Tea Stick Stirs Heaven Into Your Cup [Leaf Soaker]

brilliant in its simplicity....re-think everything

from Gizmodo by Charlie White

All right you potheads, knock it off. This is not a special one-hit toker. No, it's the Tea Stick, a spring-loaded doodad that lets you place loose tea on its little retractable shelf, and then you stir it into some nice hot water, resulting in a tea connoisseur's nirvana. The stainless steel and plastic implement, formerly only dreamed about as a design concept, is now available for $20. Say goodbye to those old tea bags, and indulge yourself with all the other tea snobs, using that precious loose tea that will take you to another place. Or something. If that doesn't do it for you, you can just put your weed in it. [Chiasso, via Crave]

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Precocious Kids Mess with Tracks of an Oncoming Train

These kids messed with the tracks of their local express train and got it to go off its normal tracks. I don't want to spoil this video for you, so just watch it. Trust me, it's worth it. It's another one of these great videos in the spirit of yesterday's flying car clip, of which I cannot get enough.

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Micron's Future Concept of SSD is RAM-Module Like [Solid State Drives]

from Gizmodo by Adrian Covert

In addition to Micron's traditional solid state drives announced today , they also showed off a concept for a SSD module that resembles RAM in physical design and would fit into a similarly designed port. It's obvious but genius: while the SSD drives with SATA interfaces are terrific because they can be used in current laptops with no mods, the real performance of flash mem is only going to be unlocked when we cast aside the legacy of spinning disks and their cases and interfaces and mount SSDs on the mobo like we do RAM modules.

The design uses a SATA interface and is only 4 mm thick. Micron claims the advantages of such a design are the small size and the ability to line up multiple drives next to each other. In addition, this design requires no wires or attaching the motherboard with screws, reducing the risk of the SSD becoming disconnnected or loose inside a computer. While this product is nowhere near ready for market, Micron says they would need to work with an OEM or someone who can offer a compatible computer solution. [Micron]

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Rambus Targets 1TB/sec Bandwith For Computer Memory [Memory]

from Gizmodo by Sean Fallon

Memory maker Rambus has unveiled its Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative with the goal to develop a new memory architecture capable of achieving 1TB/sec bandwidth. The plan is to push the data rate to a whopping 32X—which can provide a 16Gbps signaling rate with a 500MHz clock. Compare that with to the 2bits/1Gbps provided by conventional DDR at the same rate. Add differential signaling an both the data and command/address channels and you have yourself one blazingly fast system.

According to Rambus, graphics and game consoles will push memory bandwidth needs toward 1TB over the next 4-5 years. Rambus believes that they can achieve the 1TB goal in that time frame using a multi-chip array. There is no doubt that the need will be there sooner or later, but whether Rambus can succeed in this time frame remains to be seen. [Rambus via Electronista]

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Playstation 3 Turned Into "Crackstation" for Super Hacking Goodness [Hax]

from Gizmodo by Matt Buchanan

Forget Folding@home and its feel-good applications. There are cooler things to be done, like cryptography cracking. Taking advantage of the Cell's vector architecture , a security consultant with Security-assessment.com has cooked up a way to to bust passwords open like bad Easter eggs really, really fast. His Crackstation shoves past "the current upper limit of 10-15 million cycles per second—in Intel-based architecture—up to 1.4 billion cycles per second." To put that in non-geek, "Intel processors are designed to do all kinds of complex calculations, whereas the PS3 is good at doing simple things very quickly." The work apparently stands to change the whole cryptography industry.

For one, it shows that using Intel processors or ones with similar architecture as benchmarks "just is not good enough anymore." Cracking cryptographer will probably get faster all around as well, which should ultimately drive stronger cryptography with better implementation. Though they haven't tried it yet, by using a technique similar to Folding@home with distributed loads, the cracking power could obviously be increased exponentially.

All of that said, I just think it's funny how it's emphasized over and over again how "simple" Cell's architecture is, after Sony's spent all this time telling us how complex and awesome it is. [PC World]

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