HP today introduced its new color-critical computer professional display, available for less than a quarter of the cost of competing offerings.
The HP DreamColor Display features a new liquid crystal display (LCD) that provides a range of more than 1 billion colors in a 30-bit, LED-backlit display. The display is now shipping worldwide for a U.S. list price of $3,499.(1)
The display is the result of an unprecedented technology collaboration with DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. (NYSE: DWA) and addresses an increasingly critical need for affordable and consistent color accuracy in the animation, game development, film/video post, broadcast, product design and graphic arts categories.
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A US military supercomputer has broken the petaflop speed record by performing one thousand trillion calculations per second.
The ‘Roadrunner’ machine was developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and uses AMD Opteron chips and the Cell processors found in PlayStation games consoles.
It will be used to model climate systems before being classified by the Army to work on nuclear explosion modelling.
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Apple has announced that its new 3G iPhone will be available in Australia through mobile carriers, Optus and Vodafone, on July 11.
Unveiled by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the opening of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WDC) in San Francisco, the new 3G version of the popular iPhone will allow faster Internet access for both consumers and business users alike.
“We’ve learned so much with the first iPhone,” Jobs told a packed audience at WDC. “We’ve taken what we’ve learned and more and created the iPhone 3G; and it’s beautiful.”
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Security specialists are warning of a new virus that encrypts data on infected machines and demands money for the decryption key.
‘Gpcode’ is thought to access PCs via unpatched browsers. Once active it encodes most of the data on the computer, including .doc, .txt, .pdf, .xls, .jpg and .png files, with a 1,024-bit key.
Once all the files have been encrypted a ReadMe file is left on the machine giving an email address to send money in order to get the decryption key.
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Google has signed a deal to build a series of research and development offices at a Nasa lab in Silicon Valley.
The search giant will lease 1.2 million square feet of office space at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Google’s home town of Mountain View, California.
The 40-year lease will include a US$3.2 million annual payment from Google which will be adjusted according to market rates.
Nasa plans to use the money for improvements and maintenance costs at the Ames Research facility.
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ASUS, a leading name in high quality computer components and solutions, announces the world’s first HDMI 1.3a compliant audio/video enhancement combo card – the Xonar HDAV1.3. Capable of outputting uncompressed multichannel high definition audio from Blu-ray movies, the Xonar HDAV 1.3 also enhances video with an onboard Splendid HD processor – providing ultimate multimedia enjoyment.
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The Federal Government kicked-off National E-security week today with the launch of a new security alert service for internet users and small businesses.
The National E-security Awareness Week is a Government initiative aimed at boosting awareness of e-security risks.
The alert service, announced today, is a free subscription-based service that provides vulnerability and threat information while advising users how to manage outbreaks.
“I am pleased to announce the new Stay Smart Online Alert Service with up-to-date advice on the latest e-security risks tailored for Australian internet users,†said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.
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Microsoft has released its Windows Search 4 to the web, updating its Vista, XP, Server 2003 and Windows Home Server offerings.
Microsoft said that this release followed an earlier preview that was downloaded some 300,000 times and has resulted in a lot of feedback, and as a result, a number of quality improvements.
One improved area is the system’s ability to search across machines. Windows Search 4′s remote discovery service will now let users run data queries between Vista and XP machines, for example.
For now Windows Search 4 is available to download from the Microsoft web site, however, in the future it will be included in the Windows Update service as an option, the firm said.
In IBM’s labs, tiny rivers of water are cooling computer chips that have circuits and components stacked on top of each other, a design that promises to advance Moore’s Law in the next decade and significantly reduce energy consumed by data centers. IBM Researchers, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, demonstrated a prototype that integrates the cooling system into the 3-D chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack.
These so-called 3-D chip stacks – which take chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side-by-side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another — presents one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted limits.
This follows IBM’s leadership in advancing chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment a year ago, which shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.
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Online auction giant eBay has been convicted of selling counterfeit goods and ordered to pay 20,000 euro ($32,497) in damages to French luxury group Hermes, Hermes’ lawyer said.
The ruling, which marks a first in France, found eBay directly responsible for the sale on its website of three Hermes bags including two fakes, for a total of 3000 euro.
“We are satisfied that they should be considered counterfeiters”, said lawyer Emmanuel Colomes, who had been seeking 30,000 euro in damages for complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods.
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This second Firefox 3 Release Candidate (RC2) is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is now available for download.
Preview releases are published to collect feedback from Web developers and the testing community before advancing to the next stage in the release process. The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when Mozilla qualify the product as fully ready.
More information about the new features and improvements in Firefox 3 can be found here.
You can download Firefox 3 RC2 by clicking here.
Addressing customer demand for higher performing, uni-processor x86 solutions, AMD today introduced three new Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processors for one-socket servers and workstations. Global tier-one OEMs including HP and Dell plan to incorporate the new processors into upcoming platforms, and global supercomputer leader Cray is now shipping Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processor-based Cray XT4 systems and upgrading some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to incorporate Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processors.
“AMD is committed to helping commercial customers who rely on 1P server and workstation solutions to take advantage of the same enterprise-class performance and energy-efficiency that power the largest global businesses,†said Patrick Patla, director, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. “From entry-level servers and complex workstation environments to some of the largest supercomputers in the world, the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processors are designed to address the key customer priorities of performance, performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar.â€
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To meet the growing demand for higher-capacity, more efficient enterprise storage systems, Seagate today introduced the Savvio 10K.3 hard drive – the world’s highest-capacity, small form factor 2.5-inch enterprise hard drive built for the demands of enterprise servers and storage arrays. This latest generation of 2.5-inch drive offers 70% lower power and greater than 60% performance density over traditional 3.5-inch drives.
As the only 10K-rpm 2.5-inch enterprise design backed by two prior generations of field-proven reliability, the Savvio 10K.3 drive leads the industry with 300GB of capacity, reliability of 1.6 million hours MTBF, and an advanced SAS 2.0 (6Gb/sec data rate) interface. Seagate’s Savvio 10K.3 drive is also the industry’s first 2.5-inch self-encrypting enterprise drive with government-grade Full Disk Encryption (FDE) data protection.
“The combination of higher capacity and 6Gb SAS on an enterprise-class small form factor disk drive, like the Savvio 10K.3 drive, continues to entice the industry to move from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch based solutions for use in enterprise storage systems and arrays,” said Dave Reinsel, vice president of Storage Research at IDC. “IDC predicts that shipments of small form factor enterprise drives into enterprise solutions will outnumber 3.5-inch enterprise drive shipments by 2010.”
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BFG Technologies, Inc., the leading North American and European supplier of advanced NVIDIA-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies and other PC enthusiast products, announced today the BFG GeForce 8800GT OCX and BFG GeForce 9600GT OCX 512MB PCI Express 2.0 graphics cards.
Each new OCX edition features the highest stable clock speeds and a ThermoIntelligence custom cooling solution. The custom fansink enables the graphics processing unit (GPU) to operate up to 18° C and 30° C cooler than the stock 9600GT and 8800GT, respectively.
“Our new custom ThermoIntelligence fansink provides dramatic improvement to the GPU cooling for both of these new high-performance graphics cards”, said John Malley, senior director of marketing for BFG Technologies. “With screaming-fast OCX-level clock speeds and amazing thermal performance in a quiet dual-slot design, these new graphics cards provide end users with maximum performance and minimum heat—all backed by our famous lifetime warranty and 24/7/365 expert tech support.”
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Microsoft Corp. announced that following the success of Windows on netbooks, the Windows offering is being extended to include nettop devices. Netbooks are commonly referred to as ultralow-cost PCs (ULCPCs) and were originally intended for students and other first-time PC customers in emerging markets. Nettop refers to desktops that are ultralow-cost.
In April, Microsoft announced the worldwide extension of the availability of Windows for this emerging class of devices that are primarily used for e-mail, accessing the Internet and instant messaging, and the company is seeing much demand among industry partners who want to ensure that customers can have the benefits of Windows on both new and existing devices.
Customers are asking for Windows on these devices because the experience is familiar to existing PC users and easy to learn for customers who are new to computing. Customers want to be able to take advantage of the wide range of applications, devices and online experiences supported by Windows today. Microsoft partners also appreciate Windows-based solutions for these computers because they already know how to build and support high-quality systems that are powered by Windows.
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