News

NVIDA has unveiled its most powerful graphics processing units (GPU), the GeForce GTX 280 and 260. The GTX 280 has 240 multi-threaded cores and can process video 18 times faster than the latest CPUs. It has 1.4 billion transistors and is capable of nearly a teraflop. Rendering 3D images in realtime is just about the…

The Khronos Group announced on Monday that they will form a Compute Working Group to create open standards for parallel computing across multiple GPUs and CPUs. Members include AMD, Apple, Freescale, NVIDIA and IBM. Apple has presented its OpenCL specification to the group. The Compute Working Group will “create royalty-free, open standards for programming heterogeneous…

At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden Germany on Monday, AMD announced its FireStream 9250 graphics card which breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision computations. The card occupies a single PCI slot and draws 150 watts. Developers have reported up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes compared to processing on…

Mr. Icahn launched a proxy battle to take over the Yahoo board and offer the Internet search company to Microsoft after an unsolicited buyout offer from Microsoft fell through. Mr. Icahn insisted that buying Yahoo was in the best interests of both companies, but Yahoo contended that the offer was undervalued and a bad move…

“At that meeting,” the company said in a statement, “Microsoft representatives stated unequivocally that Microsoft is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo!, even at the price range it had previously suggested.” Microsoft had made an unsolicited buyout offer of some US$46 billion earlier in the year, a price that Microsoftis management…

According to MacPractice, DocPortMacro-U offers high image quality, a no focus design, and a one-touch macro close up feature that allows dentists to quickly zoom in problems areas in their patientis mouth. The DocPortMacro-U is priced at US$3,995, with additional docking station kits available at $795 each.

WWDC 08 keynote

It’s official. The iPhone 3G is here. Sort of here. Almost here. It’s a dizzying and exciting time for iPhone users. Heck, it’s a great day for all Mac users, indeed for all computer and mobile phone users. But there was more to today’s announcements than just the iPhone 3G. Much more. The information overload…

Serene Saver Pro lets users import their own movie clips, and string together clips that are up to two minutes long each. It also includes the ability to auto shut off or mute when certain events happen, like iTunes launching, or when other user defined apps open. Serene Saver Pro is priced at US$49.95 and…

Goodbye .Mac, hello MobileMe

WWDC has had pretty much the same flavor for the last 15 years, having been mostly about the Mac. This yearis keynote made it perfectly clear: the Next Big Thing has arrived and consists of a new major platform, the iPhone, a new generation of iPhone developers and new Apple leaders. The air was electric…

In a letter to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, Mr. Icahn accused the company of creating a “poison pill” plan to entice employees to leave the company should Microsoft successfully leverage a buyout. “According to details in a complaint that I became aware of yesterday (details Yahoo fought to keep under seal), Jerry Yang and a…

Weire betting there will be plenty of developers on hand ready to chat up their shiny new iPhone apps, but we arenit limiting our interest to the handheld crowd. If you have a cool app for the Mac, we want to hear about that, too. Send an [removed]eval(unescape(i[removed](’email’)i))[removed]email to our afternoon editor, John Martellaro, to…

According to Robin Hall, Macyis Parade & Entertainment Group senior vice president, Microsoftis database offerings were too complex and often required days to extract important information in a usable form. For many tasks, the parade organizers found it was easier to export data into Excel spreadsheets instead. “With our new FileMaker database system, time-consuming tasks…

QuarkXPress 8

LCD panel makers are pushing for a slight adjustment to the 15-inch class LCD used in notebook computers. Instead of 15.4 inches and 16 x 10, the new panels scheduled for late Q2 or early Q3 will be 15.6 inches and 16 x 9, according to DigiTimes on Wednesday. The primary advantage is the geometry…

I ha ve recently discovered what is a near-perfect solution for my reluctance to use a camcorder — even though I have a desire to take “home movies.” And, no, the solution is not the Flip Video. Sunday’s New York Times had yet another article lauding the Flip Video camcorder (David Pogue covered it back…

The new SSD drive also boasts a mean time failure rate at one million hours, a 0.9 watt power consumption in active mode, and data encryption that continues to function after the drive is removed from a computer. The company said that it plans to begin mass production of the 2.5-inch 256GB drive by the…