Hasta La Gadget!

Bill Gates, it seems, is set to become the world’s most lovable mad scientist. In a scheme fit for the world’s top supervillians, the former Microsoft head–and current full-time philanthropist–is reportedly concocting a plan to control the weather. Hurricanes, specifically.

Plans for Gates’s latest patent application have leaked out–plans which involve stopping hurricanes before they hit land. PC World explains it thusly,

The idea is for barges to pump cold water from the depths of the ocean to create a sort of road block for the hurricane. Since hurricanes cull power from the water’s warm temperatures, cooling the water could theoretically lessen the impact or outright dismantle a hurricane.

According to Intellectual Venture’s Lab’s Pablos Holman, the plan would go into effect when, “humans decide that we have exhausted all of our behavior changing and alternative energy options and need to rely on mitigation technologies.”

Interesting that this information comes out as Microsoft is holding its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Everyone talks about the weather, but only the super rich do anything about it.

Microsoft’s Project Natal took a step away from the stage
and closer to the living room when Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan and Mark Wilson took
the system for a test drive.

While the preview did consist of some of the same
style of tech demos we saw on Monday, the exciting part involved playing
Burnout Revenge, an existing 360 game, with the system. The game was able to
run even with Natal‘s processing
overhead, controlled via an air steering wheel and moving feet forward and
backward to represent the gas.

Despite their dedicated efforts to get the
system to hiccup, Gizmodo was impressed with the device, commenting on how
natural and polished the experience felt. Despite the usual pre-production
glitches, Natal seems ready to take
on the gaming world whenever it comes out. Video after the jump.

Seiko Epson Corp. announced yesterday that it’s made an important step toward realizing bigger and better HD OLED TVs.

OLED televisions offer high contrast, a wide viewing angle, and fast response time, all with low power requirements. The tricky part to the larger screens is in the manufacturing: Mass production is impossible when using conventional methods to deposit the organic materials layer evenly.

Epson’s new fabrication process uses Micro Piezo inkjet technology to enable accurate positioning of the organic material, making 37-inch and larger OLED screens possible. The company’s prototype OLED displays 38 pixels per inch on a 40-inch diagonal screen with 260,000 colors.

Look for the announcement, a prototype demo, and more details at SID 2009.

Over the years, we’ve searched high and low for the craziest tech to sate your gear-craving jones. We call it “the Relentless Pursuit of Awesomeness.” Today, I call your attention to Honeywell and the Prestige, a thermostat so technically advanced that it just slapped your thermostat in the face. For starters, it has a full color, high definition, touch-screen interface that just screams expensive. It’s also programmable, and you can control it wirelessly (using Honeywell’s RedLink technology).

But what the company’s really stoked about is the interview-based set-up technology: Once installed in your wall and hooked into your home heating, cooling, and dehumidifying (is that a word?) systems, the Prestige’s patented interface will program itself after walking you through a series of preference questions. “You like it hot? How’s that? You want maybe some cool air in the bedroom?” It goes almost without saying that it can display outdoor temperature information, allows for different thermal zones, and can be scheduled to turn on and off. Did I mention that this thing speaks three different languages as well? It makes human beings look bad.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Honeywell thinks the Prestige will actually save you money too. According to the product brochure, “On average, heating and cooling costs make up 50% of your utility bill, and we all know that energy costs keep skyrocketing. Because the Prestige Comfort System automatically manages your home’s temperature to maximize savings, you can cut your annual heating and cooling costs by up to 33% – or by $200 or more each year.”

Back in November of 2007, Microsoft filed for a patent on a device known as the “Magic Wand.” The patent, which was filed roughly a year after the release of Nintendo’s gesture-based Wii console, was just recently made public.

The abstract description of Microsoft’s device is as follows,

The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can facilitate rich interaction with and/or management of environmental components included in an environment. The architecture can exist in whole or in part in a housing that can resemble a wand or similar object. The architecture can utilize one or more sensor from a collection of sensors to determine an orientation or gesture in connection with the wand, and can further issue an instruction to update a state of an environmental component based upon the orientation. In addition, the architecture can include an advisor component to provide contextual and/or comprehensive guidance in an intuitive manner.

There are plenty of theories surrounding the proposed application for such a device, including a Wiimote-like controller previous referred to as Newton. The patent includes the names of a number of Microsoft bigwigs, including Zune/Xbox-daddy J Ballard and Andy Wilson, one of the heads of Microsoft’s Surface project.