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- Intel Launches Sleek Single-Slot Arc Pro A60 Workstation Graphics Card
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- Maxon Redshift With AMD Radeon GPU Rendering Support Now Available
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Picture This: Transonic Jet Gathers Clouds
The F-22 stealth jet may be about as useful for fighting insurgents as a snowboard in Baghdad. The plane may cost nearly $120 million a pop, making it one of the most expensive fighters of all time. But hot damn, does that thing look bad ass when it’s going transonic.
This is incredible to see, even if you are not a fan of jets.. or clouds.. or science. $120 million dollars per though? Unbelievable.
Source: Wired
6 More Geek Squad Manuals Leaked
Consumers could use some of these manuals to see if a Geek Squad employee is really living up to company standards, or to determine, before going to the store, if the Geek Squad service would be up to their standards.
The Consumerist has no love for Best Buy, as this is the second or third roundup of leaked handbooks/manuals that they’ve made available. How much longer is Best Buy going to allow this to happen without doing something about it?
Source: Consumerist
The 21 Biggest Technology Flops
Hype is the coin of the realm in the technology business. If you listen to vendors and the media, it may sometimes seem as though every new product, service, concept or even security threat will be the Next Big Thing. Some live up to all the fuss, but many don’t — and some fail spectacularly.
You can all breathe a sigh of relief. Our website did not make this list. Some that did though, are not surprising in the least. These include Microsoft BOB, E-books, internet currency, the Apple Newton and much more.
Source: Computer World
Apple Stokes a Digital Music Standards War
Using AAC is brilliant for several reasons. First, for Apple, whose stated market aim is to do everything in its power to sell more of its highly profitable iPods (and beginning in June, presumably profitable iPhones), the choice of AAC means more non-Apple devices will be able to play songs purchased on iTunes.
AAC might become more popular over time, but I’d be surprised if it overtook MP3. That format has just been around far too long to be fazed out anytime soon. Either way, the good thing is that most modern players (even non-iPods) play AAC already.
Source: Business Week
Microsoft Releases API For Windows Home Server
Our little set of APIs let you integrate your Add-in into the Home Server Console and interact with some of the elements behind the solutions we provide. But all the interesting work that great Windows Home Server Add-ins will do will be done using the standard “Windows API”.
This is a smart decision on Microsofts part for obvious reasons. WHS seems hopeful as is, but with the help of third party developers, it could become a much more robust server OS. The SDK is available now, but will only do you any real good if you are have access to the beta.
Source: Home Server Blog
Womans House Emptied After Craigslist Hoax
Many people have had success buying, selling and swapping goods on the Web site craigslist, but one Tacoma woman says she was robbed. Laurie Raye said she had everything stripped from her home after someone placed a fake ad on the San Francisco-based Internet site, a collection of online classifieds.
Ouch. It’s almost painful just to read this. People were evicted shortly before this happened, but I won’t jump to conclusions and call it a coincidence. Though it is.
Source: Seattle Times
Lavalys Releases EVEREST Ultimate Edition Version 4.00
Lavalys is proud to announce the immediate availability of EVEREST Ultimate Edition version 4.00. This release brings powerful new features as well as several improvements and bug fixes in direct response to customer feedbacks. You can find more information about this new release by reading the official press release and the new features list.
It seems a little foolish to see a new “major” version already. 3.0 was just released less than nine months ago! I don’t have much of a right to say much more without actually installing it though… which I plan to, soon.
Source: Lavalys
Intel Marks 30 Years In Embedded Computing…
EMBEDDED SYSTEMS CONFERENCE, San Jose, Calif., April 3, 2007 – Commemorating 30 years of delivering products and technology to the embedded computing market, Intel Corporation today introduced the Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor 5300 series with extended life cycle support, the first to bring Intel architecture-based quad-core performance to the embedded segment.
Source: Intel Press Release
Intel Serves Up ‘Pro’ To Go
SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 4, 2007 — Under a new brand called Intel(R) Centrino(R) Pro processor technology, Intel Corporation today announced it will extend its innovative and popular features designed for desktop business PCs called Intel(R) vPro(TM) processor technology into its forthcoming high-performance laptop offering. IT departments will be able to reliably manage both desktops and notebooks and deal with what plagues them most – security threats, cost of ownership, resource allocation, and asset management — and do so wirelessly.
Source: Intel Press Release
Samsung Releases Quiet(er) Hard Drives
The new SpinPoint S Series of hard drives offer upgraded versions of Samsung’s proprietary SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies to accelerate operational speed while reducing noise. Benchmarking results presented by Samsung show competing hard drives generate on average 2.8 bel (1 bel = 10 decibels) in idle mode and 3.2 bel in seek mode, while Samsung’s S166 series generate just 2.4 bel and 2.75 bel respectively.
It doesn’t seem like a big deal on paper, but it would undoubtedly be a nice addition to a quiet PC, PVR or the like. Pricing is not mentioned in the press release, but it shouldn’t be too high considering the low densities (80GB/160GB).
Source: Daily Tech
Bite Into An 8-Core Apple
Apple last reached several major milestones in its computer career, releasing a barrage of Intel x86 machines that used the latest hardware. Apple revamped its entire range of computer systems while sticking to a rather strict time-to-market schedule. Some of the releases were quiet while others were well heard. Today’s update from Apple is one of those quiet but important releases: dual 4-core Clovertown Mac Pros are now officially available.
As with most workstations, this one is not cheap. The basic Octal-Core rig will set you back just under $4K with a 7300GT video card and 1GB of ram. Taking the most obvious upgrade route, you could replace the card with a Quadro FX 4500 and install 16GB of ram. Sure, it becomes a $10,000 system, but bragging rights are priceless.
Source: Daily Tech
Arctic Monkeys Bite the Hand that Fed
The Arctic Monkeys. The band was a true internet wonder, using file sharing to help boost attention and making the band a huge success. That’s why it’s quite surprising to hear that the band and its backers are now doing everything possible to prevent file sharing for its latest album.
It’s not surprising for a band to want to protect their work, but the process to hear the new album for the sake of review is actually traveling to their “headquarters” to hear it there. I might be naive, but I know if I hear songs prior to an album being released, I get all the more enthusiastic to purchase it once it hits the stores. Too bad these Monkeys don’t see it that way.
Source: Tech Dirt
Pentium E2100-series Benchmarks Revealed
Productivity benchmarks such as Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 show an approximate 1-point difference between the Pentium E2160 and Core 2 Duo E4300, favoring the E4300 – both processors have 1.8 GHz clock speeds. Video encoding in TMPGEnc 3.0 reveals a 1 second performance difference between the two processors, and again favoring the E4300.
When the E4300 was first launched, it’s performance came quite close to the E6300. The same will happen here, where we see the E2160 almost equaling performance in office applications when compared to the E4300. It’s becoming ever clearer that building a high-performing PC doesn’t mean you have to empty the bank account.
Source: Daily Tech
Lenovo Tops Eco-Friendy Ranking
Compiled by Greenpeace, the quarterly report ranks firms by how green their production processes are and what they do to recycle hardware they sell. In previous reports Lenovo ranked low for eco-friendliness but in 2007 it scooped the top spot over Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Dell, and Samsung.
I’m not an environment nut, but it only makes sense to treat our Earth right. It’s good to see such great practices being exercised by Lenovo, but we have to wonder about some of the companies on the list. Apple was by far the lowest, with a score of 2.7 out of 10. Talk about a total iPollute.
Source: BBC
VGA and DVI To Go Way of Dodo?
Get ready for hot, hot convergence kids ’cause the DisplayPort 1.1 specification was just approved. The new VESA-approved digital interface standard is meant to replace DVI and VGA ports while co-existing with HDMI for HDTV connectivity.
No matter how often we upgrade our peripherals and hardware, the next upgrade is always right around the corner. DisplayPort is looking good though, with far better capabilities over DVI, including better performance and the addition of HDCP 1.3 support.
Source: Engadget
Transgaming Cedega 6.0 Preview
While id Software and Epic Games are among the few major companies that are Linux gaming patrons, if you’ve been wanting to play such games as Battlefield 2142 or Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you will now be able to do so starting April 14!
Like most people, I’m curious most about the performance of the games, not just the fact that they run. This might finally be one of the first major Linux gaming advances if it works well.
Source: Phoronix
NiGHTS 2 To Use Wii Forecast Channel
Sega Europe updated their NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams page to show the new features the Wii game has when it gets released in winter 2007. Except those features weren’t supposed to be known yet, so they’ve been taken off the page again.
It’s too early to jump to conclusions on how robust this feature will be, but I am already skeptical. It sounds like a great idea, but it primarily mentions seasons. If that was the case though, it wouldn’t need to communicate with the Forecast Channel to tell… it could just read the date. If it’s based off the city you live in, things could be interesting.
Source: Videogames Blogger
Most Have No Vista Upgrade Plans
While most online computers users are aware of Microsoft’s Windows Vista, few are intending to switch over to the new operating system anytime soon, according to a recent Harris Poll. The Harris Poll of 2223 US online adults in early March found that 87% were aware of Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, only 12% of Vista-aware respondents were intending to upgrade to Vista in the next 12 months.
If 13% of these people have never heard of Vista, then Harris is questioning the wrong crowd. Regardless, Microsoft has not given anyone a true reason for upgrading to Vista, except to ogle a prettier UI. I am sure most people will want a far more beneficial reason than that.
Source: Tech Blorge
Why Intel Really Put 80-Cores On a Single Chip
A big part of the project at this early stage seems to be to provide a venue for asking anew a slew of fundamental questions about system- and network-level architecture, and in looking for answers based on the new assumption that you can put a 80 cores worth of useful hardware on a single chip.
As far as processors go, the future is questionable. Uses mentioned in the article tie to network-type processes, where instead of having six machines to accomplish various tasks, a single processor could do it all.
I’d have to question the amount of ram that would be required in that machine. Of course, by the time we see an 80-core processor being released, we will all have at least 32GB of DDR5 ram in our PCs *.
* Don’t quote me.
Source: Ars Technica
Gigabyte Announces Three AMD 690-Series Motherboards
Gigabyte has released three new motherboards based on AMD’s 690-series chipsets. The new motherboards include one AMD 690V and two 690G-based in micro ATX and ATX form factors: GA-MA69VM-S2, GA-MA69GM-S2H and GA-MA69G-S3H. The AMD 690-series powered motherboards support AMD Socket AM2 processors and DDR2-800 memory over four memory slots.
For those of you who want a 690 board, you are in luck if you like Gigabyte. The GA-MA69G-S3H is the first full-sized 690G board. They claim it’s a crossfire board, but it only includes one PCI-e 16x slot. Hmm.
Source: Daily Tech
10 TV Guides Services Compared
I set off on a quest to find a replacement for Yahoo!’s television listings. At times, as I dug through the various online tv listings services, it almost seemed that there were as many ways to find out what was on TV as there were channels to watch! Below, in alphabetical order, are quick reviews of 10 such services that I tried (including Yahoo!’s).
If you are a huge TV viewer (not physically), then you will love this roundup. The author takes ten of the the most popular services available and scrutinizes their design and content.
Source: Read/Write Web
WEP 104-bit Cracked In Under a Minute
We were able to extend Klein’s attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets… for 85,000 data packets [the success probability is] about 95%… 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition.
This might be a good time to move over to WPA. If WEP can be cracked that quickly, you won’t feel safe using it. It’s noted further that the actual computation was completed in under 3 seconds on a 1.7GHz laptop.
Source: Slashdot
Be Your Own Mobile Carrier With Sonopia
Starting today you, yes you, can be your very own mobile carrier through the company Sonopia. Sonopia allows individuals to create their own calling plans and then sell them to others. Your wireless carrier is just like any other with unique calling plans and allows you to send out messages to your subscribers.
This is a new spin on things. Essentially, it sounds like you run your own mobility business, but it will ultimately go through Verizon. For potential customers, I am unable to see actual benefits. It’s unique though, I’ll give it that.
Source: Download Squad
Why Are Geeks Often Atheist?
‘Geek’ brings to mind a long list of traits- Glasses, obsession with science, a high IQ. Recently, however, a new trait has come to light to add to the long, esteemed list: Atheism. Despite being widely known, there has been very little in the way of explanation proposed for this phenomena. It is the purpose of this article to address this deficiency.
I am not an atheist, but it’s an interesting read that offers a few possible reasons, such as, “It might make sense to think that many such geeks simply find something as simple as a creator an overly simplistic explanation for something so elegant.”
These geeks should just be happy they don’t have to deal with life’s source code.
Source: m4th
Amazon Patents Humans Assisting Computers
Amazon’s latest patent, the Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement, reads like scary sci-fi, with claims covering the use of humans ‘of college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, and not formally educated’ to perform subtasks dispatched by a computer.
Next up, Amazon patents "Humans Purchasing Items Off Amazon".
Source: Slashdot