Items tagged with Car
Andy Grove was once the Chairman of Intel, and is widely considered one of the best minds in American management. Time's Man of the Year for 1997 isn't spending his retirement from the chipmaker doing nothing; he's championing a push to get plug-in hybrid cars on the road ASAP.During the past year and a half, Grove has created his own crash course in electric power, plug-in hybrid vehicles and finding ways of shifting the nation's fleet of vehicles from gasoline. His goal: To draw more attention to electric vehicles."The most important thing I would like to do is light that almost half-assumed truth up in neon lights: Electricity in transportation has to be done. It is urgent. It is important...
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Verizon offers discounts to their customers if they bundle services like Internet, television, and landline phones. But with up to 15 percent of US homes now foregoing having a landline at all, Verizon realized they were missing out on opportunities to offer a package of services to people who have said goodbye to copper wires forever. They've decided to offer special pricing to customers who carry their phone in their pocket instead of screwing it to the wall. The discount applies to DSL service with downloads at 3 megabits per second, and to FiOS, or fiber-optic, broadband at up to 20 megabits per second. The fastest DSL plan, at 7 mbps, and the fastest FiOS, at 50 mbps, are not eligible for...
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Hewlett Packard announced its new blade setup today, and the ProLiant BL2X220c G5 is something of a breakthrough. HP has been able to put two servers into one blade, cutting energy consumption and shrinking the space needed down on the server farm. The two servers are completely independent of each other, but share the same shell. That setup allows the BL2×220c G5 to offer 60 percent better performance per watt than similar configurations. As for HP’s 60 percent improvement claim: In “internal testing the BL2×220c achieves 1582.73 bops/watt compared to 958.86 bops/watt on a cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1955 servers.”But even if you quibble over the energy savings claim it’s clear that...
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A few months ago, ASUS jumped into the audio card market with both feet with the introduction of their Xonar product line. One of the first models to market was the premium Xonar D2 Ultra Fidelity 7.1 sound card. The D2 boasted a superb retail package with all of the cabling, software and extras one would need thrown in, along with a slick, eye-catching design, for around $180. Not only did the Xonar D2 Ultra Fidelity 7.1 deliver on all fronts, but it also proved to be solid competition for Creative, who still has somewhat of a stranglehold on add-in audio card marketTo further infuse themselves into the audio card market though, ASUS didn't stop with the Xonar D2...
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Just a few years ago, if someone said that integrated audio would deliver great performance with many of the features of a full-blown add-in card, it might have raised an eyebrow or two. Today, however, thanks to vastly improved integrated technologies, today's integrated audio solutions are often more than satisfactory for a large portion of consumers. Nonetheless, there are those who want a better audio experience, which can only be delivered from the likes of an add-in card.A few months ago, ASUS jumped into the audio card market with both feet with the introduction of the Xonar product line. One of the first models to market was their premium...
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The amount of videos viewed online rose 66 percent in the US in February, compared to the same period last year. The huge goose in traffic is interesting, but what might be even more interesting is how little of that traffic is enjoyed by sites run by television networks. From the figures, the only way networks can get anybody to look at what they're offering online is to get it pirated and uploaded to YouTube.Some networks said they are stymied by instant piracy in which uploads of their content make it to other Web sites just minutes after broadcast.The culprits often post the footage on Google Inc.'s YouTube.com, the dominant video service in the new survey.YouTube racked up one-third of the...
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As many of you know, ATI has been particularly aggressive with their FireGL workstation graphics card lineup over the past six months. While their flagship R600-architecture was the basis for the solid (but ultimately underwhelming) Radeon HD2900XT for the gaming market, our tests have shown that this particular GPU architecture is much more competitive in the workstation market. While the R600 may not be the best choice for a high-end gaming rig, it is indeed a powerful chip for high-end OpenGL work, and as such, has led to a revival of sorts for ATI’s FireGL lineup. With an excellent performing workstation GPU in tow, ATI finally took the steps to get their latest generation of FireGL cards...
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When we heard about a Vista Home Premium upgrade edition bundled with OneCare stuffed into a box that looked like it belonged to Hello Kitty, we were naturally wondering if we ate some bad seafood. Here's more:“As a special promotion for the Japanese market, an upgrade version of Windows Vista Home Premium is bundled with a year’s subscription of Windows Live OneCare and a copy of a Vista tips and tricks book. If that deal isn’t sweet enough, then you better know it comes in a pink box with little flower petals plastered all over. Imagine checking out of the electronic store with a copy of Crysis in one hand, and this in the other.”Memo to Apple: we're not entirely sure, but we think that...
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Crystal Clear Audio for Gaming and Home Entertainment The ASUS Xonar DX PCI-e 7.1 soundcard delivers 35 times cleaner audio than integrated motherboard solutions FREMONT, CALIFORNIA (March 17, 2008) - Providing an alternative to flat and murky motherboard audio, ASUS, leading manufacturer of high quality computer components, releases the Xonar DX soundcard. Engineered for pristine, clean audio quality with a 116 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), the Xonar DX is equipped with innovative technologies such as Dolby Home Theater and DirectSound3D Game Extensions 2.0 (DS3D GX2.0) offering immersive home theater audio and rich gaming sound features. 35 Times Cleaner Audio QualityToday’s motherboards...
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Monday the Massachusetts Bankers Association (MBA) issued a press release announcing a major data breach at what Visa and MasterCard said was an unnamed "major retailer." The details were far worse than the original news, though.A security breach at an East Coast supermarket chain exposed more than 4 million card numbers and led to 1,800 cases of fraud, the Hannaford Bros. grocery chain announced Monday.Hannaford said credit and debit card numbers were stolen during the card authorization process and about 4.2 million unique card numbers were exposed, placing the case among the largest data breaches ever.The breach affected all of its 165 stores in the Northeast, 106 Sweetbay stores in...
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The Consumerist featured a story a year ago about a woman that wasn't allowed to buy an Apple computer because she wanted to purchase it solely using Apple-issued giftcards. Stung by negative publicity, Apple relented and she got her computer. But instead of liberalizing their giftcard policy, Apple simply gave the one customer a computer paid for with giftcards and then changed their giftcard FAQ. Others shut out in Apple's giftcard eligibility maze want a computer too. Or maybe their money back. I have 7 gift cards totaling $1250. Apple refuses to sell me a computer despite having $1250 upfront.As soon as I found I could not enter more than half my gift cards on the Apple website, I used their...
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If nothing else, it appears that the contentious divorce between Paul McCartney and Heather Mills has led to one good result - well, not for either of them, but for music fans. McCartney has authorized the release of the Beatles' back catalog on iTunes in a deal that is valued at $400 million.The deal has been much delayed. But industry insiders say that by the end of the year fans using iTunes will be able to buy songs from albums such as Help! and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.Although the Beatles last recorded together almost 40 years ago, the deal will provide huge rewards - estimated at £200million - to Sir Paul, Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison....
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Verizon is touting what they refer to as "Any Device, Any App." They want to settle on a universal wireless technical specification that any maker of wireless devices can use to offer their goods for use on any network. Verizon asserts that the smartphone market in America is less robust than elsewhere because hardware from various **cough** Apple**cough** manufacturers is not usable across wireless services. The carrier said version 1.0 of its specs will be released at its Open Development Device Conference beginning March 19 in New York City. It said the conference will "focus on how traditional device and consumer electronics companies and entrepreneurs new to the wireless ecosystem...
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Ah, thank goodness the writers came back. The Oscars are actually more fun between awards! In this case, Jon Stewart was "caught" playing Wii Tennis coming back from a break. You can bet Nintendo knew about this (how else would they have gotten a Wii!)Watch the video:...
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Late last year, NVIDIA released a pair of new 8800-series graphics cards based on their G92 GPU. The new cards were designed to keep NVIDIA's products at the top of the food chain at their respective price points, while also being a bit more affordable. The first of the two was the GeForce 8800 GT. It brought high-end performance to the mainstream crowd mostly due to its 112 stream processor configuration and 65m G92 GPU. The G92's shrink to 65nm from TSMC's 90nm process used with the G80, brings with it lower power usage, but also lower prices due to a reduced die size, enabling NVIDIA to set the MSRP for the 8800...
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For those of you who use devices with SDHC support such as the Eee PC, it appears that SanDisk has a late Christmas gift for you: 32GB SDHC cards.“Giving photo enthusiasts the freedom to take more pictures and shoot more video, SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today increased both capacities and speeds in its SanDisk Ultra® II line with the introduction of 32- and 16-gigabyte (GB)1 SDHC™ cards and an 8GB SDHC Plus card. The announcement was made at the photo industry’s PMA 08 International Convention here.Ideal for today’s camcorders and point-and-shoot digital cameras that can record both video and still images, the cards offer faster read and write speeds of 15 megabytes per second2...
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HIS introduces the HIS Radeon™ HD 3450 Silence (Full HD 1080p)HDMI 256MB (64bit) DDR2, delivering the ultimate silence solution for hometheater PC!Hong Kong — Jan 23, 2007 — HIS today unveils the HIS Radeon™ HD 3450 Silence (Full HD 1080p) 256MB DDR2 card, featuring the ultimate silence solution. It delivers the next generation of HDgraphics with strikingly fast gaming performance, and support for the latest Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 gaming environment.The HIS Radeon™ HD 3450 Silence (Full HD 1080p) 256MB DDR2 card is powered by a chipset with core speed up to 600MHz and memory speed up to 800MHz. Play the next generation of HD gamesfeaturing life-like graphics realism...
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GE Money misplaced a backup tape with about 650,000 customer's personal credit information. There are two additional facts that make this particularly noteworthy.First is that GE Money handles the credit information of more than 100 retailers including JC Penney. Without knowing the names of the other retailers, it isn't possible to really say exactly who else may be impacted directly by this loss.The second is that the data loss was discovered in October!“The information was on a backup computer tape that was discovered missing last October. It was being stored at a warehouse run by Iron Mountain Inc., a data storage company, and was never checked out but can't be found either, said...
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Back in November 2007, AMD launched the 55nm ATI RV670 GPU. With this launch, we were introduced to two new ATI video cards, the Radeon HD 3870 and 3850. If you read our launch article, then you already know that the RV670 is a derivative of the R600, which powers the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Our initial experience with AMD's new cards was pretty positive. The Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 offer good performance at nice MSRPs with impressive power characteristics. After launch articles though, everyone anxiously waits for the retail board reviews. This article will be our first look at a full retail board based on the new RV670 GPU. The card we have up on the review block today is the ASUS EAH3850 TOP (full...
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Back in November 2007, AMD launched the 55nm ATI RV670 GPU. With this launch, we were introduced to two new ATI video cards, the Radeon HD 3870 and 3850. If you read our launch article, then you already know that the RV670 is a derivative of the R600, which powers the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Our initial experience with AMD's new cards was pretty positive. The Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 offer good performance at nice MSRPs with impressive power characteristics. After launch articles, though, everyone anxiously waits for the retail board reviews. This article will be our first look at a full retail board based on the new RV670 GPU. The card we have up on the review block today is the ASUS...
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As Christmas approaches, we at HotHardware would be remiss if we didn't give you an opportunity to hear Jingle Bells on a graphics card, and we don't mean because of a vibration in the fan or anything. There's little we can add, so enjoy....
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We've got a bit of show-and-tell for you here this morning. You might recall recent announcements of a new digital display interface, dubbed DisplayPort by VESA, the Video Electronics Standards Association. This new interface will supplant DVI and VGA connections eventually and its micropacket architecture offers significantly more bandwidth with multi-monitor support over a single cable. Like HDMI, a DisplayPort connection can carry 8-channel 24-bit audio, but also offers a dedicated auxiliary link for control communications of things like panel I/O and microphone connections. There are hundreds of big brand name...
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