IT News HeadLines (HardOCP) 31/08/2010

HP Ups the Ante for 3PAR To $2B
The back and forth bidding war between Dell and HP is getting ridiculous. Last week ended with Dell on top with a $1.8B bid. Hewlett-Packard must have held a bake sale (or two) over the weekend to come up with the extra cash for the $2B counter-offer it made this morning for 3PAR. Hewlett-Packard submitted a $2 billion offer for 3PAR on Friday morning, topping Dell's latest $1.8 billion bid for the storage technology provider. Formed in 1999 by a group of server-cluster engineers from Sun Microsystems, 3PAR offers technologies that enable enterprises to service a wide range of applications concurrently from multiple on-premise servers, virtual cloud servers, or hybrid systems that combine on-premise and off-premise elements. Comments
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Uber High-Tech Touch Screen Stove
This high-tech, touch screen stove concept is pretty damn impressive. Yes, if it was ever developed, it would be extremely expensive but the geek bragging rights would be off the charts. Thanks to our very own Earl Keim for the heads up. Comments
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ATI Brand Discontinued
There are several sources saying that AMD is finally laying the ATI brand name to rest. I know a lot of you are going to have an opinion on this so feel free to hit the link and share yours. Best of all, AMD has redesigned the stickers for its chips, and there are actually two sets. One drops all mention of even the AMD name, replacing it with the word "graphics" so when its discrete graphics cards ship in Intel boxes, the names won't clash. So goes the complex corporate maze that lies behind those ugly stickers found on all PCs.
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Civ5 Demo Releasing Same Day as Game
The Civilization V demo has been delayed until the same day as the game is released. That's a bit of a bummer, but I'm still excited they're releasing a demo. They're a rare treat these daysÂ… Firaxis apologized for the demo's delay in the aforementioned announcement, explaining, "at the time of that announcement, we expected to be able to get the demo out before the 21st, but unfortunately we weren't able to finalize it in the timeframe we had initially planned, and for that we're very sorry." Comments
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Google Plans Pay-Per-View Films
Youtube is in negotiations with Hollywood's leading movie studios to launch a pay-per-view video service by the end of the year. "Google and YouTube are a global phenomenon with a hell of a lot of eyeballs – more than any cable or satellite service," said one executive with knowledge of the plans. "They've talked about how many people they could steer to this . . . it's a huge number." Comments
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What the Dell/HP 3Par Buyout Really Means
With personal computer sales slumping as the market evolves towards handheld devices, Dell and HP have both turned towards the server market. With the server market now shifting towards cloud based computing, it's fairly obvious why both companies are fighting for 3Par. Whichever company ultimately comes out on top in the bidding war will undoubtedly incorporate 3Par's virtual storage solutions into its already robust storage portfolio. The acquisition will position either HP or Dell as a one-stop storage solution with greater production and cost efficiencies, which should make it pretty attractive for cash-strapped customers looking to pare down the number of physical servers and decentralize their data in the cloud. Comments
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Foursquare Hits 3 Million Users
Foursquare has now hit the three million mark. Co-founder Dennis Crowley recently told the LA Times that Foursquare is gaining about 180,000 users every 10 days. Some thought Foursquare was doomed when Facebook rolled out its location-based feature,Places, a few weeks ago. In turns out that via the Places API, the feature serves as a platform for services like Foursquare and Gowalla. But Foursquare's co-founder Dennis Crowleyreported that Foursquare had its biggest day of signups following Facebook's announcement. Comments
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Google Narrows Its Acquisition Focus
Google has been on a shopping spree buying up nearly anything over the past year+. Since July, however, their purchases have been strictly focused on two categories: search and social. Is Google playing defensive, or are they merely focused? In a report this week, Caris & Co.'s Sandeep Aggarwal called attention to the trend, saying that Google's purchases were becoming "more defensive," citing its Like.com purchase, its buy of social search engine Aardvark, travel search technology provider ITA Software, and social game company Slide. Comments
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New TV Show: Bad Universe
Phil Plait, the man behind the Bad Astronomy blog, has a new show on Discovery. The first episode involves imitating an asteroid impact using explosives. Who doesn't love blowing stuff up in the name of science? Comments
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Google Confirms Chrome 7 GPU Acceleration
Google has begun implementing GPU acceleration into the latest Chromium builds to "speed up its entire drawing model, including many common 2D operations such as compositing and image scaling." The foundation of the GPU acceleration in Chrome is a new (modified) sandbox process called the GPU process. Via this process, Chrome can take graphics commands from the renderer process and send them to OpenGL or Direct3D. This approach enabled Google to separate the rendering of a web page into different independent layers, such as CSS, images, videos, and WebGL or 2D canvases. Comments
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Diaspora Eyes Launch Date
The open source Facebook alternative, Diaspora, was announced back in May during all of the privacy concern issues, which seem to have mostly died out nowÂ… funny how that works. The developers have announced that it will launch on September 15th. The team said they had spent the summer "building clear, contextual sharing". "That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their co-workers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that's a hard [user interface] problem and we take it seriously." Comments
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Infared and X-ray Spectroscopy Reveals Greek Color Schemes
With the help of raking light and UV light, infrared and X-ray spectroscopy can tell which color was once applied to an object. Let's just say that these Greek statues aren't as dull as you once thought. Comments
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Play Games for Management Skills
The University of Florida is offering a two-credit course which uses Starcraft gameplay and analysis of recorded matches to develop workplace skills. In other news, management buzzwords such as "synergy" and "going concern" are being replaced by "kekeke zergrush" and "gg no re ubad" "In StarCraft you're managing a lot of different units and groups of different capacities. It's not a stretch to think of that in the business world or in the work of a healthcare administrator." Comments
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