Two — no, three — things in life are sure: Death, taxes, and the fact that storage manufacturers will continue to cram ever-more ridiculous quantities of memory into tinier packages. SanDisk announced a new 32-GB microSDHC card on Monday, effectively doubling the maximum storage capacity of the tiny
1987: Thousands of physicists crowd a ballroom at the New York Hilton for a hastily arranged marathon session on high-temperature superconductivity. The event generates so much excitement that it is later referred to as the “Woodstock of Physics.” Discovered in 1911, superconductivity is a phenomeno
Cisco Tuesday announced a new router, the CRS-3, that it says is capable of delivering 322 terabits per second. Now, we don’t usually cover routers and similar enterprise hardware here in Gadget Lab, but this one’s worth a brief mention. Let’s leave aside Cisco’s breathless hype (it will “forever ch
In music, timing is everything. When you’re dancing with an enormous machine, it’s even more important to get the timing correct, down to the microsecond. For its latest video, released on YouTube Monday night, pop band OK Go recruited a gang of very talented engineers to build a huge, elaborate Rub
1837: The U.S. Patent Office approves Thomas Davenport’s application for a patent on an “Improvement in Propelling Machinery by Magnetism and Electro-Magnetism.” We’d call it an electric motor. Davenport was a Vermont blacksmith and an amateur tinkerer, not a trained scientist or engineer. When he h
While magazine, newspaper and book publishers wrestle with the logistics and technical details of publishing to the Apple iPad, Scribd has an alternative: a “send-to-device” feature that lets people send documents to their e-readers or smartphones for reading on the go. The new feature, reported in
Review: Kayland Zephyr Hiking Boots Hikers usually have to choose between boots that are lightweight and boots that are protective and supportive. Kayland’s Zephyrs override that dilemma with a polyurethane exoskeleton that gives the boots leatherlike rigidity, while keeping them lightweight (about
Someday, you’ll be able to fit as much data in a small, square CompactFlash card as AT&T carries on its entire network in a week. In theory at least, version 5 of the CompactFlash standard will allow CF cards to hold 188 petabytes of data. By comparison, that’s equivalent to 188,000 one-terabyte dri
A new app invites you to command your iPhone in the same way that Captain Kirk addressed the Enterprise’s computer. Siri’s visual interface displays a transcription of what you say, then hands the data off to an appropriate web service or search engine. Siri, an artificial intelligence-based voice-r
Sun’s erstwhile CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced his retirement Wednesday night in a uniquely geeky way: With a haiku posted to Twitter. Financial crisis Stalled too many customers CEO no more Schwartz’s decision to announce his departure in the form of a short, Japanese lyric was, perhaps, a veiled
