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Posted: 05-03-2012 21:15 Post subject:

I saw the FanWing on telly years ago, and I thought that there was no real benefit to it at all. Also, I thought that it might be inefficient, because the fan in each wing is so huge - it must take a lot of fuel to turn it.

Posted: 05-03-2012 21:22 Post subject:

Posted: 05-03-2012 21:29 Post subject:

Posted: 05-03-2012 21:40 Post subject:

Ive been trying to get my father to buy a Lytros, as hes looking for a new camera, but no luck so far.

Posted: 07-03-2012 11:14 Post subject:

This is so cool. A little pointless, but cool:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/04/mercedes-f-cell-gets-led-camouflage/

Posted: 07-03-2012 18:14 Post subject:

Posted: 09-03-2012 08:50 Post subject:

Posted: 23-04-2012 07:34 Post subject:

...and celebrating something less colossal (but still important in its day):

ZX Spectrum's chief designers reunited 30 years on
By Leo Kelion, Technology reporter

The ZX Spectrum is 30 years old. The successor to Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX81 - at the time the world's best selling consumer computer - it introduced colour "high resolution" graphics and sound.
It also offered an extended version of Sinclair Basic, a computer language with which hundreds of thousands of users were already familiar.

The thin Bauhaus-inspired design was sleeker than anything else on the market, but what was more impressive was its price: £125 for the basic model with 16 kilobytes of RAM, or £175 for the 48k model.
That allowed adverts at the time to boast: "Less than half the price of its nearest competitor- and more powerful".

Sir Clive believed hitting the low price points was crucial.
Rival Acorn Computers had beaten him to a contract to build a tie-in computer for an educational BBC television series which started in January 1982.
It seemed the best way to overcome that promotional advantage was to undercut the BBC Micro's £299/£399 charge - and the strategy worked.

It also protected the Spectrum from the higher-specced, but more expensive, Commodore 64 which was unable to dislodge Sir Clive's computers from being the UK's number one selling computer.

Although some bad business decisions forced the sale of Sinclair Research's computer business to Lord Alan Sugar's Amstrad in 1986, the Spectrum remains a 1980s icon.

Sir Clive was the face of the company, but credit is also due to the original ZX Spectrum's engineer, Richard Altwasser, and its industrial designer Rick Dickinson.
The BBC reunited the two men about 25 years after they last spoke to discuss their work's legacy:

Q. How much of an effect did hitting Sir Clive's price target have on the design?

Dickinson: Cost has always been very high on the agenda with all Sinclair products no matter how far back you go and Clive knew exactly where a product had to be priced.

Literally every penny was driven out where possible. So one of the consequences was that we would very rarely take an existing technology and simply mimic or buy it, but instead would engineer another way of doing it.

So for example with the Spectrum keyboard we minimised it from several hundred components in a conventional moving keyboard to maybe four or five moving parts using a new technology.

Altwasser: On the electronics side we needed to keep the silicon real estate as small as possible and continued to use the very cost effective ZX80 processor. Much of that was achieved by having a very good BASIC interpreter design that could be kept in very little ROM memory space.

Q. Demand was phenomenal - within three months there was a 30,000-strong backlog of orders despite it initially being restricted to mail order. Was the scale of its popularity a surprise?

Dickinson: No matter how much history one might have with successful products like the ZX80 and 81 there is always a niggling doubt in one's mind that to come out with something new and significantly different is a risk. I think that we were all overwhelmed by the demand and the number of products that were sold.

Altwasser: I think with hindsight the BBC did an awful lot to popularise the use of micro-computers, and if we consider the fact the Spectrum was selling for half the price of the BBC Micro we shouldn't be surprised it was very successful.

I clearly recall having discussions that a time would come when every home would have a computer. We could see the applications and uses for everyday purposes.
We'd have these discussions with friends and family and people outside the computer club in Cambridge and people would scoff and say: 'Why on earth would a family want a computer in the home?' Cool

The success was I think beyond anyone's expectation. But perhaps with hindsight it wasn't totally unpredictable.

etc...

Sir Clive declined to take part in the conversation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17776666

Posted: 23-04-2012 16:18 Post subject:

We bought a 16k ZX Spectrum and it turned out to be a 48k Spectrum in the wrong box. Bargain.

Posted: 27-04-2012 17:53 Post subject:

Posted: 27-04-2012 20:42 Post subject:

Really exciting if they make it work and then make it commercially viable.
I hope it doesn't go the same way as HOTOL.

Posted: 27-04-2012 21:58 Post subject:

Hurrah!

Posted: 28-04-2012 08:03 Post subject:

Skylon test: video report:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17874276

Posted: 29-04-2012 01:43 Post subject:

I think Skylon is a tremendous project...but I'll bet a pound to a penny that it'll get fully developed somewhere other than the UK. We just don't do this kind of thing anymore. Sad