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

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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PCs Join Globally to Map the Milky Way

Milky_Way_Sloan.jpg
In the spirit of SETI@home–the decade-old distributed computing project dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life–over 17,000 people are now working together to help map the shape of the Milky Way, according to RPI (the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY).
The new MilkyWay@Home project focuses on the distribution of stars and mysterious dark matter in our own galaxy. The project uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, the same one that provides the foundation for SETI@home, to create a three-dimensional model of the Milky Way based on data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
To this end, MilkyWay@Home participants have so far combined to deliver over one petaflop of computing power. That effectively places this distributed ‘supercomputer’ at number two in the world in sheer speed, according to the report. For more information on the project, head to the main MilkyWay@home site, or grab the BOINC 6.10.21 client to participate. (Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

The Death of Cash? Square’s Personal iPhone Credit Card Reader

square-signature-screen

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]


Quotient system electronically diagnoses ADHD, oh look a bunny

Quotient system electronically diagnoses ADHD, oh look a bunnyCubicles are the site of many of the worst cases of adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), so it’s perhaps a bit ironic that Quotient’s ADHD System looks an awful lot like a cubicle on wheels. It’s an automated machine that presents a series of games and challenges for a user to participate in, all while watching that user with a pair of cameras — one up top to monitor head movement and one below to look for a bouncing leg. We think the same could be done far cheaper with a webcam and a Yurex leg odometer, but the FDA has recently seen fit to clear parent company BioBehavioral Diagnostics to start marketing this thing, so look for these to crop up in every elementary school faster than a twitchy kid can say Ritalin.

Quotient system electronically diagnoses ADHD, oh look a bunny originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Friday Poll: Best gift for a love-seeking nerd

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.

Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video)

Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video)

Say all you want about how bad your local forecast is, it’s way more accurate than our local solar forecast. The last time we checked, solar storms are said to knock out GPS temporarily sometime in the next two years — the kind of window that would make even the most suave meteorologist smirk. With the launch of the new Solar Dynamics Observatory we’re hoping NASA can shrink that window down by, oh, at least a few months. The probe lifted off yesterday, perched atop an Atlas V rocket, and is now orbiting Earth. There it will study our sun with a series of optical and magnetic sensors, beaming data back at a rate of 150MBit/sec, making us ever so slightly jealous that this thing can get a better signal in space than we can down here on the surface. The launch fireworks are embedded below for those who weren’t glued to NASA TV yesterday morning.

[Thanks, Pavel]

Continue reading Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video)

Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Vodafone Offers SIM-Only Price-Plans

vodafone-simVodafone 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]


Brother’s SV-70 e-book reader is a little bit cheaper, still $1,100

Brother's SV-70 e-book reader is a little bit cheaper, still $1,100

Remember the SV-100B “Document Viewer” from this time last year? It’s okay, we had to look it up too. With its $1,500 MSRP and exclusive release in Japan, it hardly made waves over here. We’re expecting the SV-70 to have a similarly ripple-free reception in the States, since it too probably isn’t coming here, but there’s no telling how Japanese businesspeople will take to it, ditching the Bluetooth module that gave its predecessor a bit of charm, and even the lowly 2GB microSD card that was formerly included on the way to a lower (but still high) $1,100 MSRP. Other specs remain the same, including a relatively expansive 9.7-inch, 1200 x 825 display, 100MB of internal memory, microSD expansion slot, and 83 hours worth of battery life. Why, that’s plenty of time to read even the lengthiest of pseudo-inspirational corporate memos.

Brother’s SV-70 e-book reader is a little bit cheaper, still $1,100 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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‘The Cat in the Hat’ comes back…to the iPhone

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

Doxie Scanner Sends and Shares

doxie_usbpowered_print

Doxie is a cheap, simple and easy-to-use document scanner that launched this week at the Macworld Expo. The slim, portable scanner uses USB bus-power to turn paper into PDFs, jpegs or lossless png files, and – here’s the twist – it then sends them directly off to the cloud.

The specs: scans can be done at up to 600dpi in 24bit color, and as fast as 12 seconds per page (if you turn off color and lower the resolution). That’s about it. Doxie shifts all the heavy lifting off to either your computer or the cloud, which is the reason for the small package and the lowish price.

In fact, the internet is the real point here. If you use Doxie’s cloud service, you can store pictures and documents and have their URLs shared or Tweeted automatically for you. Better is integration with existing services like Flickr and Picasa for photos, or Evernote and Google Docs for text (and subsequent OCR scanning).

If you don’t like sharing everything, the companion software will crop and straighten your photos and add them direct to Lightroom or iPhoto, and let you choose what to do with documents, too. In short, if you deal with a lot of paper, this could be a cheap and simple solution. Available late March.

Doxie scanner [Get Doxie]