Items tagged with arc
Touchy, touchy! Microsoft has just unveiled a new mouse that's just begging to be touched, the Explorer Touch Mouse. This one is a sleek, glossy device in the same family as the Arc Touch Mouse, with an advanced scroll strip for vertical and horizontal navigation on your PC or Mac. There's also support for side-to-side swipes and five customizable buttons, and the BlueTrack technology allows users to mouse along just about any surface -- even a pant leg. Another impressive stat? This is the first Microsoft mouse to offer an 18-month battery life. Of course, if you use it with any regularity, it'll perish before then, but that's still a wild baseline. The Explorer Touch Mouse will be available...
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Fractal Design is a relatively new name in the expansive PC case business, and while it's definitely tough to cut through in this saturated market, this particular company seems to be doing a great job of doing just that. Their designs are refreshing, unique and intelligent, and much like the Define case that was introduced at the start of this year, the company's new Arc series is also classily styled and great for those building out a smaller rig. It's a Micro ATX case that provides loads of room for cooling options (up to 7 total fans), top/front panels that are removable, a sleek black exterior, all-white expansion bays and HDD trays, and as with the Define, these trays are also outfitted...
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You might not realize this, but Yahoo quietly launched a new way to provide search results last night. This new paradigm is called Yahoo! Glue, is currently in beta in the U.S., and is based on a similar program Yahoo! has already been experimenting with in India for the last few months. If you perform a search on Yahoo! you are not going to see anything different--Yahoo! Glue currently resides on its own standalone site at glue.yahoo.com, and you'll need to perform searches specifically from Yahoo! Glue if you want to see the new search results selections and layout.The focus of Yahoo! Glue is to offer an alternative to what has traditionally been a text-heavy-based model and to make providing...
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Remember SanDisk’s new SlotMusic format that we told you about last month? Well, the world’s four largest music companies will begin shipping almost 40 music albums in this format this week. Additional albums are planned for the Christmas season.Although we initially heard prices in the $7 - $10 range, recent news is saying a 1GB microSD memory card containing MP3 files will cost $14.99. Keep in mind, these tunes are DRM-free, so that’s a plus.Best Buy will be getting their albums this week, while Walmart shoppers will have to wait another week or two. These retailers also carry the SanDisk Sansa-branded SlotMusic players, which start at about $20. There will also be artist-branded players that...
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The next time you are taking money out at the ATM, be wary of anyone lurking nearby with an antenna sticking out of their pants. They might be stealing your PIN wirelessly. A pair of Ph.D. students at the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) of Switzerland's Ecole publique Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), recently demonstrated a number of techniques for listening in on the electromagnetic emanations coming from wired keyboards and interpreting that information into the actual keystrokes pressed. The two researchers, Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini, tested four different versions of this technique on 11 different wired keyboards with PS/2 and USB connections, as well as with...
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Rob Pardo, executive vice-president of game design at Blizzard announced at BlizzCon 2008 that they realized during the design of Starcraft 2 that the campaign was becoming so large, they faced the choice of delaying the game or scaling it back. Instead, the campaign version of the game will be a trilogy, with each part focusing on a separate race. The trilogy will be, in this order: Terrans - Wings of LibertyZerg - Heart of the SwarmProtoss - Legacy of the Void No pricing or release details were announced. However, each game is promised to have 26-30 missions, and a self-contained story. Pardo added that while to some the last two chapters may feel like expansion packs, the company will not...
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Today's Web search engines are driven primarily by searching for text keywords. This works fairly well when what you are searching for is words; but it fails pretty miserably when you are searching for video. Video search is almost entirely dependent on someone taking the time to manually (and accurately) add text tags to videos to make them searchable. This is all about to change, however, if VideoSurf's claims are true: The company says it has developed a way to visually search videos for it content: "VideoSurf is a computer vision search engine that has created a new way for users to easily find, discover and watch the videos from across the Web. Founded in 2006 by leading experts in computer...
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... but they're still not a monopoly, at least if you ask the company. On Monday researchers at market research firm Hitwise released their monthly search share report, and their data indicates that Google has now topped 70% in terms of search market share.Google reached a new milestone and accounted for 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches. Google’s share of searches increased 10% over the same month last year and 2% over the previous month. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search (including Live.com), and Ask followed with 18.65%, 5.36%, and 3.53% share of searches, respectively. That's Google's tenth consecutive record high in monthly search share. And if you wonder why Microsoft is / was so keen on snagging...
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Sometimes we have to remind ourselves here at HotHardware that us editors and our loyal readers do not necessarily represent typical Internet users. Many of us consider ourselves to be "power users," and feel we know how to leverage the available tools to find exactly what we are looking for online. Which is why it came as a surprise to us to learn that on average, "the percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day... [is] just under one-half (49%)." This revelation comes from a recent survey conduced by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. We were under the (mistaken) impression that search engines were such an integral pat of online life that nearly anyone who...
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First: there's no real evidence this is a "kill switch" that Apple will use, but still, based on Apple's protectiveness over the iPhone, it wouldn't surprise us.Jonathan Zdziarski, author of the upcoming book iPhone Forensics, has revealed an URL that he suggests Apple is using to keep a list of any "offending" applications: https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps.Apple apparently can disable App Store software remotely on your iPhone 3G. The iPhone calls home and poof the application is nuked. Needless to say that this has caused a bit of a blog ruckus (Techmeme). MacRumors notes that Apple has come under fire for removing App Store software without notification and the...
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One of the key challenges of digital photography technology has been to try to capture images as well as the human eye does. While optics have made significant improvements in recent years, modest enhancements to the resolution density of the electronic sensors have kept the lofty goal of mimicking human perception as just a pipe dream. But scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have now made a breakthrough that might take a giant leap toward reproducing human-eye-like sight in an electronic sensor. Their breakthrough comes in the form of liberating the light-sensing array from the traditional planar or flat surface, which tends to introduce "aberrations."...
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FIRST DETAILS ON A FUTURE INTEL DESIGN CODENAMED ‘LARRABEE’ Intel Corporation is presenting a paper at the SIGGRAPH 2008 industry conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 12 that describes features and capabilities of its first-ever forthcoming “many-core” blueprint or architecture codenamed “Larrabee.” Details unveiled in the SIGGRAPH paper include a new approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline, a many-core (many processor engines in a product) programming model and performance analysis for several applications.The first product based on Larrabee will target the personal computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry’s first many-core x86 Intel...
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Microsoft and Yahoo aren't the only companies looking to compete with Google in the search business. In fact, this morning a new startup called Cuil opened its virtual doors for the world to start using its search engine. So, on this morning we ask, how is Cuil different from all other search engines? The site claims: "Cuil (pronounced COOL) is a search engine that combines the largest Web index with content-based relevance methods, organized results, and complete user privacy. The company's next generation approach to search is the result of proprietary breakthroughs in search architecture and ranking algorithms."Ciul claims to have an index of 120 billion pages, which it states is "three times...
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NVIDIA DRAMATICALLY ACCLERATES THE SEARCH FOR A CURE GeForce GPU Runs Folding@home Protein Simulations 140 Times Faster Than Traditional Processors SANTA CLARA, CA—JULY 24, 2008—Stanford University’s distributed computing program Folding@home has become a major force in researching cures to life-threatening diseases such as cancer, cystic fibrosis, and Parkinson’s disease by combining the computing horsepower of millions of processors to simulate protein folding. The Folding@home project is the latest example in the expanding list of non-gaming applications for graphics processing units (GPU). By running the Folding@home client on an NVIDIA GeForce GPU, protein-folding simulations can be done...
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LifeLock, which is an ID theft protection service, but which has both been written about earlier in unflattering terms as well as sued by Experian, has been sued again, this time by a competitor. On Wednesday NAMESAFE sued LifeLock over search ads that it said were purchased by LifeLock, which used the NAMESAFE trademark yet directed users to LifeLock's web site. According to a press release issued by NameSafe on Friday, "We have discovered that LifeLock has been sponsoring advertisements on most major search engines including (among others) Google, Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, Dogpile, and AOL, that deceptively led consumers to Lifelock.com. Specifically, when you searched 'Namesafe.com' in any major...
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Starcraft II was announced in May 2007, and Korea went wild. While it may just be coincidence that a number of etailers have posted ship dates for Starcraft II, and that they all picked the same date, is it also a coincidence that Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational Event takes place in Paris on June 28 and 29 this week?Many froth-mouthed fans of Blizzard's intergalactic real-time strategy masterpiece Starcraft have anxiously been awaiting word on when the next installment of the series would land in their anticipatory laps. Blizz has been characteristically tight-lipped about the title's launch window, though we were recently informed that an online SKU search for Starcraft II on Best Buy, Circuit...
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Can't buy the company? Can't buy the search technology? Well, how about buying the talent? Wednesday Microsoft placed a full-page ad for "search jobs" in (gasp!) an honest-to-goodness hard copy paper, The San Jose Mercury-News. Despite the ubiquity of the San Francisco Chronicle, for Silicon Valley, the Merc is the paper."There are now very few companies that remain truly committed to defining the future of search and online advertising," the ad reads. "Microsoft is one of them."Microsoft's not-so-subtle dig at Yahoo is particularly well-timed amid rumors that Yahoo is in a hiring freeze, or at least a cold chill and amid a rash of high-level defections.In the ad, Microsoft touts its partnerships...
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You probably recall AOL's 2006 leak of search user data, which actually was more like a flood. AOL published the search logs of 650,000 subscribers, which eventually resulted in some heads rolling, after the smoke cleared. Why not take a tack from Law and Order and rip a story from the headlines, eh? And that's what director Michael Alltop did.The show--which opened Wednesday and runs through June 22--is based on a now infamous real-life search log that included queries ranging from "purple lilac," "happy bunny pictures," and "square dancing steps" to "cut into your trachea," "pee fetish," and "Simpsons incest." And that's just for starters."It was something that captured my imagination and seemed...
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When checking out the specs on the Voodoo Envy 133 earlier, we were pretty annoyed by the Flash intro to the revamped VoodooPC site. That's precisely the reason for a feature such as this. Search for a site, and - if the site has a Skip Intro link on it - results will have a "Skip intro," which enables users to skip the Flash intro, directly from the search results.Of course, this doesn't help on the VoodooPC site, as there's no "Skip Intro" option on their site. Possibly because the intro is pretty short, but still irritating.This is precisely the type of small, some-would-think inconsequential feature which is just the type of thing that draws people to one search engine over another. ...
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Customizing your rig or morphing it into a different form factor has become passe. Or so says Google Trends. We checked out a graph of searches on "case mods" over the last four years and found that lookups on the term dropped precipitously for no apparent reason.Here's the indisputable visual evidence: Why did the interest in case modding slow down? It's hard to pinpoint, but perhaps the hobby of tinkerers and creative minds has returned to the underground. What do you think? Are case mods still hot or is the trend above an accurate indicator of interest in the topic?...
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Hacker Safe? We're guessing that applies only to web sites, not securities fraud.One of the researchers behind ScanAlert, the "Hacker Safe" certification company McAfee recently acquired, is facing fraud charges in Indiana.Brett Oliphant, whose title had been vice president of security services before the Napa, California, company was acquired by McAfee in January, is facing 11 counts of securities fraud in transactions that allegedly brought in more than US$1.215 million.Oliphant and his brother Bryan were charged in December. Their trial is set for Nov. 18 at the Elkhart County Superior Court in Indiana.ScanAlert built technology for auditing and then certifying Web sites as "Hacker Safe."...
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Yahoo wants your Web searching to be safe. Yahoo has partnered with McAfee to utilize McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology in Yahoo searches to keep Web surfers from visiting would-be harmful sites. In a press release from earlier today, Yahoo stated:"Yahoo!, Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) and McAfee, Inc. (NYSE:MFE) today announced a partnership to deliver a safer Web search experience through Yahoo! Search. Launching in beta today, the new SearchScan feature by Yahoo! Search, powered by the award-winning McAfee(R) SiteAdvisor(R) technology, provides always-on alerts to users for "risky" sites with security concerns such as spyware, adware and other malicious software that can infect and damage a user's PC....
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