Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re in the Washington, DC area on Wednesday, June 30th, HotSeat Chassis will be at the U.S. Capitol demoing the Pilot Pro Flight Simulator for members of Congress and the general public during the 5th Annual Capitol Hill Modeling and Simulation Expo. The event is designed to help members of federal and regional governments see new technologies that can help train police, fire, medical, and other first responders in how to manage an emergency situation.

HotSeat Chassis manufactures training simulators that governments and businesses can use without having to buy massive simulator rooms that can be programmed for flight simulation, police and law-enforcement training, defensive driving exercises, and even training doctors with surgery simulations. The Pilot Pro simulator will be on display tomorrow in the Rayburn House Office Building at 12:30 EST, with demonstrations to follow. 

The Onkyo DX1007A5B notebook is why I flew 7,800 miles to attend Computex. It doesn’t feature the fastest processor or break new ground in terms of the platform. And to be honest, I didn’t even know Onkyo made PCs until I saw this system in the Microsoft booth. But this is exactly what I expected to find at the show, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Hardware-wise, the system is nothing special: AMD Athlon Neo CPU, 4GB of RAM, 320GB HD, and Windows 7 Home Edition. But the cool thing is the displays, plural. Two 10.2-inch displays are mounted horizontally, so you can extend your desktop horizontally. Since that would be kind of awkward to carry, they collapse down into a standard form factor for travel.

But wait, there’s more! Twist the screen around, and the system works as a tablet. Albeit without a touchscreen, but still pretty neat.

Practical? Probably not. But you got to love the effort. Check out the video to see it in action and tell me you don’t agree.

Although most of his Computex keynote was about its new Atom initiatives, Intel EVP David Perlmutter found time to praise Intel’s next major chip architecture, code-named “Sandy Bridge.” Perlmutter promises significant performance increases, according to Permutter. In part, this is because the CPU, media processor, and graphics component will all use the firms latest 32nm process. Indeed, he showed a demo of a Sandy Bridge processor rendering a complex 3D game and holding its own against a system with a discrete graphic card. Here is the video, so you can see for yourself. Just remember, products won’t be on store shelves until Q1 of 2010.

To kick off the World Science Festival (WSF), to be held at various venues throughout New York City this week, a full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope, the size of a tennis court, was unveiled this morning in Battery Park in lower Manhattan.

The World Science Festival consists of 40 events (talks, performances, readings, and more) in diverse subjects, including some exploring the relationship between science and music, visual art, and faith. They include a gala in Lincoln Center tonight to honor Stephen Hawking, and events featuring luminaries such as neurologist Oliver Sacks, Mars rover project leader Stephen Squyres, SETI researchers Jill Tartar and Seth Shostak, artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, physicist Kip Thorne, and even some non-science notables such as cartoonist Jules Feiffer and actor Alan Alda. Also, science-oriented street festival will take place next Sunday in Washington Square Park. The first World Science Festival, in 2008, drew 120,000 people to its events.

More about the Webb telescope after the jump.