Items tagged with test
Apple's iPhone has been generating tons of demand ever since it was unveiled in 2007, and right from the start, consumers seemed to adore the touch screen. Unlike many phones before it, the iPhone uses a capacitive screen, which reacts instantly to finger presses without the need for a stylus. Right or wrong, the phone has been hailed as the touch screen king for years now, but MOTO Development Group decided that it was finally time to put the supposedly mighty panel to the test. A simple DIY performance analysis between the iPhone, Google's Nexus One, Motorola's Droid and HTC's Droid Eris put each of the modern smart phones to the test, with the primary objective being to find out which screen...
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It's a topic we cover often because it's near and dear to our hearts. It's battery life, and it's finally starting to get the attention that is has long deserved in the industry. We've seen article after article point out that battery life claims on laptops are flawed in one way or another, and AMD's own Pat Moorhead is stepping forward this week with some facts and figures to back that up. For whatever reason, AMD has taken a strong, vocal stance against shoddy battery life claims. They've had it with PC manufacturers pumping out notebook after notebook with crazy claims, ones that they can't possibly deliver. Take any laptop of your own, for example. Has it ever fully lived up to the claims...
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Hey, kids -- how would you feel about taking your next round of end-of-quarter exams without even having to pick up a pencil? No, we're not talking about telepathy (though, we kind of like the idea!), we're talking about laptop testing. In a move that we can only hope spreads encouragement to classrooms around the world, about 6,000 students in the nation of Norway are being allowed to complete examinations on their laptops in a trial run that could soon be rolled out across the country.Every single 16 to 19-year old in Nord-Trondelag county in Norway has been involved in the notebook-based system, and it's no surprise to see officials testing things out on the oldest, most "mature" students...
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If space truly is the final frontier, then one company just took another small step toward the eventual giant leap toward reaching space. SpaceX, (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), a privately-held space-transportation company, just conducted a successful test of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle's first-stage rocket booster. This comes less than two months after SpaceX successfully launched its two-stage, Falcon 1 rocket to become "the first privately-developed liquid fuel rocket to achieve Earth orbit." Where Falcon 1 is designed to launch small payloads into low-earth orbit, the Falcon 9 is designed to carry heavier payloads and travel further above the Earth, such as into geostationary...
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Do You Have What it Takes to Beat the Pros? Top 1508MHz Dual Channel DDR2 and win some cash Taipei, Taiwan, GIGABYTE – Wanna win some cash? From November 7TH to Dec 30th, 2008, GIGABYTE would like to invite you to show off your overclocking skills in order to beat the pros and win USD$ 1,500 CASH. Fugger and Vapor (Freestyle Champions of the GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship, GO OC 2008) challenge you to beat their record memory frequency overclock of 1508MHz Dual Channel DDR2 on one of GIGABYTE’s latest P45 Ultra Durable 3 motherboards. So tune up your GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 motherboard and visit the GIGABYTE website for complete contest details, and get ready to win some...
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There are only a select few events in the PC hardware world that get hardcore enthusiasts truly excited. For example, when popular trade shows like Computex, IDF, and CES take place, there is a fair amount of buzz. Also, anytime the major players in graphics release next-generation GPUs, things definitely heat up; or likewise when a hot new game hits. Finally, when either of the processor big guns, Intel or AMD, unleash new CPU micro-architectures on the world, you can almost bet that the community will come alive with enthusiasm. We're sure we've missed a few other momentous occasions as well, but you get the gist. It takes something new and exciting to get a PC Enthusiast's pulse racing. Thankfully,...
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How would you like to be the unofficial spokesperson for the U.S. transition to digital television (DTV) and win a home entertainment system in the process? All you need is a video camera and a YouTube account. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)--sponsor of the yearly consumer electronics circus, CES, in Las Vegas--is promoting a contest for user-submitted videos "that educates the public on how to prepare friends and family for the digital television (DTV) transition." The contest kicked off a few days ago on YouTube with a call-to-arms video featuring the country music group, Whiskey Falls. User submitted videos to the contest must be less than three minutes in length and in English....
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Although the word has been out for a while, T-Mobile and RIM finally announced a price and shipping date for the first ever BlackBerry flip phone, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220. Launching today in black for $149.99 with a two-year contract, the Pearl Flip 8220 features Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, a SureType keyboard, 2MP camera with video, and a 2.4-inch internal display. Like many flips, the phone also has an external display for easy access to calendar reminders, email, text messages, and phone calls at a glance. The Pearl Flip 8220 uses the popular “pearl” trackball for navigation. Full specs include: • Support for Unlimited HotSpot Calling • myFaves support • Six popular instant...
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Researchers are planning to conduct an experiment at the University of Reading to see if humans can be fooled into thinking they are talking with another human, when in fact they will be talking with a machine. The experiment is a homage to mathematician, logician and cryptographer Alan Turning, who originally proposed the Turing Test, in which a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test."Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse...
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Forget David Blaine's recent antics of hanging upside down for 60 straight hours in New York City's Central Park. The real challenge of human endurance commenced yesterday morning about a mile south of Blaine's stunt, in the middle of Times Square. There in a makeshift "plexi-glass living room" for the world to see, eight brave souls commenced a competition to determine who is the world's greatest couch potato. The Netflix Movie Watching World Championship: The Quest for the Popcorn Bowl underway in New York City (Credit: Gothamist)The contest is sponsored by Netflix, and the winner takes home "a $10,000 cash prize, a lifetime subscription to Netflix and the first-ever Popcorn Bowl trophy."...
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With Windows 7 slated for either late 2009 or early 2008, those of us foolish enough to buy into Microsoft's hype over Windows Vista Ultimate Extras are probably running out of time in which we might see a really useful Extra come down the pipe. The latest set of underwhelming Extras were released last week, so quietly we sure didn't notice. Microsoft announced them in a blog post on the official Windows Vista blog. The new release includes: Microsoft Tinker: Microsoft Tinker is a casual game that provides players with short puzzle game play sessions set in a warm, calming environment. Ultimate Extras Sounds from Microsoft Tinker: Based on the positive feedback we received from the release of...
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It appears that a bug in a network driver used in the kernel of the latest alpha release of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro is damaging Intel network controllers, sometimes irreparably.In bug #263555 on the bugs.launchpad.net website titled, "[intrepid] 2.6.27 e1000e driver places Intel ICH8 and ICH9 gigE chipsets at risk", it is noted that the NVRAM on Intel 82566 and 82567 based LAN controllers is being corrupted, but the bug seems to have affected only notebook users at this point..."In some circumstances it appears possible for the 2.6.27-rc kernels to corrupt the NVRAM used by some Intel network parts to store data such as MAC addresses.This is limited to the new e1000e driver, and reports...
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Don't expect this issue to go away anytime soon. We know many are (understandably) upset over the DRM used on the critically-acclaimed game Spore, not just because of SecuROM but also because of the "three activations limitation" and one account per CD key (which was not noted in the manual; in fact the opposite was said in the manual!). And hey, if the game allows you to create the creatures you want, why not create a protest creature, eh? A look at Sporepedia (Spore's official encyclopedia of creatures) shows that users aren't shy about expressing their displeasure. A search for DRM, for example, leads to a ton of creatures, one shown above. A typical "Description" is given above --- "Get rid...
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There's something about the machine. Some folks have a passion for things that fly, while others, an affinity for things that float. However, nearly everyone, young, old, male, female, can appreciate a seriously stylish ride. It's probably somewhere within those four wheels, that freedom speaks. Perhaps your inner child, in adolescent transition from being house-bound and ever-reliant on your parents, yearns for the excitement that only a new automobile can bring. From Little Red Corvette, to Mustang Sally, Little Deuce Coupe, Low Rider and Bitchin' Camaro, over the years folks have sung the praises of the automobile and there is little question, its appeal seems...
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Scientists in Pisa, Italy claim to have set a new world record for the fastest wireless data transmission. They report that during an uninterrupted 12-hour experiment, they were able to achieve throughput speeds above 1.2 Terabits per second; which they say beats the previous wireless data transmission speed record of 160 Gigabits per second by Korean scientists. The researchers claim that speeds of this magnitude can typically only be achieved using fiber optics. The technology that the Pisa scientists utilized to achieve such high bandwidth, actually shares a significant similarity with fiber optics: Both technologies use optical communications. Unlike Wi-Fi or microwave communications, which...
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As we wrote earlier, Wilmington, N.C. was getting to be the victim, er, volunteer city in a full-on digital TV experiment. What was the expectation? Well, the hope was that it would be a smooth transition, especially since Wilimington has a lower percentage of residents who would be affected by the changeover. But it sure as heck wasn't smooth, after the switch was thrown on Monday at 12 noon EDT.The test in Wilmington, where officials had made a concerted effort to get the word out about the switch, is a good indication that more education is needed. According to the Journal, by mid-afternoon roughly 74 calls had been placed to two TV stations, WSFX-TV, a Fox affiliate, and...
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As the Yahoo! shareholders meeting on August 1st rapidly approaches, Yahoo! is preparing. They sent a letter to their shareholders on Thursday, urging them to vote against a proposal by Carl Icahn which could result in the unseating of some of all of the Board of Directors. The letter, from CEO Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock was also filed with the SEC Thursday afternoon. The letter is pretty long, but pretty contentious as well. There's no doubt that the battle has just begun. Some high (or low) lights: Carl Icahn bought his stock two months ago for an estimated average cost of less than $25 per share. He is well-known as a corporate agitator with a short-term approach to his investments...
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IBM Introduces the Industry's Fastest One Terabyte Storage Tape DriveNew IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive Delivers New Capacity and Performance for Clients ARMONK,NY - IBM today introduced the industry’s fastest one terabyte (TB) storage tape drive, which will enable clients to protect and archive more information with less cost and less energy usage - the highest capacity and performance of any tape drive in the market.The new IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive will be able to store up to one TB of uncompressed data per tape cartridge and with a native data rate of 160 megabytes per second (MB/s), storage backups can be completed up to 54 percent faster than the previous generation...
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Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the "industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives." The company claims that it is able to greatly increase the areal density of its drive substrates by utilizing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Wikipedia states that PMR is "capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording." Credit: Wikipedia Seagate's latest desktop-class hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, will be available in a 1.5TB capacity starting in August. The 3.5-inch drive is made up of four 375GB platters and has a 7,200-rpm rotational speed. It has...
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ASETEK FIRST WITH LIQUID COOLING SOLUTION FOR AMD’S “HOT” NEW ATI RADEON HD 4870 GRAPHICS PROCESSOR CARDS AND ASETEK ANNOUNCES LCLC LIQUID COOLING SOLUTION FOR NVIDIA’S LATEST GEFORCE GTX 200 FAMILY OF GRAPHICS PROCESSORS We'll be honest: why bother with just one press release when two will work? After all, there have been two recent "hot" video card announcements, and both are in serious need of some cooling.First up, we have NVIDIA's GTX200 family of GPUs. According to Asetek:Asetek announced today the availability of its OEM-ready, LCLC liquid cooling solution for nVidia's new GeForce GTX 200 family of graphics cards. Asetek's unique liquid cooling solution provides nVidia's GTX...
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Toshiba recently announced that its lightweight Portégé R500 ultraportable laptop is now available with a 128GB solid state drive (SSD). With this new, but pricey option, Toshiba claims that the Portégé R500-S5007V is now "the world's lightest laptop with a 128GB SSD and DVD SuperMulti drive." That might sound impressive upon first blush, but it's actually a rather hollow claim, as there are very few--if any--other 128GB SSD-based laptops on the market right now. But, we thought we would use this opportunity to proclaim HotHardware.com as the world's favorite tech enthusiast site among HotHardware.com editors.The Portégé R500 has been around for a year or so now, but still remains one the...
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The future of high-performance computing might very well depend on graphics cards. It's not just CPUs that are crunching numbers faster and faster. Today's GPUs are just as efficient at performing floating-point calculations--perhaps even more so, especially when special floating-point hardware is integrated directly into the GPUs: "At the International Supercomputing Conference, AMD (NYSE:AMD) today introduced its next-generation stream processor, the AMD FireStream 9250, specifically designed to accelerate critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC), mainstream and consumer applications. Leveraging the GPU design expertise of AMD’s Graphics Product Group, AMD FireStream 9250 breaks...
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