First day at CES 2012 a mixed bag
Acer's products on display at its CES press conference. (Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
Acer today kicked off what will be a parade of press conferences by announcing a host of ultrabooks, including a new "world's thinnest ultrabook," but ultimately proved thin on what it had booked. The company's big disappointment was that it had its head in the cloud--finally. It announced its AcerCloud effort, and in doing so it looked like a late-to-the-party copycat.
OnStar followed up by announcing it was giving the green light to third-party developers and opening up its previously close API. The first third-party app will be RelayRides, a peer-to-peer service in which users rent out their personal cars to other drivers in the area.
Sandwiched in between those press conferences was a tasty treat from Lenovo. Perhaps beating Apple to the television punch, Lenovo unveiled its K91--a 55-inch 3D LED that will be powered by Qualcomm's 8060 Snapdragon dual-core CPU and feature voice controls, a Webcam, and--oh yeah--Google's Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich).
Tomorrow is, of course, the big day--Press Day. But have all the leaks helped it lose its luster? There will be at least 22 live events by tech headliners, but at least six of them have already lost some thunder. Lindsey Turrentine opines that even though this is the most preshow news we've seen in years, both in terms of formal announcements and flat-out leaks, the leaks actually make the show more entertaining.
Tune in tomorrow for more tech fun in the desert sun.
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Scientists claim they made event invisible
Think of all the things you wish you'd never seen happen.
Your auntie making that speech at Thanksgiving dinner about birds, bees, and Bieber. Your lover accusing you of infidelity with an alien. Every last minute of "From Justin to Kelly."
Well, now some very clever Cornell people want to offer you hope, mingled with fact.
Research published in Nature magazine, helpfully translated by the Associated Press, declares that these scientists successfully managed to time-cloak an event--so that, to naked and disbelieving eyes, it never happened.
They say they did it by interrupting the light flow in such a way that the light experiences a change of pace. The idea was to see whether they could change the pace of that light flow sufficiently for a security camera to have simply not registered that it had happened.
So this is me juggling a ball, while reciting Shakespeare.
This trompe l'oeil meant that as one part of the light was sped up, another part was slowed down, thereby creating a little gap in experience.
"You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place," Alexander Gaeta, director of Cornell's School of Applied and Engineering Physics told the AP. "You just don't know that anything ever happened."
You, like me, have surely had dates like that. Afterward, you discover something happened. During the two hours of the date, you simple had no idea.
Alexander Gaeta, director of Cornell's School of Applied and Engineering Physics, co-authored the time cloak study.
(Credit: Cornell University)Sadly, this particular experiment in time management only managed to mask the event for 40 trillionths of a second. Most of us have only had one or two dates that short.
However, the mere fact that the invisibility was achieved in the time dimension, rather than that of space, surely offers hope that, one day, we fragile humans will simply be able to avoid events that we cannot bear seeing.
That hope might take a while to fulfill, as Gaeta believes that a thousandth of a second might be the limit for his current time-cloaking machinery.
To make a full second disappear, he believes he would need a machine 18,600 miles long.
Over time, though, I am sure that scientists will find ways to create smaller machines and faster processes so that so many troubling events can never strike our eyes--and, more importantly, our psyches.