Tag Archive for 'computers'

SuperSpeed USB Data Transfer Demo Shows Blazing Speed

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on August 22, 2008
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There are a couple of things we all want from our computers - less wires and more speed. Our beloved USB connection can provide both of these thanks to wireless USB and the coming USB 3.0 specification. USB 3.0 promises data transfer speeds up to 4.8 Gbps. USB 3.0 was first announced at Intel’s IDF 2007. At the time, it was first announced the specifications are expected to be finalized in the middle of 2008 and devices are expected to hit market 2009.

A USB 3.0 data transfer demo at Intel’s IDF 2008 has proven that the specification is a little closer to becoming a reality. Fresco Logic has demonstrated data transfer using USB 3.0 for the first time at IDF 2008. The company employed a self-developed software development platform to achieve SuperSpeed data transfer speeds of 350MBytes/s or 2.8Gbit/s using its own USB 3.0 host and device controller IP. To put this into perspective, this is about 60% of its theoretical speed of 4.8Gbit/s. The platform is connected to the PC through a PCI Express port and used Xilinx Inc’s Field Programmable Gate Array.
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MSI GX620/GX720 Gaming Laptop

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on August 5, 2008
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This is the latest gaming laptop from MSI, the GX620/GX720. Both have the Turbo Drive Engine which allows the Intel® Core™2 Duo processor goes 15% faster. They both come with 320 GB HDD, up to 4 GB DDR2 RAM, Blu-Ray reader (optional), MSI’s VIVID Image Enhancement Technology, the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 3D graphics card, and Dolby® 7.1 digital surround sound. Both were housed in an alloy case with strong red accents. It is definitely a laptop for hardcore gamers. More pictures after the break.



[via TechFresh]

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Lawsuit Raises Questions About Private E-Mail at Work

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on July 2, 2008
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When he was fired, Scott Sidell was angry enough. Then he found out that his former employer was reading his personal Yahoo e-mail messages, after he had left the company.

In a lawsuit that he filed in May against Structured Settlement Investments, the finance company he used to run, Sidell claims that executives at the company went so far as to read e-mail messages that he had sent to his lawyers discussing his strategy for winning an arbitration claim over his lost job.

“It’s kind of like the other side gets your playbook or they’re spying on your locker room,” said Russell Green, a lawyer representing Sidell. He said that his client was now using a new e-mail address.

The lawsuit filed by Sidell in U.S. District Court in Connecticut involves an unsettled area of the law, where changes in technology create tension between expectations of personal privacy and companies’ rights to monitor the equipment they provide to employees. The case’s unusual combination of facts, which are in dispute, paves the way for a decision that could help set a precedent for dealing with personal e-mail at work.

The law governing e-mail communications is still evolving. Generally, courts have found that employers can monitor employees’ e-mail communications on company computers. But courts have also recognized greater privacy protection for e-mail messages sent using personal, Web-based e-mail accounts. For example, this month a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled that personal text messages sent on two-way pagers provided to police officers in Ontario, California, were protected from the department.

Sidell’s case gives the courts an opportunity to address other questions, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “This case raises a lot of new issues that reflect the changing place of e-mail…

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Lithuanian Web Sites Met with Cyber Attack

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Hackers attacked about 300 Web sites in Lithuania during the weekend, defacing them with Soviet symbols and anti-Lithuanian slogans, officials said Monday.

The sabotage of the Web sites occurred two weeks after Lithuania, a former Soviet republic, outlawed the display of Soviet symbols. The ban touched off new tensions with Russia.

Lithuanian officials did not directly accuse Russian hackers of initiating the attacks, but said they had come from foreign computers and were most likely related to the ban.

Last year, Web sites in Estonia, another Baltic nation and former Soviet republic that has rocky relations with Russia, were bombarded with cyberattacks after Estonian officials removed a statue of a Red Army soldier from the center of the capital, Tallinn, provoking violent disturbances.

Some Estonian officials contended that Russia was behind the attacks, but the Kremlin said it had no role in them.

During the weekend in Lithuania, Web sites of government agencies, political parties and businesses were defaced with the hammer-and-sickle symbol and five-pointed stars, as well as derisive and profane anti-Lithuanian slogans, said Rytis Rainys, a Lithuanian official.

Most of the Web sites were restored by Monday.

Meanwhile, relations between Russia and Estonia also appeared to worsen during the weekend.

On Sunday, the Estonian president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, walked out of a conference in Russia after a member of the Russian Parliament harshly criticized him. The Russian, Konstantin Kosachyov, accused Ilves of stirring up pro-independence sentiment among Russia’s Finno-Ugric minority and condemned Estonia’s treatment of its sizable Russian minority.

The conference was focused on Finno-Ugric culture. Last year, Ilves was barred from attending the conference in Russia, though Estonia is one of only three countries, along with Finland and Hungary, with a majority Finno-Ugric population.

After walking out of the conference on Sunday, Ilves told The Associated Press that Kosachyov’s charges were absurd….

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Chips for Mobile World Pose Challenge to Intel

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From mainframes to minicomputers and then personal computers, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.

That is why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cell phones.

An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-size circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now common. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.

As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cell phone. Many expect the resulting effect to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cell phone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed — at which Intel excels — is no longer the most important factor. For a cell phone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.

The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost 30 years.

Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just last month at Computex, an electronics trade show in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long…

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Chips for Mobile World Pose Challenge to Intel

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on July 2, 2008
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From mainframes to minicomputers and then personal computers, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.

That is why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cell phones.

An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-size circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now common. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.

As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cell phone. Many expect the resulting effect to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cell phone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed — at which Intel excels — is no longer the most important factor. For a cell phone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.

The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost 30 years.

Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just last month at Computex, an electronics trade show in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long…

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Adobe Joins with Google, Yahoo to Search Flash Files

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on July 1, 2008
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Adobe Systems on Tuesday announced a new initiative with Google and Yahoo to improve search results for dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to enhance indexing of the Flash file format and uncover information currently undiscoverable by search engines.

This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player, according to the companies. That means RIA developers and Web-content producers won’t need to amend their content to make it searchable.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the platform business unit at Adobe.

Understanding the Flash Challenge

An openly published specification describes the SWF format used to deliver rich applications and interactive content in Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers.

Although search engines already index static text and links within these files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been difficult because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.

Adobe is initially working with Google and Yahoo to improve searches, Wadhwani said, and also intends to broaden its effort to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.

Better Indexing

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology in its search engine. As a result, millions of existing RIAs and dynamic Web content that utilize Adobe Flash are searchable without changes.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with…

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Laptop: The Best Bet in Today’s Computer Market

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on July 1, 2008
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If there’s a recent grad in your house, or you’re one of the many buyers who think they can get a better deal at midyear than during the holidays, chances are good that you’re looking for a computer. And your chances of finding a good one for a reasonable price are good indeed.

For that we can thank Moore’s Law, which should more accurately be called Moore’s Bubble. Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, predicted decades ago that the number of transistors that engineers could cram onto a wafer of silicon would double every 18 months for the foreseeable future.

Moore’s Bubble has created a market for ever more powerful computers at lower prices, not to mention a generation of cheap, pocket-sized gadgets.

Let’s talk about the best computer choice for your student — or for you. Thanks to Mr. Moore, it’s likely to be a laptop machine today, rather than a desktop. And if you don’t like an idea of a laptop because the screen and keyboard are too small, here’s my advice: buy a laptop, hook up a keyboard, monitor and mouse, and use it as a desktop machine.

Laptops, of course, offer portability, and that increases the price. But on the whole, when the average price of a computer is now in the $600 to $700 range, a 20 percent to 30 percent premium for portability doesn’t mean as much as it did when PCs were selling for $1,500 to $2,000.

There are four general classes of laptops on the market today, and picking the one that’s right for you is more important than a particular brand or specifications.

At the highest, and least portable end, are desktop replacement machines. They can do everything a desktop computer can do….

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How Nokia’s Symbian Move Helps Google

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Nokia rocked the wireless industry June 24 with news it would purchase the portion of Symbian, a maker of mobile-phone software, that it didn’t already own — and then give away the software for nothing.

The prospect of free software would surely lure users away from competing cell-phone software makers including Google, which in the past year threw its hat into the cell-phone software ring by spearheading the creation of Android, an operating system for wireless devices. Or so the argument runs.

But Nokia’s move may play right into Google’s hands, by helping to nurture a blossoming of the mobile Web and spur demand for all manner of cell-phone applications — and most important, the ads sold by Google. “There’s nothing to say that this isn’t what Google’s plan was all along,” says Kevin Burden, research director, mobile devices at consultancy ABI Research. “They might have wanted a more open device environment anyway. This might have been Google’s end game.”

Opening the Airwaves

Google, which makes money from ads placed on Web pages and alongside search results, stands to benefit from anything that helps spread the use of the Web — be it on computers or the advanced cell phones known as smartphones that run Symbian software. With the desktop search market showing signs of slowing, the company needs to ramp up usage of its applications from mobile devices. U.S. mobile search ad sales are expected to rise to $1.4 billion in 2012 from $33.2 million in 2007, according to consulting firm Kelsey Group.

But in the U.S. market, Google has long been hampered in getting its applications onto cell phones for a variety of reasons. To now, Web search on phones has been too slow or awkward, mobile data plans and smartphones are often expensive, and carriers and cell-phone makers place restrictions on which…

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Google Data Take Aim at Web Surfers for Targeted Ads

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Google, with its deep reservoir of data about online behavior, gathered by tracking hundreds of millions of computers, is for the first time testing ways to use some of that information to aim advertising at Web surfers who use its search engine.

Ads that a person sees on one Google search may be influenced by what was searched a few minutes earlier. Searching for “scuba,” then something else, and then “vacations” could pull up ads for diving trips, for example.

This change in Google’s approach was discovered by Gene Munster, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray, who this year started a series of tests looking at which ads were displayed in a series of queries on Google’s search engine. Google assigns every computer that visits its sites a unique number, known as a cookie, and records searches and other activities in an unimaginably large file with those cookies.

The company had previously said that it had not used any of that information to draw inferences about users for the purpose of selecting ads to show them.

Google changed its privacy policy a few years ago and warned users that it might capture personal information about them for reasons that include “the display of customized content and advertising.” Last year, Google started looking at the immediately previous search when considering ads. Google did not need to use its cookies for this because Web browsers report the address of the previous site visited to the current site being visited. And in the case of a search, that address contains the search terms.

Nick Fox, a director of product management who looks after ads on Google’s search site, said the company was now testing the use of more search queries in its ad targeting. He did not describe how it was doing that. But Internet experts said that…

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