This is getting silly on Microsoft’s part. Those SP3 updates we’ve been talking about for Windows XP might do some more harm than good. Some users have reported that the update causes their computers to endlessly reboot, something a few updates for Windows 95 did over a decade ago.

Intel users appear to be in the clear, the problem affects computers with AMD chipsets primarily. Some Intel machines have the problem, but not many.

So far Microsoft is mum on the issue, though we’re confident that it has a team working on the issue day and night, fueled by Sparks.

Giant working NES controller coffee table
Video: Meet IBM’s Newton
Order this beer pong table NOW!!!
Video: Sub-Zero vs Batman
Look-alike Transformers iPod dock: Because you need another such dock

The Japanese firm, Sagawa Advance, has created a face scanner that can supposedly tell identical twins apart. It works by analyzing 40,000 data point on the face, and then comparing it with a database of faces it knows.

The company plans to sell the technology to power plants, medical factories, and anyone else who needs tight security. It will retail for about $60,000 and they’re looking to move 40 units in the first year.

Volkswagen says they are planning to produce a 1-Liter car, ready for sale by early 2010. The body of the car will be made of plastic and magnesium. A one-cylinder engine with a top speed of about 74 mph will power the gas sipping car.

With the rising price of fuel, the main selling point for this car is that it will get 235 mpg (hippies are going to love this thing). That might sound like a fantasy to some, but its true. VW developed a concept version back in 2002.

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This is a promotional video for a “home robot”, and it is awesome. You must watch this all the way through, and then you must comment below. Has anyone ever seen one of these?

As always, you’re very welcome.

Steinway & Sons, the famous piano maker, has been working with high-end Danish audio manufacturer Lyngdorf to produce co-branded stereo systems that you would probably sell your first-born for. The model I demoed today, the Model D, is a massive speaker and head combo that costs $188,000 — up, due to the current economic crisis, from $150,000. That’s right: for the price of a house in Glendale, you can outfit your home with one of the crispest sounding systems I’ve heard in a while.

The speaker set I saw and head unit was quite handsome, clad in piano black wood and brass. The remote control — which costs $7000 — is basically a big metal dial with a red light on it. It was damn cool, but it still costs more than my car.

Overall, the sound was great. There was excellent separation in all of the instruments, whether it was a classical piece or Fleetwood Mack. They turned it up quite a bit and the audio stayed strong and crisp throughout.

Each system is made by hand out of Steinway wood and hand lacquered for an amazing finish. You can pick colors to match your “music room” or go for the standard black gloss.

This just in; kids that go to MIT are really F-ing smart. I just saw seven Android applications that have been developed over the short span of four months — with very little (if any) money — as part of a class called “Building Mobile Applications with Android”. It was a lot like most college presentations, except that HTC, Google, Verizon, Sprint, and the press don’t usually show up.

Hit the jump for a peek at the applications.

loco

Loco is a mobile social network built on top an Android phone’s contact manager, so anyone in your contacts is already your friend, so to speak. You’ll be able to view and track where your friends are located using Google Maps and real-time geolocation.

You can search within the application for, say, “party” and see a bunch of events that have been tagged by your friends with “party,” and what’s even more cool is that you can view real-time photos of the event in progress, assuming the people there are taking photos with their Android phones. So, in essence, you can check out the scene at a few places before you commit to going all the way across town.

I’m done with “scenes” since I’m now married, but this would have been cool for College Doug. He was a pretty awesome dude.

Flare

Flare is a geolocation tracking system aimed at small business owners who want to keep tabs on their employees. The demonstration given was that of a pizza delivery boy who has five pizzas to deliver. If a couple of customers call up to ask why they haven’t gotten their pizza yet, the delivery guy’s manager can use any web-based system to check out the location of his driver.

What’s more, he can give an ID number and PIN code to the customers, which the customers can then use to track the pizza guy themselves. Thankfully, that PIN code can be set to expire after a certain amount of time and/or each customer’s specific tracking privileges can be cut off by the manager or the driver himself.

GeoLife

GeoLife is very, very cool — perfect for a guy like me. It’s basically your to-do list on top of Google Maps. When you get within a certain range of something you need to pick up, it alerts you.

It also works as a traditional to-do list for things that aren’t location-based. The team that put this together is also working on a route-creation system wherein you could pick a few important items from your list and then have a route plotted out for you to follow that day. 

One reporter remarked that a similar idea is being developed by a company on the West Coast but he wouldn’t name names. So this might be a hot area. I’d use it for sure.

RE:Public

Guess what? Kids at MIT are smart and some of them are pretty funny, too. I thought that RE:Public was a brilliantly funny idea.

It’s basically a location-based social networking service for finding new friends once you get tired of your old ones. You connect locally based on a radius that you feed into the program and meet people based on dovetailing interests.

The real brilliance lies in the fact that you can rate and tag each friend and the system automatically updates each friend’s score based on how much time you spend near each other. So after a while, you can see who your “top friends” are.

Tags that are given to people on the network can be voted up and down by other users, so if one person tags me as “jerk”, all my real friends can vote that tag far enough down that it eventually disappears. That, or I’ll find out that my friends actually think I’m a jerk and I can start finding new friends. It’s the circle of life!

Locale (winner of the Android Project - top 50)

Locale actually just finished in the top 50 applications for Google’s Android Project competition, so congratulations to the team. Nice work, indeed.

Locale is a dynamic settings manager. You basically set up different settings for your phone based on time and location. So when you’re at home, you can automatically have all your calls forwarded to your home phone line. When you’re at work, you can have your phone set to silent mode and have your phone’s background screen set to a constantly updating work chart. That kind of stuff.

There’s already an API available for other developers to tap into Locale to set up profiles and settings for events and itineraries. My idea would be to have the phone’s mic take samples of ambient sound and then automatically adjust the phone’s ringer volume based on how loud or quiet your surroundings are. That’s just me, though.

KEI

KEI has been a dream of mine for some time. It’s basically a Bluetooth key for all your stuff. In this early version, it was demonstrated as an automatic car starter and unlocker so you don’t have to try to find your car keys all the time.

It’s built so that multiple people can control the same car and/or multiple cars can be controlled by a single phone. Security is handled via 128-bit encryption and there will be an administrative interface so you can cut your ex-lover’s access off when the two of you break up.

There’s a relatively simple module that gets installed in your car, much like existing remote starter systems work. Future KEI systems would also read diagnostic information from your car as well.

snap

Snap is very cool — I would absolutely use it. It’s kind of like Digg on a map. People can tag certain places and then other users can vote that particular attraction up or down.

So if you’re in a new city, you can pull up your current location and find things around you that other people think are interesting.

If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool.

The Internet is a great big place. Make sure you know where on it you are before posting on a forum. That is all.

Thanks, Josh.

I played a lot of beer pong and flipper in college. It was fun, but it got a little unsanitary when people forgot to wash the balls after each throw. Drinking beer with whatever filth is on the table or floor is disgusting. My alma mater had a huge contingent of engineers and quite a few of them were in my fraternity, which makes me wonder why none of them thought of this contraption made by some nerds at WVU. Maybe it was the searing hot crab boil we poured on them, I’m not sure, though.

Anyway, this is why we have nerds. The first two and a half minutes are boring, but the last minute or so is pure eye candy. I’m getting one of these when I get my own place. Maybe we’ll get one for the next CrunchNetwork party!

via Geekologie