// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.
// November 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
You might think that Cray, the company whose name has practically been synonymous with “supercomputer” three decades, would be a regular fixture at the top of the Top 500 Supercomputer List. But you’d be mistaken. Today’s first-place win by Cray marks the company’s debut in the top slot—at long last, after 34 lists, Cray won.
// November 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Geeks, technophiles, early adopters, giant nerds—these are hard people to shop for, because by definition they’re always more up on the latest and greatest than their peers. That’s why every year at Christmas time, loved ones and significant others struggle to find gifts for that special geek that fit the following three criteria: 1) they want it, 2) they don’t already have it, and 3) it won’t break the bank if you buy it for them. And, every year, the Ars Technica Holiday Gift Guide is here to help. Most tech-oriented gift guides are filled with gadgets and gear that only meet criterion #1 above—truth be told, we at Ars have written a few guides that fit this description in the past. That’s why with our 2009 guide, we put our heads together and came up with an assortment of gift ideas that, for the most part, should fit all three criteria for the nerd in your life. We asked ourselves not “what is the top X or Y of 2008?”, or “what should everyone have at least one of?”, but “what is it that we’ve come across in the past year that we actually wanted, for whatever crazy reason?” We then threw all of the suggestions in a giant pile, and sorted them into some basic groups. We admit that this process produced a list with a few super-random items in in it—ninja star coat hooks, a chess set that you hang on your wall, a wand-shaped remote that lets you go all Harry Potter on your entertainment system—but we challenge you to find another guide this year that contains more items that you’ll actually want to buy, either for a loved one or for yourself. So take a look through the Holiday Gift Guide 2009, and keep the plastic handy, because you won’t find a more entertaining, geek-appropriate collection of gift ideas this holiday season. Table of Contents PC and Mac Accessories : things go with your PC or Mac PC Hardware : storage and portables iPhone : for the iPhone power-user Kitchen : Top Chef wannabees will want these Apparel : get your geek on Camera : just in case you’re camera shopping Fitness : drop some pounds, post-holiday Consumer Electronics : stick this in your entertainment center Games : ten games that you’ll want (to get for yourself) Gaming Hardware and Gear : not quite what it sounds like, so prepare for surprises Books and Movies : read and watch Time : keep track of it (Very) Odds and Ends : who comes up with this stuff?
// November 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
This past Friday, Intel and AMD announced a settlement in their acrimonious antitrust dispute, with AMD clearly coming out on top to the tune of $1.25 billion in cash and a host of concessions. Both companies hosted conference calls that Friday morning, and later in the day the released excerpts from the agreement that makes up the non-cash portion of the deal, in which Intel agrees to a number of conditions that should make life much easier for AMD and its fab spinoff, GlobalFoundries.
// November 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
The NPD Group’s sales information for October has been released, and DJ Hero is nowhere to be found on the top ten list. According to Gamespot , the game sold 122,300 copies. That may not sound like a flop, but keep in mind that this number is spread across four platforms . The sales breakdown is depressing: it sold best on the 360, with 62,000 units moved. The worst? 3,300 units on the PlayStation 2. What happened? Activision Blizzard spent a mint promoting the game, including hiring big-name producers and DJs to hype the release, as well as bringing in Jay-Z and Eminem to perform at a star-studded concert at E3. The game had strong early buzz, and it could still be a slow-burning hit. Our guess, though, is that you’re looking at an expensive flop of game. Why did a title with so much going for it miss the mark in sales so spectacularly? We have a few theories.
// November 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
At a financial analyst day on Wednesday, AMD gave out a little more detail on its “Fusion” plans, making the word “Fusion” the centerpiece of its marketing push for the post-honeymoon, post-GlobalFoundries, AMD/ATI relationship. The first product to feature both a CPU core and a GPU core on the same die is codenamed Llano, and will appear in 2011. Llano features one or more Phenom-derived CPU cores, combined with a GPU that supports DirectX11 and OpenCL. But AMD was at pains to stress that Llano is an intermediate step, and is not the end-of-the-road for its Fusion program. The real goal of Fusion is to merge the CPU and GPU entirely, and to bring that combination directly in contact with the OS. (See the red arrow in the slide below.)
// November 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor is finally coming to little laptops. The chip company has confirmed that its speedy ARM offering has been adopted by Lenovo for a new product with a netbook form-factor. The device will be available from AT&T, presumably offered with some kind of contract subsidy. Despite being named after a flower, the Snapdragon has serious bite. Its Cortex-A8 core packs 1GHz of processing power, delivering an impressive balance of performance and energy efficiency. The chip is already being used in a handful of ultra high-end smartphones, including the HTC HD2 and Sony Ericsson’s upcoming Xperia X10 Android handset. The company hopes to bring it to more mainstream phones and other devices in the future.
// November 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
As the telecommunications world went wireless and digital, the tried-and-true method law enforcement agencies used for wiretaps—splicing into the local loop—was in danger of becoming an anachronism. In 1994, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act , which required telecommunications switches to incorporate a capacity for government monitoring of phone calls and other communications. That requirement ultimately produced an ANSI standard, J-STD-025, that dictated the capabilities of the hardware interface used by law enforcement agencies. A team of academic researchers has now put that standard to the test, and found that it’s vulnerable to various forms of denial and obfuscation attacks. As the authors note, the monitoring of domestic communications has been a source of controversy in recent years; others have questioned whether having a standard capacity built into every piece of communication hardware leaves the US communications infrastructure at risk of external attack. They avoid these issues, however, and focus on a simpler question: how well does the J-standard actually work?
// November 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
SUNNYVALE — Companies rarely make big news at financial analyst day events, but AMD bucked that trend Wednesday by unveiling details of its newly revamped roadmap, its two brand-new processor architectures, and its plans for CPU/GPU integration. (AMD and Intel also made some other news together ). Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview of what was announced, I’ll walk you through the two new processor architectures, leaving the CPU/GPU “Fusion” revelations and roadmap specifics for a second article.
// November 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
It’s a tricky thing to be a PC gamer who wants to play Modern Warfare 2 . We weren’t sure we’d get an advance copy from Activision, so we went to a local game store and put our money down to make sure there would be a copy waiting for us on launch day. (If we complain about preorders in the future, be sure to point out this hypocrisy.) When I went to pick up the game, the store manager let me know that I was the number four pre-order for the PC version of the game. He then told me he had over 400 orders for the Xbox 360 version. It’s hardly a scientific poll, but when one version of the game outsells the other 100 to 1, it’s hard to feel like you’re part of a demographic the publisher is going to listen to. When the time came to pick up the game, the clerk couldn’t find it. It was tucked away in the back, with no display, and I was the first person who came in to get their copy. No PC gamers attended the midnight launch. I was asked, more than once, if I was sure I wanted this version. Even if you bought on Steam, you have to wait until November 13 to play it, which is weird since the game uses Steamworks copy protection and requires a Steam account to play. It seems retail was cut a break on this one.
