Asus floated some big plans this year at the Consumer Electronics Show for merging categories of devices in a number of ways. Following in the Transformer Prime’s footsteps is the tablet hybrid T700 Series, along with two 7-inch tablets and an elusive oddball of a gadget, the Padfone. We visited the company at CES to check out all these items.

T700 Series tablet hybrid

Asus’s Transformer Prime has stirred the emotions of PC hybrid enthusiasts over the last couple of months, but Asus has no problem with making the tablet and keyboard dock look like old news. The 10.1-inch T700 series Android 4 model will have a Super IPS+ display at a 1920×1200 resolution, and a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor running Android 4—slightly faster than the Transformer Prime’s 1.2GHz.

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Hands-on with Asus’s follow-up to Transformer Prime, tablets, Padfone

Media baron, professional evil white guy archetype, and technologist Rupert Murdoch recently took to Twitter regarding his company’s historically awful purchase of MySpace. So, what they do wrong? Literally everything. More »

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Rupert Murdoch Admits He Screwed Up MySpace "In Every Way" [Block Quote]

The turbines that propel jets through the air can be traced back to an idea originated by Hero of Alexandria in the first century AD. Find out what you do with an engine that pre-dates steam power and manned air flight by roughly two thousand years. More »

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The ancient ‘jet’ engine that was used to cook meat [Engineering]

Bloomberg reports via Twitter that production of the next generation tablet is supposed to have started this month according to three people familiar with the situation. Rumors indicate it will have a high-density retina display, 4G LTE data radio, and a quad-core A6 processor. More »

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Bloomberg: iPad 3’s Rolling Off the Factory Lines With a Retina Display, Quad-Core A6 CPU and LTE [Apple]

Continue reading 2013 Dodge Dart digital dash display hands-on (video)

2013 Dodge Dart digital dash display hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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2013 Dodge Dart digital dash display hands-on (video)

Cory blogged earlier about the Missionary Church of Kopimism, Sweden’s newest registered religion. Now there’s a feature about it in the New Yorker, by Rollo Romig:

The Missionary Church of Kopimism picks up where Piratbyrån left off: it has taken the values of Swedish Pirate movement and codified them into a religion. They call their central sacrament “kopyacting,” wherein believers copy information in communion with each other, most always online, and especially via file-sharing. Ibi Botani’s kopimi mark—a stylized “k” inside a pyramid—is their religious symbol, as are CTRL+C and CTRL+V. Where Christian clergy might sign a letter “yours in Christ,” Kopimists write, “Copy and seed.” They have no god.

“We see the world as built on copies,” Gerson told me. “We often talk about originality; we don’t believe there’s any such thing. It’s certainly that way with life—most parts of the world, from DNA to manufacturing, are built by copying.” The highest form of worship, he said, is the remix: “You use other people’s works to make something better.”

THE FIRST CHURCH OF PIRATE BAY (New Yorker)

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New Yorker on new Pirate Bay religion, the Missionary Church of Kopimism

Lucas123 writes “IBM researchers say they’ve been able to shrink the number of iron atoms it takes to store a bit of data from about one million to 12, which could pave the way for storage devices with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today’s devices. Andreas Heinrich, who lead the IBM Research team on the project for five years, said the team used the tip of scanning tunneling microscope and unconventional antiferromagnetism to change the bits from zeros to ones. By combining 96 of the atoms, the researchers were able to create bytes — spelling out the word THINK. That solved a theoretical problem of how few atoms it could take to store a bit; now comes the engineering challenge: how to make a mass storage device perform the same feat as scanning tunneling microscope.”

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IBM Shrinks Bit Size To 12 Atoms

Photo: Ferenc Szelepcsenyi / Shutterstock.com

The New York Philharmonic’s Tuesday performance of Mahler’s Ninth symphony was halted by an unwelcomed sound: someone’s ringing iPhone (using the marimba ringtone). It rang repeatedly in the fourth movement of Mahler’s final completed symphony. From Super-Conductor:

According to an eyewitness, the offending phone owner was in the front rows of Avery Fisher Hall when his phone went off. (A post by Michael Jo on the classical music blog thousandfoldecho.com specifies that the interruption happened just 13 bars before the last page of the score.) In other words, in the final moments of a 25-minute movement, that ends a 90-minute symphony.

“Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra,” the concert-goer, music student Kyra Sims, reports. She related how the orchestra’s music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good “three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long.”

The original eyewitness story at thousandfoldecho.com. (Thanks, Miles O’Brien!)

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Ringing iPhone stops New York Philharmonic

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Monday, platform vendor Canonical unveiled a special version of Ubuntu that is designed for televisions. The platform has an integrated media library manager and will offer DVR capabilities. It includes a variant of the Unity shell that is intended to be operated with a television remote control.

The launch of Ubuntu TV fits with Canonical’s efforts to bring its popular Linux distribution to a variety of mobile and embedded form factors. These include an Ubuntu smartphone operating system due to arrive by 2014. The decision to launch a platform for televisions was unexpected, but seems like a natural step for Canonical’s evolving consumer electronics strategy.

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Hands-on with Ubuntu TV, above and under the hood

Back in May, we heard about Qualcomm’s plans to hammer out details for an X PRIZE competition to invent a Star Trek-style tricorder. Now, reader Sven-Erik sends word that the requirements have been finalized and the competition has launched.
“As envisioned for this competition, the device will be a tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases. Metrics for health could include such elements as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature. Ultimately, this tool will collect large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements. Given that each team will take its own approach to design and functionality, the device’s physical appearance and functionality may vary immensely from team to team. Indeed, the only stated limit on form is that the mass of its components together must be no greater than five pounds.”

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$10M Tricorder X PRIZE Kicks off