Hasta La Gadget!

Sure, there’s not much chance of popping down to your local hypermarket and picking up something with a Power7 roaring inside, but there’s also nothing stopping you from a bit of vicarious investigation, now is there? IBM’s eight-core, 1.2 billion-transistor Power7 chips have begun shipping as promised, with the entry-level Power 750 Express starting at a few bucks over $34,000. That offers you some truly supreme computing power, as each of the eight cores can run four simultaneous threads for up to 32 parallel tasks, with 8MB of embedded DRAM (acting as L3 cache) per core. The top-tier POWER 780 system maxes out with either eight 3.8GHz eight-core chips or eight 4.1GHz quad-core units, allied to a maximum of 2TB of DDR3 RAM and up to 24 SSDs — though you’ll have to call IBM to find out the price (presumably so that a trained professional can counsel you after hearing the spectacular number). Watch the video after the break while we try to cajole IBM into sending us one for benchmarking.

Continue reading IBM specs out Power7 systems, starts shipping them to your local server farm

IBM specs out Power7 systems, starts shipping them to your local server farm originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Square is an iPhone credit card payment system from Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and it has just entered public beta. Square lets anyone with an iPhone accept payments from a credit card using an iPhone app and a small card-reader dongle which plugs into the iPhone’s headphone jack. Square is different from other solutions because it is designed for individuals, not big-business. All you need to start is the widget and an account at Square. Check the video:

All you do is enter the cash sum, swipe and have your “customer” sign the screen with their finger. If they are a Square member, too, you can see a picture on-screen to check they really are who they say they are. The buyer can have a receipt sent to them via SMS or email.

It all looks super-slick and even fun (when was the last time you said that about paying by credit card), but the real revolution will come if this goes mainstream. There are more than 40 million iPhones in the world, which is a huge market. Imagine paying the hot-dog guy with your Visa, or having the girl-scouts swipe your card at their lemonade stand. All those small transactions that still use cash are covered.

If you want to try it out, you’ll need to join the line by submitting your email address. Right now, terms and condition (and the cut presumably taken by Square) are still under wraps, but this could be the beginning of the end for cash, in the credit-card crazy USA, at least.

Square [Squareup]

What could jaded Crave writer Matt Hickey buy himself to attract the perfect geeky girl? Vote in our poll–it’s almost Valentine’s Day and he needs your help.

Vodafone in the UK has introduced a range of SIM-only tariffs. Hands up if you can guess why. Yes, you at the back there, speak up. That’s right. The iPhone. A gold star for you.

In the UK, you can now get an iPhone from pretty much any carrier, which is good news for new customers. If you already have an iPhone, though, a new handset is little incentive to switch, so Vodafone’s new plans make a lot of sense. There is of course a confusion of different rates and options, but it boils down to this: All plans except the cheapest £10 ($15) per-month option have unlimited texts. Paying anything above £20 also gets you 500MB of data, and you will only be on-contract for thirty days.

Choose to sign up for a year and £25-per-month also gets you a gig of data and 900 minutes of talking. There are more variations, but they’re almost all the same as these.

Those are pretty good deals, although not as good as the almost unlimited data you get from UK telco O2 even on the pay-as-you-go iPhone plan. This is what happens when the market is opened up to competition.

What this also hints at is the future for the iPad. In the US there is already an AT&T deal in place, but as the iPad will come unlocked, we imagine pretty much every GSM provider in the world will be offering up SIM-only, data-only plans. And those plans should be a lot easier to understand: Price and bandwidth limits are about the only differences that count. Here’s hoping there’s a price war.

SIM only plans [Vodafone]

This dazzling e-book is a must-have for “Cat” fans young and old. Same goes for two companion apps: “Dr. Seuss’s ABC” and Dr. Seuss Camera–The Cat in the Hat Edition. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10452032-233.html” class=”origPostedBlog”iPhone Atlas/a/p