arc

AUSTIN, Texas--If you wanted to see tesla coils rocking out, Dorkbot was the place to be Saturday evening at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference here.

The local art collective Arc Attack had its singing tesla coils turned up loud and it put on several demonstrations of its machines at this celebration of "people doing strange things with electricity."

The highlight of the group's show was either a rendition of the "Dr. Who" theme or perhaps the Imperial march music from "Star Wars" (see video below--and give it a few seconds to get … Read more

Microsoft is introducing a new technology to help keep laptops cooler. Unfortunately, it's not software.

The company on Tuesday introduced its first Notebook Cooling Base, an inch-thick stand with built-in fan. Available in white and black, the laptop-chiller is powered over a USB connection.

The product will sell for $30 when it hits the market in July and represents a new direction for Microsoft's hardware unit, which is best known for its mice and keyboards.

At one point, the company sold wireless networking gear, though it got out of that business in 2004.

Microsoft on Tuesday also announced … Read more

Aside from the new Shuttle, Virgin Mobile is also churning out new colors of some of its existing phone offerings for the fall season. The LG Flare will now be available in silver, the Kyocera TNT will be available in lavender and espresso (with matching earbuds as an option), and the Arc will be released in a rather audacious gold. The silver Flare will be offered via Best Buy Mobile with a dollar of each purchase going to benefit a nonprofit. The lavender and espresso TNTs are exclusive from Wal-Mart, and you can get a gold Arc at Target stores. … Read more

Virgin Mobile has announced that it will carry yet another UTStarcom phone, and this time it's dubbed the Arc. The Arc is a simple camera phone with trademark Virgin Mobile black and red colors, as well as Bluetooth, a VGA camera, and it's available for only $49.99 without a contract.

Source: Engadget Mobile

When you think of things related to science, music may not make the top of your list.

But the folks involved with a small collective called ArcAttack would like you to change your associations.

ArcAttack is all about one thing: building singing Tesla coils and crafting entire musical performances around them. For some time, at events like Dorkbot and other geekfests, the team--Joe DiPrima, Oliver Greaves, and Tony Smith--had been pulling off straightforward demonstrations of their creations. But they were synchronizing the machines to other people's music and not adding much in the way of their own innovations besides … Read more

Kudos to ArcSight for having the chutzpah to go public rather than wait around to get acquired. What does the company's IPO mean to the market? Three things.

1. The space is on fire. ArcSight revenue was up about 75 percent year over year--from just under $40 million to just under $70 million. A testament to ArcSight? Absolutely, but the whole log management space (along with its security and compliance analysis aspects) are as hot as can be. ArcSight is one of the boats in this rising tide.

2. ArcSight makes the short list. Yes, the competition is steep. … Read more

The past three weeks The Open Road's review team has been putting Arc'Teryx's Sidewinder SV jacket and pant to the test. We've skied them in some brutally cold weather and on warmer days. In both cases, however, we were swimming through at least 18 inches of Utah powder. It was the ideal testing lab.

If you spend any time at all around ski stores (mea culpa), you will have noticed Arc'Teryx gear. It tends to be very lightweight. Arc'Teryx does make insulated jackets, but these aren't the ones that stand out to me. No, I've longed to try one of its hard shells but always assumed that they wouldn't be warm enough.

Worn over a t-shirt, that supposition might well be correct. But with proper layering (I generally wear a layer or two of Under Armour gear, depending on the conditions) both the Arc'Teryx Sidewinder SV jacket and pants came through a cold powder wash just fine. While not quite as warm as the North Face and Mountain Hardwear jackets we evaluated, the Arc'Teryx gear is also not as bulky as the apparel we reviewed from these other brands.… Read more

Digg seems to have outgrown Google as its ad provider, as today marks the start of a new three-year deal with Microsoft to serve up ads on the popular social news service. Microsoft is replacing Google for serving up many of the ads you see on Digg's pages. The rest are provided by Federated Media, which also works with Digg to create special branded pages like the newly-updated Arc visualization in Digg labs.

Digg is claiming the move is about scalability, and positive reviews from Facebook who also uses Microsoft for their contextual advertising. What does this mean for … Read more