3M has announced a new high-density version of its Embedded Capacitance Material (ECM), an innovation it says will have wide application in miniaturized computing.

Embedded Capacitance Material (or ECM) is constructed from a thin layer of epoxy filled with ceramic and layered on both sides with copper foil. It can be embedded directly onto printed circuit boards (PCBs), reducing the number of surface mount capacitors needed, leaving more room on the boards and reducing noise that causes electromagnetic interference.

The company says it has increased the capacitance in its ECM to between 20 to 40 nF from 10 nF in previous versions. This means computer and electronic component manufacturers will be able to “include more functionality in a device of the same size, or within practical limits, shrink the device some more,” says Alexander Barr, senior product develop specialist at 3M.

The new ECM would theoretically be able to reduce the hardware required for something like a mobile device by several orders of magnitude, adds Joel Pfeiffer, a technical support engineering specialist at the manufacturer. “It works that way, mostly. If you for some reason had a need for, say, 100 nF of embedded capacitance previously, that would have taken 10 square inches and now you could do that with much less.”

According to a 2010 study by AVX Corp., a U.S.-headquartered global manufacturer and supplier of electronic components, up to 70 per cent of the PCBs on today’s electronic devices are covered with passive components (which consume energy that could be used to power the device). ECM is designed to replace these, thus making PCBs more functional per square inch.

However, Prof. Todd Hubing, who works in the electrical and computer department at South Carolina’s Clemson University, says while ECM could be the future of computers and electronics, its cost remains too high to see widespread adoption in those industries.

“If it cost the same as just adding surface mount capacitors I think everybody, well not everybody, but most electronics would be using embedded capacitance materials because they really do reduce the noise,” he says. “Electrically, they’re just a better option than these lumped components. But the problem has always been the cost of putting this material in versus the cost of just adding some more surface mount components.”

ECM suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem with manufacturers, he says. “There’s nothing inherently expensive about it. I think the reason the costs are so high is because the volumes are so low. It’s one of those things, I think, that if everybody started using it, it would be cheap, and if it were cheap everybody would start using it.”

So far, 3M [NYSE: MMM] has not released the new ECM to the market, but has supplied it to several OEMs in the qualification process.

Hubing says ECM is just one emerging technology with the potential to make computers smaller and more powerful. In September of last year, IBM and 3M announced a partnership to develop special adhesives that would stack semiconductors into towers of as many as 100 chips, creating a new kind of microprocessor. These stacks could be used in everything from servers to smartphones.

“Certainly we’re doing a lot more stuff on-chip right now,” says Hubing. “The stacked silicon inside chips is catching on [and] will eventually be widely used, I think. And that’s allowed us to put a lot more computing power or a lot more function inside a single chip.”

Source:http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/3m-creates-high-density-material-for-pcbs/144839

Toshiba has announced their next Ultrabook will be a 14-inch computer, their first Ultrabook the Toshiba Portege Z830/Z835 featured a 13.3-inch screen. Another thing is the new model will be the first Ultrabook for the consumer centered Satellite brand. Toshiba says their new Ultrabook will be marketed under the name Toshiba Satellite U840 the world over.
New design

Design wise the new Toshiba Satellite U840 will be a pretty big change from the first Ultrabook that Toshiba launched last year. For starters the ports have been moved back to the right and left-hand sides for the new U840, on the first Toshiba Ultrabook the ports were all located on the back.

Toshiba Satellite U840 vs Portege Z830 trackpadOther than the rearranging of I/O ports the new U840 has a new touchpad and keyboard design. The Toshiba Satellite U840 has much more simplistic touchpad design that ditches dedicated buttons for left-and-right click in favor of integrated buttons for those functions within the single large touchpad –the touchpad on the previous Toshiba Ultrabook was much smaller than the new U840′s touchpad in sheer size.

The tech specs.

Toshiba plans on offering similar internal hardware options for their U840 as they did their first Ultrabook the Z830/Z835. Intel’s Core i processors, SSD’s and plenty of built-in DDR3 RAM are all things you should see in Toshiba Satellite U840 models.

However here is the full list of technical specifications that Toshiba is committed to offering with the U840 (keep in mind some of the features are optional and won’t come standard):

* 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i3 and i5 Processors for Ultrabook™
* RAM: up to 8GB DDR3
* 128 GB SSD or 320GB/500GB Hybrid HDD with 16GB SSD
* 14.0″ HD display with LED backlighting, 1,366 x 768 pixels
* WLAN, Bluetooth™ 3.0, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet LAN
* 1x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0, SD Card Reader, HDMI®
* Backlit A4 tile keyboard, large ClickPad with multi-touch
* 1.3 megapixel webcam with Toshiba Face Recognition
* Stereo speakers enhanced with SRS Premium Sound 3D Technology
* Intel Rapid Start Technology
* Toshiba Hi-Speed Start Technology
* Toshiba Resolution+, Toshiba Eco Utility, Toshiba Media Controller, Toshiba PC Health Monitor
* OS: Windows 7 Premium
* 342 x 232 x 19.9mm
* Weight starting from 1.59kg

Launch and price

Toshiba has only announced that they will be releasing the Satellite U840 in South and Southeast Asia during the first quarter of this year. No pricing has been announced at this time for the U840, but I don’t see Toshiba going too far away from the pricing they have established for their Z830/Z835 Ultrabook (starts at $899 USD).

Source:http://laptop-computer-planet.com/blog/2012/02/07/toshiba-believes-in-an-ultrabook-future-reveals-second-model/

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the “fused architecture” emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip. The technology, called CPU-assisted general purpose computation on graphics processor units (CPU-assisted GPGPU) uses software compiled to leverage the architecture to allow the CPU and GPU to collaborate on computing tasks, boosting processor performance on average by more than 20 percent in simulations.

The approach, outlined in a paper by NC State Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Dr. Huiyang Zhou, Ph.D. candidates Yi Yang and Ping Xiang, and AMD GPU Architect Mike Mantor, is designed for fused architecture chipsets with a shared L3 cache and shared off-chip memory for CPUs and GPUs. The approach developed by the team leverages the computing power of the GPU, while taking advantage of the CPU’s more flexible data retrieval and better handling of complex tasks.

The current generation of hybrid CPU/GPU systems, including Intel’s “Sandy Bridge” and AMD’s “Llano” has helped create more energy-efficient systems and reduce manufacturing costs, Zhou said. “However, the CPU cores and GPU cores still work almost exclusively on separate functions. They rarely collaborate to execute any given program, so they aren’t as efficient as they could be. That’s the issue we’re trying to resolve.”

GPUs are obviously designed for handling graphics, but they are also very good at handling large numbers of parallel processes, particularly in applications where the same process needs to be applied to large amounts of data. Traditionally, one of the the biggest problems when using GPUs for general purpose computing has been that they don’t handle complex, branchy, pointer-heavy code very well at all—which is the strength of CPUs. The long pipelines of most GPUs instead favor sequential, streaming reads, and applications where there’s a high ratio of arithmetic operations applied to data relative to the amount of data that has to be moved to and from memory. Hybrid chips like Sandy Bridge have less main memory bandwidth than typical discrete GPUs (albeit with lower latency), so keeping the fast level 3 cache filled with data is essential if developers want to avoid starving the GPU of data.

CPU-assisted GPGPU uses the CPU’s faster L3 cache pre-fetching to feed data to the GPU, cutting out performance drags that come with GPU code accessing memory. A program compiled for CPU-assisted GPGPU launches a “pre-execution” program at startup on the CPU to pre-fetch data to be processed by GPU code and load it into the level 3 cache onboard the chip. That allows process threads running in the GPU to hit the L3 cache directly, rather than fetching from memory, reducing latency and significantly boosting performance. In some cases, the performance of simulated applications improved by up to 113%, the researchers claimed.

Why simulated? AMD’s current hybrid processor, the Llano, lacks a shared L3 cache, so it won’t support the approach. And Intel’s Sandy Bridge offers only limited GPGPU functionality. In a phone interview with Ars, Dr. Zhou explained that in theory the research could be applied to Intel’s current Sandy Bridge architecture, which provides a shared last-level cache for CPUs and GPUs in its architecture. But he said that Sandy Bridge’s GPU “isn’t that powerful” and Intel’s current software support “doesn’t include support for OpenCL and other GPGPL stuff.” However, he said, he expects that the hardware support for CPU-assisted GPGPU applications will be in upcoming generations of hybrid platforms from both Intel and AMD, and software support will follow. And, he added, “it’s already assumed that the GPU (in Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors) will be much more powerful than Sandy Bridge.”

Real World Technologies editor David Kanter said that he expects to see “a lot more work in this area, as engineers and researchers must improve performance significantly, while maintaining or reducing power consumption.” But he noted that there wasn’t information in the research about the power consumption impact of the technology. Zhou said that the research hasn’t yielded any hard numbers on what the power consumption impact would be.

Zhou said that his team’s research had been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and AMD, and was just the latest collaboration with Mantor. But the research up until now has been fundamental scientific research, and he couldn’t say how it might be commercialized by AMD or Intel.

Source:http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/researchers-boost-processor-performance-by-getting-cpu-and-gpu-to-collaborate.ars

AMD’s Financial Analyst Day last week contained very little information about the company’s plans for its workstation graphics division, but Sunnyvale remains committed to professional graphics. That was the emphatic message from the FirePro personnel we spoke to about this launch; we’ll have a review of the card up in the not-too-distant future. The V3900 replaces the V3800 and is the entry-level counterpart to the V5900 and V7900 we reviewed earlier this year.

Compared to its predecessor, the V3900 is a major upgrade. It sports double the RAM (1GB), uses the Turks GPU derived from AMD’s 6800-series, doubles the available memory bandwidth (to 28.8GB, up from 14.4),and supports the latest versions of OpenGL and OpenCL (4.2 and 1.1 respectively). Raw compute performance as measured in single-precision GFlops is also 20 percent higher, at 624 GFlops. The MSRP of $119 is a tad higher than the $99 tag on the V3800, but the V3900’s additional performance should more than justify the higher price tag.

AMD claims that the V3900 outperforms both the Quadro 400 and the V3800 in a wide range of tests. The hardware specs on the cards make this likely–the Quadro 400 and the V3800 are well matched as far as RAM loadout and memory bandwidth–but we’ll be following up with our own benchmarks as well.

Cutting into Nvidia’s Turf:

Nvidia has dominated professional graphics for years; the company currently holds ~80% of the professional market. When we asked AMD about this disparity, the company confirmed that they were fighting to gain share but noted that the current 80/20 split is a marked improvement over the 90/10 break of 3-4 years ago. Thus far, AMD’s push into the workstation space has been centered around aggressive MSRPs and providing features Nvidia has yet to match. Eyefinity is one of the best examples.

None of Nvidia’s entry or midrange cards support more than two displays; the company’s cheapest triple-display options debut around the $400 mark. AMD, in contrast, bills the V3900 as capable of driving up to five displays. Granted, there’s a significant caveat–you’ll need DP 1.2 support and a separate hub–but if you need to drive that many screens off a single low-end card, it’s possible to do so.

The V3900 will also ship with a half-height bracket to ensure it fits into small form factor systems and is expected to debut in systems from HP with ISV certification from Fujitsu-Siemens following in the spring.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Launches-New-EntryLevel-FirePro-V3900/

Acer said that it had initiated legal action against former CEO and President Gianfranco Lanci. The company claims that Lanci has breached the non-compete clause in his contract when he left the company in March 2011. Acer has initiated legal action in Italian courts, the company said.

Lanci stepped down from his position at Acer last year over disagreements around product strategy. After joining the company in 1997, he helped Acer expand its global presence, presiding over the acquisitions of both Packard Bell and Gateway. Thanks to his leadership, Acer at one point became the second biggest PC company in the world.

But as consumers began to shift to smartphones and tablets, the split between Lanci and Acer investors began to grow: Lanci wanted to push the company to become more mobile-focused and more global. Acer also needed to focus on software and hardware integration by expanding from 300 to 400 engineers to 1,000. This meant hiring talent that currently wasn’t present in Taiwan.

But investors feared that this move would lead to a “de-Taiwanization” of the company. Lanci argued that it’s just globalization. “If we want to be in the top three (PC makers) in the next three to five years, we need to be a global company and we need to leverage resources wherever they are,” he said in an interview at the time.

The bickering between Lanci and the investors continued. Meanwhile, Acer was late in delivering on its smartphone and tablet vision. It misjudged the weakness in demand for products in Europe and the United States, thus leading to two consecutive quarters of missing earnings guidance. It also brought a $150M write down for excess (unsold) inventory in Europe.

Yet had Acer followed his vision, Lanci said the $20 billion business would have quickly grown to a $30 billion business, bringing in over a third of its sales from smartphones and tablets by 2015. “People after a few years will decide who was wrong,” he said.

Seven months after leaving Acer, Lanci signed on with Lenovo as a consultant focusing on assisting the computer firm to build itself as a consumer brand. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed the head of Lenovo’s Europe, Middle East and Africa businesses last month.

“Gianfranco brings years of expertise and insights to Lenovo that will help us strengthen our growing global consumer business,” Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang said of Lanci’s new role last year. But apparently Lanci wasn’t allowed to share that expertise and insight with Lenovo, as Acer states that there is a 12-month non-compete period in Lanci’s agreement.

“We believe Mr. Lanci has clearly breached the terms of the non-compete agreement he entered into willingly,” the company states. “We believe we have a very robust case.”

Source:http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Acer-non-compete-Gianfranco-Lanci-Lenovo-Lawsuit,14647.html

Mac OS X currently runs on Intel-based x86 systems. However, it seems as if Apple has seriously considered the possibility of porting the popular operating system to ARM chipsets.



Indeed, according to a Delfte University of Technology paper spotted by iMore, Apple’s Platform Technologies Group kicked off a project in 2010 to port the OS X Darwin kernel to ARMv5 architecture – the same family of chipsets that currently powers iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.

“The goal of this project is to get Darwin into a workable state on the MV88F6281 processor so that other teams can continue their work on this platform,” reads the paper.

“The project has three major milestones: Getting the buildsystem into shape so that it can build the kernel and kexts; building and booting the kernel into single user mode; booting the system into multi-user mode.”

As iMore’s Jack Perry points out, the project was only made public several months ago – and it remains unclear if the initiative is still ongoing. However, the author of the paper is now a full-time employee at Apple, where he works as a CoreOS engineer.

“[Remember], Mac OS X once ran on Power PC chips, yet Apple had it secretly running on Intel chips at the same time. It only makes sense for a company as forward thinking as Apple to have ARM-compatible builds of OS X in the development labs,” Perry explained.

“So while neither an OS X tablet nor an ARM MacBook Air seem likely, it’s interesting to see further evidence of Apple keeping the Mac platform nimble.”



Nevertheless, it should be noted that a number of recent reports indicate Apple has seriously considered moving from x86 chips to RISC-based ARM architecture for its laptop lineup. In May 2011, SemiAccurate’s Charlie Demerjian claimed Cupertino had already reached its decision, making the switch a “done deal.”

“Apple is moving the laptop line, and presumably desktops too, to ARM based chips as soon as possible. With A15/Eagle allowing more than 32-bit memory access, things look up, but it seems silly to do so before the full 64 bit cores come in the following generation,” said Demerjian.

“It is a done deal, Intel is out, and Apple chips are in. The only question left is if they will use their own core, a Samsung core, or the generic ARM black box. My bet is on generic for the first round, with a custom uncore, and moving to progressively more proprietary features with each successive generation.”



However, Silicon Valley chip expert David Kanter believes Apple won’t switch its laptops to ARM anytime soon. Yet, Kanter does acknowledge eventually unifying three major platforms (computers, tablets and phones) would make it far easier for developers to target Apple platforms.

“In some ways, this might be the most sensible, since expanding the iOS installed base would help Apple create a more attractive market for developers compared to Android and could facilitate tying the iPhone to other Mac products. [Remember], Apple has few attachments to x86 and would not hesitate to shift to a better alternative,” Kanter wrote in a RealWorldTech analysis.

“[Yet], there are no ARM designs [to] meet Apple’s needs for performance and efficiency in the next two or three years. Even if there was, it is hard to see how such a design would be substantially better than AMD’s offerings. Over 5-10 years though, many of the technical and business hurdles may change. The ARM ecosystem is moving forward at a rapid pace, and Apple is watching carefully.”

Kanter also opined that Cupertino may be planning to design a hybrid x86-ARM system at some point in the near future.

“There are a number of ways putting ARM near a computer could be quite interesting and valuable… For example, Apple could include an ARM core in future notebooks for ‘instant-on’ web browsing while the computer is booting – something done in certain Dell and HP models. A [further] extension of that idea would be an update to OS X with an iOS emulator and maybe a co-processor for future hardware.

Source:http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/61300-apple-eyes-arm-for-mac-os-x

There are a few common things we all deal with in our daily lives, no matter where we live. Take the weather, for example.

For many of us, one of the first things we think of after waking up in the morning is: what is the weather like today? Sure, you can go and dig up the forecast using your smart phone, the TV, orr computer. Or, you could use a really cool device such as the one Robb Godshaw recently created called the Cryoscope.

The Cryoscope boasts hardware that is likely familiar to computer enthusiasts. At the top of the cube is a peltier element that sits on a heatsink. The device is also equipped with a cooling fan, as well as an RGB LED on the bottom. The outside of Cryoscope is an aluminum cube that sits over the works and conducts the heat and cold to its surface for the user to feel. The Cryoscop is controlled by an Arduino device that communicates with a web app for retrieving the weather forecast in your area.

All of those individual parts work together to make the Cryoscope’s aluminum cube the same temperature as the outdoors. Meaning, instead of looking at a thermometer that says 60°, you simply walk up and place your hand on the aluminum cube and feel the temperature. In addition, the LED on the bottom of the assembly also shows you – using color codes – if it’s warm or cold outside.

I think this would be awesome for parents with little kids who want to know what the temperature like outside, but don’t want to venture outdoors in case it’s too cold. I know the first thing my daughter asks me every day is what the weather will be like today. All she really wants to know is if she needs to wear a jacket, pants, or shorts. With one of these sitting in the kitchen, she could walk up and put her hand on it and know what she needed to wear for the day.

Source:http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-brief/61270-cryoscope-tells-you-the-temperature-with-a-touch

Nothing makes one feel really stupid more than changing computer systems — both hardware and software. We were trained last week, and all seemed crystal clear at that time. But, throw in a weekend — which was just enough time to forget many things — and things don’t look so clear today. Plus, we changed from Macs to PCs, so my fingers, the keyboard and my shortcuts aren’t exactly meshing. Here’s a hope and a prayer that this column actually publishes on Page 5A today as planned.

Birthday balloons and confetti to Dustin Branaman, Allen Mallet and Alice Kordisch, today; Bill Zink and Chance Gregory, Wednesday; Heather Robinson, Bonnie Fisher, Sue Nelson and Mickey DeWitt, Thursday; Garby Branaman and Tatum Branaman, Friday; Dale Wolverton and Wes Pierson, Saturday; and Ron Branaman, Veta Fritts and Linda Baggett, Sunday.

Anniversary hearts and roses to Richard and Meg Hanna, Steve and Karin Bluemlein, Jerry and Linda Dobbs, Allen and Carolyn Wright and Wayne and Linda Preston, Feb. 14.

Try this recipe:.

English Muffin Loaves

English Muffin Loaves
2 packages active dry yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
2 cups milk
½ cup water
5 1/2 to 6 cups flour
Cornmeal

In a large bowl, combine 3 cups of the flour with yeast, sugar, salt and soda. Heat milk and water to very warm — 120-130 F. Add warmed liquids to flour mixture, mixing well. Stir in remaining flour to make a stiff dough. Spoon into two 9-by-5-inch loaf pans that have been greased and dusted with cornmeal. Sprinkle with additional cornmeal.

Cover pans and let rise in a warm place for approximately 35-45 minutes. Bake at 400 F for 20 minutes, or until loaves are lightly browned. Remove from oven and turn out of pans on cooling rack.

Source:http://www.baxterbulletin.com/article/20120207/COMMUNITIES/302070024

MAINGEAR, an award-winning PC system builder offering custom desktops, notebooks, and workstations, has updated the TITAN 17 high performance desktop replacement solution with all new aesthetic features while still maintaining top of the line performance for PC gamers who want to harness desktop-like power wherever they go and creative professionals that can work on site with no loss in productivity.

The TITAN 17 features support for both the latest Intel Core i7-3930K and the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition. With fast, intelligent multi-core technology that accelerates performance to match your workload, it delivers an incredible breakthrough in gaming performance. For both gamers and demanding users, the Titan 17 capitalizes on a dramatic leap forward in processing technology to provide all the power you need for even the most advanced games and applications.

Constantly looking to push performance boundaries, MAINGEAR’s TITAN 17 features the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M, combining the power of DirectX 11 and NVIDIA PhysX technologies. The GTX 580M can also be configured in SLI offering up to 2x’s performance scaling on today’s hottest PC games. The TITAN lets you play games the way they’re meant to be played without having to worry if your video card is up to the task.

The updated TITAN 17 also features support for the Quadro 5010M, featuring up to 4 GB of graphics memory and 384 CUDA cores. Built on the innovative NVIDIA Fermi architecture, the latest Quadro mobile graphics offerings integrate high performance computing capabilities with advanced visualization, transforming your TITAN 17 into a mobile super computer.

maingear32 300×257 MAINGEAR Updates the TITAN 17 17.3 inch Desktop Replacement

Gamer and PC enthusiasts on the go will never have to compromise with the TITAN 17. This powerhouse notebook can be customized with up to 32 GB of DDR3 memory with speeds up to 1866 MHz, two hardwired USB 3.0 ports, up to three SSD or SATA HDDs with hardware RAID support, and even when fully loaded; it keeps the option for an optical drive. As the power of the notebook will allow user to do more faster, the TITAN 17 also offers a full size illuminated keyboard and numeric pad.
main21 300×183 MAINGEAR Updates the TITAN 17 17.3 inch Desktop Replacement
The MAINGEAR TITAN 17 is currently available for pre-order and is offering free shipping along with the highly anticipated legendary game: Jagged Alliance: Back in Action and Batman: Arkham City PC games. For more details visit: http://www.maingear.com/titan17.

Technical Specification:

- Video Card: up to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M SLI with 2 GB GDDR5 or NVIDIA Quadro 5010M with up to 4 GB GDDR5 Graphics memory
- Display: 17.3″ (16:9) Full HD (1920×1080) LED-Backlit Display with Super Clear Glare Type Screen
- Processor: Intel Core i7-3930K Processor (3.20 GHz)/(3.80 GHz) in Turbo Mode, 12 MB L3 Cache, LGA 2011 or Intel Core i7-3960X Processor Extreme Edition (3.30 GHz)/(3.90 GHz) in Turbo Mode, 15 MB L3 Cache, LGA 2011
- Memory: Up to 32 GB Quad Channel DDR3 – 1600/1866 MHz
- Optical Drive: Up to Blu-ray reader/8x Multi Combo (BD-R, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
- Hard Drive: Up to 3x 600 GB Solid State Drive or 750 GB 7200 RPM SATA 2.5
- Network Adapter: Bigfoot Networks Killer Wireless-N 1102 supports 802.11a/b/g/n
- Keyboard: Illuminated Full size isolated keyboard with Numeric Pad, 6 instant buttons for Volume up, Volume down, Mute, Wi-Fi On/Off, Bluetooth On/Off, and Camera On/Off
- Audio: Built-in High-Definition Audio
- Slots: One ExpressCard 54/34 Slot and Built in 9-in-1 Media Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/MS/MS Pro/MS Duo/SD/Mini-SD/SDHC/SDXC)
- Operating System: Genuine Windows 7 Home, Professional or Ultimate 64-Bit
- Battery: Removable Polymer Smart Lithium-Ion battery pack
- I/O Ports: 1-HDMI 1.4a out, 1-DVI-I out, 1 Display Port 1.2, 2-USB 3.0, 2-USB 2.0, 1 IEEE-1394b Fire Wire, 1-S/PDIF out, 1 RJ-45 LAN, 1-eSATA Port (powered USB 3.0 (AC/DC) combo)
- Security: Kensington Lock and fingerprint reader
- Dimensions: (W)16.5″ x (H)2.2″ x (D)11.3″, 12.13 LBs with battery pack
- Price: Starts at $3,499

“The new MAINGEAR TITAN 17 offers the best in desktop replacement versatility,” Said Wallace Santos, CEO and Co-founder of MAINGEAR Computers. “With the power of the latest Intel 2nd generation Core I7 Extreme Edition desktop processor, dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580Ms in SLI and with the option to use Quadro 510M graphics, this system caters to anyone looking for the ultimate mobile powerhouse.”

Source:http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/maingear-updates-the-titan-17-17-3-inch-desktop-replacement-2/

A computer made entirely of biological molecules — named a “biological computer” — has been developed by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in California and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

The biological computer can decrypt images encrypted on DNA chips, the first time this use has been demonstrated, according to the scientists. The group, led by Professor Ehud Keinan of Scripps, used the computer to decrypt logos of The Scripps Research Institute and Technion.

The study was published in a recent online-before-print edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The computer doesn’t look like any computer people would recognize: It’s a combination of DNA molecules and other chemicals in solution in a tube. The molecules carry out all the traditional functions of a computer, with the chemical reactions performing the computing that usually is performed on transistors on a microchip.

The energy source is also biological: the molecule ATP, which powers metabolism.

DNA computers won’t replace traditional electronic computers, which are faster and more accurate. However, biological computers excel at handling extremely large quantities of information, such as that embedded in images. Also, DNA computers can perform certain calculations in parallel, speeding up the process.

———————————————–

Here is more from the Scripps press release:

In explaining the work’s union of the often-disparate fields of biology and computer science, Keinan notes that a computer is, by definition, a machine made of four components-hardware, software, input and output. Traditional computers have always been electronic, machines in which both input and output are electronic signals. The hardware is a complex composition of metallic and plastic components, wires, and transistors, and the software is a sequence of instructions given to the machine in the form of electronic signals.

“In contrast to electronic computers, there are computing machines in which all four components are nothing but molecules,” Keinan said. “For example, all biological systems and even entire living organisms are such computers. Every one of us is a biomolecular computer, a machine in which all four components are molecules that ‘talk’ to one another logically.”

The hardware and software in these devices, Keinan notes, are complex biological molecules that activate one another to carry out some predetermined chemical work. The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, predetermined changes, following a specific set of rules (software), and the output of this chemical computation process is another well-defined molecule.

“Building” a Biological Computer

When asked what a biological computer looks like, Keinan laughs.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not exactly photogenic.” This computer is “built” by combining chemical components into a solution in a tube. Various small DNA molecules are mixed in solution with selected DNA enzymes and ATP. The latter is used as the energy source of the device.

“It’s a clear solution-you don’t really see anything,” Keinan said. “The molecules start interacting upon one another, and we step back and watch what happens.” And by tinkering with the type of DNA and enzymes in the mix, scientists can fine-tune the process to a desired result.

“Our biological computing device is based on the 75-year-old design by the English mathematician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist Alan Turing,” Keinan said. “He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation, and he played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer.”

“Turing showed convincingly that using this model you can do all the calculations in the world. The input of the Turing machine is a long tape containing a series of symbols and letters, which is reminiscent of a DNA string. A reading head runs from one letter to another, and on each station it does four actions: 1) reading the letter; 2) replacing that letter with another letter; 3) changing its internal state; and 4) moving to next position. A table of instructions, known as the transitional rules, or software, dictates these actions. Our device is based on the model of a finite state automaton, which is a simplified version of the Turing machine. ”

Unique Biological Properties

Now that he has shown the viability of a biological computer, does Keinan hope that this model will compete with its electronic counterpart?

“The ever-increasing interest in biomolecular computing devices has not arisen from the hope that such machines could ever compete with electronic computers, which offer greater speed, fidelity, and power in traditional computing tasks,” Keinan said. “The main advantages of biomolecular computing devices over electronic computers have to do with other properties.”

As shown in this work, he continues, a wealth of information can be stored and encrypted in DNA molecules. Although each computing step is slower than the flow of electrons in an electronic computer, the fact that trillions of such chemical steps are done in parallel makes the entire computing process fast. “Considering the fact that current microarray technology allows for printing millions of pixels on a single chip, the numbers of possible images that can be encrypted on such chips is astronomically large,” he said.

“Also, as shown in our previous work and other projects carried out in our lab, these devices can interact directly with biological systems and even with living organisms,” Keinan explained. “No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input, and output, are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events.” He adds that because of DNA’s ability to store information, major computer companies have been extremely interested in the development of DNA-based computing systems.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Israel-US Binational Science Foundation, and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, as well as graduate fellowships from the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Foundation, the Fine Foundation, the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, and the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology.

Below are the three companies in the Computer Hardware industry with the highest free cash flow per share. FCF/share is a valuable metric signaling a company’s ability to facilitate growth in the business.Apple ranks highest with a FCF per share of $36.00. Following is Hewlett-Packard with a FCF per share of $3.87. Diebold ranks third highest with a FCF per share of $3.26.

Dell follows with a FCF per share of $1.81, and Stratasys rounds out the top five with a FCF per share of $0.69.

SmarTrend recommended that subscribers consider buying shares of Stratasys on October 11th, 2011 as our technology indicated a new Uptrend was in progress when shares hit $23.74. Since that recommendation, shares of Stratasys have risen 70.9%. We continue to monitor Stratasys for any potential shift so investors can protect gains and will alert SmarTrend subscribers immediately.

Source:http://www.equities.com/news/top-financial-story?val=173085156&cat=fin

So much of our lives and livelihoods are tied to computers, so keeping them safe and secure should be a major priority. You’re not just protecting data but a considerable investment of time and money.

There are a number of things you can do to protect your computer from physical theft. To prevent someone from walking off with your equipment, it needs to be anchored to an immovable object, such as a desk, the floor or a wall. Both desktop and notebook computers can be tethered to secure objects using high-grade steel cables and locks. Many notebooks come equipped with what’s called a Kensington security slot, to which you attach a no-cut cable with either a keyed or combination lock. This will deter thieves from walking off with an unattended notebook, though it won’t prevent them from stealing the hard drive or damaging the unit.

Desktop PCs have more options to protect them against physical theft. Computer towers can be equipped with latches and secured with a small padlock to prevent opening the case. Many companies — Kensington, Belkin and KSL Security, to name a few — make lock-and-cable security mechanisms as well as heavy-duty security pads that bolt computers to desks.

The above security methods will help deter theft, but they won’t always prevent it. When thieves want something bad enough, and are given enough time, they usually can get it. There are, however, security measures that can help in case of theft. The most obvious is to inscribe some kind of identification onto the computer case then take a picture of the mark so you can prove ownership. The picture also will help with insurance claims if it can’t be recovered. Many universities offer notebook engraving as a free service to students.

Computer hardware always can be replaced, but your personal or business data often cannot. Making routine backups of your data will ensure, even in the worst case scenario, your data remain intact. Remote data backups are the best, though as the recent Megaupload fiasco has proved, backing up to so-called cloud servers isn’t always secure. Servers get hacked and shut down all the time.

Perhaps a better method is to back up to a removable device, which can be stored off-site but locally accessed. For example, use at least two external hard drives, swapped out with each weekly backup, always keeping one stored in a secure place, such as your bank’s safety deposit box, a personal safe or some other trusted off-site location. This method keeps you in total control instead of at the mercy of some distant cloud.

Other safeguards against data theft include the use of password-protected data encryption, so even if your computer or its backups are stolen, the thieves won’t be able to access your data. Chances are, however, that whoever steals your computer hardware isn’t after your personal or business data; they merely want whatever cash they can get from its sale.

Most often, the biggest threat against your data isn’t theft but rather naturally occurring contaminants. In the dryness of winter, the same static electricity that shocks your finger can instantly destroy sensitive electronics. Always discharge static or wear a grounding strap before touching your computer’s internal components. As spring approaches, so does the season for thunderstorms and lightning strikes. A simple $25 surge protector can be enough to save your data and equipment from instant death.

It’s also important to keep the internal components of your computer free of dust, which can choke electronics, creating a thermal blanket that retains heat and burns out components. At least every six months, unplug everything and take the case outside for a cleaning. Use a can of compressed air and a small, soft-bristled brush to loosen and blow out as much dust as possible.

Source:http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2012/feb/07/hardware-data-need-protection/

AVADirect, a leading provider of custom notebooks, is the first to offer Clevo’s P270WM mobile gaming notebook.
The future is here, and AVADirect is readily expanding its offerings with hardware to prepare for it. For those who need ultimate performance on the go, AVADirect can feed your need for mobile speed with the Clevo P270WM. Based off of the Intel X79 chipset and Sandy Bridge-E processors, end-users can expect performance increases as much as 35-50 percent while keeping current and ahead of the curve for their much needed productivity, efficiency, and entertainment. Promising new features give the Clevo P270WM a name and reputation that is surely to leave a lasting impression for those who have it at their fingertips. The industry rookie, relative to age rather than experience, has no limits to its depth of functionality.

The P270WM’s design shapes the ground we stand on by creating new standards for mobile desktop replacements. The revolutionary X79-fueled P270WM, being the successor of the world renowned Clevo X7200, supports all of the functionality provided by its older brother. Three 9.5 inch hard drives, with optional RAID, two USB 3.0 ports, SLI support, HD LED screen, HDMI 1.4a support, and the recently re-designed express card slot for third-party expansion are still key features of the newly offered Clevo P270WM Gaming Notebook.

The Nvidia GTX 580M 2GB comes standard in the Clevo P270WM and offers SLI support for gaming duality. The GPU offers 384 CUDA cores, or 768 when in SLI. Furthermore, the victor of desktop replacements offers the Quadro 5010M 4GB for the elitist AutoCAD or developing engineer. Combined with the support of Quad-channel DDR3 SODIMM RAM and speeds up to 1866Mhz, creating a configuration suitable for your tasks is as simple as a few clicks on AVADirect’s website. The board features a total of four SODIMM slots expandable up to 32GB. The P270WM includes full 3D support, which has never been provided in a desktop replacement until now. End-users will more importantly be interested in the first-ever backlit keyboard integrated in the P270WM notebook. Clevo has not received outstanding remarks in the past for their lack of aesthetically pleasing designs, but a backlit keyboard changes everything enthusiasts have grown to know about Clevo’s design.

AVADirect will begin to accept pre-orders for the X79 high-end gaming notebook as of today. The base price starts at around $3000.00 and will feature the Intel core i7 3930K, GTX 580M 2B, 4GB of DDR3 RAM at 1333Mhz, 750GB 7200RPM hard disk, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/AVADirect-Now-Offering-X79-Gaming-Notebook/

Intel is launching a brand new line of solid state drives today, built around SandForce’s popular SF-2200 family of storage processors. The new SSD 520 Series solid state drives, as they are known, will supplant the Marvell-based 510 series at the top of Intel’s consumer-targeted SSD lineup and be offered in capacities ranging from 60GB to 480GB.

Like other SandForce SF-2200-based drives, the new Intel SSD 520 series is outfitted with a SATA III interface with sequential reads and writes speeds in the 550MB/s to 520MB/s ranges, respectively. According to their specifications, 4K random reads peak at around 50K IOPS (QD32), with 4K random writes hovering around 80K IOPS for the 240GB model we’ll be showing you here…

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-SSD-520-Series-Solid-State-Drive-Review/

The folks behind the Raspberry Pi $25 computer say that they could start taking orders by the end of February. This isn’t the first release date we’ve seen — the computers were supposed to be ready to go in December, but that didn’t happen. But not it looks like the first batch of 10,000 should finish production by February 20th.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer motherboard with a Broadcom BCM2835 low-power ARM-based processor. It’s designed to be able to run Linux-based software and it’s targeted at hobbyists, educational institutions, or anyone who really likes the idea of a $25 computer.

If you want internet connectivity, you’ll need to buy a slightly pricier $35 version.

While the system is designed primarily as a low power, low cost PC, it can handle 1080p HD video playback and even some 3D gaming. There’s also a project underway to port the popular media center application XBMC to run on the Raspberry Pi hardware.

Broadcom has also released a datasheet (PDF link) for the BCM2835 chip which may make it easier for independent developers to work with the Raspberry Pi — but the chip still uses closed source drivers, so the datasheet will only get you so far.

Source:http://liliputing.com/2012/02/raspberry-pi-25-computer-could-go-on-sale-this-month.html

A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn’t want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don’t want, French campaign group No More Racketware said Monday.

Stéphane Petrus bought a Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop from French retailer Cybertek in December 2007. The PC had Microsoft Windows Vista and other software installed on it, none of which Petrus wanted, so he sought a refund from Lenovo under a French law forbidding the sale of one product to be tied to the sale of another. In November 2008, the court rejected his request, telling him that if he didn’t want to pay for the copy of Windows, he should have returned the PC.

The judgment was overturned by the Court of Cassation two years later on appeal, and sent back to the court in Aix en Provence for retrial, on the grounds that the lower court had not considered whether the case was covered by the provisions of the 2005 European Union directive on unfair commercial practices.

After reconsidering the case, on Jan. 9, Judge Jean-Marie Dubouloz ordered Lenovo to pay Petrus legal costs of €1,000 (around US$1,300), damages of €800 and to refund the cost of the Windows license. Petrus had estimated the cost of the software at €404.81, but the court found that excessive, given that he had paid €597 for the PC and software together. Observing that “it is commonly accepted that the price of a piece of software represents 10 percent to 25 percent of the price of a computer,” the court ordered Lenovo to reimburse Petrus €120 for the software.

The campaign group No More Racketware welcomed the ruling, saying it symbolized the crumbling of the bundling of hardware and software in France. But more significantly, the group said, the ruling was founded on a European directive regulating unfair commercial practices, opening up the possibility that it could set a legal precedent in other E.U. countries too.

Frédéric Cuif, attorney for Petrus, wrote in a blog posting that the ruling was a step in the right direction, although he would have appreciated something less terse.

No More Racketware is not the only group campaigning against illegal software bundling: Consumer group UFC-Que Choisir has been fighting similar actions for years. A case pitting Que Choisir against Hewlett-Packard and retailer Darty in 2008 returned to the courts last year with a win, on appeal, for Que Choisir.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/249340/lenovo_ordered_to_pay_and83641920_for_making_french_laptop_buyer_pay_for_windows_too.html

The new form factor has been addressed with security as a top priority, along with USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt ports, according to Intel.

Intel has also worked to improve the user experience, making it more seamless by increasing the performance of the solid state drive and calling for the use of more hybrid SSD/hard disk drives.

This will deliver more storage capacity, at the same time giving users a faster over all experience. Intel has built a layer of protection into the hardware that will be needed as the devices go mainstream in the coming years.

Asus has married the world of design and top-end performance on its Zenbook. The Zenbook UX31E has an excellent look with a stunning 13-inch LED backlit display with a pixel resolution of 1600×900. It is powered by an Intel Core i7 processor, boasts 128GB and 256GB SSD hard disk and runs on Windows 7 operating system.

Acer unveiled its Aspire S5 model, supporting the faster data transfer speeds with Thunderbolt, two USB 2.0 ports, a USB port 3.0, HDMI, audio and mic ports, webcam, integrated gigabit LAN and Bluetooth v3.0. Powered by Intel’s Ivy Bridge Processor, it offers 8GB of RAM, runs on Windows 7 operating system and features a 13-inch LED backlit display.

There’s no pricing at the moment, but Acer expects to begin shipping the Aspire S5 in the second quarter of this year.

HP’s Envy Spectre sports a 14-inch Radiance LED backlit display, Intel i5 processor, Intel HD 3000 graphic cards, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD and runs on the Windows 7 OS. The device comes pre-installed with full versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements.

Samsung announced the latest update to its Series 9 laptop at the show, making the stylish machine thinner and promising a whole new batch of hardware. The new Series 9 is less than half an inch thick. High-end aluminium covers the frame, which still manages to expose a few connectivity ports on the side in the name of utility.

The ASUS Zenbook features an ultra slim 13-inch design, SonicMaster audio technology and all-in-one multimedia functions.

The Z330 is the most compact product in LG’s newest Super Ultrabook Series. In terms of performance, LG’s proprietary Super Speed Boot technology enables rapid booting _ roughly three times faster than other 13-inch notebooks in the market. Powered by an Intel Core i7 processor, the Z330 requires less than 10 seconds to complete booting, while it requires a mere 2 seconds to recover from stand-by mode.

The Z330 is equipped with the latest SATA3 Solid State Drive (SSD), which is more than 11 times faster than an ordinary hard drive. The device is light, weighing a mere 1.21kg.

Lenovo is expanding its Ultrabook portfolio with the IdeaPad U310 and U410. Powered by the Intel Core Processor family, these thin and light laptops include Ultrabook versions with 64GB SSD drives for caching data, and versions with up to 500GB HDD storage. Both versions feature ultra-responsive performance with fast boot times and quick resume from sleep. The PCs also features other smart elements including automatically updating the mailbox, instant messaging and social media messages even in sleep mode, with up to 8 hours battery life.

Dell introduced its new XPS 13 Ultrabook _ a 13.3-inch high definition model running on Intel’s second-generation Core i5 or i7 processors. Intel HD 3000 graphics and Intel Rapid Start technology are highlights of the new device, while Intel Smart Connect technology is also included, allowing the XPS 13 to “wake up” periodically to update calendars and email. Battery life is slightly under 9 hours. Dell took strides to ensure the new XPS 13 would appeal to both consumer and corporate markets.

Sony’s Ultrabook concept was protected in a glass case without disclosing any specs.

Sony so far has not launched an Ultrabook. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Sony showcased a concept device but did not disclose any specifications. The concept, however, should feature one of Intel’s Ultrabook guidelines: ultra-low voltage (ULV) Sandy Bridge, or the upcoming Ivy Bridge, processors as well as SSD or hybrid storage.

Both Toshiba and Asus agreed that the Ultrabook segment has acceptably responded to a group of users who require the light and thin form factor with performance.

Last year Toshiba Thailand introduced the Portege Z830 at 39,000 baht. Takon Niyomthai, country manager for IT of Toshiba Thailand, noted that the market feedback has been very promising. Toshiba plans to launch its second model in the segment under its consumer Satellite brand, with a lower price and more mainstream features. The new Satellite will be some 10,000 baht lower than the Portege.

AsusTek Computer managing director Pornthep Watchara-Amnouy noted that the performance of the Ultrabook is not inferior to MacBook Air, in fact some are even better. “Price is not a concern if the device fulfills ones’ needs,” he said, pointing out that there will be more variety of Ultrabook models on the market during the second quarter, while the average price will be around 30,000 baht.

At present, Ultrabooks accounts for less than 1% of the PC market in Thailand and most of the models introduced so far have been high-end and expensive. Starting from the second quarter of this year, many brands are going to launch new series giving consumers a wider variety of choices at competitive prices.

Source:http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/computer/278625/ultrabooks-refresh-laptop-category

Leading IT experts agree that the single best tool to have in your disaster-recovery arsenal is Superman’s cellphone number. Armed with this simple tool, you’re covered against pretty much anything.

Superman will just make a few hundred loops around the planet at hyper-Newtonian speeds. The Earth will reverse its rotation just long enough to cause time to flow in reverse, and then you’re free to make sure that The Terrible Thing That Happened will never have happened to begin with.

All in all, it’s even better than the Genius Bar at the Apple Store.

Sadly, this Superman feature was terminated during DC Comics’ “New 52” reboot event in September. So we all need to go back to the complicated and boring process known as “planning ahead.”

I mention this because I’m about to recommend a tool that will help you to recover lost or stolen electronics. It’s called “Prey” and it’s truly what spyware would be like in the Bizarro World.

(Second Superman reference in as many paragraphs. I lean back in my chair, level a critical eye at what I’ve written so far, and ponder a third. “Well, not in a row,” I conclude. “But I sense an opportunity for a third, later in the piece.”)

Conventional spyware is a piece of code that invisibly tracks a user’s movements and habits without his or her knowledge, and silently reports what it learns back to an evil enterprise (which we can define as anything from “A Russian crime syndicate” to “Facebook”). Prey is a special kind of “white hat” spyware that lies dormant and never tracks a device’s legitimate user. But when your hardware is stolen, you can remotely activate Prey and it’ll begin to invisibly and regularly report the hardware’s location, and the thief’s activity, back to you. Prey isn’t designed to make your life miserable; it’s designed to help you get your gear back.

Oh, and incidentally: the definition of the word “thief” also includes “someone who finds a lost device and thinks ‘Ooo, cool . . . free iPad!’ instead of arranging for its return.” Who the hell does that? Every time I hear about this, it irks me more and more.

It seems insane to voluntarily install tracking software on your computer. And installing Prey does require a measure of faith. Rest assured that when Prey is in its dormant mode, it does only one thing: from time to time, it spends a few microseconds checking in with a central server to find to see if its owner has reported it as “missing.” If not, Prey goes back to sleep.

The magic happens only after you realize that your computer has disappeared. You leap to a web browser, access Prey’s web-based control panel, mark the device as missing, and tell Prey what kind of information you’d like to receive. Soon enough, the Prey code on the machine will go into “full ungodly fury of vengeance and justice” mode, and lots of interesting information will begin to appear in the control panel. You’ll see location information (based on GPS and WiFi/network data), screen captures of what the thief is doing, and even photos of the eggsucking weasel themself, via your device’s chat cam.

I installed Prey on my MacBook and then reported it as “missing” via my iPad. Then I kept right on working. The first report showed up about twenty minutes later. It included a photo of me (do I really scowl like that when I’m writing?), a screen grab of the file I was working on, and my location, determined via my network address and marked on a Google Map. It was so accurate that if my laptop really had been stolen, I could have told my band of vicious armed mercenaries — many of whom have diplomatic passports and are far beyond the reach of any mortal law — to begin their search at the Boston Public Library and to head specifically to Bates Hall.

Prey is silent and devious when it’s in Ungodly Fury mode. After reporting my MacBook missing, I didn’t honestly know for sure that the software was working until the first report arrived. The MacBook has a green LED that illuminates whenever the camera is active, but it illuminated so briefly that I didn’t even notice that it was taking my picture. The only “tell” of any kind was the briefest stutter during the instant Prey was taking a screen capture. Even then, I only noticed it because I was typing at full speed, and I knew better than to attribute it to some other system process or hiccup.

Prey does leave footprints behind, but it’s fairly well-hidden and a thief would need to be specifically looking for Prey before he’d discover it. Assuming, of course, you did the smart thing and deleted the Prey download package after installing the software.

So long as your device is switched on and it can find any kind of connection to the Internet-proper, it’ll start sending reports. The thief doesn’t even need to willingly open a connection; Prey can independently detect the presence of an open WiFi hotspot and silently exploit it.

What do you do next? It’s up to you. Prey is a flexible tool. Your first instinct will probably be to strike out on the path of vengeance. The longer you allow the thief to use your laptop, the more evidence he’s going to unwittingly send you. Ultimately, you’ll have enough to unequivocally prove where your property is and who has it. You can have Prey quietly block access to your browser cookies, system-stored passwords, and Outlook data, to minimize the privacy breach. Or you can go for broke and have Prey blast an alert sound and display a message to the user.

If you value the privacy of your data over the recovery of your device, Prey can simply render the device inoperable until it receives your remote password. This will, of course, encourage the thief to stop using your device and thus it’ll probably halt the flow of usable information.

Alas, Prey can’t remote-wipe your hard drive, which is the ultimate defense against theft of your personal documents and information. If that’s a concern, there are plenty of utilities that can automatically keep all of the data on your hard drive encrypted.

And what happens after what happens next?

We’ve reached the end of the range of solutions that can be provided by technology. You’re now forced to rely on the actions of improbable and imperfect flesh. The Internet is loaded with stories about what happens when the owner of a stolen laptop or device gets in touch with local law enforcement and provides them with a boatload of evidence furnished by Prey or another “track my missing hardware” utility. Responses range from “We wish we could solve all stolen-property cases as quickly and easily as we closed this one” to “Contrary to all logic, there’s absolutely nothing we can do for you.”

Mark Waid — writer of the “Superman: Birthright” limited series and an obvious finalist in any legitimate Greatest Comic Book Writer Of All Time competition ever held — left his iPad behind on an airplane in Los Angeles. He activated Apple’s “Find My iPad” feature and tracked it to a hotel in Indianapolis. The Indy police couldn’t do anything about it unless the LAPD filed a report, and the LAPD claimed they were too busy. “Final score: Crooks 1, Waid -$916.75” he Tweeted, closing out a daylong drama.

Nothing can absolutely ensure that you’ll get your property back. But it’s damned-certain that your chances are far better with Prey installed. Prey has only one operational weakness: you need to actually install the software while the device is still in your physical possession.

I now refer you back to my opening comments. If Superman was unwilling to turn back time to allow Waid — who also wrote the seminal Elseworlds future-Superman crossover “Kingdom Come” — to go back to that plane and retrieve his iPad he’s certainly not going to do it so you can install Prey on your MacBook before your car was broken into.

Why Prey, and not any of the other “recover my stolen laptop” services? Because it’s free. You can visit preyproject.com right now, install it, and then forget it exists without spending a penny. “Pro” Prey plans (which start at $5 a month) add additional services. Instead of tracking just a three device and retaining only 10 reports (old ones vanish as new ones are collected), Pro accounts can track multiple devices, retain 100 reports, and can collect them as frequently as every 2 minutes. That’s great if you see that the perp is actually at your machine, and you want to catch information from his Facebook, Twitter, or email windows that will confirm his identity.

Also, Prey is available for just about every device you own. Editions are available for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, and Android, though the iOS edition is still awaiting approval from Apple before it can appear in the iTunes Store.

Is Prey safe? I’ve been hammering at this question for months and I’m convinced Prey is about as safe as this kind of tool can be, given that (from a paranoid, stark perspective, at least) the software is designed to secretly do things and to evade detection.

Unlike commercial alternatives, Prey is open software. The source code can be downloaded and examined by people much, much more savvy and cynical than you or I. It does use external code modules that aren’t part of Prey’s core library, but the modules themselves are used by just about everyone, so their behavior and limitations are well understood by the security community. If Prey itself was designed to prey upon its users, that would have been discovered long before now; from that perspective, it’s safe.

Which isn’t to say that Prey isn’t without controversy. Because it’s been scrutinized so closely, potential weaknesses in Prey’s methodology have been identified. Its primary problems are that Prey runs on your computer as a root system process; it does its business via shell scripts; and it seems to communicate with its servers in a manner that could be intercepted by a man-in-the-middle attack. All of the security experts I consulted agree that Prey could go about its work in a far more secure fashion. The concern isn’t that Prey could do something to harm your system or your privacy, but that a third party could exploit these weaknesses to attack your system.

Nearly all of the experts I spoke with agree that the potential rewards that Prey presents far outweigh its risks. An attack on your computer that targets Prey’s weaknesses would require custom code that’s never been spotted in the wild, running on a machine with proximity to your system (that is, a machine on a nearby network that’s looking for Prey-equipped computers). Greg Martin is one of the experts I spoke with. Last summer, he used Prey to successfully recover his MacBook Pro and he continues to recommend it.

The objections to Prey are nicely outlined here and here.

My own conclusion is that if you have reasonable fears about your devices being lost or stolen, not using Prey is riskier than using it. I’m convinced that the added security risks are minimal, and that potential rewards of installing it are monumental.

What if you don’t install Prey, and your hardware is stolen? Can you do anything to locate it?

You might have a chance to locate your property if you’ve installed Dropbox. Dropbox’s servers log the IP addresses that your computers use to access the service. You can view that address by logging in at Dropbox.com, clicking on the link for your account settings, and then clicking the “My Computers” tab. An IP address is usually enough to get at least a rough fix on the computer’s location. It’s nothing like the comprehensive set of data mined by Prey, but it’s better than nothing.

I’m not insisting that you rush out and install Prey this instant. I’m not even insisting that you install it all all. But if you’re now convinced that Prey is a good idea, don’t wait. Do it now, before you forget. You can install Prey in less than ten minutes.

I’m telling you to do this because whether you install Prey or not, you’ll never think of this software ever again. Until your computer gets stolen. Then, you’ll either think “Thank God, I actually have a shot of getting my laptop back” or “I’m such an idiot! Why didn’t I install Prey right away, like Andy told me to?”

I promise you that under no circumstances would I ever point and laugh and mock you for ignoring my advice. But you’ll be imagining that I am. And unlike the real me, Imaginary Andy also has access to your memories of all of your past mistakes and will use all of this information to devastating effect. Is that what you want to happen?

Source:http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/10467526-452/prey-takes-over-your-devices-to-keep-thieves-under-surveillance.html

There are some common misconceptions with respect to whether or not it is better to have a custom built computer instead of one manufactured by a major manufacturer. There are some things you should consider when faced with this decision. Some reasons your computer guy may have told you you would be better off with a custom built computer:

True or False: “I (your computer guy) can build a computer cheaper than you can buy one from a major manufacturer!

Really? How many custom built computers does your computer guy build a year? 10? 100? 1000? Is your computer guy suggesting that they have some secret “In” with computer component manufacturers that they can secure these parts at great cost savings? Does it make sense that a computer guy building a few hundred (if that) computers a year can get a better deal on parts than a company like HP or Dell? If that’s true, why are there not more stores just specializing in custom built computers? A good business person needs to make a profit with their business. In order to do so they have to charge more than they pay for the products they sell. To make a reasonable profit they either have to sell a large volume of computers making a few bucks each, or a small number of computers making many more bucks each.

True or False: “It’s better to have a custom built computer because I (your computer guy) know every part that is installed in the machine is the best on the market.”

Be wary of someone suggesting some parts are better than others in the same breath they suggest they can build something cheaper than a major manufacturer can produce. Does it make sense that a guy building computers in Midcoast Maine can get a better deal on high quality parts than a company like Dell or HP? Probably not. Furthermore, if you were in charge of operations at a major manufacturer and you knew you were going to offer a three year warranty on parts for a computer, would you buy low quality parts to install in that machine? Again, probably not. It’s going to cost the company more money to carry through the warranty on those parts. They know this so they make sure all the parts installed in their machines meet their standards. Yes the company is in business to make money, but like most businesses, they probably believe in doing so by providing a great product with great service instead of ripping everyone off every chance they get. And keep in mind… some of these large companies have shareholders to answer to as well. Selling a bad product isn’t going to instill great confidence in the masses.

True or False: “Your computer guy is a genius because he can build a computer from a bunch of parts?”

It doesn’t take a genius to follow directions. With the amount of information available on the Internet, and a bit of patience, anyone with the ability to read and follow directions could build a computer. It may not be the fastest, or the best computer in the world, but a computer nonetheless. Computer hardware is built based on certain standards. That’s part of the reason there are so many manufacturers and it is such a wide spread industry. Everything is standardized to meet certain specs, thereby working with everything else. They are just like automobiles and with enough money, the right tools and enough patience, one could even build an automobile from parts.

Generally, for an estimated 95% of the computer using population a computer built by a major manufacturer is going to be a better value for your money. That doesn’t mean your computer guy is ripping you off, it just means he can’t produce enough volume to lower the cost of the machine to compete with a major manufacturer on an apples to apples basis. Not only can you get a computer from a major manufacturer for a reasonable price, but you typically can get an extended warranty on the hardware for a little extra as well. Does your computer guy offer you an extended warranty?

And don’t think you can’t get what you specifically want with a major manufacturer. Some companies produce thousands of computers all with the same specs and software installed and ship them to department stores and other outlets to be sold to the masses. Others have developed the ability to build a computer specifically for your needs, providing you with options on hardware and software configurations, and still provide it to you at a reasonable price.

When is a good time to get a custom built computer? When you have a special situation, Marine Navigation computers, for instance. Typically these are built using specialized hardware to withstand the environment they will be subjected to. Computers that interact with specific machinery may also require special equipment. If your business has proprietary software that requires certain hardware and that hardware can’t be bought from a major manufacturer. Computer gaming can sometimes benefit from a custom built machine, although usually you can get a comparable machine for a comparable price from a major manufacturer.

Source:http://waldo.villagesoup.com/business/brief/business-services/true-or-false-you-should-buy-a-custom-built-computer-instead-of-one-from-a-major-manufacturer/483223

Smartphones outsold computers for the first time in 2011 according to data from marker research firm Canalys.

Full year shipments for smartphones totalled 487.7 million units, higher than the total number of PCs which is 414.6 million units.

Total smartphone shipments rose 63 percent in 2011, up from 299.7 million shipped in 2012. The PC market only grew by 15 percent, despite an increase of 274 percent in the tablet PC subcategory.

The PC category included desktops, netbooks, notebooks and tablet PC devices.

Fourth quarter shipments were part of the driving force behind the impressive smartphone sales, with smartphone vendors shipping 158.5 million units. This was up 57 percent from 2010.

Canalys expect the smartphone market growth to slow in 2012 as manufacturers start to focus on profitability.

Source:http://mybroadband.co.za/news/quick-news/42839-smartphones-overtook-pc-shipments-in-2011.html