Two Lenovo leaks in one day? Our cup runneth over. It feels like we just played with the T400s and the T400s touch just yesterday, but we did see some leaked slides forecasting a T410s for January back in June, so these images are basically right on schedule. Big changes include a couple more USB ports here and there, some cleaned-up design, and — big news — the addition of a second display-mounted ThinkLight keyboard light. That’s simply decadence, friends. No word on specs, pricing or a release date, but we’ve got a feeling we’ll be finding out more real soon.
Episode 58 of the Digital City, where we wrangle with the legal arguments over Apple vs. Psystar; show off the latest super-fancy laptop to hit our desks, the $2,000 HP Envy 15;
It may look a lot like the General Mobile DSTL1, but SciPhone’s N21 still has its very own soul. Our BFFs over at Engadget Chinese were able to wrangle one in, and naturally they took the opportunity to score a photo shoot and host it for the world to see. There aren’t too many surprises to be found, but if you’re looking for a pinch of KIRF, twin SIM slots, a 5 megapixel camera and the not-exactly-newest version of Google’s mobile operating system, you know where to look.
The New York Times reports on an Apple patent that was disclosed last month (the same day as the Windows 7 launch, incidentally) that would embed ads within the Apple OS, possibly as a way of subsidizing its hardware.
The claims are eye-opening: “A computer-implemented method for providing an advertisement in a device, the method comprising:providing an operating system of a device with at least one advertisement, the operating system configured to temporarily disable a function thereof and present the advertisement in the device while the function is disabled; and receiving a report from the device confirming that the advertisement has been presented.”
What this means, in plain English, is that an Apple device could be configured to lock down at least a portion of it until the ad itself was acknowledged, most likely through a button click. And the ads, not surprisingly, could be used to help defer the cost of the product.
“In return for paying attention to the advertisements, the user can receive a product or service for free or at reduced cost, or otherwise receive a benefit,” the patent notes. Users could also “unlock” an ad-free mode through a payment.
The Times raises the question that Apple could lose its “cool” reputation by embedding ads in the OS. It’s not clear that it will; Apple doesn’t have to act on its patents, although a significant number of them (such as multitouch gestures and the Magic Mouse) seem to end up as products of some form or another.
Okay, so maybe you didn’t need a full-on review to tell you that Fusion-io’s ioXtreme PCI Express SSD was staggeringly pricey, but at $11 per gigabyte ($895 for 80GB), you may want to turn a blind eye right now if you’re short on disposable income. If you’ve managed to continue on, then you owe it to your collective senses to give the read link a look. The gurus over at HotHardware were able to get one of these lightning fast devices in for review, and while we were always assured that performance would be mind blowing, it’s another thing entirely to see those promises proven in the lab. Critics found the card to be the “fastest overall SSD solution on the market today,” with consistent 700MB/sec reads and 300MB/sec writes. Of course, they were still anxious to get their hands on a supposedly forthcoming update to make this thing bootable, and the omission of a RAID BIOS definitely put a small damper on things; still, it’s hard to let annoyance such as those overshadow the monster performance numbers, but we’d recommend giving the full skinny a good lookin’ at before committing your child’s college education fund to a pile of NAND.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Cray XT5 — aka ‘Jaguar’ — is a computing monster with the ability to clock 1.759 petaflops (1,759 trillion calculations per second).
So just what exactly is inside this machine?
About 37,376 AMD processors, to begin with. The Jaguar has 255,584 processing cores and is built using AMD six-core Istanbul Opteron chips running at 2.6 gigahertz.
That’s a step up from the four-core AMD chips that the computer used to have.
“The most interesting thing about the Jaguar is that they have actually upgraded an existing supercomputer,” says John Fruehe, director of Opteron product marketing for AMD. “And they have managed to double its speed.”
Engineers replaced quad-core AMD processors with six-core chips (see below for a video showing the upgrade process). The nearly $20 million upgrade has created a high-performance computing system that is now deployed by the Department of Energy and housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jaguar beat IBM’s “Roadrunner” supercomputer to the top list, according to a ranking of the top 500 supercomputers in the world that will be unveiled Tuesday at a conference.
What will the world’s fastest supercomputer be used for?
The Jaguar has a system memory of 362 terabytes, which is almost three times that of the second largest system. It can read and write files at 284 gigabytes per second and uses a 10-petabyte shared file system. Most of those components remain unchanged from the earlier versions of Jaguar.
“That’s the beauty of Cray’s architecture,” says Fruehe. “Nothing else needs to be replaced.”
Upgrading the 37,376 processors inside the Jaguar took just about a week, explains Fruehe. Eight chips are housed on a board along with heat sinks. Once the heat sinks are removed, the processors are unclipped and the upgraded chips are fit in.
“It takes about five minutes to upgrade each board,” says Fruehe of the 4670 boards that the system has. “The boards are mounted in individual cabinets and they take sections offline to upgrade them.”
AMD shipped out the first batch of six-core processors in June.
To see the process up, close and personal, check out a video that shows a Cray technician upgrading the Kraken, another Cray XT5 system. The Kraken currently ranks third on the top 500 supercomputers list.
AMD says it will offer the first eight-core and 12-core x86 processors for high performance computers early next year.
This article was written on March 18, 2008 by CyberNet.
Radiohead is an English alternative rock band that has been around since 1992. Last year a big deal was made with their In Rainbows album because they were the first to sell it through their own site as a digital download and then the buyers chose the price they wanted to pay (this is similar to the approach that Nine Inch Nails is taking with their latest album). Now a big deal is being made over how Radiohead is choosing to produce a music video for the previously mentioned album… they’re turning to their fans and asking them to do the work!
It’s being called The Radiohead In Rainbows Contest, and unlike most music videos out there, the group wants an animated video. To do this, they’ve partnered with a fairly recent start-up called Aniboom. The best way to describe Aniboom is that they’re the YouTube of animation, a “cross-media, cross-platform animation content project which addresses wide audiences through a range of genres, techniques and means.”
The competition started yesterday and anybody is able to upload a storyboard (whether it be sketches or a fully developed animated video clip). Starting on April 7th, users will be able to rate the storyboards that were submitted. From there, 10 finalists will be selected and then given $1,000 to create a one minute video clip that is based upon their storyboard using songs from the In Rainbows album. Once again, users will vote and the five highest ranked clips will be presented to Radiohead. They’ll select the winner who will receive $10,000 to create a full music video.
Given all of the amateur video producers out there who submit some pretty decent content to sites like YouTube, it wouldn’t be surprising in the least to see other musicians turn to their fans and the plethora of online media sources to produce their videos.
Although Microsoft has just made its mobile marketplace available for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1, Microsoft will have to do more if it wants to reach Apple’s 100,000 apps–and counting. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10399007-12.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Download Blog/a/p
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