Boston Dynamics to build Cheetah Robot for DoD

Boston Dynamics have been awarded two multi-million contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) to build several life-like robots. One will have human-like features and the other will be designed after a Cheetah.  The first model of the robot Cheetah is due in 20 months and the Boston-based company is aiming for it to reach speeds from 20-30 mph. This technology is expected to be updated two more times set at one-year intervals. In the future they hope to reach speeds of up to 70 mph which will completely destroy the current existing robot speeds of only 13 mph. The robot Cheetah will have a malleable body to allow for a zigzag motion and speed up the robot ability to take sharp turns faster. The build on the robot will be an articulated head, a flexible spine, a tail, and four legs.  Hopes are that the robot will be able to stop on a dime from whatever speed it is running at.

The human robot is called Petman and it has a lot of the same capabilities as human have only it doesn’t have a head. Petman is the same size as the average human and at times can look like a headless person. The Army uses Petman to test suits that are made to protect soldiers from certain types of chemicals. The Department of Defense is planning on using these futureristic robots for military purposes mainly but they can’t help but think that it would be practical for firefighting or maybe even agriculture.

Below is a video from one of several futuristic robots that Boston Dynamics development. It is called BigDog and it has the ability to hold up to 340lbs for long distances over rugged terrain. Check it out!

PCmag.com

Motorola Atrix 4G Plus Docking Station

AT&T after having lost their deal with Apple to keep the iPhone restricted to their network, decided to try their hand at a new concept. That concept is called the “Motorola Atrix 4G”. It weighs 4.76 oz. and runs off of HSDPA (voice and data) technology with a 4in multi-touch display. It lacks the new Android OS 2.3 by using the older version 2.2 that unlike the iPhone supports Adobe Flash. The Atrix 4G comes out with a 5MP front-facing camera (720p) with a LED flash bulb. It is GPS capable with 16GB of internal storage and additional storage option via a Micro SD card. The lithium ion battery is rated to last 9hours while talking and 250 while used under standby.

 Here is the cool part; the phone has a docking station that essentially turns the phone into a laptop. The laptop is basically a shell for the phone so when the phone is detached, the shell is rendered functionless. There is a mobile view of your phone on the laptop screen which allows you to still make calls while using the other apps on the screen. The user can “Goggle” a location (Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, and Hospital) and when the results appear you can click on the phone number to dial the chosen location. There is an alert system that lets you know when a text, email, or call is coming in. On the back there are some USB 2.0 ports for extra storage. Gaming works on the docking station just as it would on the phone. My favorite feature is the option to allow the phone to work as a mobile hotspot for other surrounding devices. Outside of these features the docking station is still fairly basic.

Solid State Drives

To the average PC user, speed is an important factor. To someone like me, it's everything! Just recently I learned that there are people out there installing their main operating system on solid state drives. By doing this they are, in some occasions, booting Microsoft Windows 7 in less than thirty seconds. This is because there are no moving parts and they use flash memory instead of spinning platters and read heads. SSD's have very high read and write speeds giving them yet another advantage over HDD's Here is an image to show you the difference between a solid state drive and a hard disk drive:

Up until recently complaints were surfacing about solid state drives slowing down after time. It was soon discovered that the solid state drives didn't completely delete a file, it was merely flagged as deleted and then when that space was to be used again the file would be written over top of. After the entire drive had been used, every new file would have to overwrite a flagged file taking up time. With the use of Trim technology the file is deleted the first time giving you the same write speed as when you first started using the drive. 

Solid state drives are much more expensive than hard disk drives. Right now the cost is not worth the lack of storage to the average user. For a 1 TB HDD you can get a 40GB SSD at the same cost(depending on the manufacture these numbers can vary). However, if you are just trying to speed up your OS, applications, and even your games then you can still use a 40GB SSD as your primary drive and back up all other data on a secondary HDD. Below is a video showing the difference between the two drives with Windows 7:

 Source: The Best HDDs and SSDs For Your Money December 2010

The iPhone has just got Smarter!

    As we all know, Apple and AT&T have been in "cahoots"with one another for some time now, allowing only AT&T customers the chance to own a iPhone. Well Verizon has finally stepped in and is now offering the CDMA version of the iPhone making it available to a much larger range of customers and also giving customers the choice of who will be their cellular provider. AT&T uses GSM communications which means the iPhone needed some changes in order to work on the Verizon network. I've found information that explains how the iPhone may be eligible to run on Verizons and AT&T's network with the new Qualcomm baseband processor. Apple has plans to make this a new feature with the release of the new iPhone 5, creating one model that works on both GSM and CDMA-based communications.

   
    Right now they are manufacturing two separate models. They made some changes by redesigning the antenna and moving the mute button to accommodate the new antenna. The vibrator was also redesigned for a smoother feel. The CDMA model doesn't come with a micro SIM card unlike the GSM version. This is because CDMA carriers do not run off of SIM card activations. Verizon is no longer taking pre-orders for the new CDMA model iPhone but they are counting down it's release to their website and store locations. These dates are 2/09/2011 at 3:00am est for the website and 2/10/2011 at 7:00am for retail stores. The iPhone starts as low as $199.99 for the 16GB version, of course that is with the two year activation.

Tear down reveals Verizon iPhone could have been dual mode