Mushkin Interview and Tour 2011
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Alpenföhn Unveils Peter VGA Cooler
Alpenföhn today unveiled its latest VGA cooler, named the Alpenföhn Peter. The new cooler boasts a maximum cooling capacity of 420W, making it perfect for cooling high-end video cards such as the AMD Radeon HD 6970 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580. The Alpenföhn Peter consists of twelve 6mm nickel-plated copper heatpipes supported by eighty-four aluminum fins, enabling effective heat dissipation. In addition the VGA cooler can support up to four 140mm fans on the fan rail. The Alpenföhn Peter will be bundled with thirty small heatsinks to cool components on the graphics card, along with multiple mounting brackets to ensure compatibility with most video cards. The Alpenföhn Peter VGA cooler will be available in mid-May for around US$80 (€54.90).
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Amazon MP3 Prices Fall Even More
As the economy continues its endless fall downwards, more people are seeing that torrenting is the cheapest and though not usually the quickest or easiest, it is the most cost effective. Amazon is looking to change that though and also poise competition for iTunes by bringing its songs, that are the chart toppers, for a mere 0.69 dollars a piece, 20 cents less than previously offered. This still beats out the iTunes offerings, with most of the same songs on the Apple side being listed around $1.24, which is almost double of what one chart topper song costs right now on Amazon. With all of its offerings, including the new video service it has launched, it seems like Amazon is slowly getting its market more broad and extreme, putting competition on a vast amount of companies.
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Homeland Security, FBI, and Others Join Investigation of PlayStation Network Hack
Earlier this week we reported the news that Sony confirmed its PlayStation Network had been hacked and our personal information was taken. At the time, the company said it was working with an outside security firm to investigate the matter, but now it seems as if things are getting a bit more intense. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Trade Commission, 22 state attorney generals, and now the US Department of Homeland Security have all joined the investigation to look into who hacked the PSN. That hack compromised the personal information of some 77 million accounts though currently it looks as if credit card information is safe. The reason all these federal agencies are joining the investigation is that some of those 77 million PSN accounts could be linked to government officials, businesses, and financial institutions. The matter is even more serious and perhaps with all these agencies investigating, we will be getting closer to figuring out exactly who did the hack.
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NVIDIA Makes It Official, SLI for the AMD Platform
I know, this may be old news for many of you with all the rumors that have cropped up over the last few weeks, but now it is official. NVIDIA has just announced that it is licensing its SLI technology for the AMD platform, effectively meaning AMD's upcoming Bulldozer chips can make do with a pair of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA announced that top motherboard manufacturers will be able to incorporate SLI technology on AMD 990FX, 990X, and 970 motherboard chipsets, with ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock being mentioned by name as launch partners. NVIDIA also said that more manufacturers will come on board later, it is just those first four who will have SLI motherboards out of the gate. The move makes sense for NVIDIA, since it will be able to have SLI on every platform now and could mean that NVIDIA believes the Bulldozer chips will compete with the new Intel chips. Either way, NVIDIA SLI is now officially on the AMD chipsets.
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New Proposal for Hiding Sensitive Data in Plain Sight
A joint research project between researchers of California and Pakistan Universities have brought about an ingenious new idea to improve data security. Encrypting one's data may very well keep it safe as long as the other party does not possess the data's unique encryption key. Whether one has legitimate reasons to encrypt their data or not, investigators will often deem the easily discoverable, though still encrypted, data suspicious. One new method that will truly conceal the data is to scramble the information into fragments across the drive, and since many modern Operating Systems always have some small amount of fragmentation, the sensitive data would not stand out of the ordinary. Based on test samples collected from 52 hard drives, a 160GB drive could store about 20MB worth of secret data. Investigators claim that they would be able to create a search algorithm to uncover the hidden data but the researchers still believe that if used correctly, discovering the information would be close to impossible
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Donation Peddling Robot Appears
Have you ever been walking down a city block only to be stopped every corner or so by somebody looking for some kind of money? It turns out that even beggars, or more correctly, fundraisers, will take a new form, a robotic one. The name of the new robot will be DON-8r, which was designed by Tim Pryde with the sole purpose of lightening up people's attitude towards parting with their pocket change. DON-8r is a cute little automated robot that will sit in one spot, remaining idle until a curious passer-by adds in a coin or two. The little robot will cry out for attention, repeatedly asking "Hello?" while waving its tail-like flag. When the unit detects a donation it will verbally thank the generous donator(s). Following the thanks, it will begin to move around in a random path of its choosing and even has collision detection and will let out an "Ow!" if it hits something. In an effort to prevent someone from taking the little robotic coin collector, the DON-8r will have a chaparone watching over it from a safe and nonobstructive distance. It is hard to say whether this will catch on as a permanently successful method of receiving donations but it certainly will grab the attention of newcomers for a while until these little freeloaders are seen at every other corner.
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No More S.E.T.I@Home (For Now)
The not as popular distributed computing project, S.E.T.I@Home (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) may be taking a long break. Due to funding issues the S.E.T.I radio dishes that scan for alien life are being shut down until $5 million can be raised. The array of radio dishes will be down until 2013, when more funding will arrive. This shut down couldn't have come at a worse time, as more than 1,235 planets have been found by the Kepler telescope that appear to be habitable. Although the radio dishes were shut down, there are other telescopes around the world still being used to search for life.
This doesn't mean that you can't still do your part, join the OCC Team and help search for intelligent life.
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Affordable Asus Eee Transformer Android Tablet Enters the Market
The tablet market has been brimming with competition, and now Asus adds in its affordable Eee Transformer model to stir up the pot. The Asus tablet was first announced back in January along with the MeMO and the Slate units. This particular tablet is priced very well, starting at $399 for the 16GB, whereas Apple's iPad 2 costs $100 more for its respective 16GB tablet. This Eee family tablet has NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra 2, so the tablet is not holding any punches in price/performance. The unit also comes with standard wireless N connectivity, a screen size of 10.1" boasting a resolution of 1280x800, and Bluetooth 2.1. There is an optional compatible keyboard that will allow the Transformer to double over as a notebook as well as a mini-HDMI port that will allow the device to stream its content onto a larger monitor or TV. Bottomline, the Transformer offers a decent hardware set for the price tag and should help Asus get a solid foot into the world of tablets.
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Typewriter Manufacturers Stick It Out
As many of you have heard, typewriter manufacturer Godrej and Boyce of Mumbai have closed up shop and will no longer produce anymore typewriters. It was believed that this would be the end to typewriters as we knew them, but it turns out that this technology is not ready to give up the ghost yet. A New Jersey based company, Swintec, is still selling plenty of the stubborn manual word processors. Businesses are still in need of typewriters for select tasks that cannot be carried out from a computer terminal. Swintec sells its products primarily to businesses and government clients, though all of the actual production lies overseas in places like Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. One of the largest markets for typewriters comes from the last place one would expect, prison. Swintec has contracts with 43 states worth of prisons to build specialized transparent typewriters designed to stop the concealment of contraband items inside. Pricing for its typewriter models range from $300 to $1000 dollars, and its flagship model has special features such as text editing, character storage, and is even sporting small 40-character LCD screens. Rest assured typewriter fans, this technology is not going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
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OCZ Introduces VeloDrive PCIe SSD for Businesses
It wasn't too long ago that OCZ decided to leave every segment except the SSD market, which means the company has a new line of solid state drives available. The VeloDrive PCIe SSDs are aimed at small and medium-sized businesses as well as enterprise clients by offering high performance with simplified integration. The VeloDrive can be run in hardware or software RAID mode and is available for half-height or full-height systems. The VeloDrive has a minimal impact on CPU utilization and the system's DRAM, meaning more of the VeloDrive SSDs can be installed without eating up system resources during read/write cycles. The VeloDrive PCIe SSDs feature a SandForce SF-1565 controller and deliver read speeds of 1GB/s and 130,000 4K random write IOPS. Each SSD use MLC NAND Flash memory and is available in 300, 600GB, and 1.2TB capacities.
There was no word on when the OCZ VeloDrive PCIe SSDs would be available or for how much.
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Patriot Memory Announces Torqx 2 SSD Series
Patriot Memory, one of the leaders in all things memory-related, has just announced its newest line of solid state drives, the Torqx 2. The Torqx 2 line lets users boost performance of their desktops and notebooks who still use the SATA II interface. The Torqx 2 SSDs use a new controller compared to the first models and utilize 3x-nm NAND Flash memory to acheive read speeds of 270MB/s and write speeds of 230MB/s. Patriot knows that not every computer user has a motherboard capable of supporting the new SATA III interface, so the Torqx 2 SSDs and its SATA II interface are perfect for them. Each Torqx 2 SSD is in the 2.5" form-factor and comes in capacities of 32, 64, 128, and 256GB. The entire Torqx 2 line supports TRIM technology to ensure maximum performance throughout its life.
The Patriot Torqx 2 SSDs should be available soon though no price was mentioned.
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Microsoft Posts Third Quarter Results, Revenue of $16.43 Billion
It seems every company is posting strong numbers from the last quarter, and Microsoft is no exception. Microsoft has just posted the results from its third quarter that ended on March 31st, 2011, and the numbers are pretty outstanding. The folks in Redmond posted a revenue of $16.43 billion with a net income of $5.23 billion. The revenue is an increase of thirteen percent from last year while the net income is a staggering 31% increase. Microsoft cites strong sales of Office 2010, Xbox, and Kinect as the reasons for the huge growth. The company also announced it has sold over 350 million Windows 7 licenses and its Entertainment & Devices Division grew by 60% compared to last year. Microsoft sold 2.4 million Kinects and 2.7 million Xbox 360s in the third quarter, the Xbox number being a record for Q3, but did not divulge many details on Windows Phone 7.
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Redbox to Offer Two Dollar a Day Video Game Rentals in June
I am sure you have all seen those Redbox kiosks outside the local big-box chain store and perhaps some of you have even rented a movie from one. Starting this June, you will now be able to also rent video games from Redbox. June 17th is the rollout date to over 21,000 Redbox locations nationwide, but some of you may have already been able to rent a game from one since the service rolled out to around 5,000 kiosks in late 2009. At any rate, now every Redbox location can rent a video game for two dollars a day, joining the DVDs and Blu-rays you can already rent. The games offered will be for either the PS3, Xbox 360, or Wii, which according to Redbox over 64% of all Americans have at least one of those consoles. Titles will range from top releases to games popular for the whole family.
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Using Empty TV Channels to Create Super WiFi
Ryan Guerra, a grad student at Rice University, has been trying to figure out how to extend the range of a WiFi signal to over a mile. Thanks to empty TV channels and some fancy engineering, Ryan has successfully extended the range of a WiFi signal belonging to a resident of Houston. This resident lives just on the outskirts of a free WiFi network, and since traditional WiFi signals use the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies the signal will not easily pass through the trees surrounding the resident's home. Ryan has figured out how to take the traditional WiFi signal and convert it into an empty TV channel. He calls this project "Super WiFi". Ryan starts off by using a typical 2.4Ghz WiFi card running on a Linux system and has the card's output sent through a frequency translator. The translator then shifts the 2.4GHz signal down to 563MHz which is sent to a small TV antenna on the resident's home. The signal is transmitted and eventually patched into the free WiFi connection using a local transmission tower. The reason behind the use of the empty TV channel is it uses a 563MHz signal, and that signal can easily be sent though the trees and walls surrounding the neighborhood.
The transmitter Ryan has created transmits in a 60 degree directional beam allowing anyone in its path to receive the WiFi signal. Since the transmitter is directional it also allows for a smaller more discreet TV antenna to be used on the resident's home. While the results so far have been excellent, Ryan does foresee problems in the future with existing WiFi protocols and his Super WiFi project. Fear not though, Ryan and companies like Microsoft are researching new protocols for empty TV channel use.
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Available Tags:Amazon , Hack , NVIDIA , AMD , Asus , Android , Tablet , OCZ , SSD , Microsoft , TV ,
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