Hasta La Gadget!

Often the best kitchen gadgets are the cheapest, or at lest the most basic. Royal VKB and Nikolai Carels’ Boomerang Wok, though, tries to make the case that fancier can sometimes – almost – be better.

A cheap, carbon-steel wok from your local Chinese supplies store is the best wok you can get. It’s tough, it has a rounded bottom for gas (the only place you’ll get it hot enough) and it skips non-stick coatings, which burn-off or go bad at the kind of temperatures a wok likes. Properly seasoned (ie. not cleaned) it will become completely non-stick and last forever.

The Boomerang Wok commits the usual fancy wok sins: Teflon, a plastic handle, a stupid price ($150!). But it has a lip at the far end which lets you toss the food with a flick of the wrist, only to return safely into the pan’s center.

Any half skilled cook can manage this most basic of chefs’ techniques, which involves jerking the wok (or sauté pan) away from you, flicking the wrist to launch the food and then catching it. But then, the kind of person who would spend $150 on a non-stick wok is not the kind of person to learn a basic cooking technique. Still, I guess the Boomerang will look nice on their countertop, right next to the block of Global knives they use to open their mail.

Boomerang Wok + Sauté Pan [A Plus R via Uncrate]

See Also:

• Drip-Free Oil Drizzler Drops in for Dinner
• 'Oil-Less' Turkey Fryer Defies Laws of Physics
• Tefal Actifry Preys on Fat Fears
• The Only Five Kitchen Tools You Really Need

This article was written on January 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Now before I get started I want to say that I use openSUSE as my choice of Linux distribution and couldn’t be happier with it. They always seem to be on top of implementing new technologies that are easy-to-use and really appealing to those who want the latest and greatest. For example, the latest version of openSUSE includes a new KDE Start Menu that is unlike anything you’ll find in other Linux distributions.

With that being said I think Novell, the company that develops SUSE, might be taking things a little far now. They have started a website that compares their Enterprise operating system with Windows Vista, in hopes of attracting more customers. Sure, that sounds like normal competition at first but the only comparisons that they make are the ones that favor them…with the most obvious being pricing.

Novell provides a table (pictured below) that demonstrates the pricing difference between the two major versions of Vista and SUSE Linux Enterprise. They then go on to show you what the total cost (with maintenance) would be over the next year and three years, but they conveniently don’t have maintenance cost information available for their operating system, so they leave that number out of the total.

It is definitely fair for them to do such a comparison because I could have seen Microsoft doing the same thing is the situation was reversed, but this was the part that really caught my attention:

The license costs for Windows Vista Ultimate with Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 reaches a whopping $1,078. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, you receive over 90 percent of the functionality of Vista and Office for less than 10 percent of the price.

90 percent of the functionality? That sounds a little high especially if you think about the applications businesses run on their machines that probably won’t work right on Linux. I guess they are probably talking about general features, like managing photos, but that still irks me a little bit.

As far as maintenance goes I would say that the cost to maintain SUSE would be much higher than it would be for Vista. Unless you’re able to get a staff that completely understands Linux the cost for supporting the system and paying IT professionals to do training would probably total more than upgrading to Vista.

I guess that is the end of my rant, which I try not to do very often, but it seems like they are misleading people a little bit. I agree that almost all versions of Linux are probably more secure than Windows, which is probably the area that Novell should have tried to focus the attention on.

What does everyone else think about this? Is Novell going about this the wrong way or are they smart for pursuing the marketing so aggressively?

News Source: Desktop Linux

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

OpenSUSE 10.2 Review And ScreenshotsVista And Suse 10.1 Go Head-To-HeadMicrosoft to Support XP 2 Years Longer Than VistaDownload Link For Adobe Reader Enterprise EditionGoogle Releases Picasa For Linux Machines

We’ve maintained for quite some time that Navigon’s MobileNavigator app was leaps and bounds better than most of the similarly priced alternatives, and if you just so happen to already own it, you can look forward to a rather sizable update this morning. The newest build — which should be percolating through the iTunes tunnels as we speak — takes things to v1.7, and it essentially includes a half-dozen new features: universal iPad integration, Zagat Survey, Active Lane Assistant, Map Reporter, enhanced Retina Display support and new user notifications. Furthermore, the outfit’s announcing a series of free single-feature apps for the iPhone in 2011, with help2park launching today; as you might imagine, this one assists in finding a parking space nearby, and it’s being offered gratis. The outfit has alerted us that all MobileNavigator US MyRegion apps should see the update right about now, while the USA and North America versions will “follow soon.” Oh, and if you’re curious about those new add-ons, the Zagat will cost you $7.99 (it’s on sale at the moment for $5.99), Traffic Live will run $19.99 and the Panorama View 3D tacks on another $9.99. The full skinny is just after the break, per usual.

Continue reading Navigon’s MobileNavigator 1.7 update adds universal iPad integration, Retina Display support, and more

Navigon’s MobileNavigator 1.7 update adds universal iPad integration, Retina Display support, and more originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 06:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Microsoft just released — or should we say, Apple just approved — version 2.0 of the Bing search app for iOS devices. In addition to several other new features including integrated Facebook Likes on search results (really!?) and in-app checkins to Facebook and Foursquare, Bing now comes packing Streetside, something that first blew us away as Street Slide when it was still in the labs at Microsoft Research. Unlike Google’s Streetview that requires a lot of forward- and back-clicking and turning in order to get a feel for a location, Streetslide provides a more comprehensive view of the shops and businesses in an area by letting you strafe down the sidewalk while zooming in and out of the buildings located on each side of the street. We took it for a brief spin (literally) and came away impressed. You won’t find Streetside implemented for all locations yet (for example, San Francisco’s Make-out Room was found on Streetside but the Slanted Door restaurant wasn’t) but they do seem to have large swaths of major cities covered based on our brief testing of Chicago, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco. Sorry, nothing yet in London and Amsterdam but maybe you’ll have better success searching your own neighborhoods. See the full list of what’s new after the break in addition to a Streetside demo from Bing’s architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas — unfortunately, we’re not seeing the impressive Panaroma feature he mentions in this release.

Update: We’ve been told that Facebook Likes, like Panaroma, like totally didn’t make it into the app release. It’s a web search results feature only for the time being.

Continue reading Bing 2.0 brings better Facebook integration and the impressive Streetside to iPhone (video)

Bing 2.0 brings better Facebook integration and the impressive Streetside to iPhone (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 05:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TechTrends  |  iTunes  | Email this | Comments

USAF to receive the last of its Predator drones in early 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 02:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Wired  | Email this | Comments