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The evidence of steps yet untaken, leaps still grounded in the now but with an eye toward the future...this is where I live, in the fastest changing world since the history of mankind. Dare to witness and participate in it, this time so singular in its speed and power. Share it with the future and present, read and post the record of its' passing.
Lenovo Group Ltd. announced the release of a ThinkPad laptop that takes the "desktop replacement" category of notebook PCs to a new level.
The ThinkPad W700ds appears to be the first laptop ever to sport two LCD screens -- a 17-in. primary and a 10.6-in. secondary screen.
The souped-up "mobile workstation," as Lenovo calls it, also comes with customers' choice of quad-core Intel Core 2 processors and Nvidia Quadro mobile graphics CPU with as many as 128 cores. It also comes with as much as 8GB of DDR3 memory and a pair of hard drive/solid-state drive bays for up to 960GB of storage.
It's all in an 11-lb. brick -- five times the weight of netbooks, such as the Asus Eee 701, and at least double the weight of typical laptops -- that is encased in the ThinkPad's trademark ebony exterior.
"This is the nitro-burning drag racer of ThinkPads," said Craig Merrigan, vice president of global consumer marketing at Lenovo, in a briefing...
The processor vendors supplying chips for UMDs (ultra-mobile devices) are playing a pivotal role in how this market is shaping up. X86-based processors are well entrenched in the PC world and ARM-based processors are well entrenched in the handset world. Since UMDs sit right between the PCs and handsets in terms of power, size, and function, x86-based and ARM-based processors will compete in the UMD space and are already fighting it out, starting with marketing wars.
ABI Research principal analyst Philip Solis says, "x86-based processor vendors are in a very good position in the near term as far as product wins and market share are concerned. However, as mobile internet devices (MIDs) start to surpass netbooks in shipment volumes, ARM-based solutions will be in a better position."
Processors based on the x86 architecture (available from vendors such as Via Technologies and Intel) hold a key advantage in that they are compatible with all x86-based applications...
Google will shutter its highly-anticipated scientific data service in January without even officially launching the product, the company said in an e-mail to its beta testers.
Once nicknamed Palimpsests, but more recently going by the staid name, Google Research Datasets, the service was going to offer scientists a way to store the massive amounts of data generated in an increasing number of fields. About 30 datasets — mostly tests — had already been uploaded to the site.
The dream appears to have fallen prey to belt-tightening at Silicon Valley's most innovative company.
"As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users," wrote Robert Tansley of Google on behalf of the Google Research Datasets team to its internal testers....
Amazon has a plan to make revolutionary computing tools available to researchers everywhere by hosting massive amounts of public data on its servers.
As of Thursday, the annotated human genome, US Census data, and countless 3D renderings of molecules are available on the elastic servers. And users can upload their own boatload of information, without a fee. But there is a catch: If you want to crunch numbers on their server, or store the output there, it will not be free.
Although the company will charge for its services, it seems committed to making them available to anyone with an internet connection, even scientists who operate on a shoestring budget.
"For over five years AWS has been working to lower the barriers to entry, level the playing field, and make it possible for our customers to be successful based on their ideas, not on their resources," Adam Selipsky of Amazon said in a press release. "Public Data Sets on AWS is the latest...
NEC Electronics introduced the EMMATM2TS system-on-chip (SoC) for tuners that enable digital terrestrial broadcasts to be viewed on current analog televisions. The new product is compliant with the "simplified DTT tuner" specifications and guidelines published by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Association for Promotion of Digital Broadcasting (Dpa) in preparation for the full migration to digital terrestrial broadcasts in Japan.
The EMMA2TS incorporates a Full SegNote orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) channel decoder compliant with the Japanese Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) digital-terrestrial standard; MPEG2 signal decoder; and image-display functionality. This combination of features in a single-chip solution is the first of its kind, and enables consumer electronics manufacturers to easily build tuners that convert digital broadcasts to analog. Furthermore, the EMMA2TS suppresses power...
There are fast computers, and then there are Linux fast computers. Every six months, the Top 500 organizationannounces "its ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications." In other words, supercomputers. And, as has been the case for years now, the fastest of the fast are Linux computers.
As Jay Lyman, an analyst at The 451 Group points out, Linux is only growing stronger in supercomputing. "When considered as the primary OS or part of a mixed-OS supersystem, Linux is now present in 469 of the supercomputer sites, 93.8% of the Top500 list. This represents about 10 more sites than inNovember 2007, when Linux had presence in 91.8% of the systems. In fact, Linux is the only operating system that managed gains in the November 2008 list. A year ago, Linux was the OS for 84.6% of the top supercomputers. In November 2008, the open source OS was used in 87.8% of the systems. Compare this to Unix, which dropped from 6% to 4.6%, mixed-OS...
MIT Tech TV, the video-sharing site for the MIT community, relaunched its site this week with a host of new features to make it more user friendly.
The new site offers a player that allows for time-code-based comments as well as the ability to make videos private. The site is now media RSS and iTunes enabled.
Phase two of the relaunch is expected to finish by the end of the calendar year and will provide increased privacy and sharing options that will allow users to post and share videos within a specific group. The general public will also be able to create guest accounts allowing them to post comments and create custom playlists.
Doping is a no-no in sports, but there's no rule against it in the classroom or on the job — and that's the way it should stay, doctors and ethicists write in a new commentary urging the safe use of medicines normally prescribed for patients with attention disorders but increasingly used off-label by healthy folks seeking an edge.
"We call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs," the authors write in this week's Nature. "Cognitive-enhancing drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar enhancements" like a good night's sleep, exercise and a healthy diet, they say.
In people with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), stimulants including Adderall and Ritalin improve attention, memory and control of disinhibitions. But the drugs' effect on the catecholamine system, which regulates stress hormones, benefits everyone, as many a soldier and student have found. Soldiers...
