We’re currently living in an age where we as a population are less impressed by new technological advances. The computer age sped up the rate of invention and innovation, and children of this age are tuned to simply be less impressed. The high frequency of viable new inventions and incredible innovations made us grow accustomed to them. Amazingly, we actually expect new inventions and innovations to drop at an alarmingly high rate, and rarely, nowadays, do they impress, even though they should. However, another way to look at our collective apathy toward modern day invention and innovation is to wonder if, possibly, the technological age in which we live redefined what it means to be innovative; so it’s not that we’re less impressed by innovation, but we don’t necessarily know what it means to be innovative anymore.

Intel turned some heads at a recent conference on supercomputing in Seattle when it announced Knights Corner, a single chip capable of one teraflop performance and uses 50 separate cores to pull it off. Intel claims that this new chip will deliver faster, more accurate results when performing calculations.

When done right, nothing is more instantly recognizable and associable as a catchy sound bite. Once upon a time, instantly recognizable jingles were the backbone of the advertising industry. Today,  audio clips are a little more pervasive, considering our seeming dependence on electronic devices. Receive a phone call? Catchy audio clip. Get an email? Catchy sound bite. Turn on just about any modern electronic device? Memorable tune. We’re living in a world where companies and devices need to differentiate themselves from the competition as much as possible, and an instantly recognizable sound bite is a three-to-ten second mean to that end. So, come with us as we check out some of the most instantly recognizable, brand differentiating, nostalgia inducing sound bites in tech.

We’re currently living in a world in which technology seems to innovate more quickly than it ever had previously, partly due to the kind of technological Golden Age we’re experiencing, and partly due to the current Golden Age of communication, in that news travels as quickly as ever, which both helps get the word out on new innovations and gives said new innovations a chance to shine. Only a decade ago video games looked like something akin to not wearing your contact lenses and were controlled with plastic controllers, and it was a pain to transfer a single large file. Sleek tablet computers were things only seen in science fiction and PDAs were kind of silly, and printers generally only printed flat words and images on flat paper. Technology has come a long way, and as time goes on, innovation in tech seems to be picking up speed. So, let’s take a look at some of the more unusual innovations in technology.

Garry’s Mod, the ever-popular physics sandbox, has become a playground for 2nd degree recursion: Games in your game. For the unfamiliar, Garry’s Mod is a modification for Half-Life 2‘s Source Engine that lets players play around with physics, NPCs, scripts, and pretty much anything else. Now, nearly 7 years after HL2‘s release, the Garry’s Mod community is still using it as a laboratory for their mad science.

The Facepunch (Garry’s Mod message board) members responsible for this particular experiement are Technicolour and Divran, who thought it would be cool to play other games inside of Garry’s Mod and what better way to do that than to emulate a Intel 8080 8-bit microprocessor and then use it to play Space Invaders, inside Garry’s mod. Where will they go from there? They have some grand aspirations.

For a while, it has been rumored that the iPhone 5 would be able to grant you three wishes support both GSM and CDMA style networks. It’s still being rumored, but now TechCrunch has found some evidence to back it up. An unnamed informant, an iOS developer, turned over some documents that show that developers have been working on apps for a single device, but that still support both GSM and CDMA. It’s not hard to figure out what that implies.

Now, ever since the iPhone 4, the iPhone has been able to handle both networks, technically. The catch was that there were two distinctly different models. You could have an iPhone on Verizon or AT&T, but the same physical device lacked the ability to migrate from one network to the other. This, however, seems like it will be a limitation of the past.

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Similar to the Social Memories app that chronicles your Facebook profile activity and puts it all into a tangible book made available for purchase, Intel’s new Museum of Me app chronicles your Facebook activity and turns it into a short film set in a museum. Different rooms in the museum have different exhibits, such as photos hung on walls like paintings in a gallery, rooms for videos and for things you’ve “Liked.”

At the time of this post, Intel’s server seems to be overloaded, so getting the app to work is currently spotty for this blogger, but if you’re the type to enjoy a video chronicling of your Facebook life to go alongside your Social Memories-crafted tangible book, Museum of Me seems right up your alley. Head on past the break to see the trailer for the app.

At a press event today, Intel announced that its next generation of chips will employ a never-before-used 3D structure. The new technology that makes this breakthrough possible, known as Tri-Gate, has been in the making for a long time: Intel was talking about 3D chips as far back as 2002, and published a lengthy overview of Tri-Gate in 2006. Now, it’s here, and it’ll first hit the mass market when Intel begins manufacturing its 22 nm Ivy Bridge CPUs in the second half of 2011.

Tri-Gate chips can rightly be called “3D” thanks to an “incredibly thin three-dimensional silicon fin that rises up vertically from the silicon substrate,” allowing for a more finessed control of current, accomplished by “implementing a gate on each of the three sides of the fin – two on each side and one across the top — rather than just one on top, as is the case with the 2-D planar transistor.” Not only does this allow Intel to manage the increasingly tricky feat of keeping up with Moore’s Law, but according to the chipmaker, it will lead to a performance increase of 37 percent and a reduction in power costs of over 50 percent; the cost of manufacture, however, will only go up two or three percent.

The three-dimensional Tri-Gate transistors represent a fundamental departure from the two-dimensional planar transistor structure that has powered not only all computers, mobile phones and consumer electronics to-date, but also the electronic controls within cars, spacecraft, household appliances, medical devices and virtually thousands of other everyday devices for decades.

Explanation video below:

Seemingly taking a cue from the video game industry’s long-standing practice of selling unlock codes and downloadable content, Intel is experimenting with selling codes for deliberately gimped processors that would unlock their full power one the unlock code is applied.

As if anyone wondered what their stance on the issue might be, Intel has clarified its stance on anyone who would use the leaked HDCP Master Key to create devices that would be able to circumnavigate HDMI, DVI, and Blu-Ray DRM.

That was a bit alphabet-soup, wasn’t it? We’ll put it another way: somebody cracked the protection that was keeping people from easily making copies of Blu-Ray players and cable television. However, in order to implement this crack in a way that would be easily usable by the average consumer, someone would have to make a computer chip with the crack in mind. Software alone won’t do it. Though they earlier downplayed the potential of this possible use of the HDCP crack, yesterday Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop made sure every body knows what Intel would do if, you know, somebody tried it. Just in case.