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Filed under: GPS, Transportation

If you’ve balked at the prices automakers are charging for integrated navigation systems, you should really take a look at what ¥300,000 ($2,746) would buy you in 1981. That atrocity you see above was an actual option in Honda’s Accord during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and while it didn’t sync up with any satellites, it did help to guide you along in some form or another. The Electro Gyrocator, as it was so eloquently named, accepted transparencies of maps and utilized a gas gyroscope that allowed the map to move with the motion of the car and plot your progress. Once a certain map ran out of road, you just popped the next one in and kept on cruisin’. And here we are kvetching about whether our portable navigator has 10 or 11 million POIs…

[Via Autoblog]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Storage

We’re not sure this is still relevant — the patent was filed in May of 2006 — but the USPTO has just published a patent application from Apple detailing a number of different 8cm to 12cm optical disk adapters. The application, credited to Tony Fadell, chief of the iPod division, says that since most software doesn’t take up all of the available storage on a disk, it would be cheaper and simpler to use the 8cm disks when appropriate — but that having to ship a standard adapter for slot-loading drives reduce any costs, because they’re the same size as 12cm disks. The solution is to make the adapters smaller when they’re not in use, and the filing goes on to detail several different folding and multi-part takes on the idea. Considering that such an adapter would make things slightly more complicated for the vast majority of Apple’s all-slot-loading installed base, we can’t see these ever actually shipping, but it’s still an interesting idea.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Networking

Remember that blisteringly fast channel bonding modem Comcast showed off earlier this year? Turns out that the firm’s CEO is apparently aiming to roll out internet services that can reach up to 160Mbps down / 120Mbps up sometime in 2008. As in, next year. In a recent interview with Fortune, Brian Roberts stated that service based on DOCSIS 3.0 technology would start “rolling out” sometime in 2008, and casually noted that it should provide “more than enough bandwidth to do multiplayer online gaming.” Additionally, Cable Digital News explains that the firm has plans to cover some 20-percent of its footprint with the uber-quick service before 2009, and while we’re left to guess what areas will be covered, we’d bet locales fetching FiOS could entertain some competition. Granted, we’ve still got aways to go before we can go toe-to-toe with a certain Swede, but we’ll take any progress we can get.

[Via ArsTechnica, image courtesy of AFP / BBC]
Read - Fortune interviews Comcast CEO Brian Roberts
Read - Comcast closes in on 100Mbit/s

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Two years after the Xbox 360 kick-started the next-gen console race on a Black Friday week, EA chief John Riccitello says this year’s Black Friday completed the transition to the (now) current-gen consoles:

“It’s been the longest, hardest transition in the history of the industry…Last Friday marked one of those points where you can say something’s changed…Around the world, based on the data I’ve got, it was pretty clear that the transition is now over.

Really though, part of the reason the transition yawned into a two-year stretch is because Microsoft decided to jump the gun on everyone by about a year. It gave them an edge, true, but it also made the shift seem longer and more difficult than it really was because its own launch window was problem-ridden.

If you take last year’s launch of the Wii and PS3 as the actual starting point, with all three on the market, the player with the most consistent difficulty since then has been Sony, but things are looking up for them post-$399 PS3 launch. (Nintendo and Microsoft have had their own share of problems, for sure.) Riccitello thinks it’s all good now, anyway:

It looked like it might have been a two-horse race, but it’s clearly a three-horse race…I think from this point, pleasantly for me, it’s sort of fat city in the game industry.

Anyone left out there that hasn’t made the “transition” to what’s now modern, civilized gaming? [Reuters via Games Radar via Kotaku, Flickr]

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Two years after the Xbox 360 kick-started the next-gen console race on a Black Friday week, EA chief John Riccitello says this year’s Black Friday completed the transition to the (now) current-gen consoles:

“It’s been the longest, hardest transition in the history of the industry…Last Friday marked one of those points where you can say something’s changed…Around the world, based on the data I’ve got, it was pretty clear that the transition is now over.

Really though, part of the reason the transition yawned into a two-year stretch is because Microsoft decided to jump the gun on everyone by about a year. It gave them an edge, true, but it also made the shift seem longer and more difficult than it really was because its own launch window was problem-ridden.

If you take last year’s launch of the Wii and PS3 as the actual starting point, with all three on the market, the player with the most consistent difficulty since then has been Sony, but things are looking up for them post-$399 PS3 launch. (Nintendo and Microsoft have had their own share of problems, for sure.) Riccitello thinks it’s all good now, anyway:

It looked like it might have been a two-horse race, but it’s clearly a three-horse race…I think from this point, pleasantly for me, it’s sort of fat city in the game industry.

Anyone left out there that hasn’t made the “transition” to what’s now modern, civilized gaming? [Reuters via Games Radar via Kotaku, Flickr]

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