Hasta La Gadget!

This week the folks at NVIDIA have unveiled several high-powered graphics cards to advance the world of desktop gaming, the tiniest of these being the GeForce GTX 700M notebook GPU. A family of four cards is being shown here, each of them with a slightly different build for different kinds of gaming setups. The builds of the devices coming with NVIDIA’s technology inside as part of this next wave of gaming notebooks will be small, too – dashing the past in which “big and heavy” were required in order to have enough power to speak of in a “gaming laptop”.

Each of the cards introduced here in NVIDIA’s new notebook line are, as they say, “Kepler top to bottom.” This means technologies like Boost 2.0, SLI, and top-of-the-line power. NVIDIA is making clear their intent to be part of the world’s most portable gaming notebooks, starting with the Razer Blade, a notebook revealed earlier today packing a GeForce GTX 765M.

The GeForce GTX 765M is a step up from the least powerful of the four cards in this family. Also included is the 760M, 770M, and 780M. The difference between these cards begins with the number of CUDA cores that sit under the hood. While both the 765M and 760M both work with 768 CUDA cores, the 770M starts in with 960 cores, and the 780M sweeps the rest with 1536 cores.

Above you’ll see a break-down of how each of these cards is different from the next: base clock speed, memory and all. You’ll be working with 1080p Ultra settings if you’ve got a 780M working for you, while a 760M will deliver 1080p High – the differences will be slight, but they’ll definitely be there.

These cards will be employing NVIDIA Optimus technology, allowing high performance graphics processing while battery life remains sustained. Optimus was created by NVIDIA at seeing IGPs deliver good battery life while failing to show GPU performance and graphics up to modern standards. With Optimus, NVIDIA is delivering a fully-automated battery optimization system that dynamically switches between the notebook’s IGP and dedicated NVIDIA GPU.

Pricing and release details for the 700M series for notebooks will be appearing soon. Stay tuned as additional notebooks begin to appear with NVIDIA’s next-generation graphics solutions under the hood – you might even be able to fit a gaming notebook in your backpack before summer is over!

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 700M aims to make gaming notebooks powerful and portable is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve seen heat maps from Foursquare before, but we haven’t seen anything from Twitter in a while. However, the micro-blogging service showed off a handful of heat maps today that map out all geotagged Tweets that make the maps look like a blue-and-white blotch of paint that spilled onto a canvas.

The maps are of Europe, as well as populous cities like New York, Tokyo, and Istanbul. What’s perhaps most impressive is that the maps are only comprised of small blue dots for each Tweet, meaning that all those Tweets merely outline the city by themselves, and you can clearly make out roads and coastlines.

The maps incorporate every geotagged Tweet since 2009, which Twitter says are in the obvious “billions,” with every dot representing a Tweet, the more Tweets there are, the brighter the blue is. The maps are really neat to look at, and they give you a sense at just how many Tweets have been sent over the last five years or so.

Twitter has a ton more of these heat maps on their Flickr page, including cities like Sydney, Boston, Seoul, Seattle, San Francisco, and Moscow, as well as the entire US and all of Puerto Rico, which are perhaps even more impressive. If you live in one of these big cities, be sure to check it out, because it’s always fun to see your hometown lit up by Tweets.

Twitter splays out heat maps with geotagged Tweets is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Turkish police reportedly used tear gas and high-pressure water hoses early Friday morning to disperse hundreds of people protesting the destruction of Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Many of the protesters had been sleeping in the park to challenge the bulldozing of trees to make way for a new development, including the construction of a shopping mall.

The hashtag #OccupyGezi lit up Twitter as the news spread quickly online. Check out some of the powerful images that have surfaced on social media from the raid and the protest:

This photo appears to show protesters being dispersed with a firehose:

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More on Video

When it comes to working the refs, no bank works harder than JPMorgan Chase.

The biggest U.S. bank by assets spent $8 million lobbying Congress on financial reform and other topics last year, outpacing every other large bank, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The second-biggest U.S. bank, Bank of America, spent just $3 million on lobbying last year, according to CRP data. That spending equates to the amount JPMorgan spent in the fourth quarter alone, MarketWatch reported on Thursday.

The second-biggest lobbying spender among banks last year was Wells Fargo, which spent $6.8 million, according to CRP. Banks are not the heaviest spenders on lobbying — JPMorgan ranked only 47th in corporate lobbying spending last year. But industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce (which spent $136 million on lobbying last year) and the Business Roundtable ($14 million) do a lot of lobbying on their behalf.

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Don't worry, this big boy isn't on a collision course.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

An asteroid the size of a small town, and its smaller satellite “moon,” are zooming past Earth this week, and you can watch on Friday afternoon as binary asteroid “1998 QE2” reaches its closet point to Earth for the next 200 years.

The 1.7-mile-long asteroid and its smaller satellite, which was just discovered this week, will come closest to Earth around 2 p.m. PT, but will still safely stay about 15 lunar distances away from us.

The stream of NASA TV embedded below will show live telescope shots of QE2, beginning at 10 a.m. PT Friday:

Editor’s note: Jump to 0:31:27 below to hear the commentators announce that the asteroid is at its closest point to Earth.

[Read more]

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