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Intel is now shipping their new 1.66GHz Atom N280 processors to PC makers—a chip should give netbooks a performance boost with HD video. The 1.66GHz N280 is only a 0.06GHz jump over its N270 processor, but the 667MHz front-side bus and the pairing of the GN40 chipset with its hardware-based 720p HD video decoder is really where its at. That will lead to better HD viewing with less power consumption. However, Nvidia is still looming looming on the horizon with their Atom-ion plaform and its full on 1080p capability. If you simply can't wait for that to go down, the Eee PC 1000HE will be the first netbook to ship with the N280/GN40 combo and is now available for pre-order. [PC World via Wired Gadget Lab] Source[gizmodo]
The embattled OLPC program, already reeling from job cuts and salary decreases, is making one final attempt to stay afloat: Open source everything and hope enough companies copy the design to make it profitable. The news was delivered by OLPC frontman Nicholas Negroponte himself, during remarks at this week's TED 2009 conference. Blogger Ethan Zuckerman, reporting from TED, said Negroponte hopes the new open source hardware design will be "something that everyone copies." "Commercial markets will go to no end to stop you. It's sort of a tragedy," Negroponte said. "So the future of One Laptop Per Child is to go 'from uppercase to lower case,' to 'build something that everyone copies.'" According to Negroponte, the open design will lead to companies worldwide creating 5 to 6 million machines, per month, in three years time. That's a lot of little mean green machines with those weird alien wifi antennas. And while this technically sounds like more of a licensing deal than true "open source," it will be interesting to see what companies cook up using the OLPC design over the next few years. If it catches on, that is. [Ethan Zuckerman via CNET] Source[gizmodo]
According to an ars technica source (who has no track record with insider knowledge), Windows 7 pricing will start at $200 and grow from there. UDPATE: ars has retracted this story. • Windows 7 Starter: $199 • Windows 7 Home Premium: $259 • Windows 7 Professional: $299 • Windows 7 Ultimate: $319 Our gut response is that $200 is just too high for both Windows 7 Starter (which, incidentally, is not supposed to be purchasable by anyone but OEMs) and Home Premium—and that the entire price range is too compressed (four versions within $120 just seems like a waste of everyone's time). But what do we know? How much would you pay for a Home Premium version of Windows 7? [ars technica] UPDATE: As we said before the jump, ars has since retracted this story. Source[gizmodo]
Passing around the salt and pepper isn't any kind of strain on our bodies, but what if you could roll it on the table instead of lifting it? Isn't that what the first cave man envisioned when he "invented" the wheel? Yes, I believe it is. Hit stores in March '09. [Menu.as via Trendsnow via Dvice] Source[gizmodo]
The period that Sprint customers can escape from their contracts without paying early termination fees has been extended to March 15th. Although, you might want to hold tight with the Palm Pre on its way. [BGR] Source[gizmodo]
Who said whiny bloggers can't get anything done? Microsoft admits they screwed up with the User Account Control security hole, and how they responded to it. It'll be patched in the next Windows 7 release. Here's what that patch entails: First, the UAC control panel will run in a high integrity process, which requires elevation. That was already in the works before this discussion and doing this prevents all the mechanics around SendKeys and the like from working. Second, changing the level of the UAC will also prompt for confirmation. In other words, a script you download can't disable User Account Control without you getting a warning flag that it's being disabled. Even if Microsoft did resist at first, it definitely deserves props for listening to users and making the changes in the end, even if on one level (absolute consistency) it was kind of right. [Engineering Windows 7 via Technologizer] Source[gizmodo]
After the aggressively lame "unveiling" we were all subjected to yesterday, details have finally emerged about the $10 Sakshat "laptop." It's not a laptop! Or much of anything, really. The thing, as described by the Times of India: A storage device containing megabytes of data info which can be accessed by a user by connecting this device to a laptop. Oh. That description sounds an awful lot like a USB drive, observed through computer-illiterate eyes. However, the only picture available of the device shows a small white box with lots of attached cabling, indicating that there's more happening here than simple storage. You know, something exciting, like networked storage! Either way, FAIL. This whole fiasco was compounded by a few factors: deliberate misinformation by people close to the project, the complete and utter incompetence of the Indian tech press (we still don't even have a solid idea what this thing is) and the condescending eagerness of Western news outlets to believe that such a product, which would have been dismissed as totally impossible if announced here, was inexplicably plausible because it was coming from the mysterious foreign land of India. Whatever the case, there is no $10 laptop, and there probably never will be—at least not from this project. [Times of India, photo via ITCafe] Source[gizmodo]
Are we really this hard up for gasoline? Are you absolutely certain that there's no other way?? In truth, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company has teamed up with those E-Fuel guys we told you about. E-Fuel has developed a system/machine to turn simple sugar and yeast into alcohol and then ethanol. (Really, it's not so different from brewing beer.) Sierra Nevada is installing an EFuel100 MicroFueler in-house to turn 1.6 million gallons of otherwise discarded yeast for brewing (yearly) into the source ingredients of what we're sure is a very, very tasty high grade ethanol gasoline. We can drink to that. (beer, not ethanol) Source[gizmodo]
Google's released Latitude, a Maps tool that allows for automatic tracking of friends in real time, using a laptop, Symbian 60, Blackberry, WinMo and soon, iPhone or Android. galleryPost('googlelatitudem', 14, ''); Laptops and cellphones (when not using GPS) can locate to a fair level of accuracy using geotagged Wi-Fi and cellular tower points in a database that Google's collected on its own, perhaps while doing Streetview photography. Or you can set your location manually. Google told me that there's no set standard for how often the map updates your location. Rather, they have an algorithm that depends on how often the device has moved, historically, and how much battery your device has left. You can also sign out of the service entirely, and set per user preferences on whether or not certain friends can see your location at all, or if only on city-levels of accuracy. Google says its been useful for family members to find out if they're stuck in traffic, or on their way home. I tested the service with some people I know, but its been hard to say if its useful for a guy who has loved ones in generally predictable places. I generally know where my friends are, more or less, or can find out by texting them. I'd probably use this service more often while skiing or picking up friends at the airport, but not day to day. I mean, sure, I can turn off my privacy, but wouldn't people used to seeing your location at all times be suspicious if you suddenly turned off permissions when you want privacy? Then again, maybe it would be nice to know when my father is playing golf in HK (all the time) or when Lisa is eating at her favorite place in Tokyo for Ramen, or where my brother is on tour with his band. That would be interesting, I suppose. But most of the time, most of us are in front of our computers. Until we're not. And that's where the phone clients come in. Most phones will be able to keep the map location updated in the background. Except the iPhone. What the iPhone users can do, as a work around, is to lock the phone with the Google app running. That'll keep the phone updating until batteries die. The Blackberry, WinMo and Symbian phones and laptops/Desktops can use Latitude now by downloading the most recent version of Google Maps or hitting Http://google.com/latitude. The iPhone gets it with an updated version of the increasingly powerful Google app, soon, as does the Android powered G1. Source[gizmodo]
20 petaflops. That's the speed rating of IBM's slated Sequoia supercomputer, the future world's fastest supercomputer that promises to be faster than every system on the Top500 supercomputer list, combined. So what's all that actually mean? IBM offered us some more tangible ways to wrap your mind around 20 quadrillion mathematical processes per second. • If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour. • 20 petaflops could offer a 50x improvement in our capability to predict earthquakes, allowing scientists to predict an earthquake's effects on a building-by-building basis across an area as large as Los Angeles County. • 20 petaflops could also provide a 40x improvement in our capability to monitor and forecast weather. This would allow forecasters to predict local weather events that affect areas 100 meters to one kilometer in size, down from their current ten-kilometer ability. The Sequoia will be powered by 1.6 million cores (specific 45-nanometer chips in development) and 1.6 petabytes of memory. It will be housed in 96 refrigerators spanning roughly 3,000 square feet. It's for the U.S. Government who will use the system for "uncertainty quantification (UQ) studies" and weapon science calculations. [IBM Supercomputing] Source[gizmodo]
If digital distribution is going to be held off for another year, Blu-ray players are going to need to achieve some serious market penetration at a rather difficult time. VIZIO's $200 VBR100 should help when it releases in a few months, but could be swiftly undercut by a predicted flood of $150 drives stated to be inbound from a number of other industry players, including Lite-On. These "white-box" drives will probably be short on features, but so too were the cheap DVD players that killed off the VCR, and nobody thought twice about that. If all goes according to plan look for stacks of affordable drives to start appearing at whatever retailers are still in business later this year. via [engadget]
Researching and purchasing a new car these days can be one of the most stressful situations you can go through. By the time you've spent hours online trying to find the right car for you and figured out how much you're willing to spend, the time you spend at the lot wears you down even more. Now, the entire car buying process becomes more personal and is no longer stressful. With Autotropolis.com you can get the information you need about new cars and used autos with the click of a mouse, leading you to find the best deal around on a new vehicle.
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If you have an RFID-lojacked passport but don't keep it in a faraday cage wallet, this video of Chris Paget's war-driving exploits—plucking information off them from afar—should make you think real hard about it. Cruising through downtown San Francisco in his car with a $250 homebrew RFID reader setup consisting of a Symbol XR400 RFID reader and a Motorola AN400 patch antenna stuck to the side of his Volvo, he snagged the info off of two passports in just 20 minutes. The point, he says, is "mainly to defeat the argument that you can't do it in the real world, that there's no real-world attack here, that it's all theoretical." The range of his gear is about 30 feet, which is plenty of clearance. He plans to release the source code of his software next month—not the first time he's tried to publicly discuss his methods and the dangers of RFID embedded in personal IDs. It also won't be the first time the government denies it's really an issue, either. [The Register via Gadget Lab] Source[gizmodo]
How do you transport a downed but still intact jet from its landing place to a salvage yard? By going through New Jersey. (Note: instructions only valid if Jet crashed in lower 48.) [Jalopnik]
Obama won the fight to keep email and his BlackBerry. Now, knowing the president's email address is a privilege reserved for the truly elite. The NYT explains this, and other juicy details about Obama's email.
We have all seen this picture below of him using a BlackBerry since becoming president, though what he is holding is "actually a more sophisticated, encrypted variation." Biden has one just care about it.
The people who know Obama's top secret email address are exceedingly few: Biden, White Home chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, senior adviser David Axelroad, press secretary Robert Gibbs, a few other top advisers and a select group of friends from Chicago. Even some cabinet members, like Defense Secretary Robert Gates don't have his email address. And, it's likely that his top secret email address will be changed on a regular basis.
If you're lucky enough to get an email from him, it's encrypted in such a way that it cannot be forwarded to your parents, or anyone. No attachments will get through, either.
Left sadly unanswered, however, is the greatest question of all: Does Oprah, formerly the most important person in America whose name starts with O, have his email address? [NYT, Top Image: Pete Souza/The White Home]
Sunday, February 8, 2009
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