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Originally Posted by Gollum

i like the way he describe the ufo. cigar shaped with 2 balls..maybe thats the most aerodynamic shape after billions of years of research in advanced civilisation. muahahha and men evolved one of that

think about it...

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thanx gollum AND Sham AND floppy AND catacomb AND booest AND rascal AND Lulu AND eastcoasthandle
AND strike
so many other members and posters who make my computer a much better place to come to...
instead of something to get away from.

I love this place

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(hint)
the avatar...

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ATI's physics goes on the back burner

During ATI's 2006 third quarter financial results conference call this morning, ATI CEO Dave Orton revealed to analysts that despite demonstrating physics processing earlier this year, volume availability will not be for another "9 to 12 months." Orton indicated that the technology was still undergoing testing and preparation. Interestingly, ATI indicated earlier that its physics technology was already on the market and needed only driver updates.
DailyTech has attempted to test some physics-enabled demos on a pair of Radeon X1900 XTX boards but drivers were not ready. Interestingly, ATI demonstrated physics on its RD600 chipset at Computex earlier this year but a year from now, ATI's RD600 will more than likely be phased out. In fact, ATI said during the call that it was already developing and testing RD700, its next generation core logic.
After ATI's announcement about its own physics solution during Computex, AGEIA responded by indicating that ATI's method was crude and did not really address the core needs of physics processing. AGEIA also indicated that its own widely accepted technology was already available on store shelves. AGEIA's availability argument was somewhat called upon by ATI customers, citing that ATI too had boards already in the market. Orton's announcement today unfortunately reaffirms AGEIA's point. Many ATI customers will have to wait a while longer.
Details on ATI's R600 core -- the replacement for its X1900 family -- is expected to be available late this year or in early 2007. It is unclear whether or not ATI's physics API will continue to support the X1900 family a year out from now.
Update 06/30/2006: We earlier reported that "retail availability" was not to be available for 9-12 months. Instead, Orton's exact meaning was for "volume availability," and as such DailyTech has changed the article text. Will Willis, Senior PR manager for ATI sent us the following comment about ATI's physics solution:
Dave’s reply was that we won’t see physics in volume (i.e. hundreds of thousands of cards being used for physics) and therefore a material revenue stream from physics for 9-12 months (i.e. another 3-4 quarters) as that’s when there will be some substantial volume of ATI graphics cards being used for physics purposes.
ATI GPU’s that support physics acceleration are already in retail (i.e. the X1900 and X1600 series of cards for example). All that’s required is a driver update that enables physics processing, and more importantly, game content which we expect around the holidays. We’re very likely to see revenue from physics before 9-12 months, but as Dave said it won’t be in volume, it will likely be early adopters.
Willis claims content for ATI physics will be available this holiday season already. However, there is no word yet on the driver other than it is "several weeks out."

sa: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3092

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German car giant Volkswagen has turned fiction into reality by unveiling a fully automatic car which really can drive itself - and at speeds of up to 150mph.

It can weave with tyres screeching around tricky bends and chicanes, and through tightly coned off tracks - without any help or intervention from a human.
The remarkable car is the VW Golf GTi '53 plus 1' codenamed after the number '53' which Herbie carried when racing in his big screen adventures.
The GTi has electronic 'eyes' that use radar and laser sensors in the grille to 'read' the road and send the details back to its computer brain. A sat-nav system tracks its exact position with pin-point precision to within an inch.
The car can then work out the twists and turns it has to negotiate - before setting off at break-neck speed through a laid out course on a test track.
On a race circuit, it drove itself faster and more precisely than the VW engineers could manage - and can accelerate independently up to its top speed of 150mph.
To prove it is no trick, guests were invited to design for themselves a variety of different courses - using road cones - and then watch the car fly around them on its own at a test track near their world headquarters in Wolfsburg in northern Germany.

SA: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770

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Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) E6400 and E6700:

Brief Characteristics of Intel Core 2 Duo Processors

The architecture of Intel Core 2, represented by the desktop core Conroe, has grown from the mobile core Yonah. Which in its turn stems from the ideas of Pentium M (Banias and Dothan). What concerns the latter, it has been noted many times that they are direct descendants of the 6-gen core of Intel processors (P6), which had been designed prior to Pentium Pro and had lived to Pentium III. Thus, on one hand, Core 2 is a step back, as it sort of cancels many architectural solutions that appeared in processor cores of the later generations (the famous Intel NetBurst architecture of the seventh generation). On the other hand, we cannot say that Core 2 is the direct heir to Intel P6 because of too many modifications. The new core has been altered beyond recognition .

The key differences of the new architecture from the closest parent — Intel Core Duo (Yonah) come down to the following:
Improved decoder, expanded to 4 decoders of x86 macro-ops (3 in the closest counterparts, Intel Pentium M / Core Duo).
The execution speed of 128-bit SIMD instructions is one instruction per cycle in each execution unit (twice as fast as Yonah).
Improved operations with memory and hardware prefetch.
L2 Cache is shared by both cores, its size is distributed dynamically depending on the load (we have already seen it in Intel Core Duo).
Better power saving technologies.
Support for a new set of SIMD instructions, SSE4.
The grapevine provides the following parameters of new processors:
65 nm process technology
1.87-2.93 GHz core
800-1066 MHz FSB (probably 1333 MHz in XE models)
2-4 MB Shared L2 Cache
65-80 Watt TDP
From the same sources not to be revealed here , the Core 2 Duo line will be initially represented by the following models:
E4xxx series — a single E4200 CPU, 1.6 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 2 MB Shared L2 Cache.
E6300/6400 processors— 1.86/2.13 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB, FSB, 2 MB Shared L2 Cache (note that our engineering sample of the E6400 has a 4MB L2 Cache!)
E6600/6700 processors — 2.4/2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB, 4 MB L2 Cache.
X6800 processor (eXtreme Edition) — 2.93 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB, 4 MB L2 Cache.
"E" means TDP from 55W to 75W, "X" — above 75W. TDP indexes "T", "L", and "U" are reserved for mobile and Ultra Low Voltage processors of the Core 2 series. We have also heard that the 4xx0 and 6xx0 series will include desktop processors, while the 5xx0 and 7xx0 series — mobile models. Continued Here

sa: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/...-2-13-ghz.html

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The Art Institute of California - Orange County announces the launch of a new bachelor's degree program in Visual & Game Programming, designed to prepare the next generation of technical artists for the animation and video game industries.
The program begins with a foundation in art and design. Then students enter into the more technical areas of programming for 3-D animation. Students learn the essential skills to effectively solve technical problems and play the indispensable role between the technical programmer and the creative artist. With an advantage of having artistic talent combined with the knowledge and skills of programming for 3-D development, the students will have an edge in finding a wide range of employment opportunities in the entertainment and game production industries. The curriculum trains students for entry-level positions that include technical artist, technical developer, assistant technical director, 3-D tools programmer, artist wizard, data wrangler, rendering wrangler or junior technical cinematic artist.
The program focuses on student ability to write, extend and modify programs/scripts for 3-D animation. Students will be introduced to the principles of programming, which enables them to enter into the world of shading development, motion capture management, and pipeline streamlining. They will learn programming and scripting tools such as Perl, C++, C-shell, MEL scripting, MAXScript, DirectX & OpenGL and become familiar with various operating systems. The bachelor's degree program is 12 quarters and contains 192 quarter credits, including 56 quarter credits in general education.
"Local video game and animation companies are clamoring for employees with these specific technical programming skills. This major will be a great service to the local industry," said Tom Jung, Art Director at Point-of-View Studios in Irvine, Calif. and Game Art & Design Instructor for The Art Institute.

sa: http://www.betanews.com/newswire/pr/...lifornia/12127

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Korea has developed its own android capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face, the second such machine to be developed after one from Japan. The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy invited some 60 children to the Kyoyuk Munhwa Hoekwan in Seoul to introduce Ever-1 to the public. The name combines the first human name found in the Bible, Eve, with the "r" in robot.
The Korean Institute for Industrial Technology (KITECH) said the android, which has the face and body of a woman in her 20s, is 160 cm tall and weighs 50 kg. Ever-1 can move its upper body and “express” happiness, anger, sadness and pleasure. But the robot is still incapable of moving its lower half. Ever-1's skin is made from a silicon jelly that feels similar to human skin. The face is a composite of two stars, and its torso on a singer.
The 15 monitors in the robotic face allow it to interpret the face of an interlocutor and look back at whoever stands near it. Ever-1 also recognizes 400 words and can hold a basic verbal exchange. "The robot can serve to provide information in department stores and museums or read stories to children; it’s capable of both education and entertainment functions," said KITECH scientist Baeg Moon-hong, part of the team that created the robot. "The Ever-2, which will have improved vision and ability to express emotions and can sit or stand, will be debuted towards the end of the year."

sa: http://english.chosun.com/w21data/ht...605040016.html

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Over the years we have seen some interesting cooling contraptions designed by Thrmaltake from the Beetle CL-P0086 to the BigWater SE and Volcano. In this article, we are taking our first look at their server cooling offerings in the form of the ITBU CL-P0303. Thermaltake is renowned in the enthusiast market, but do they deserve the same for their ITBU server cooling solutions? To start with, the CL-P0303 is designed for Xeon Dempsey 2U systems with an LGA-771 socket, while making this design possible are copper fins, dual heatpipes, and a near silent fan. Today we are strapping the Thermaltake ITBU CL-P0303 on top of Intel's fastest Xeon Dempsey to take it for the ride of its life.

Features:
• Application for Intel Xeon Dempsey 2U active solution
• Low noise and silent server cooler
• All copper soldering Technology
• Heat-pipe designation provide better heat conductivity
• Dow Corning 5022 Interface material performs well

Contents:
For testing purposes we had received two Thermaltake ITBU CL-P0303 coolers. The CPU heatsinks were individually packaged inside of a simple Thermaltake cardboard package. The only part was the heatsink itself, no instructions or other accessories were included. For reference, the thermal compound comes pre-applied to the base of the heatsink. The CL-P0303 uses four spring screws for fastening the heatsink to the CPU socket. The heatsink is only compatible with LGA-771 Xeon processors, and is not compatible with the common desktop LGA-775 design.
Continued...Here

sa: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item=504&num=1

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sa: http://www.xyzcomputing.com/index.ph...sk=view&id=688

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Since their introduction to the PC world, Hard Disk Drivers have been getting bigger and bigger. Technology to pack more onto the platters of a HDD keep getting better to the point where we are now seeing storage capabilities hitting half a terabyte or a whooping 500GB.
Speed on these drives have also been increasing, with speeds from the original 2,300 RPM drives up to 10,000 RPM on the Western Digital Raptor and even higher again on server / enterprise drives - things keep getting better all the time.
One of the most important additions to the desktop market is the inclusion of RAID technologies, which not all that long ago was only reserved for enterprise computing such as servers. This technology, while now very common among consumers, allows for spanning, mirroring and mirroring with spanning, all depending on what your needs are (speed, redundancy or both).
Western Digital has recently introduced a new hard disk drive to the market. It’s dubbed the Caviar RAID Edition or RE2 for short. It is tweaked and designed to offer the best performance when setup in a RAID configuration environment. We’ll take a quick look at the drive and then see how it performs against one of Seagate’s latest hard drives in RAID and non-RAID testing.
Let’s begin and check it out!

sa: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/921/

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Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross

Q: The community is at work on Firefox 2.0. Given the success of the first Firefox, is there pressure to make big advances with the second one?
Ross: Yeah, there certainly is pressure. There's pressure on pretty much everything we do right now – the marketing side, the engineering side, because of the initial success of it. People expect us to come up with ever-better Spread Firefox campaigns.
That's especially difficult for us, because the goal of Firefox has always been just to make things simpler, and making things simpler usually doesn't mean adding grandiose new features and making sure that the next version has something that identifies it as being new, which has kind of been the (Microsoft) Office model to date, every release has to have something new so people know they got their money's worth.
Some of the feedback we have gotten about the 2.0 release (test version) has been, what's new here? It looks like the 1.0 release because most of the work that has been going on has been to make it more stable, how do we fix the memory problems that people are complaining about, how do we make everyday tasks easier – like spell-checking, for example, in Web forms. Little things that you're not going to notice when you first fire up Firefox 2.0, but you're going to use it for two weeks and say, yeah, this is definitely an overall better experience.
Fortunately we've become kind of accustomed to complaints from the blogosphere and from geeks, which is generally where this line of pressure comes from. We're pretty good at picking out the points that are important to us and really just letting the others go. I think we're pretty focused on making the experience better, making it simpler, and not focused on making a big splash just for the purpose of making a big splash.
Q: I know you're asked frequently about Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's next browser. How much have you used the test version, and what do you think of it?
Ross: I've used it a little bit. The truth is that it actually looks pretty good. People don't expect me to say that, they expect me to say that it's terrible. They did exactly what we were expecting them to do, which was take a bunch of time and get IE7 up to feature parity with Firefox. I haven't seen any real innovation above and beyond what we delivered in Firefox. I think that it's a solid product, but I think that by the time it comes out, we're going to be another world ahead of them again, so I think it's kind of a step or two behind us.
We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing. The whole browser space in general has traditionally been very religious.
Q: Kind of like operating systems.
Ross: Kind of like operating systems, exactly. We're trying to just say, we've all got good ideas in this space. Everyone's talking, for example, about how IE7 is ripping off Firefox. I'm very careful to say that they're matching feature parity. They are ripping off Firefox in a sense, but the truth is that when we started Firefox, we ripped off Internet Explorer because we wanted to make sure that people who migrated from IE felt comfortable in the Firefox world.
Continued Here

sa: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/p...entryID=104679

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BenQ's anticipated BW1000 3-in-1 Blu-ray burner (also known as the "Trio): it'll be coming out in late August, and set you back 799 euros, or a little over $1,000. As you'll recall, that grand is buying you an internal drive that writes to BD-R discs at 2x speed, to DVDs between 4x and 12x, and to CDs at 32x speed, while obviously playing back Blu-ray content at full 1,920 x 1,080 resolution as well. You're also getting the usual suite of features designed to dampen vibration and ensure data integrity, which will come in especially handy for folks who can't afford to be wasting those initially-expensive next-gen discs. Keep in mind, though, that this model won't be the only option available to you by the time it hits stores, so make sure to check out the supported formats and features on competing units from Pioneer, Samsung, Panasonic and Philips before you lay down all that cash.

sa: http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/03/b...lu-ray-burner/

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Follow this mod from concept to final product:

sa: http://www.bit-tech.net/modding/2006..._Ediejo/1.html