Google Buzz Now Available as an iPhone App
Here it is folks, the first ever third-party application for Google Buzz, now available through the iTunes App Store. It's called Buzzie, and for the next few days, you can snag it for 33 percent off as part of a special introductory price.If you're a fan of Google's newest social networking tool and can't imagine owning a smartphone other than the iPhone, then this is probably the best news ever. But you don't have to be a Buzz user to check it out. Non-Gmail users who want to see what all the fuss is about
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Alpine & Nokia Team Up To Integrate Smartphones Into Cars
Alpine Electronics and Nokia are working together to bring a new technology called Terminal Mode to car infotainment systems. By integrating a smartphone with in-car electronics, the companies will bring services such as navigation, music, weather reports, and application stores to the car. When appropriate safety measures are in place and the phone is connected to the car, users will be able to use these services through high-resolution screens and audio systems that are embedded in the car. Terminal Mode helps
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Averatec Introduces Thin & Light 10-Inch Netbook
Claiming to be the thinnest, lightest 10.1-inch netbook on the market today, the new Averatec N1200 weighs 2.2 pounds and measures less than an inch thick. In order to make this design possible, the N1200 incorporates a slim LED LCD as well as a 7mm hard drive and a magnesium-alloy casing. The N1200 features a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 160GB or 250GB hard drive, 1GB DDR2 memory, and a 1.3-megapixel webcam. This new netbook offers up to six hours of battery life with the extended battery model. The N1200
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Dell Adds Traditional & Alternative Desktop Solutions
Dell introduced two new computing options designed to give companies increased IT performance with reduced energy and operational costs. Dell describes the new Dell OptiPlex 980 Desktop as the "most powerful and the most energy efficient" commercial desktop the company has ever offered. The second new option is the Dell FX100 zero client solution, which centralizes desktops and delivers the performance and flexibility of a traditional PC. Dell Delivers Performance and Flexibility with Traditional and Alternative
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IBM Engineers Use Light To Speed Up Chip Communications
Every so often, an idea comes along that really strikes us as amazing. This is definitely one of those. IBM has a team of scientists with IQs that we can't even fathom, and those very people have created an ultra-fast device that can use light for communication between chips. The goal here? It's to find a way to replace electrical signals that communicate via copper wires between computer chips with tiny silicon circuits that communicate using pulses of light. Even more importantly, this creation could advance
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HP Mini 210 Vivienne Tam Edition Brings Style To The Netbook
A couple of important things matter a whole lot when it comes to making a buying decision on a notebook: price, power and fashion sense. Yeah, fashion sense. While plain ole notebooks may have sold like hotcakes years ago, people demand style now, and that's exactly what HP is intended to give you with the new HP Mini 210 Vivienne Tam Edition.This netbook is a beautiful marriage between fashion, flair and hardware, and HP even calls this a "fashion accessory." Also, "netbook" probably isn't the best term here;
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Some Fun With A 6-Screen ATI Eyefinity Configuration
We're just doing a bit of testing here in the lab today, and wanted give you all a glimpse of what was on the test bench. We have already given you glimpses of AMD's ATI Eyefinity technology running on more than three screens on a few occasions in the past, but we haven't had the ability to do any hands-on with the technology up to this point because the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition and the requisite software wasn't quite ready yet. Well, it's here now. And we'll be able to give you the full scoop very
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No Saturday Mail Delivery Shouldn't Hurt Netflix, Gamefly In Long Run
A collective shudder likely went up the spines of Netflix and Gamefly customers around the nation when they heard the U.S. Postal Service is looking to eliminate Saturday delivery.Both services — Netflix for DVDs of movies and television shows, Gamefly for video games — rely on snail mail to get their goods into customers' hands. Other mail order businesses, such as Amazon or eBay don't rely solely on the post office for delivery and in most cases shipping costs fall to the customer, so if someone wants more
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Alleged ATM Scammer Swallows Flash Drive to Destory Evidence
When we first caught wind of this story, we thought maybe there was some kind of bizarre oral fixation that prompted a New York resident to toss a perfectly good USB thumb drive into his mouth and swallow it like a Tylenol. As it turns out, Florin Necula was simply trying to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid.We've seen this tactic in several spy movies, and we're guessing so did Necula. But what Necula didn't take into account was how much more durable portable flash drives are compared to paper,
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Sapphire's New Radeon 5970: It's Bigger Than Yours
Competition in the video card market can be pretty cutthroat, particularly when it comes to predicting the whims of the enthusiast market. Companies regularly vie for the title of Largest Pe... Fastest Video Card Available and they're willing to pull out all the stops to take home the crown. Case in point: Sapphire. The manufacturer's latest Radeon 5970 design was on display at CeBIT this year and packing enough firepower to perforate a burro at 20 paces. This new Radstrosity packs 4GB of RAM (2GB per GPU) and
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Fail Is The New Black: Panasonic Sued Over Defective TVs
Panasonic is facing down a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company's G10 line of plasma televisions is defective. The 'alleged', in this case, is a bit of a misnomer, as the issue has been independently confirmed and admitted by the company itself. The question at hand is whether or not the change is picture quality constitutes a breach of contract. The brouhaha started last July when a member of the AVS Forum noted that his Panasonic G10 was displaying a much brighter black than it had previously. Discussion
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NASA Probe Discovers Huge Water Reserves On Moon
Scientists have theorized that there might be frozen water on the moon for decades—while water vapor quickly boils away on the moon's surface, frozen water was predicted to exist inside permanently shadowed polar craters as far back as the 1960s. Evidence has mounted for the existence of water in the last 10 years, but new findings from NASA confirm the presence of a whole lot of H2O. Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the
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Son of Chumby: Sony Dash Now Available On Preorder
It may seem an odd way to write news about a product, but before we talk about the Sony Dash, we're going to talk about the Chumby. A Chumby is a bit of consumer electronics designed to run a variety of widgets that can do...well...just about anything. The entire project has been open-source from the beginning, and the touchscreen device is capable of functioning as an alarm clock, digital picture frame, streaming Internet radio, displaying RSS feeds, and any number of other options. An entire development effort
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Alleged ATM Scammer Swallows Flash Drive to Destory Evidence
When we first caught wind of this story, we thought maybe there was some kind of bizarre oral fixation that prompted a New York resident to toss a perfectly good USB thumb drive into his mouth and swallow it like a Tylenol. As it turns out, Florin Necula was simply trying to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid.We've seen this tactic in several spy movies, and we're guessing so did Necula. But what Necula didn't take into account was how much more durable portable flash drives are compared to paper, which is a lot easier to digest. But more on that in a minute.
First, let's discuss for a moment why the hungry New Yorker would eat a flash drive in the first place. According to The Smoking Gun, prosecutors believe Necula and three other men are behind an ATM scam. As the lawsuit goes, the bumbling bandits placed memory card readers over ATM slots in order to "skim" magnetic strip information from bank customers.
As with most ill-conceived crime rings, this one fell under the watchful eye of federal agents, who eventually busted the four men. Necula was arrested outside a bank in Queens, NY, and was then transported to a Secret Service office in Brooklyn. It was there that inspiration (or hunger) hit Necula, who then grabbed a pieced of evidence labeled "Subject Flash Drive 2" and swallowed it while federal agents looked on.
It gets even better, folks. While most of us can probably picture some poor intern being tasked with retrieving the USB key from Necula's body waste and cleaning it off, the thumb drive remained inside him for four days. At that point, it was determined that he "would be injured if they allowed the flash drive to remain inside of him." The solution? Surgery.
So here's where we stand. Not only is Necula still in hot water for his alleged ATM scam, but he now faces obstruction of justice charges, had to undergo surgery, and will receive 5 minutes of fame as one of the dumbest crooks of the decade.
As for the Kingston flash drive, it's unclear whether or not it survived the ordeal. In an email to The Smoking Gun, Kingston executive Mike Sager said, "As you might imagine, we have no actual experience with someone swallowing a USB." Fair enough.
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Sapphire's New Radeon 5970: It's Bigger Than Yours
Competition in the video card market can be pretty cutthroat, particularly when it comes to predicting the whims of the enthusiast market. Companies regularly vie for the title of 
This new Radstrosity packs 4GB of RAM (2GB per GPU) and cranks up both the GPU and memory clocks. The GPU clock is boosted from 725MHz to 850MHz (a 17 percent increase) while the memory clock ticks up 20 percent from 1GHz to 1.2GHz. This inevitably begs the question of whether or not it can run Crysis. In fact, it can eat Crysis for breakfast while munching on a side of DirectX 11. There's no word on what it'll cost, but we're staring at a triple-thick mammoth with what look like CPU coolers welded over the twin graphics engines. Sapphire outfits this card with two eight-pin PCIe power slots instead of an eight-pin/six-pin combo—no word yet on whether or not you'll actually need two eight-pin cables to use the card.
It doesn't play Crysis so much as it causes one. With your wife.
We're not sure why Sapphire didn't opt for a water-cooled card, but we'll still take two.
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Some Fun With A 6-Screen ATI Eyefinity Configuration
;)
In the meantime, we wanted to show a few examples of the 6-screen Eyefinity setup we're working with. What you see above is six Dell 22" LCDs, each with a native resolution of 1920x1080. A little simple arithmetic reveals the effective desktop resolution of a setup like this is 5760x2160, or 12.4 megapixels. You want high res? We've got it right here. What's more interesting than sitting at the Windows desktop, is gaming on a 6-screen setup like this. With that in mind, we also snapped a couple of quick videos showing that a single Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition can do in H.A.W.X. and Left 4 Dead 2.
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We should note that anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were used in both games while running at 5760x2160. We can't tell you what the actual frame-ratres are just yet, but will be able to soon. For now enjoy the eye-candy. As you could see easily in the video however, both titles were totally playable with these high image quality settings enabled at this super high resolution.
Here are some additional details of the card that was driving this insane gaming setup in our office today.
;)
The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition Is On The Horizon
Keep that drool napkin handy. More details to follow in our full review in the weeks ahead.
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Happy as can be
I asked a simple question on overclocking and got an answer quickly!!! That said alot about this site, people here are friendly and I look forward to many many more years with HotHardware. Keep up the good work guys!!!!!!!!
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Fail Is The New Black: Panasonic Sued Over Defective TVs
Panasonic is facing down a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company's G10 line of plasma televisions is defective. The 'alleged', in this case, is a bit of a misnomer, as the issue has been independently confirmed and admitted by the company itself. The question at hand is whether or not the change is picture quality constitutes a breach of contract. The brouhaha started last July when a member of the AVS Forum noted that his Panasonic G10 was displaying a much brighter black than it had previously. Discussion of the problem burbled along, as such things do, until the company admitted to CNet that the issue existed and is caused by an automatic voltage adjustment as time passes. From the email: As a result of this automatic voltage adjustment, background brightness will increase from its initial value. After several years of typical use, the internal material characteristics will stabilize and no additional automatic voltage adjustments are required. The Black Level at this stabilized point will yield excellent picture performance. The newest Viera plasma HDTVs incorporate an improved automatic control which applies the voltage adjustments in smaller increments. This results in a more gradual change in the Black Level over time.
When asked if Panasonic intended to fix the televisions that had shifted to a brighter black that their now-unhappy owners deemed unacceptable, Bob Perry, Senior VP of Panasonic Consumer Electronics responded "Since the TVs work as designed, there's nothing to fix." That answer hasn't proven popular among Panasonic owners aware of the issue; today's lawsuit is the result. Thus far, the company has attempted to duck behind claims that the image changes are "subtle," but this may not fly in court if the plaintiffs can demonstrate that the difference is both un-subtle and particular to certain models of Panasonic displays. At the same time, however, image quality is a nebulous measurement that's highly dependent upon each individual's eyesight and ambient light conditions.
If you own one of the affected models, drop a comment below and let us know.
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No Saturday Mail Delivery Shouldn't Hurt Netflix, Gamefly In Long Run
A collective shudder likely went up the spines of Netflix and Gameflycustomers around the nation when they heard the U.S. Postal Service islooking to eliminate Saturday delivery.Both services — Netflix for DVDs of movies and television shows, Gameflyfor video games — rely on snail mail to get their goods into customers'hands. Other mail order businesses, such as Amazon or eBay don't relysolely on the post office for delivery and in most cases shipping costsfall to the customer, so if someone wants more expensive overnightdelivery, they can pay for it.
But with Netflix and Gamefly, thecustomers can borrow, to a degree, as many DVDs or games as they wantin a month for the same fee. If Charlie Jones received 2012 inWednesday's delivery, watched it right away and dropped in the mailthat same day, it would be technically possible to receive another DVDto replace it in just a couple of days. So neither company is likely tobe willing to pay FedEx or UPS more to deliver videos or games onweekends; the customer's gonna just have to wait until Monday.One websitewent so far as to suggest that maybe Netflix should just buy the postalservice and enact sweeping changes, saving money and keeping theirSaturday service.
But more and more customers are streamingvideo from Netflix, cutting out the DVDs entirely. Besides throughcomputers, Netflix subscribers can purchase special receivers or usetheir video game consoles to stream the video directly to theirtelevision sets. There's no reason why this couldn't happen with videogames. In fact, the Xbox 360 already allows players to purchase videos by downloading them; why not enable game rentals this way?Netflixrecently came to an agreement with Warner Brothers to wait 28 daysbefore allowing subscribers to borrow the studio's new releases, thisin hopes of getting more people to purchase the DVDs. In return, Warnerallowed Netflix access to a much larger portion of its catalog forstreaming. Netflix is only getting more videos in streaming mode, andthis should accelerate as more customers demand it.
While theloss of Saturday delivery could hurt Netflix and Gamefly today, in thelong run it might not make one whit of difference.
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In-use review - Lenovo ThinkPad T61
I have written a in-use review for my blog regarding my 3 years old ThinkPad T61. I think people considering buing this nice business machine second hand (or perhaps is interrested in seeing what 3 years wear and tear does to this machine) could have some interest in reading this :
Lenovo ThinkPad T61 in-use review
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IBM NetVista P4 as a Windows XP Pro file/printer server
If you have a classic IBM NetVista laying around, why not make the use of it. I have made a how-to in three parts while transforming a IBM NetVista from a dusty desktop computer into a useful file/printer-server running Windows XP Pro (!!)
Part 1 - Hardware modification
Part 2 - Hardware modification
Part 3 - Installation and configuration of Windows XP Pro as a fileserver
Multi-purpose fileserver! [how-to] – Bonus part 1
IBM NetVista running Wamp + Joomla (screencast)
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Lenovo ThinkPad T410 - 7200 RPM vs. SSD
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NASA Probe Discovers Huge Water Reserves On Moon
Scientists have theorized that there might be frozen water on the moon for decades—while water vapor quickly boils away on the moon's surface, frozen water was predicted to exist inside permanently shadowed polar craters as far back as the 1960s. Evidence has mounted for the existence of water in the last 10 years, but new findings from NASA confirm the presence of a whole lot of H2O. Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.
"The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon," said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. "The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought."
Photo by Paul Martinez
Effectively tapping into this supply would be essential to the construction of any lunar bases, if and when such colonies are ever launched. In the meantime, the more pertinent question is who owns it. At present, no nation currently claims ownership of any part of the moon; the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 established that the moon would be considered international waters. This may or may not continue to be true now that a valuable resource has been found (albeit not in a very convenient location) on the lunar surface.
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