We've discussed the fragmentation of Android and the shoddy update services of the various carriers before, but the Droid 3's situation is raising these issues again. According to pre-CES reports, Verizon is poised to end-of-life (EOL) the Droid 3 along with its entire current lineup of MiFi hotspots. The BlackBerry...Read more...
When AMD launched the Barts GPU that powers the Radeon 6850 and 6870 last year, it added support for what it described as a new type of antialiasing—Morphological AA (MLAA). Intel, who originally developed MLAA in 2009, has released a follow-up paper on the topic--including a discussion of how the technique could be handled by the CPU....Read more...
Any of you holding your breath for the possibility of Advanced Micro Devices announcing its own version to Intel's atom processor for use in netbooks better have large lungs. AMD's Chief Executive Dirk Meyer announced Thursday: "We're ignoring the Netbook phenomenon--just thinking about PC form factors above that form factor." That is, AMD...Read more...
The Classics Deserve First-class Treatment ASUS Announces Xonar Essence STX PCI-e Audio Card with 124dB SNR Audio and Built-in Headphone Amplifier for Extraordinary Audio Performance Taipei, Taiwan, November 12, 2008 – Aimed as the culmination of searching for the very essence of sound, the new ASUS Xonar Essence STX range of audio cards delivers...Read more...
The enterprising lads over at iFixit sure like to take stuff apart. Then again, that's at the heart of their bread-and-butter--they take the risks with potentially broken parts and lost screws so that they can assemble comprehensive DIY guides for instructing you how you can repair your own Apple products, such as MacBooks and iPods. If you...Read more...
So we were kicking around the lab for the weekend with nothing much to do (ok, ok, we have plenty to do but we decided to goof off). And what do any self-respecting Tech Geeks do with a little time on their hands? We take stuff apart of course. This time our victim was the Dell Studio Hybrid. We'll be showcasing...Read more...
There is no doubt that spam is pervasive and can be a major productivity killer if the right safeguards aren't in place. In fact, MessageLabs indicates that 78.2 percent of all e-mails sent during the month of August were spam. To make matters worse, Sophos reports that by the end of June, 96.5 percent of all e-mails to businesses were spam....Read more...
Thecus 1U4500 Passes IEC / ISO Certified Reliability Test The CE marking is a mandatory European marking for NAS products to indicate conformity with the essential health and safety requirements set out in European Directives. Thecus products are evaluated by a Taiwan Accreditation Foundation (TAF) certified independent test laboratory. CE...Read more...
Lenovo Asset Recovery Service Helps Businesses Go Green, Turning Computer Trash into CashEco-Solution Gives Customers Easy Way to Refurbish, Reuse and Recycle ComputersRESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – June 17, 2007: Lenovo today introduced Lenovo Asset Recovery Services (ARS), a new set of services to help business customers in the U.S. and Canada...Read more...
Don't worry, Rupert (Murdoch); MySpace still outdraws Facebook in terms of unique U.S. visitors. But in terms of worldwide visitors: second place.comScore statistics indicate that Facebook drew even with MySpace in April. At that point, the networks interested about 115 million users each. If we're allowed mentally to extend the...Read more...
Google Sites, the group Website tool that was originally available only to "companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains," can now be utilized by even non-business users--and you don't even need to host it on your own domain anymore: "Now we've made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types...Read more...
NVIDIA held a Financial Analyst Day yesterday, where representatives spoke about the company's strengths, market share, technology, and direction. There was a lot of discussion regarding current products and competition, which seemed to get NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Sun Huang fired up in a way that's not often seen publicly. The always outspoken...Read more...
ASUS Takes the Mini PC to a Mighty Level with Essentio CS5110 Taipei, Taiwan – Extensive research and development have resulted in ASUS innovations that help pack more versatility and performance into compact frames. Packed with innovations, the ASUS Essentio CS5110 is a Mini PC that features exceptional graphics performance as its main focus...Read more...
A copy of an internal Apple email to employees indicates that iTunes has surpassed Wal-Mart as the #1 music retailer. Or has it?The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the...Read more...
Israeli mobile phone technology company Modu has announced their modular mobile phone system, the modu. By including only the components necessary to send and receive voice and data, their module is designed to be integrated into "modu mates," and "modu jackets": mobile phone skins and various electronic devices that need mobile connectivity....Read more...
We've been wondering how much performance benefit there might be for 64-bit software on the desktop ever since AMD started talking about the Sledgehammer series of chips nearly a decade ago. Now that 64-bit is here, in various forms of implementation, we're getting our answers. Some of the most interesting answers might come from...Read more...
Certainly the RIAA and MPAA feel an IP address can be used to ID a person: that's the whole basis of their lawsuits to collect money from downloaders. So why can't the EU believe the same?Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines...Read more...
Well, not exactly, but pretty close. The Turing Test is a proposition first offered in the 1950s that tests a computer's ability to fool a human into thinking it's another human, using only natural language text interaction. Well, now there's a Russian website named Cyberlover.ru that sells a software utility that engages women...Read more...
A lot of people, businesses included, have more or less decided to skip upgrading their OS to Microsoft Vista. Windows XP works for them, is well supported for foreseeable future, and many feel they can skip a generation and wait for Vista's successor, dubbed "Windows 7" to come along. Gartner Research VP Michael Silver thinks that might be...Read more...
A report from Forrester Research paints a bleak picture for sales of next generation DVD players. They estimate that at least another eighteen months will roll by before many consumers make up their minds to buy one; and until then the two formats will fight it out in low-level trench warfare until one or the other is embraced by consumers....Read more...
AMD made an announcement a few weeks ago that made many in the industry scratch their heads: AMD (not Intel) will release SSE5. This was quite confusing since AMD is known for their own set of instructions, 3D Now!, which the company has quietly dropped development of in favor or following Intel's lead with SSE instruction sets.One of the...Read more...
It's been two years since the New York Times starting charging for "select" content on its site (hence the name), but the paper has admitted defeat and decided to open the content up for all, saying it could make more money from increased ad revenue than the subscription fees.Times Select, the name of the service that charged access to opinion...Read more...