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techy.Bytes - November 2006

e700
Acer's e700 multimedia PC
The Aspire e700 is Acers new incremental (or evolutionary?) upgrade to its Multimedia Centre PC’s.

With the fastest available DDR2 memory and using Intel’s Core 2 Duo CPU’s which is up to 40% more energy efficient and of course better performing you get more power for less heat generation so the case fans can be smaller and quieter, crucial for a media centre PC.


Just like a TV the e700 can be turned on and off instantaneously courtesy of Intel’s Viiv technology. Other benefits Viiv gives the e700 is faster storage speeds and improved (integrated) graphics among a myriad of multimedia based enhancements.

The e700 also features a 9 in 1 media reader and it also has optional wireless LAN. It also features a hard drive that can be up to 400gb and a dual layer DVD burner.



Download the product sheet here.
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What surprises me most about AMD announcing the first ever Dual Socket multi-core desktop PC platform is not the fact they did it before Intel (about time AMD did something before Intel) but the fact NVIDIA claims to be ‘pleased’ by such developments indicating its relationship with AMD has not been damaged in light of the AMD/ATI merger.

“NVIDIA is pleased to be the launch partner for the launch of the new AMD Quad FX multi-GPU Platforms," said Drew Henry of NVIDIA continuing to say the Geforce 8 series will be ideal when partnered with AMD’s new platform for the ‘mega tasker’.

AMD has two other key partners with its new platform, Voodoo PC and Alienware both of which specialize in selling pre-assembled enthusiast level PC’s.


The new platform called ‘Quad FX’ provides excellent performance scalability particularly with AMD’s Athlon 64 FX processors. Quad FX is specifically designed to enhance the ‘mega taskers’ experience with ‘Windows Vista Ultimate’, so in essence Quad FX is the first generation enthusiast level platform for Vista.

Dual Socket Direct Connect Architecture (DSDCA) is the heart of the Quad FX platform. It gives matched processors high bandwidth communication between each other, these processors are dual core AMD Athlon 64 FX-70, AMD Athlon 64 FX-72, and AMD Athlon 64 FX-74.


Price and Availability

While powerful the new platform may be, it has a price tag to match (as always) the pricing for pairs of the new AMD Athlon 64 FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74 dual-core processors is $599, $799 and $999 (US) respectively.

They are first set to be put on the market on November 30th on NewEgg and it is set to be available worldwide early 2007. The new platform is expected to be available from all major system builders.
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NASA Gives the OK for Discovery Launch

November 30th 2006 01:36
NASA senior managers have unanimously agreed to launch Space Shuttle Discovery on December 07 9:35pm EST.

Commander Mark Polanski will take a six man crew to continue building of the International Space Station. Specifically they aim to start up the Space Stations cooling and power systems.

This may prove to be one of the more complex missions, as Associate Administrator for Space Operations Bill Gerstenmaier said after a two day meeting to discuss plans "What struck me during this meeting was how complex this mission is and how it fits into the next series of assembly missions...".

Let’s just hope it won’t be disaster...

For more information on the mission you can visit NASA’s Shuttle Page.
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The Trojan War and Game Consoles

November 29th 2006 13:54
Achilles
Achilles (AKA Sony Computer Entertainment)
Imagine the console wars is the Trojan wars. We have Microsoft (Paris) hiding from the relatively safe position of Troy while Sony (we’ll assume Sony is Menelaus) amasses a massive army from various nations (notably, nVidia, IBM and Toshiba) to take the city of Troy, the Army is led by SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) AKA Achilles.

Sure, it looks to be relatively safe for the well defended and well entrenched Microsoft, but even as we speak the citizens of Troy are somewhat fearful of what Sony (Menelaus) might have at its disposal yet somewhat skeptical that it might all be a bluff, and still remains loyal to Menelaus (Microsoft) and have faith in his (its) strength


[ Click here to read more ]
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VoIP for Nokia N80

November 29th 2006 08:56
N80
First step towards true mobile PC's
Voice over IP (or VoIP) is a relatively old (read that? ‘Relatively old’) internet technology where put simply telephone calls are made on the cheap.

The ‘Nokia N80 Internet Edition’ now supports Gizmo’s VoIP software which can be downloaded for free to eligible customers. Through it users can make cheap VoIP calls over the internet through their mobile phones


[ Click here to read more ]
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Gemalto has announced that Windows Vista will support Gemalto .Net devices right out of the box.

Security is taken a step further from the usual username/password prompts with Gemalto’s smart cards, tokens among a myriad of software level security measures


[ Click here to read more ]
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cheesy
Wow, to think these ads actually built hype!
Naysayers will always be naysayers, at first when the Wii was unveiled they said it was too small and had no HD so it was a failure, when the Wii-Mote was unveiled they said it was a gimmick, just like the DS (O_o), when the hype was building they said it would burst like a bubble, when the launch sales rocketed they said it was just early adopters (so-called fanboys), as the sales continue to rocket they claim whatever the hell they want to. But whatever they say, Nintendo will still be laughing all the way to the bank.

Only eight days on the market the Wii has sold 600,000 units, its biggest selling game is (quite predictably) ‘Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’ with an attachment rate just over 0.75, which means approximately 454,000 units of ‘Twilight Princess’ has been purchased by Wii owners


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Well this is a website about interesting things, such as what would happen if you were exposed to the vacuum of space. THE vacuum of space, and damn if it isn’t interesting, or obvious if you have any common sense. Yeah, those Hollywood movies really had us fooled... CURSES!

Everything, from giant carnivores centipedes to gravity trains, even the lost city of Atlantis might have been found, and is thoroughly explained on ‘Damn Interesting


[ Click here to read more ]
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Google Earth using satellite technology has found an anomaly over Amsterdam.

Ladies and gentlemen that is positive proof that extra terrestrial beings are in fact visiting our planet


[ Click here to read more ]
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3D Yoda with Dislocated Eyeballs

November 24th 2006 06:27
Nothing much to do today, so I decided to make this, took about ten minutes so I am quite pleased with the results… Well not really, but I’m not going to be displeased either. I call it ‘Yoda with Dislocated Eyeballs’, my intention wasn’t making Yoda, but those ears I gave this thing sure remind me of Yoda.

Sadly ‘3D Yoda with Dislocated Eyeballs’ won’t be getting a body in the foreseeable future


[ Click here to read more ]
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MS Paint taken to the Extreme

November 23rd 2006 11:47
MS Paint might be simple but damn well any guy who can put in 500 hours into it can turn up with a masterpiece. A simple bloody masterpiece.


[ Click here to read more ]
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Urban Dictionary

November 23rd 2006 11:42
Cross Oxford with the Bronx and you get ‘Urban Dictionary’.

Urban Dictionary (UD) is essentially a dictionary containing user defined words derived from street slang, words like ‘slapper’ or ‘Techokillologie’ can all be found on UD


[ Click here to read more ]
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Playstation 3 VS Playstation 2

November 23rd 2006 07:57
With all the crazy ‘Xbox 360 VS PlayStation 3’ comparisons going on no one seems to have bothered comparing the Playstation 3 launch titles to previous generation games.

Many people camped out for just a chance to get a Playstation 3, just the chance, they got soaking wet, cold and annoyed, and for what? I decided to find out


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WidowPC sticks it up Dell

November 22nd 2006 23:20
WidowPC
WidowPC's new line of laptops to compete with Dell
Dell might find its self in a run for its money with WidowPC announcing a new line of ‘gaming’ laptops to act as a direct competition with Dell’s gaming laptops, such as the XPS M1710.

Sporting the industries fastest Dual Core CPU and GPU for laptops with a starting price of $2195, $100 less than Dell’s offering WidowPC hopes to break Dell’s market dominance in this area


[ Click here to read more ]
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Mobile TV in Italy

November 22nd 2006 20:54
P930
Samsungs new Mobile TV for Italy
A new TV mobile phone, Samsung’s P930, has been released to the Italian market through ‘Telecom Italia’.

The P930 is essentially everything you’d expect from a TV and more, it sports a 240x320 LCD screen, which is essentially a wide screen aspect ratio and PIP (picture in picture). Talk about overkill. PIP? a 240x320 screen is small enough already, why would you wan't to watch two TV shows at the same time


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Here Comes the Penguin

November 22nd 2006 06:17
Tux
Here comes the penguin!
I downloaded and installed Ubuntu, an operating system that runs under the Linux kernel the other day. Let me tell you, it was so easy, and it was so efficient, and best of all it was SO FREE.

The 700mb download gave me an ISO which I burned onto a CD, then I inserted it into the CD drive on my PC and hit reset. Upon booting up I was given the option to run Ubuntu directly from the CD, ‘great’ I thought, that way nothing is ruined on the computer should I dislike it, no need to uninstall or anything


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LCD Panel
Thick as a credit card, the worlds thinnest LCD screen
Like they weren’t thin enough already (are they ever?) Samsung has created a new LCD display screen that is 0.7mm thinner than the last thinnest and at a thickness of just 0.82mm about as thick as the average credit card.

Samsung has achieved these results by redesigning the light guide plate subassembly and the glass substrate which contributed a lot to the LCD screens thickness. By doing so Samsung's engineers were able to shave 0.7mm's off of the width of the (previous) thinnest LCD screen in existence


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Where’d that come from?

November 22nd 2006 00:47
AMD has congratulated Nintendo on a successful launch of the Nintendo Wii... huh? Since when did AMD have anything to do with Nintendo?

I mean... Well... last I checked the CPU was developed and manufactured by IBM and the GPU by ATI... OH! That’s right, AMD bought out ATI... figures


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Cost of War

November 22nd 2006 00:38
Interesting website that displays a rough estimate of the war in Iraq in real time, needless to say in any given second it costs about as much as most get paid every few weeks.

You can even compare it to the cost of several things such as housing and education


[ Click here to read more ]
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Online TV

November 21st 2006 18:57
When Google sees the potential, and is willing to put money where its mouth is you know it has a future.

Online TV, or to put more accurately, video’s made specifically for online viewing are short (usually no longer than five minutes), to the point and are often more entertaining than regular TV shows


[ Click here to read more ]
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Playstation 3 Grill

November 21st 2006 07:42
While it has been photoshopped into a grill and fridge, no one has up until now tried converting the Playstation 3 to either.

So here it is, the worlds first Playstation 3 grill


[ Click here to read more ]
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NEC for Super 3G

November 21st 2006 07:31
Super 3G is the next leap from 3G mobile technology. 3G simply is the third generation of communication for mobile phones.

NEC has announced it will develop components for ‘Super 3G’ capable handsets which will be available on the market by 2010 for NTT DoCoMo
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SD card
Toshiba's new SD memory card
Toshiba has announced the world’s first Class 4 8gigabyte SD Memory cards. Well I have no idea why they give it such complex naming, but that isn’t Toshiba's fault (apparently).

Basically it is a flash card, like the ones you put in digital camera’s that can store 8gigabytes of data (that’s a lot of photographs). It’s called a ‘Class 4’ because it can be written to at a speed of four megabytes a second, and up to six megabytes a second


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Mature Gamers

November 20th 2006 06:37
Today I had a personal experience, one of those moments geeks tend to have. On the bus, home from my last difficult exam (which turned out to be really short and not so difficult), there were two lads. High school, senior high I believe, and they were talking about videogame consoles.

Mature or not?
You could play on a DS, but that doesn't make you mature
Well here they are, around seventeen years old, so I decided to ‘overhear’ their opinions on the next-gen (so-called) consoles. Well it looks like the Xbox 360 was on top of their most wanted list, with the Playstation 3 being the dream machine both knew was too far away to reach


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Comp Sci finding its way to English Lit

November 14th 2006 14:18
As a computer science student in games tech, I hold a somewhat odd position at my campus. I’m the, shall we say, envied guy. They think games dev is all about fun’n’games, when it is anything but. It requires thinking, problem solving, and above all an acceptance of your imperfections, since the computer is never ever wrong.

English literature
Woohoo, English lit
Ironically I have always envied those doing the English related degrees for instance. I mean, you can say ‘your English essay sucks’, but that is coming from another person, it is all opinionated


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QuadCore CPU
A variant of Intels new Quad Core CPU's
Hewlett Packard has announced a new line up of workstations based on Quad Core CPU’s at QuadFest. There was (is) dual core, now it has been stepped up to quad, so it was two now it's four, one can assume it’ll be eight, or if computers are anything to by, sixteen within a year and a half (note my technopotomistic post a while back).

Quad Core CPU’s are more powerful, use less power and produce less heat than other CPU’s… which have fewer cores


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You’re probably thinking ‘he’s mad!’ I mean, who’d buy a game console under the guise of it being a PC? Well truth is gents and non-existent ladies (since women obviously don’t surf the net! It’s a paradox I say!), the Playstation 3 may end up being the first ever hybrid game console plus personal computer in one package.

Playstation 3
The Playstation 3
With the release of the Playstation 3 in Japan (launch date in North America is 17th of November, the rest of the planet has to wait until March next year), it has been realized that the Playstation 3 can actually support any and all standard PC hard disk drives


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The cure for paralysis?

November 11th 2006 20:12
With the advent and advancements of neural networking nanotubes perhaps we’ll have doctors of the future wondering what doctors of these years used to do without the technology. Neural networking nanotubes can one day act as artificial nerve cells which can block off pain or control muscular movement.

Nanotube
3D animation of a single walled Nanotube
Nanotubes are perhaps one of the biggest discoveries that has resulted directly from the buckball capabilities of carbon elements. Essentially they are a collection of carbon atoms that form a tube, their diameter measures to about 1/50,000th the width of human hair. They have many and varied applications from space science to medical technologies


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SD-L902A
Toshiba hopes the SD-L902A will help push mobile HD-DVD drivers further into the market
Toshiba recently showcased the worlds first HD-DVD burner, the SD-L902A, intended for mobile PC’s at CEATEC 2006.

Measuring at only 128mm x 12.7mm x 126.1mm and weighing in at 170grams this little midget of a drive can slip into tight spots making it the obvious if not (at time of writing) only choice for laptop based HD-DVD burners


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Yes they are, how else would you explain them converting straight democrat votes to republican votes?

eSlate
The eSlate voting machine is a republican
Programming error? Maybe, but I am still convinced the machines are republicans, because even those that were not ‘programmed’ software wise still flipped democrat votes. Voting on the eSlate machine cannot be explained as a calibration error of the machines as it is not calibrated, and uses no software


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Internet Libraries

November 6th 2006 12:32
One day the internet may replace libraries.

Google is perhaps the leader in the field of digitalizing books and putting them on their search engine Google Book Search. Another company in the loop doing this is Questia
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Borat
Smile
Well not quite, but he just as well might grab some tickets to the international space station in light of these recent developments. Yes, you read right, one of the pioneering space tourism programs has set up shop in… Iran.

While here in Australia for instance we are still complaining about our slow internet connection speeds, up in Iran of all places, a woman of all genders (of which two exist in fact) gets to go to space


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If you can’t beat them…

November 4th 2006 08:20
Pretend you join them and tear them limb for limb from the inside. You might think that is cruel, harsh, diabolically evil, but when you know Microsoft is in the picture you know only one word can pretty much describe it all: “Typical”.

MS TUX
That'll be the day
Microsoft has for years been trying to destroy open source community via calculated law suits, generally speaking it has had wins and losses for Microsoft legally, but nothing but loss in terms of public relations. One of the main reasons many claim Microsoft is evil is the fact it goes after unpaid programmers who produce software that may or may not even (in some cases) infringe on Microsoft’s patents


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Real Life Mech

November 2nd 2006 12:11
A mech is basically a vehicle on legs. Impossible to create? Well thus far, yes, very impossible.

More of a science fiction concept that is best known and recognized in sci-fi movies such as Star Wars (i.e. the ATST), or in videogames such as ‘Mech Warrior’ among many others


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Britain: The Prison State

November 2nd 2006 11:31
Remember that movie ‘Johnny English’, where a crazy bad guy Frenchman wanted to turn the UK into the largest prison in the world? Looks like his dream has finally been fulfilled, if not in a slightly more subtle way than one might first assume.

Big Brother
The British are the most spied upon people in the world, which is on its own alarming news. Were not talking about Stalin Russia or post apocalyptic future of the US of A, we are talking about the 2006 Britain


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Free Water

November 1st 2006 16:03
Ever heard of ‘free energy’? Well as much as the developed world would love something that is impossible to create, not to mention has no place in the current political world, it cannot want it, or desire it as much as third world countries loves and desires clean fresh drinking water, something they can drink that doesn’t taste horrid, and that won’t make them sick.

Before you feel guilty about the fact that one in five people don't have access to safe drinking water and reach into your pockets to dig up a few bucks for World Vision, I would like to point out it’s not about throwing money at it, or digging wells, the solution to this problem is far simpler than that. The answer to this problem exists, and it is surprisingly cheap and efficient


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What would be the super soldier? Well according to some film makers and writers the perfect soldier would be a ruthless efficient killer desperate to gain acceptance in what he does, in what he is, and desperate for the love of the very country he fights for, for what he is, he’ll act out of hand to defend the country, or do what he believes is defending his country, and he’ll do it well… Also the perfect soldier would happen to be the spitting image of one Marlon Brando and would be a ridiculously good actor.

That’s not the militaries opinion of a super soldier. What the military wants is a soldier who is indestructible. To what degree will they go to do this? I would say that they would go as far as they could


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