Archive for the ‘news’ Category

Last month, a new supercomputer top 500 has been issued.

Thought that your own super PC was a mathematical wonder? well, in supercomputer land its like an embryo compared to the machines that rule out there. the supercomputers are giants compared to the home/office PC. The number one on the list is capable of making a 478.2 Teraflop/s (which means Tera=trillion calculations p/s…) compared to a high end CPU for home users which comes to a 30 Gigaflops a second, this is light speed compared to the speed of sound.

Now don’t go asking your family or PC shop for a supercomputer, the supercomputers are made to do calculations only, so no graphics or other game/video oriented specializations to be found there, maybe with some good programming you could get a super games computer but that would take a lot of time and money. which you could invest in playing with your high end game computer that’s ready for sale right now! So its only for the geeks that wish to calculate the weather systems or flush out that one shiny star in the middle of that big milky way far far away.

If you look at the list, which can be found at top500 the first computer is way beyond the number two in speed… which is nothing compared to the computers lower on the list. IBM is the major investor in supercomputers and builds around 250 of the computers on the list, HP is second with around 150 which leaves 100 more places to be taken by smaller manufacturers.

Technology is progressing fast, it will be a matter of time before the first Petaflop is reached and this will increase the run on technology even more, the run will continue and probably accelerate faster and faster. ten years ago the speed of a supercomputer was almost comparable with the desktop computers today, so in ten years from now everybody will be able to do the maths that are done on a supercomputer today. where will it end?

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Greenpeace published a new Greener electronics guide, this is the 6th version of the list of producing companies and their polluting manufacturing ways.

The list gives the electronics market a view of who’s the most polluting company at the moment. Its based on the producing of components and how much toxic waste is created with this process. In this edition Greenpeace included producers of game consoles and televisions, which didn’t make it popular by Phillips and Nintendo, they sunk to the lowest positions ever on the list. Microsoft isn’t much better, Sony Ericsson is the cleanest producer and pushed Nokia downwards. Nokia got penalized for not giving the correct numbers and forgetting to mention the new recycling rules to their departments in a lot of third world countries.

One positive point on behalf of Nintendo, Greenpeace didn’t measure energy levels used in production, Nintendo is one of the cleanliest producers in that segment.

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Is Microsoft admitting that bringing Vista on the market was a bad idea? The Beta testers of SP3 for windows XP are benching a 10% increase in speed for windows XP when updated to SP3.

This increases the gap between Vista and XP even more, especially since the update of Vista isn’t increasing anything anywhere. The difference between  XP and Vista in ease of use was already a little bit on the XP side, with this update it could be even more. Not many people will change platforms if there is no real improvement to get. As you can see in the graph, Vista isn’t the fastest anyway, the update even widens the gap a little…. To be honest, its a Office bench and doesn’t say anything about gaming or visual performance, but its a difference and probably not the only one. One of the main pros for Vista is the directx 10.x application, this doesn’t run on XP and is in the long run the new standard for games, so for gamers with high-end hardware Vista is the next step to ultimate gaming, for most computer users that are happy with their Internet and office capabilities it does matter that Vista is slower than XP and will probably make the choice to stay with XP easier.

We’ll keep you updated,

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HTC, one of the big phone producers said to bring a Android phone on the market next year. The alliance of phone producing companies and Google has begun an Open handset alliance to bring an open software mobile platform in the smartphone market to bring a cheap and free way to develop platform for mobile phones. Its called Android, the goal is to make it an open source platform which will enable a lot of enthusiast to program and develop for the smartphone.

HTC enrolled on the project to make sure there is a market for the software and in the hope that more people start to buy smartphones, did I forgot to mention HTC is one of the bigger smartphone producers in the western world?

HTC expects that Android will have a big impact on the smartphone market en will change the landscape hugely.

Details of the phone itself stay a secret and will probably be published in the coming year. This change in operating platform will not mean that HTC is leaving the windows mobile market for what it is. In the contrary it will stay the biggest niche where HTC is focussing, but the hope is that Android will find a place next to it.

somewhere mid 2008 the phone will be released, we’ll be watching! –>

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Google has an new niche in the market, it has teamed up with Gilbarco Veeder-Root to put all the gas pumps in Google maps. and… to supply all its gas-stations with a tabletpc with googlemaps on it to get directions from.

so when you’re lost and refuelling your car, you can check your location at the pump and search for a way back to known territory. You can even print the direction on the receipt printer in the gas station. one of the reasons google provided is; to prevent people using their mobilephone or PDA while driving, since this can be dangerous to yourself and your fellow road users

The theory behind it is: Its a way to allow men who are lost, and to proud to ask for directions, be able to find the route again without losing face to their fellow men…… All good and well, but what difference does it make? In my opinion walking in a gas station and buying a map or…. buying new batteries or a carkit for my navigator isn’t that big of a problem. And I certainly won’t have to tell everybody that I don’t know where I am. If i’m in real need, I can always sent in my wife and pretend to be sleeping.

Now its true that the PDA with navigator or mobile phone with navigation is still only a small part of the navigating market, but shares are going up, almost with everything you buy thats car orientated you get a navigator from tom tom, garmin etc. only set back is you have to buy the road maps separately.

but the market is growing, so it looks like Google is investing in an market thats shrinking instead of growing…. maybe they want to implement it later inthe google software and you can plan your trip on google maps with all the gas stations in it and set waypoints where you have to refuel… etc. etc.

Lets see where this brings google.

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Starting on Friday the second of November, wal-mart is putting a Toshiba HD-player in its stores for almost nothing!

for around 100,- USD you can get a HD-player from Toshiba.

the question is: how on earth can they think to make an profit from this? the production costs are probably the same or even more than they are asking.

Rumor has it that its a big marketing project to get a niche in the HD-player market, since the PS3 is selling so well and building up a market-share for blue-ray disks and players. The HD market was left behind, until now it seems. With this project at wal-mart, more stores and producers wil have to follow soon if they want to share in on the run for HD-players.

One of the remaining questions is, will wal-mart have enough players to support this action? rumor has it they spent around one hundred million USD to buy 2 million players for their stores. this will mean the producers that tried to go for a more expensive player will be fishing behind the net and blue ray has to bring in some lighter guns that go for more comparable prices. Else the holidays wil bring some funny changes in the high definition market.

to be honest, i’m still wondering how many different media devices can there exist next to each other? after vinyl came the tape-recorder, soon after the CD was introduced, vinyl became nearly obsolete, the super/laser disc never saw a big production, and the DVD is not even 10 years in worldwide production…… which means we have a DVD which is finally pushing the CD back to the back of the room, probably the same corner where Vinyl is holding his head above water.

And Blue ray and HD are coming through the door pushing each other sideways to make enough room for a reasonable market share. If you ask me only one of them is going to make it and for now with the wal-mart action, i’d go for HD…

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