all regions are equally saturated with mobile phones. Africa and the Middle East have the lowest penetration with only about 50%. On the high end is Western Europe where cell subscriptions out number people; about 157% penetration. Many Europeans have multiple low-cost subscriptions to enable calling when traveling to other countries.
It's often said that phones are the computing platforms of the future. These new numbers really drive the point home. People that could never hope to afford a computer can manage a cell subscription. iSupply feels this trend will continue to encourage the technology supply chain to shift away from traditional computer hardware, and toward mobile devices.
Posted 09/17/2010 at 12:50pm | by Christopher Null
The “lifecasting” craze never really took off -- and thank heavens for that! -- but that hasn’t kept the good folks at Looxcie from attempting to jump on the bandwagon.
The idea: Put a camera in a gadget that’s worn like a Bluetooth headset, and shoot video from the side of your face, recording everything you look at. The device has onboard storage for up to five hours of video, and it will literally record everything you see, recording over the old footage after your first five hours are up.
Home theater PCs are the ultimate digital entertainment systems, capable of delivering everything from movies, games, YouTube videos, and more. Connect one to your home network and you can access all your music, digital photos, and digital home videos, too. We show you how to create the ultimate “HTPC” on this issue’s bundled disc.
maximumpc: Here's what the EVGA GTX 780 looks like with its new ACX cooler - what do you think? http://t.co/N3RzaAs81A2 hours 40 min ago
maximumpc: @markiel_tero @pcgamer Well, there's always the Dream Machine.2 hours 41 min ago
maximumpc: EA's CTO says the new Xbox's architecture is a generation ahead of current high-end PCs. http://t.co/qaItNW21Ts via @pcgamer3 hours 56 min ago
