Algae fuel improvements to lithium-ion battery tech
As notebook makers continue to obsess over ever-thinner designs that leave little room for batteries, dramatic improvements in battery tech may be the only way to get a full day's worth of run time out of future devices. Fortunately, lithium-ion batteries could one day be on the receiving end of an upgrade that boosts their capacity by an order of magnitude. MIT's Technology Review has published an interesting article on researchers who have been able to bolster battery capacity by switching from graphite anodes to silicon ones.
Silicon anodes aren't a new thing, but they reportedly swell to up to four times their original size during charging, which compromises the polyvinlidene fluoride binding agent used to hold them together. While scientists at Georgia Tech and Clemson haven't ...
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Windows 8 to cut boot times dramatically
Judging by our latest poll, nearly half of TR readers still shut down their PC when it's not in use. Those folks will no doubt be happy to hear that, with Windows 8, Microsoft will reduce boot times substantially.
The company says it has implemented a "fast startup mode" that's a "hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate." User sessions are closed, just like during a traditional shutdown, but the kernel session is hibernated. That kernel session has a small memory footprint, so it can be written to the disk ...
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Life after Moore's Law
Recently, I've been turning the pages of Michio Kaku's new book, Physics of the Future. While much of its content echoes what was said in his earlier work, Physics of the Impossible, one section in particular grabbed my attention: Kaku's discussion regarding the end of Moore's Law.
When transistors can no longer be made smaller, the only way to continue doubling the transistor count every two years is to build upward or outward. Stacking dies poses challenging heat dissipation and interconnect problems, while making larger ...
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Max Payne 3 to hit PCs, consoles next March
Rockstar Games has been bringing up Max Payne 3 every so often for the past few years, and it seems the game is finally getting close to a release. The company announced yesterday that Max Payne 3 will be out some time in March 2012. That's the firmest estimate so far, at least. Wikipedia points out that the title was originally scheduled for a late 2009 launch, before being postponed to 2010, then again to 2011... and yet again after that.
If Rockstar manages to hit its target this time, gamers can look forward to a cross-platform release on the PC, Xbox ...
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Inside the second: A new look at game benchmarking
I suppose it all started with a brief conversation. Last fall, I was having dinner with Ramsom Koay, the PR rep from Thermaltake. He's an inquisitive guy, and he wanted to know the answer to what seemed like a simple question: why does anyone need a faster video card, so long as a relatively cheap one will produce 30 frames per second? And what's the deal with more FPS, anyway? Who needs it?
I'm ostensibly the expert in such things, but honestly, I wasn't prepared for such a question right at that moment. Caught off guard, I took a second to think it through and gave my best answer. I think it was a good one, as these things ...
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Report: MS and Samsung to show Win8 tablet next week
Judging by the latest from the rumor mill, Windows 8 won't be out for another year or so. If this story by AFP is to be believed, then, Microsoft is getting things into gear early as far as Windows 8's tablet implementation goes.
The story, which quotes an "industry source" cited by the Korea Economic Daily, says that Microsoft and Samsung have partnered up on the very first Windows 8 tablet, and ...
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Hard Reset demo available now
Remember when developers used to release demos ahead of a game's launch date? The practice has fallen out of favor in recent years, with multiplayer betas often being your only chance to preview a game before making a purchase. I guess that makes the folks behind Hard Reset a little old school. The PC exclusive is due out in less than a week, but you can sample a free demo on Steam.
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