US Army turns to toy company to develop new weapon

US Army turns to toy company to develop new weapon

by Donald Melanson, posted Jul 24th 2008 at 5:38PM

We're not quite sure how the pitch session went with this one, but it looks like the US Army was so impressed by toymaker Lund and Company's Hydrogen Fuel Rocket that it decided to recruit the company to build a decidedly more lethal version of it. The new system, dubbed the Variable Velocity Weapon System, will apparently be able to be switched between lethal and non-lethal modes, and be loaded with rubber bullets, actual bullets, or other projectiles, which are fired by mixing a liquid or gaseous fuel with air in a combustion chamber. What's more, the company says that the technology could be applied to any size weapon from a "handgun to a Howitzer," and it says a demonstration version could be ready in as little as six months, with full production possible within 18 months, pending approval.

Project: Alien Mouse gets your arm into it

Project: Alien Mouse gets your arm into it

by Darren Murph, posted Jul 25th 2008 at 2:51PM

Mizanur Rahman is clearly sick and tired of traditional mousing devices. So sick and tired, in fact, that he's kicked out a rendering of the Project: Alien Mouse. In short, this decidedly gigantic mouse shoots for ergonomics by providing a place for your wrist, lower arm and maybe your elbow if you're a small enough person. We'll be honest, all those gel cushions sure look comfy from here, but the amount of brain energy that would be required to use it kind of puts a damper on the whole deal.

PS3 homebrew capabilities inevitably leads to Pong

PS3 homebrew capabilities inevitably leads to Pong

by Darren Murph, posted Jul 27th 2008 at 1:51PM

If you'll recall, the evolution of homebrew on the Wii started out quite similar to this. First comes the Hello World proof of concept, then comes Pong. It would just be wrong to unfold otherwise, right? Dragula96, the same guru who whipped up the original homebrew hack, has now introduced 2 Player Pong 1.0 -- the first notable game to take advantage of the Java devkit (at least, that's how it looks from here). Currently, the collisions are "very basic" and further tweaks are necessary before it's perfect, but it should be stable enough to take you to some sort of blissful state for now.

New Xbox 360 Dashboard update gets leaked, shown off

New Xbox 360 Dashboard update gets leaked, shown off

by Donald Melanson, posted Jul 28th 2008 at 11:11AM

Sure, we've seen the Xbox 360's forthcoming Dashboard update demoed in a polished presentation and detailed in high res press pics, but if you're like us, you don't really get exciting about something until it's leaked out into the wild and shown off blurry cam-style. The particuarly adventurous can apparently even take their chances and install this new "Xbox Experience" update themselves, but the exact details about where to get it and how to install it are understandably a bit hard to come by. If you do go that route, however, you'll need to make sure you have a modded console with an Infectus 2 Chip in the system and, most likely, a second 360 to fall back on in the event the first bursts into flames. The rest of us will just have to make do with the video after the break.

[Via Xbox-Scene News]

Cuil - The World's Biggest Search Engine

Is Cuil Too Cool For School, Or Does It Still Need To Learn Some Lessons From Google?

Posted by Eric Zeman, Jul 28, 2008 10:39 AM

This morning a band of ex-Google employees launched a competitive search offering called Cuil (pronounced kool). Cuil has indexed about 120 billion Web pages, which is approximately one-eighth of Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s claimed 1 trillion indexed pages. Just how useful is Cuil?

Lately it seems as if a new search engine is popping up every week. This week's entrant? Cuil. While I've seen some good alternatives to Google -- especially those that focus on visual search results -- it doesn't appear that the new entrants are making much of a dent in Google's massive presence on the Web.

I decided to take Cuil for a spin this morning to see just how well it stacks up to Google.

I went to Cuil.com. It's obvious Cuil wants to be the anti-Google. Where Google's home page is all white, Cuil's is black, with just some simple text and a search box located smack in the center of the page. I am sure this design is no accident. I typed in the search query "Mesa Boogie."

Cuil returned about 200,000 results. Rather than a simple list of links, Cuil gave me three columns of results. Each column had four results in it, making for 12 search results on the first page. These results go beyond links to other Web pages. Each result displayed the name of the Web page, included an image, and had about 50 to 100 words worth of text pulled from that Web page so you know what's on it.

The results included several selections from the Mesa Boogie Web site, as well as some from a competitor, Wikipedia, a retail store and at least one forum discussion board. One of the results was in Russian, so I pretty much discounted that one from the start.

Cuil also offers a way to explore the results by category. In this case, I could parse the results by: Instrument Amplifiers, Guitar Amplifier Tubes, Fender Amplifiers, Guitar Amplifier Manufacturers, and Members of Metallica - perhaps the most noted users of Mesa Boogie amps. Mousing over this set of categories opened up pull-down boxes for each of the categories, showing another eight options from which to choose. The search terms found in this pull-down box were certainly relevant.

Briefly examining the second through tenth pages of results, they all looked to be about the same, providing a mix of links to actual Mesa Boogie material and other places where Mesa Boogie amps are mentioned. The only result I was really thrilled to see was an old interview with Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci, who uses and endorses Mesa Boogie amps.

There were no adds on any of the pages.

In comparison, Google's results included links to the Mesa Boogie Web site, retailers of Mesa Boogie amps, forum discussion boards, eBay auctions, and some music-related magazine Web sites. There was one ad served on the main search page. In total, Google returned 2.37 million results, eleven times that of what Cuil returned. Does that make one search engine more useful than the others? Not really. I don't know anyone who has the time to go through 200,000 search results, let alone 2.37 million.

If you don't know anything about Mesa Boogie, performing a blanket search such as this with either search engine is a decent starting point. You get access to information straight from the horse's mouth, as well as (what I generally believe to be more valuable) information from real people out in the world who use Mesa Boogie products.

Did either search engine outperform the other? Not in any quantifiable way. But having Google search built into my Web browser (FireFox 3), means I am pretty much going with Google for now.