Items tagged with arc
Google has a pretty reliable algorithm for determining page rank on text searches. All sorts of attempts are made to game the system, by both legitimate and unscrupulous Search Engine Optimization schemes alike, but those strategies always seem to fail in the long run. But put a search query into Google Images, especially with safe-search turned off, and you'll get a bizarre assortment of pictures to look at. That's because image searches generally just comb through the associated text appended to images. It's the reason why if you're an ornithologist looking for pictures of birds with bright blue feet, you might see a different sort of boobies if you search for them. Now Google says it's got...
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How about that? Microsoft gave Yahoo! a hard deadline, and Yahoo! fires back, outsourcing Search Ads to Google. Granted, it's a limited trial.The test will last up to two weeks and involve no more than 3% of Yahoo's Web search queries, the Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company said. It is designed for Google and Yahoo to evaluate the revenue potential of a broader search ad sales outsourcing arrangement, according to people familiar with the matter. They have been discussing such an arrangement as part of Yahoo's pursuit of alternatives to Microsoft's unsolicited acquisition offer. Yahoo views the latest test partly as a way to demonstrate its belief that it is worth more than Microsoft...
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While it appears there certainly is an ad for this particular, er, subject, the question of how legitimate it is remains.In one of the more unbelievable media twists to come in the aftermath of last week’s Byron Review, a national newspaper is offering readers 'hundreds of pounds' to confess that games pushed them into a life of crime.An advert encouraging readers to ‘pitch’ their story to the newspaper has appeared on an 'online talent community’ – which promotes opportunities for aspiring actors and models to raise their profile.The Byron Review piece discussed above is about a piece in the UK paper The Review that said that Tanya Byron wanted laws changed so that retailers faced a stiffer...
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Contest Reminder - Your Last Few Days To Enter! Hot on the heels of our Skulltrail giveaway, we’re announcing a new sweepstakes where you could win a full Core 2 Duo E6750-based system, complete with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series graphics and a Gigabyte nForce 680i SLI-based motherboard. This is a highly tweakable system, and it could be all yours! We’ll be giving away this rig to a randomly selected contributor to our on-line forum and discussion systems. The complete break-down of components in the system includes: Processors: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6Memory: 2GB DDR2 MemoryGraphics: GeForce 8800 GTS 640MBOptical Storage: Lite-On 20X DVD-RW with...
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Yesterday, news broke regarding Microsoft and Intel launching parallel research centers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to investigate way to accelerate developments in mainstream parallel computing. And today, we've posted some details and commentary on the subject over at HotHardware. Here's a snip from the piece... "Even today, writing software able to take advantage of multi-threading is notoriously difficult. In order to help drive the development of the tools and threading-aware applications, Microsoft and Intel are together awarding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley $10 million dollars...
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It's no secret that the days of procuring performance exclusively through faster clock speeds are over. The current crop of multi-core server, desktop, and mobile CPU designs are a dead giveaway that processor vendors like Intel are instead looking to increased parallelism as the facilitator of more computing horsepower. The problem, according to David Patterson, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, becomes one of scheduling and balancing workloads across multiple sets of processing resources, so that you can truly get more performance out of those threaded designs. If an application is only running in one thread, upgrading to a dual- or quad-core chip won't help speed it up. It's a...
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A new twist on search by Google, though one that Yahoo! already has, at least to some extent, is secondary search boxes within search results.Google has started offering search boxes within their search results. In the example above, a search box is offered for Amazon. The new service seems to be restricted to larger sites with a slant towards retails sites. Borders, BestBuy and OfficeMax offer the secondary box, as does a search for Wikipedia and The NY Times. On the surface it would appear to be yet another dilution of Google’s famed simple interface, the very interface that helped put Google where it is today. And yet, some my find it useful.It's a quick way to search within a site, but aside...
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Utilizing a little known fact about RAM, researchers have devised a way to crack disk encryption. The attack takes only a few minutes to conduct and uses the disk encryption key that's stored in the computer's RAM. The attack works because content as well as encryption keys stored in RAM linger in the system, even after the machine is powered off, enabling an attacker to use the key to collect any content still in RAM after reapplying power to the machine. "We've broken disk encryption products in exactly the case when they seem to be most important these days: laptops that contain sensitive corporate data or personal information about business customers," said J. Alex Halderman, one of the researchers,...
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We've just posted a new article here at HotHardware, in which we evaluate X-Gaming's very cool, very retro, X-Arcade Tankstick Dual Controller with Trackball. Just seeing this thing will take you back to your earlier years when gaming meant stopping by the local arcade and dropping quarters into a slot on your favorite machine. Be warned though, after reading this article you may be compelled to connect the Tankstick to a home theater PC. Playing favorites like Mr. Do, Galaga, and Street Fighter II on the big screen would definitely rock! Click the link below and check it out...X-Arcade Tankstick Dual Controller with Trackball...
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Many of us have fond memories of playing video games in the arcade of a local bowling alley, popping 25 cents into the machine on a regular basis to keep the fun going. Back then, that was the main way to get your game on, displaying your skills for all to see. If you can remember dropping quarters into the slot of a machine running Pole Position, Galaga, Missle Command or any other game of that era, you might like the business model of X-Arcade. Reminiscent of the days when quarters ruled the video game market, X-Arcade has built a product base of custom game controllers that are built to the same standards of the video game systems of yesteryear. The company...
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As with all rumors, please take the following with a grain of salt. A new rumor is being circulated that AMD's upcoming triple-core CPUs are likely to hit the shelves sometime in March 2008:“AMD will launch two B2 stepping triple-core CPUs, Phenom 8600 and 8400 in March of next year, while in the second quarter, the company will launch three more models, Phenom 8700, 8650 and 8450.The Phenom 8400 and 8600 will feature core frequencies of 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz, respectively, while the Phenom 8700 will clock at 2.4GHz. Phenom 8650 and 8450 will be based on B3 stepping cores, and will have frequencies of 2.3GHz and 2.1GHz, respectively. All five CPUs will have a 95W TDP.The high price/performance...
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While we don't officially know exactly what Blizzard is working on we're going to start our rumor that the project codenamed Hydra will probably end up being a StarCraft MMO. We've been gathering bits and pieces about this for a while now, and Drysc, a Blizzard employee, added the following quote regarding the reason Blizz is hiring new talent:"No, it is an unannounced Next-Gen MMO. And that doesn't mean an expansion for World of Warcraft either."The reason we think that this new project is likely to be a StarCraft related MMO are pretty simple: 1) We know Blizzard licensed PhysX technology from AGEIA a while back and while initial speculation was that it'd be part of Diablo III, we just...
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Ask.com is the fourth most popular search engine in the United States, accounting for 4.7 percent of all web searches. They've decided to differentiate themselves from the rest of their competitiors by offering AskEraser -- a widget on their service you can use to direct the search engine to discard information like search term, user's Internet address, and other identifying features immediately after your search. If you're worried about what search engines do with the archived information they glean from your searches, this is the service for you. Maybe.“It works like a light switch,” said Doug Leeds, senior vice president for product management at Ask.com. Mr. Leeds said the service would...
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To say that the AMD K10 has suffered delays is an understatement. Many in the industry were honestly expecting this holiday season to feature a heavyweight CPU bout for the ages, but sadly it looks like we'll have to wait just a little bit longer.While the entire world is getting ready for that bout, it seems that AMD has decided to transition many of their existing K8 CPUs over to the 65 nm manufacturing process.“The AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ will be the first to jump on the new 65nm K8 bandwagon with a 65W TDP. The previous Windsor-based chip of the same featured an 89-Watt TDP. AMD will also add 100 MHz to the core frequency of the Athlon 64 X2 5600+, now rated at 2.9 GHz. Total L2 cache...
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Volume shipments of AMD's Barcelona will be delayed until 2008 because of a bug (what else). AMD definitely didn't need more bad news.Barcelona, AMD's first quad-core processor for servers, is shipping to some customers in the high-performance computing market. But the company had hoped to start shipping it to a wider variety of customers this month, as well as introduce a faster model that could better compete with Intel's latest Penryn chips.Unfortunately for AMD, that's going to have to wait, according to a company spokesman. The Tech Report has an excellent description of the problem that AMD encountered with the translation lookaside buffer used in cache memory, which also affects...
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As it stands today, many of the major components in a typical enthusiast class PC have built-in mechanisms for monitoring the health status of the device. Processors and GPUs have internal thermal diodes for monitoring temperatures, and graphics cards and motherboards have sensors for monitoring a myriad of voltages and things like fan speeds. Other components, however, like cases, power supplies, and cooling systems, for example, usually don’t have any such mechanism. And even if they do, odds are it uses a proprietary interface that isn’t universally compatible. To remedy this situation, the crew at NVIDIA has architected a new open standard the company hopes will be adopted...
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NVIDIA has just introduced a new open-industry standard for real-time monitoring and control of PC power supplies, chassis and water cooling systems, dubbed ESA, short for Enthusiast System Architecture. The company hopes ESA will be adopted across the industry and a new wave of ESA compliant hardware than can be monitored and controlled via a standard interface will ensue. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen. For now though, we've got the details for you available for you right here on HotHardware.NVIDIA's ESA - Enthusiast System Architecture Standard...
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No, we (China) really, really don't want you to hear anything about the Dalai Lama. Or so that's the theory behind search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Windows Live Search being redirected to Baidu.Various reports indicate that YouTube, Yahoo, Google, and Windows Live Search are all being redirected to Baidu, in a possible move to block out news of the Dalai Lama's receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal.Such a move would not be surprising, considering China has already done something similar in the past. In 2002, it redirected Google surfers away from the site ahead of the Communist Party Congress meetings.In what should surprise no one, there's been no comment from Chinese authorities....
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Microsoft is updating its Live Search web search service, They're hoping that pleasing users with more relevant search results will help it to crawl out of the distant third place it finds itself in -- behind Yahoo a little, behind Google a lot. Microsoft says its goal is to encourage people who are using its Live Search service to continue doing so. It points to the large numbers of people who find their way to the service through the MSN portal and other online services such as e-mail and instant messaging. Brad Goldberg, general manager of search-product management and marketing, said 40 percent of all Internet searchers use Live Search, but the service...
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While it might not sound as fun as bashing in an opponents face with a well placed move in Virtua Fighter 5, the Cell CPU at the heart of each and every PS3 can also be put to use helping researchers understand diseases such as various forms of cancer, Alzheimer's & even Parkinson's disease.Due to the highly parallel nature of the research project and the aptitude of the Cell CPU for such tasks, it isn't very hard to figure out just why the project supervisors are giving the PS3 such praise:"The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor...
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Fulfilling a promise made when they began their partnership late last year, when Microsoft and Sprint launched Windows Live Search across the Sprint mobile web, Microsoft and Sprint have added GPS-enabled local search functionality to their offering.Sprint's local search as well as full Internet search through the carrier's mobile portal would now be powered by Microsoft. The local search would also be GPS-aware, allowing consumers to search around their location as detected by the Sprint's network. <script language="JavaScript" src="https://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/ttm.betanews/bn/home;tier=1;sz=336x280,300x250;tile=2;ord=1068424074?" type="text/javascript"></script>...
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As you all know, AMD launched their highly anticipated Barcelona native quad-core Opteron processors a few days ago. And on the night of the launch the company threw a big bash at the Letterman Digital Arts Premier Theater at the headquarters of Lucasfilm to celebrate the event. Here are a few snapshots from the party where Barcelona was on-display. AMD’s CEO Hector Ruiz spoke at the event and a live band was there keeping the crowd entertained. There are a number of live demos on display as well, of course, including a Phenom powered rig running John Woo’s Stanglehold game. And no, you don’t have Déjà vu,...
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