Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

NVIDIA managed to generate quite a bit of interest with its $59 GeForce 9400 GT graphics card, and it looks like rival AMD is now taking things one step further with not one but two cards that are even cheaper. Those include the $55 ATI Radeon HD 4550 and the $39 ATI Radeon HD 4350, which pack 512MB and 256MB of memory, respectively, along with some other suprisingly not too shabby specs. Namely, each card packs DirectX 10.1 support, an HDMI port with support for 7.1 channel audio, upscaling “beyond 1080p,” and even support for ATI’s CrossFireX technology in case you want to pair two of them up. As usual, you can expect the cards to be available from a whole host of different manufacturers, at least some of which should have cards available by October, if not sooner.

[Via bit-tech.net]

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Desktops

Let’s not beat around the bush: AMD’s oft-delayed Barcelona quad-core processor was a flop. It arrived late and buggy, an undesirable reception that helped to drive the company’s $1.2 billion Q2 loss this year. AMD can’t afford another flub like that and is hoping that processor’s successor, Shanghai, finds more success in the server market. It’s a 45nm quad-core chip with three times the cache (6MB) and HyperTransport 3, apparently equating to a 20 percent boost in speed and even thriftier power consumption. AMD is saying the chip is already under production and will be available for sale before the year is out, actually beating expectations for once. That should be shortly followed by the release of 45nm Deneb processors for desktops, then six-core Istanbul chips sometime late 2009. Meanwhile, Intel’s six-core, 45nm server chips are now shipping.

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Original post by Tim Stevens

An anonymous reader writes “According to a research report out of UCLA, released this morning, NVidia’s high-lead bump packaging could last anywhere from 1/10th to 1/100th as long as AMD’s advanced eutectic bump approach. (TG Daily has picked up the claim.) NVidia is currently in the midst of a $200M recall of bad GPUs, and the report suggests that the issue could be much deeper than NVidia’s PR department suggests.” The report lends credence to the strident claims of the Enquirer’s Charlie Demerjian, which we discussed a month back.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Desktops

Get out your processor score sheets, folks (both of you), ’cause it looks like your world is about to get shook up again. According to some unnamed “industry sources,” AMD is going to be welcoming its new 45nm Phenom processors by slightly revising its conventional naming scheme, although it’s not going quite so far as to ditch the main Phenom X3 and Phenom X4 branding all together. Instead, it’s supposedly going to be switching the model numbers from four to five digits, with the lower-end processors following a 1xx00 format and the higher-end CPUs using a 20xx0 scheme. That, of course, is being done in the name of “simplying” things, although we’ll let you be the judge if that’s the first word that pops in your mind or not when you take a glance at the table available at the read link below.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Desktops

Get out your processor score sheets, folks (both of you), ’cause it looks like your world is about to get shook up again. According to some unnamed “industry sources,” AMD is going to be welcoming its new 45nm Phenom processors by slightly revising its conventional naming scheme, although it’s not going quite so far as to ditch the main Phenom X3 and Phenom X4 branding all together. Instead, it’s supposedly going to be switching the model numbers from four to five digits, with the lower-end processors following a 1xx00 format and the higher-end CPUs using a 20xx0 scheme. That, of course, is being done in the name of “simplifying” things, although we’ll let you be the judge if that’s the first word that pops in your mind or not when you take a glance at the table available at the read link below.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

Now that Sprint’s AIRAVE has been on sale (nationwide, that is) for nearly a month, we’re curious to know if it has lived up to your expectations. We’ll admit — it definitely lived up to ours, but we can still think of a few things we’d like to see different. Would you too enjoy being able to use this thing abroad? Is the 3-call (simultaneous) limit too tight for you? Do you wish your EV-DO data was piped through this thing as well? Oh, and does the pricing scheme set well with you? Let us know just how you’re enjoying (or not) that fresh new femtocell in comments below.

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Original post by Darren Murph

A ruling was just issued by the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) of Hamburg, Germany banning VoIP on the Apple iPhone. Specifically, the sipgate VoIP app (image right) has been banned - all part of T-Mobile’s ongoing fight to block VoIP on the iPhone.

Apparently, the court felt that sipgate would “lure” iPhone users into “jailbreaking” their iPhones. WTF? Banning software because it might entice customers to do something bad? Glad I live in the good ole’ freedom-loving USA where we punish people for committing crimes not for “intentions” of committing crimes, jailbreaking iPhones, violating terms of service contracts, etc.

There is a single instance for appeals past this court (Bundesgerichtshof) so there is some hope this decision will be repealed.

sipgate’s Thilo Salmon told me, “Unfortunately, T-Mobile has found a court to ban VoIP from the iPhone. I am glad to report though, that we have found a court to hold up the current ban of their iPhone ads in Germany. I guess, that at least eases the pain.”

According to Thilo, here is exactly what happened:

1) T-Mobile has managed to bring a court to crack down on our VoIP application for the iPhone. T-Mobile has claimed our labeling the software as “beta” is misleading, as this allegedly does not point out the pre-release nature of our software. Furthermore, we would lure customers into jailbreaking their 2G iPhones (and their terms and conditions) as using sipgate is too attractive. While charming, we dispute this.

This injunctions comes after almost two month of jurisdiction shopping by T-Mobile. The Higher Regional Court (OLG) of Hamburg has now issued a preliminary injunction barring us from advertising and distributing the software. It is still a bit too early to tell what we can do next owing to the complex legal nature of this move. I like to point out, that sipgate has not been heard by the court prior to issuing the injunction.

2) In a related matter we had a German court preliminarily ban T-Mobile’s iPhone ads on the grounds that they are misleading. T-Mobile has advertised its plans as “free Internet access with unlimited usage” but has put a number of severe restrictions on its use. Not at least did they ban the use of VoIP.

After a hearing the Regional Court (LG) of Hamburg has now decided to uphold the injunction.

Tags: block, court, court ruling, German, Germany, iphone, jailbreaking, sipgate, T-Mobile, Thilo Salmon, voip

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Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Desktops

Atom-based desktops still aren’t nearly as plentiful as Atom-based netbooks, but that equation looks to be slowly changing, with Korea’s Ripple only the latest to join the fray with its new “Mini Chocolate” desktop. This one packs the usual 1.6GHz Atom processor into its Mini-ITX form factor, along with support for up to 2GB of RAM, four USB ports, two SATA sockets, and a single IDE socket, plus room for a slot-loading optical drive, which you’ll have to supply yourself (along with most of the other components). As you can see above, you can also get it in your choice of three colors, with each setting you back 209,000 Korean won, or just about $200.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Go get it kids, Firefox 3.0 has just been released. We’re out of beta and looking at web page loads 3- to 4-times faster than Firefox 2.0 and more than 7x faster than IE, according to its makers.

Update: Looks like we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Although a file titled, “Firefox 3.0″ (without the RC# associated with previous release candidates) is active and available to download, it looks like it’s just the RC3 installer placed in the final 3.0 folder.

[Thanks, James D.]

Download — FF 3.0 all versions [Warning: FTP, will not be counted in world record attempt]
Download — FF 3.0 to be counted in world record attempt (active at 10am PDT)
Read — 10am PDT translated into local times
Read — Release progress

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Cellphones

It’ll be a fabulous day when a cellphone-friendly version of Firefox finally lands, and judging by the video and details in the read link down there, that day is getting ever closer. Granted, this whole thing is being dubbed a “concept” for now, but we’re definitely digging where it’s headed. We’re warning you, there’s a boatload of information just one click away, but if you fear your eyes just can’t handle it, peep the video after the break.

Continue reading Firefox Mobile concept gets detailed on video

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Original post by Darren Murph

Zemanta notified me to tell me that Zemanta’s Firefox plugin now works with Movable Type. Woohoo! They said, "Just wanted to drop a quick note that we released a new version of Zemanta today that adds support for MT 4.1. Only through extension for now, but plugin will follow in a few weeks." I was a little peeved that their initial launch included Wordpress and not MT so I actually posted a thread to their forums asking when Zemanta would be available for Movable Type. They promised me support for MT was coming and indeed it has!

What Zemanta does is simply monitor the text in your blog draft and then go out on the web (connecting to Zemanta’s web servers) to find relevant/related images, articles, and tags. I guess you could call Zemanta a blogger’s "cheat sheet" for quickly finding relevant articles, images and tags. Until now, Zemanta only worked on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted Wordpresses from version 2.0 onwards. But as of today, Movable Type 4.1+ is supported. Speaking of Movable Type, the latest version of Movable Type v4.15 was expected to be released 2 days ago (May 19th), but was delayed until May 28th. Bummer. Can’t wait to upgrade, since MT 4.15 has some cool new features and performance enhancements. But I digress…

Below is a screenshot of me testing it on Movable Type 4.1 while pretending to blog about Michael Jordan. Click for full-image where you will see the Zemanta Firefox plugin seamlessly integrating into the Movable Type interface. From the Gallery I was able to hover my mouse over an image to see a description, copyright info, source, etc. and then simply click on the image to have it inserted into my blog post. Same thing with related articles and related tags. As to whether I’ll actually use Zemanta on a regular basis remains to be seen. I prefer uploading my own images to the blog server rather than "hot linking" to outside images. But I’m going to try it for awhile and see how it goes.

Tags: blogging, blogging tool, Firefox, Movable Type, Wordpress, Zemanta

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Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video, Transportation

Our experiences with Microsoft’s Sync in Ford cars has been mostly a comedy of voice-recognition errors (we’ll never forget our rental at CES blasting NWA in response to “Play artist: David Bowie”), but it looks like other automakers will be able to join in the confusing fun in November, when Microsoft’s exclusive contract with Ford runs out. Hyundai and Kia are the first to sign up for what’s now being branded Microsoft Auto, and while it’s not exactly clear what their versions of the system will look like, you can expect the same basic features as Sync, as well as some new capabilities like navigation and emergency-response services. Microsoft also says that Auto will be available for “general release to the automotive community,” which could lead to the inclusion of the OS on aftermarket gear as well. Let’s just hope they tune the system to figure out the difference between Ziggy Stardust and Eazy-E, eh?

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Just two months prior, we all stood in awe of the mighty HERCULES laser housed at the University of Michigan. Now, however, those 300 terawatts of power look mighty puny compared to the one petawatt potential claimed by the Texas Petawatt. Hailed as “the highest powered laser in the world” by Todd Ditmire, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, the device has the “power output of more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States,” and in case that wasn’t impressive enough, it’s also “brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun” — but alas, only for a tenth of a trillionth of a second. Aside from totally ganking the geeky gloating rights from the Wolverines, the Longhorns will use the laser to study astronomical phenomena in miniature (and probably take over the world in short order).

[Via Physorg, image courtesy of University of Texas at Austin]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Buffalo announced today the launch of its new LinkTheater High Definition Digital Media Player, a device that streams videos, pictures music from Windows or Mac PCs, NAS devices, USB hard drives, and DLNA media servers to a television set or stereo.The LinkTheater also automatically backs up content storage on flash-based USB drives and video camera, when the devices are plugged into its front USB port.

The unit supports 720p and 1080i hi-def video output and 480i and 480p video modes,m as well as JPG, BMP, PNG, and GIF, MP3, WAV, WMA, Dolby Digital (AC-3), AAC-LC, and AAC-HE, and DRM10 file formats. It also features 10/100 LAN port, analog audio/video connectors, D4/component video connectors, optical audio connectors, and comes bundled with a remote.

The device will be available later this month for $199. For more information, check out Buffalo’s site.

gearlog561:http://www.gearlog.com/2008/04/buffalo_introduces_new_linkthe.php

Original post by Brian Heater

Today Panasonic unveiled its new line of flat panel plasma TVs, including six new series of 720p and 1080p models that might have consumers saying, “What recession?” The two to-die-for lines include the new PZ800, a THX-certified 1080p line that includes a 24p cinematic mode and four HDMI inputs, as well as the even-more-upscale flagship PZ850 line, which features pro settings, four HDMI inputs, and even RS 232 control interface.

The PZ800 will available in 42-, 46-, 50- and 58-inch screen sizes, while the PZ850 will be available in 45-, 50-, 58- and a truly massive 65-inch panel sizes. These sets will feature a native contrast ratio of 30,000:1 for extremely deep black levels. Pricing has yet to be announced for these models, which will arrive in later this spring, but as with last year’s step-up plasma models the extra cost is truly worth every penny.

Panasonic also unveiled three new series of LCD sets, including the LX85 720p models, available in 26- and 32-inches; the LZ85, a 37-inch 1080p display; and the flagship LZ800 1080p models, available in 32- and 37-inch sizes. These sets will also be available later this spring with pricing yet to be announced.

Post by Peter Suciu

Original post by Carol Mangis