Here we are in 2013, a bunch of suckers – suckers! – cleaning the screens of our phones and tablets using our bare hands. …
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TechnologizerCompanies
The Sad State of Japan’s Consumer Electronics Giants
The Washington Post‘s Chico Harlan has a sobering story on the dicey financial condition of big Japanese electronics companies such as Sony, Panasonic and Sharp. Once they were the gold standard in gadgets; now they’re struggling …
Climb into the Cockpit of This 13-Foot Robot for Only $1.28 Million
Get ready to fulfill all of your Robotech-related fantasies — provided you have $1.28 million on hand. That’s how much it will cost you to buy Kuratas, the 13-foot tall humanoid robot on wheels unveiled at Tokyo’s World …
Move Over, Roomba: Multilingual Cocorobo Can Vacuum and Talk
Roomba is great, I guess. I mean, it can vacuum your floor while you sit on the couch watching Perfect Strangers. But can it talk to you?
Cocorobo can. It’s the new robot from Sharp that will finally allow you to become …
WATCH: Kid in Japan Controls Working ‘Real Steel’ Robot
I’ve always believed that our number one goal when it comes to robotics should be to create real-life Rock em’ Sock ‘em Robots, as dramatized in the think piece Real Steel, starring Mr. Hugh Jackman.
It appears that the …
New Facebook Feature Lets You Mark Yourself as ‘Safe’ After Major Disaster
In the wake of a disaster, one of the most terrifying things is not knowing if your loved ones are safe. Contact can be difficult: Landlines can go down and cellphones can lose their charge. Even if you call your mother and tell …
And Today’s ‘Fastest Computer in the World’ Award Goes to…
Anyone else tired of these “fastest computer in the world” stories? I am. They almost sound like bragging. Look what we did with our computer, but you can’t with yours! I don’t really care whether a Smaug-the-dragon treasure horde’s worth of silicon can do 10 or 100 petaflops. I just want to know how many frames per second it gets in …
Hackers Target Japanese Weapons Maker, Nuclear Power Plants
Missiles, submarines and yes, even nuclear power plants were targeted in a cyber attack launched against Japan’s premiere weapons maker, reports Al Jazeera. The victim: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which said today that a total of 83 of its servers and computers were infected by as many as eight separate viruses.
The Japanese …
Apple Slides Earthquake Early Warning System into iOS 5
Would a phone-based alert system have saved lives in Japan, had one been available for iOS users when the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that raised a wall of water devastating much of Japan’s Pacific coastline hit in early March this year? Apple’s betting yes. Cupertino’s adding a special earthquake notification widget to the Japanese version …
WATCH: Say Hello to the Flying Sphere of Awesomeness
It looks like the kind of gadget you’d see CGI’ed into a sci-fi show (in fact, similar CGI flying spheres did appear in Doctor Who not all that long ago). But this particular flying object is very real, very cool, and very coming to a battle zone near you in the not-too-distant future.
This radio-controlled spherical flying drone is …
Just How Crazy Is the World’s Steepest Rollercoaster?
Imagine hurtling downward at nerve-fraying speeds while shooting slightly backwards before curving into a perfect vertical drop and out again, sort of like surfing the inside bottom-half of the letter ‘s’.
That’s how the world’s steepest rollercoaster brings it, and if you were silly enough to scarf down a plate of nachos and maybe a …
World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Is Faster than 28,000 PS3s
Where in the world can you crunch over 8 quadrillion calculations per second? Find 672 computer racks linking an astonishing 68,544 CPUs, each of which harbors eight cores? Where the computing output is roughly equivalent to the power of 28,160 PlayStation 3s? *
On Japan’s “K” computer, that’s where. The supercomputer was built by …
