Hasta La Gadget!

Trains have some solid advantages over other forms of transportation: they’re fast and they’re much more environmentally friendly. But the current railway infrastructure in North America renders them nowhere near as efficient. In an attempt to remedy this, business magnate and philanthropist Warren Buffett invested a whopping $26 billion in the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.

And according to Buffet, while the move was profitable, there were other reasons for his decision to invest such a large sum of money.

“Railroads have major cost and environmental advantages over trucking, their main competitor,” he told the New York Times. “Our country gains because of reduced greenhouse emissions and a much smaller need for imported oil. When traffic travels by rail, society benefits.”

Multiple cores are old hat, particularly in the GPU world where you can have hundreds of simultaneous processing units working in concert, but multiple GPUs on the same PCB, that’s still exciting territory (not least because of the crazy thermal and power requirements that go with it). AMD and NVIDIA are set to clash horns on this field of battle once again, fishing for mindshare as much as they are for high premium sales, with the Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590, respectively. The former has already slipped out of the shadows of mystery to reveal a size slightly longer than an A4 sheet of paper, while the latter is being rumored for an unveiling at the PAX East 2011 gamer gathering. Expected GTX 590 specs include 1024 total CUDA cores, 3GB of onboard RAM with dual 384-bit memory controllers, and three DVI outputs for some single-card 3D Vision Surround gaming. This year’s PAX East is kicking off on March 11th and AMD is also looking very close to launching its part, so you should need no more than a couple of weeks’ worth of patience before everything about the latest and greatest from both camps is known.

Radeon HD 6990 pictured, GeForce GTX 590 rumored for PAX East 2011 reveal originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Joining its Intel-powered 100W cousin at CeBIT this week is MSI’s WindPad 110W, basically an AMD Brazos-powered remix of the original with a slightly different design. You’ve got an optical pad on the upper part of the right bezel that controls a mouse pointer — if you’re into that sort of thing — but hopefully you’ll be touching the lovely 10.1-inch IPS display (which it shares with the 100W) directly most of the time. We would’ve liked to have taken the skinned load of Windows 7 for a spin, but MSI had its demo unit set up on a looping video and kept it under glass or in employees’ gentle hands for the entirety of our time at the booth, so we didn’t get a great sense for performance; they’re targeting mid-year for release, though, so they’ve got some time left on the clock to put some spit and polish on the package. There’ll also be a dock available that plugs into a connector in the bottom of the tablet — it wasn’t on-hand, but the company had some prototype docks connected to WindPad 100A dummy units (showing Honeycomb on their fake displays, interestingly, even though live 100As at the show are running Froyo). Follow the break for a quick video from all angles.

Continue reading MSI WindPad 110W eyes-on (video)

MSI WindPad 110W eyes-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CNET tries out a new app that’s poised to turn your Android phone into a business device–but only when you ask it to.

Originally posted at Dialed In

Several publications report that consumers have already snatched up 400,000 3DS units, selling out in Japan since Saturday’s launch.

Originally posted at The Digital Home