Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

It looks like Sony will be able to market the upcoming Playstation 3 as a “medical miracle” because of its integration with folding@home. BBC News is reporting that the PS3, which is scheduled for release in November, can be setup to donate the system’s idle time to the folding@home project.

The folding@home project was started in hopes to gain an understanding of protein folding and misfolding. Here is a snippet from the project’s homepage that describes why that is important:

Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.”

…

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

To help the team learn more about protein folding they have asked PC users for years to donate your computer’s idle time to simulate the folding process. The problem is that it takes a normal PC 10,000 days to simulate one complete fold even though it takes 10 microseconds to happen in your body.

Surprisingly, the processor that is in the PS3 (which is called a cell) has the ability to run up to 10 times faster than current PC’s. It is estimated that 10,000 PS3′s working together would have the same computational power as IBM’s BlueGene/L System supercomputer. That’s more than 280.6 trillion calculations each second!

Of course, it will be kinda cool to put it on your PS3 because “the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering.” Here is a quick video on what that will look like:

Read more about this on the folding@home PS3 announcement page.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Kiosk movie rental giant Redbox is finally officially expanding into the games category, announcing today it will offer videogames nationwide starting June 17th. The $2/day game rentals will include selections for PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii (two of which even have a working online service right now). This may be old hat to some since it’s been in testing at about 5,000 locations since around the same time it kicked off nationwide Blu-ray rentals, but for 21,000+ other locations there’s now a whole new reason to stand behind someone that wants to check each and every title available when all you want to do is return a disc. Seriously, express return slots Redbox — get on it.

Continue reading Redbox will offer $2 per day videogame rentals nationwide in June

Redbox will offer $2 per day videogame rentals nationwide in June originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The worst part about buying a fancy new gaming keyboard? It’s hard to show the thing off if it never leaves your basement apartment. MSI‘s newly announced GX780 notebook combines a colorful backlit 102-key SteelSeries-designed keyboard with the (relative) portability of an 8.6 pound gaming laptop. The keyboard features 1,000 different color combinations, five lighting modes, 10 key simultaneous input, and a layout the company calls “The Golden Triangle” — trademark pending, we’re sure. The 17.3 inch notebook has some solid non-keyboard specs as well, including GeForce GT555M graphics, a second gen Intel Core i7 processor, and an impressive maximum 16GB of DDR3. No word on pricing or availability, but hopefully the MSRP isn’t as colorful as that keyboard. Full press release after the break.

Continue reading MSI gets a SteelSeries keyboard, builds the GX780 gaming notebook around it

MSI gets a SteelSeries keyboard, builds the GX780 gaming notebook around it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Imagine a world where Nokia’s N-Gage is the mobile platform of choice — there’s no iOS, no Android, and Nintendo’s 3D ventures ended mercifully with the Virtual Boy. It’s a world where the Nckia NG belongs. In our universe, a knockoff of the stillborn Nokia 7700 doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, even with a MicroSD slot and added buttons for dialing. And then there’s the fact that the handset runs a JAVA OS that doesn’t exactly offer a bounty of mobile gaming choices — which was sort of the whole point of the N-Gage. As for other familiar features, we can’t be sure that this will be the rebirth of side-talkin’, but with what could be a speaker slot on the side, we’ve got our fingers crossed. No word on pricing, but if you’re truly nostalgic for a time that never was, you can pick one up from Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen. Get a closer look after the break.

Continue reading Keepin’ it real fake: Nckia’s N-Gage knockoff harkens back to a simpler, side-talkin’ era

Keepin’ it real fake: Nckia’s N-Gage knockoff harkens back to a simpler, side-talkin’ era originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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