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The Moller M200G hover car by Moller International is supposedly coming to market in the no-too-distant future. Priced between £45,000 and £62,000, the car will allow consumers to live out their wildest Jetsons fantasies.
You can see a video of the M200G in action here.
Once upon a time, consumers viewed Sony as a desirable brand. The company was renowned for innovation: the legendary Walkman, the groundbreaking PlayStation, Aibo, the first commercially available robotic pet.
Fast forward a few years, and things are looking grim. They now produce derivative rubbish that nobody in their right mind would want to invest in. Take the NW-HD5 for example:
It’s a poor man’s iPod that uses Sony’s proprietary format, ATRAC3. Sony helpfully bundled SonicStage with the player to encourage users to convert all their nice MP3 files into Sony’s white elephant format, leaving them with gigabytes of useless music when the player stops working. Cheers Sony!
The Bean is equally terrible:
Surely somebody within Sony must have noticed that this thing is a pig! What will they think of next? The Sony Spud - an MP3 (sorry, ATRAC3) player shaped like a potato?
Poor products and incredible errors of judgment have plagued the company in recent times: take their sluggish, wait-and-see approach in the TV market. Upon closing their south Wales manufacturing plant with the loss of 650 jobs, Sony announced:
“The demand for CRT-based televisions within the UK and Europe has fallen significantly and the transition to flat TVs has been much quicker than we first expected”
No kidding!
Their lack of foresight is astonishing for company that claims to be at the forefront of technology. They’re playing catch-up now with the Bravia range of televisions, but is it too little too late? The Bravia range may have a nice television campaign to support sales, but Sony’s competitors are offering products of similar (if not better) quality at a lower price.
The PlayStation 3 is another great example of a product that arrived too late for far too much money. The Xbox 360 currently retails at £296.96 on Amazon, or a mere £195.48 if you fancy the Core System. The PlayStation 3 comes in at a whopping £419.99! It may play Blu-Ray discs (which will be obsolete in no time as broadband speeds and on-demand services increase), wifi and a larger drive, but why bundle these things in off the bat?
The PS3 has…. what…. about 20 games? The 360 has loads (OK, so shoot me, I don’t know exactly how many).
Sony have just unveiled their latest product: a clock radio with an integrated iPod dock.
Another piggy pig pig! It is so piggy is stinks like bacon! It looks like a car battery or possibly a toaster.
The VAIO is yet another example of the derivative rubbish they’ve been peddling for far too long.
Hmmmmmm… looks suspiciously like the Apple MacBook! At least they’re priced reasonably enough.
Sony’s retail outlets are looking very tired - if you’ve walked past the one on Baker Street you’ll know what I mean.
Sony - please, go back to square one, head back to the drawing board and dream up some new, innovative, exciting products before it’s too late.
Rant over.
Poo: love it or hate it, you’re sure to release it now and then. If you’re a big fan of poo you’re sure to enjoy Poo Warrior, the incredibly odd poo-themed Flash game. It’s arguably the best poo game on the ‘net, although Catch a Shit is a strong contender.
The PHP development team have officially announced that support for PHP4 will cease at the end of 2007. With PHP6 on the way this news is hardly surprising, but it’s a big deal for most sysadmins and PHP programmers given the adoption rate for PHP5 currently stands at less than 20%.
For those that haven’t upgraded already, take a look at the PHP4 to PHP5 migration guide.
I must confess, I’d never heard of UK car manufacturer Noble until this week. Given the sorry state of car manufacturing in the UK it’s little surprise. What is a surprise is that they’re designing some spectacular vehicles that really warrant more publicity (their awful website does them no justice).
The Noble M15 is a great looking car:
Of course, they’ve only gone and sold the design to an American company! After a few tweaks, a little remodelling and a rebadge, the beast that is the Rossion Q1 was born:
smbclient, a command-line client for accessing SMB/CIFS servers, is a great tool for shunting large quantities of data between servers on a local network. Unfortunately, the man page for smbclient is a bit of a chore - it doesn’t offer any useful examples, making it unnecessarily difficult for the first-time user to make any progress with the software.
To copy from one server to another, SSH into the destination box then make a connection with the following command:
smbclient //your_ip_address/name_of_share -U your_username
Upon connecting:
smb: \> recurse
smb: \> prompt
smb: \> mget *
The recurse command toggles directory recursion; prompt toggles confirmation prompts (you’ll want this off if you’re copying thousands of files!). The mget command will now copy recursively from the the target smb resource to the current directory of the destination machine. To change directory, simply CD as per usual; for a list of available commands type help.
After having his body sliced in two by a lorry over 10 years ago, Peng Shulin assumed he’d never walk again.
However, doctors in Beijing found out about Mr Peng’s plight late last year and devised a plan to get him up walking again. Following a rigorous exercise regime and the addition of some legs made of Meccano (or similar, I really have no idea), Mr Shulin is up and walking again.
Whilst I must commend the designers of his legs for having achieved the objective of getting him walking, I can’t help but think they missed a great opportunity to try out some new ideas. Would a giant spring have been better, like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout? Perhaps two giant springs could have been embedded into his artificial legs, bestowing upon him the great leaping power of Inspector Gadget? I guess we’ll never know…
Following the appearance of thousands of Google Maps mashups, Google have introduced a new technology to encourage further user interaction. The “mapplets” (mini-webpages inside an IFrame) can be combined to create custom mashups: for example, you could display information on house prices, crime rates and cemeteries simultaneously, with built-in features such as driving directions thrown in for good measure.
The following YouTube video shows the system in use:
You can find out more about mapplets here:
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/
More info on the Google Earth/Maps blog.
The service will be live to the public sometime today, following months of private beta.
