Gizmodo: lies

Kinoki Footpads Are Stained with Lies and Shame, Not Body Toxins

Dan Nosowitz — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Sarah Varney of NPR's "All Things Considered" tested out the Kinoki body-detoxifying footpads currently making the rounds of late-night infomercials, to see if they really eliminate "heavy metals and metabolic waste." She and her husband used them for a night, and by the next morning the pads were covered in disgusting black gunk, as advertised. But then she took them to a lab for chemical analysis to learn exactly what was going on. The results? The Kinoki footpads are a dirty scam.

The adhesive footpads use bamboo vinegar and an unspecified combination of herbs and minerals to draw out toxins through your feet while you sleep, supposedly resulting in the gross-looking muddle you see when you peel them off. But when John Goyette at the Curtis and Tompkins Lab used nitric acid to measure the metallic levels in the two used pads and one fresh pad, he found that they "look like three of the same sample, basically." No heavy metals, no lighter metals: There was no significant difference, chemically speaking, between the samples. The $30-per-month pads are, definitively, just another shifty case of new-age snake oil, like the master cleanse or "recycling."

It turns out the Kinoki product is activated by either heat or moisture—the pads turned into the dirty "used" state even when held over a steaming pot of harmless water! Our bodies have a pretty efficient ways to get rid of metabolic waste; usually, you can even read the paper while it happens. Either way, waste definitely doesn't emanate through the skin of your feet while you slumber, or my Mighty Morphin Power Rangers footie PJs would've been tossed out long ago. [NPR via Consumerist]

Wal-Mart IS Carrying the $199 Venturer HD DVD Player After All

Jason Chen — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:20:21 EST

After flat-out denying that they were going to carry the $199 Venturer HD DVD player this holiday season, Wal-Mart's turned around and carried the $199 Venturer HD DVD player this holiday season. But if you take more than a cursory look at this sub-$200 player, you'll find that the cheap Chinese knockoff isn't actually a better deal than a name-brand third-gen Toshiba HD-A3. Toshiba's is actually $196 on Amazon, and comes with a bunch of free movies as well. [Wal-Mart via Electronista]

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MacIntel Only 25% Faster than G5 - When Jobs Lies, MacBooks Fry

johnb — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 09:23:26 EST

Ok. I'll admit I was duped by Apple many times—all you need is one mouse button, girls aren't as fun as a PowerBook, Steve Jobs came to us on a comet and will die for our sins strapped to a volcano. But even I was kind of fuzzy on this whole Intel chips being faster than a G5 trip. I know that Intel makes some nice, low-power chips, but AMD is eating their lunch in terms of speed and if you wanted real low-power consumption you'd go with VIA—I'm talking hypothetically. Therefore, it's good to know that the MacIntels tested by MacWorld offer about 25% more speed than a similar G5. This, obviously, is quite a bit less than the original 2X and 4X improvements Apple was touting.

Under the Rosetta emulation - a British invention from Manchester - PPC applications running in x86 performed at about half speed. With the exception of iTunes, which encoded audio files a third as fast as it would have done running on a decent processor, such as the IBM G5.

So maybe the joy is slightly premature. While it's a good idea that they're moving out of the floundering grasp of IBM, it's clear that they still have a ways to go before they work out the hardware bugs.

Intel Macs only one fourth, not four times faster - report [RegHardware]