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Friday, September 30, 2011

HP Phoenix gaming desktop U.S.-bound?

HP's gaming-oriented Pavilion Elite Phoenix is UK-only for now.

(Credit:

PC Gamer
)

UK-based PC Gamer has a cheeky post up today regarding a for-now-UK-only Pavilion Elite Phoenix gaming desktop from HP. PC Gamer points out the rebirth metaphor in the name as it relates to the goings-on with HP's Personal Systems Group. We might also note the significance of the name as it relates to HP's previously stagnant gaming PC efforts since the departure of Rahul Sood, former head of HP Global Gaming, and founder of the HP-acquired boutique PC builder, Voodoo PC.

The system itself looks like a stylized take on the HP's newly redesigned Pavilion Elite desktop that came out in the U.S. this summer. That model and its AMD Radeon HD 6850 graphics card had respectable gaming chops, but it played to a more... [Read more]

Netgear WNDR3800 N600 router review: Unintentionally top-notch

The Netgear WNDR3800 N600 Wireless Dual-Band Gigabit Router - Premium Edition

(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET)

The WNDR3800 N600 Wireless Dual-Band Gigabit Router isn't intended to be Netgear's top-of-the-line wireless router for homes. That's the role of the WNDR4500, which makes no compromises and offers 450Mbps wireless speed on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

However, in our testing, we found that the WNDR3800 is arguably the best router among those recently announced by Netgear. For one, despite the fact that it only supports the 300Mbps standard, its real-world data rates on the 2.4GHz band are better than the WNDR4800's.

Furthermore, the WNDR3800 offers something that its big brother doesn't: it can host a USB external hard drive as a personal cloud storage option. It even comes with a piece of software called ReadyShare Cloud PC-Agent which
enables VPN-like access for the remote computer, as though the remote computer were in the same local network as the router.

On the other hand, the WNDR4500's storage capability is li... [Read more]

Dell unveils thin 14-inch XPS z laptop

Dell is adding a 14-inch model to its new line of thin XPS z series laptops--though availability, for now, will be limited to China.

The 4.4-pound XPS 14z boasts a borderless--or bezel-free--display yielding a design that's similar to a 13-inch laptop. And Dell squeezes an optical drive into a form factor that's just less than an inch thick.

Dell XPS 14z.

(Credit:
Dell)

Like the earlier XPS 15z, the 14z has Intel Core i5 and Core i7 Sandy Bridge processors. It also comes with an Nvidia GeForce GT 520M graphics option, USB 3.0 ports, and a 1366x768 HD LED display.

Availability is in China only and is being launched ahead of the country's Golden Week holiday. Availability in other regions, including the U.S., will be announced in the coming weeks.

By announcing in China first, Dell is acknowledging the enormity of that market.

In China a model with an i5 processor, 4G RAM, 500GB HDD, and 1GB video card will be priced at 7,699 yuan. Information about pricing and sales in the U.S. was not immediately available.
[Read more]

Harman Kardon's MS 150 speaker dock supports multiple devices, $600 pricetag (video)


Some folks get along just dandy with an iPod and a speaker dock, but if you need a rig that'll handle more sources, Harman Kardon hopes to have you covered with MS 150 -- which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Zeppelin Mini. This stereo system comes loaded with an iPhone dock, CD drive and FM tuner, along with a flood of auxiliary connections not limited to its headphone jacks and subwoofer output. It's even sporting an LCD display so you'll know what's pumping out of its 30 watt drivers. The MS 150 is available now from Harman Kardon, but all of its functionality will cost you -- it's priced at a whopping $600. Hey, at least it comes with a remote. You'll find full details in the PR and video demo below.

Continue reading Harman Kardon's MS 150 speaker dock supports multiple devices, $600 pricetag (video)

Harman Kardon's MS 150 speaker dock supports multiple devices, $600 pricetag (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Adidas builds intelligent soccer cleats that can outwit even Joey Barton



Impoverished football soccer clubs, with their massive stadiums, billionaire owners and millionaire star players have it awful hard, you know. If a club wanted a statistical analysis of the team's movements over the 90 minutes (more if Sir Alex Ferguson is involved) then it needs to spend big on a ProZone statistics system. That's all due to change, thanks to Adidas' new adizero f50 miCoach -- an "intelligent football boot" that includes a space for the miCoach Speed Cell, a tracking device that works like a souped-up Nike+iPod. The chip records your speed, sprint times, distance, step and stride rates, stores it for up to seven hours and pushes it over WiFi or USB to the device of your choice. You'll be able to share your stats online with friends via Facebook and compare them to pros like diminutive pitchman Lionel Messi, diminutive Welshman Gareth Bale and the, ah, not-so-diminutive Emmanuel Adebayor. A pair of boots, Speed Cell and dongle will require your bank account to shrink to the tune of €245 ($330) and will hit the stores in November -- just in time for you to sit indoors during the snowy January transfer window.

Continue reading Adidas builds intelligent soccer cleats that can outwit even Joey Barton

Adidas builds intelligent soccer cleats that can outwit even Joey Barton originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tag Heuer concept watch beats 3.6 million times per hour, $89,000 price tag gives heart palpitations


Tag Heuer's high-end concept chronograph is so precise, blink and you'll miss it -- literally. The Mikrotimer Flying 1000's watch movement runs at 500Hz. Compare that to other high-end chronos plodding along at 5Hz, and you start to see the sort of power and precision Team Tag are working with -- this mesmerizing piece of wrist jewelry is capable of banging out 3.6 million beats per hour. Initially planned as a one-off, the concept watch will now go on sale for a lucky few timepiece obsessives. Be prepared to reach for your severely over-burdened money clip, though; the price is set at €65,000 ($88,580), with a limited run of ten arriving before the end of the year. Gawp in awe at the brief video after the break. You may have to sell the Batmobile.

Continue reading Tag Heuer concept watch beats 3.6 million times per hour, $89,000 price tag gives heart palpitations

Tag Heuer concept watch beats 3.6 million times per hour, $89,000 price tag gives heart palpitations originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

LG seeks ban on South Korean BMW and Audi sales, sticks out its LED lit tongue at Osram


Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where we all just got along, people worked for the thrill of it, and knowledge was free? Yeah, fat chance dreamers. 'Sue', our new millennium's most oft-used verb, is getting some heavy play at the hands of the tech industry. The latest court room combatants? Why, that'd be LG Group and Osram. You see, once upon a time LG was late to the LED patent game, and was content to fork over the cash to Osram for use of its tech. Skip to now, and the electronics giant's claiming it can get its lighting goods elsewhere, picking from a plethora of relevant IP-holding companies and combining that with its own patents. Despite having already countersued Osram in July to prevent the import of that company's allegedly infringing products into South Korea, LG's gathered its legal arsenal once again to block the sale of Audis and BMWs throughout the entire country -- cars that include Osram's LED tech. It's hard to imagine the courts would grant such a wide-sweeping ban on major auto players' bread-and-butter. And all grandstanding aside, it's more likely the two fisticuffing parties will come to some sort of revised financial agreement.

LG seeks ban on South Korean BMW and Audi sales, sticks out its LED lit tongue at Osram originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tiny 'jumping robots' have more in common with firecrackers than Johnny 5

Jumping robot
Perhaps calling an immobile plastic bug with explosives strapped to its underside a "jumping robot" is a bit of a stretch, but who are we to argue with the Army Research Laboratory and the University of Maryland. The two groups have collaborated to create a pair of "robots" that measure just a few millimeters in size but can jump several centimeters in the air. One uses a spring like mechanism (which an operator must press down with a pair of tweezers) to propel it, while the other uses a small rocket, which can be triggered either by current applied over wires or a phototransistor (for untethered flight). It all makes for a pretty neat video, which you can find after the break - even if your sister's Furby was more robot than these tiny things.

Continue reading Tiny 'jumping robots' have more in common with firecrackers than Johnny 5

Tiny 'jumping robots' have more in common with firecrackers than Johnny 5 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Sep 2011 01:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Amazon’s New Kindles: What You Need to Know [PICS & VIDEO]





































Amazon unveiled three new products at a press event in New York on Wednesday, including its much-anticipated first tablet computer, the Kindle Fire.

The new Kindles — and their unusually low price points — will likely have an impact on both the ereader and tablet markets. Here’s a concise guide to the new products and what makes them different from their predecessors.


  1. Like similar products from Kobo and Nook, the Kindle Touch allows readers to flip pages, search, shop and take notes by swiping and tapping the screen. It costs $139 with 3G, and $99 for the Wi-Fi-only version. Because it needs no extra room for buttons, the device itself is smaller than previous models of the Kindle. Here’s a gallery of the Kindle Touch:
  2. The $79 Kindle.




    The $79 Kindle.





    The $79 Kindle.

  3. The $79 Kindle.


    The Kindle Touch comes in two versions: $139 with 3G, and $99 without.



    The Kindle Touch comes in two versions: $139 with 3G, and $99 without.



    The Kindle Touch comes in two versions: $139 with 3G, and $99 without.




    The Kindle Touch comes in two versions: $139 with 3G, and $99 without.





  4. The latest version of the original Kindle costs just $79. It does not have a touchscreen, but it’s 30% lighter than its predecessors, 18% smaller, and turns pages 10% faster. Much of the size reduction is due to the absence of a keyboard. Here’s a video of the original Kindle from Amazon:




  5. Amazon’s new tablet, Kindle Fire, is an affordable tablet that focuses on content. While it runs the Android operating system and some apps including email, its interface looks nothing like the collection of apps that line the home screens of other Android tablets and the iPad. Rather, it looks like a bookshelf. Users can line its shelves with books, periodicals, movies and music they purchase from Amazon. New owners will also have free access to the Amazon Prime unlimited movie and TV streaming service for 30 days after purchase.

    The tablet has no camera, microphone or 3G capabilities, but at $199, it’s the most affordable tablet from a major player.
  6. Amazon designed a new browser for Kindle Fire. The “smart” browser is called Amazon Silk, and cuts down on load times by splitting the workload between the tablet and the Amazon Web Services Cloud. It also speeds things up by predicting what the user will do next. In a demonstration at its press event in New York, Amazon loaded 53 static file images, 39 dynamic files, 30 Javascript files and three Flash files within seconds. Here’s a video of Silk in action:



  7. Every Kindle is a sponsored Kindle by default. In April, Amazon launched a clever deal for its Kindle 3G: If users opt to receive ads on their Kindle screensavers when they aren’t reading, they can buy the Kindle at a discounted rate. Earlier this month, it announced that some of those ads would be offers from its daily deals site AmazonLocal — giving the service a distinct advantage over those that advertise deals mostly through emails.

    Now Amazon has made Special Offers a default option for its new compact Kindle, Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire. To get a new generation Kindle or Kindle Touch that won’t display ads when idle costs an extra $30. A Kindle Fire without Special Offers costs an extra $40.


  8. The Kindle Fire will be released on Nov. 15. The Kindle Touch will be available on Nov. 21. The $79 Kindle is already available.

More About: amazon, Kindle, kindle fire

How Open Source Development Is Becoming More Social






Tim Yeaton is the President and CEO of Black Duck Software. He has more 30 years experience working in the software community. Contact him at tyeaton@blackducksoftware.com.

Most people do not think of software developers as being high on the “social” scale. In fact, the (misinformed) stereotype for a typical developer is that of the introverted geek. But in many ways, particularly with open source developers, this couldn’t be further from the truth.


Contributing to open source software is a profoundly social activity. Some of open source’s main tenets are collaboration, transparency and meritocracy, which require developers to collaborate and share at a highly productive level. And with over 500,000 open source projects on the Internet, there’s a lot of collaboration going on. It’s clear that by participating in open source communities, developers are engaging in productive social behavior.

While some people may picture open source developers as working quietly and in isolation, the reality is they may work on large projects with a wide community of collaborators. For example, Linux has nearly 10,000 contributors. Others may focus on small, personal projects, which may or may not draw the attention of the larger development community.

But even developers working on small projects are still working with other people. And virtually all new open source projects derive from those projects and the developers that preceded them, creating a vast body of work that accelerates innovation and fuels further collaboration.

Today’s open source developers are contributing to projects in very different ways than just a few years ago. What has changed?


Search + Social Media = Social Development




Two developments — search and social media — have changed the way coders work to create “social development,” a new style of software collaboration. Let’s look first at social media’s influence on it.

Social media’s impact has forced change (some good and some bad) in nearly every sector of the economy — including open source development. While communities such as Slashdot and Stack Overflow provided an early glimpse of social media’s impact on development in the FOSS community and encouraged developers to become more active within these and other communities, the effect took some time to achieve.

Today, it’s not unusual to see enterprise software developers more active in social media circles, even as enterprises themselves are evolving socially. According to a recent study by Forrester, developers are engaging socially; they’re joining communities to connect with experts, seeking answers to business problems and, like many people, networking for career advancement. The figure above shows the leading reasons developers join communities: to connect with thought leaders, gain expertise and engage in high quality discussions.


Web search has also enhanced the importance of social media among open source developers, affecting this new style of development. My company recently commissioned a study with Forrester to investigate the social habits of developers. As shown above, contributors to open source projects turn to online search first for information about development technologies, followed by social sites like networks, forums and other online communities.

Developers also share search results via open source or project forums, communities and more general social media tools like Twitter.

As a result, today’s “social developer,” even if not an employee of a large enterprise, is participating more than ever with enterprises – or more specifically, with developers in those enterprises who are increasingly involved with FOSS communities of various types.

Social development arms corporate developers with a new toolset for producing innovative and high quality software at enterprise scale faster than ever before. This style of development wasn’t possible just a few years ago before search, social media tools and online collaboration tools made it possible to create software using social development techniques. Nevertheless, the evolution has been crucial to the success of businesses and individual developers.

Another pivotal change is the fact that enterprise IT organizations are now discovering the need to “go social” and join communities as a strategy for leveraging and using more open source software, especially mission-critical components. This significant trend reflects the reality that open source use is becoming a competitive requirement. Even within the firewall of an enterprise, the trend toward collaborative development to share best practices, facilitate code reuse, and enhance developer productivity is escalating rapidly.

Other environmental and technical changes have supported the emergence of social development. Communications between project committers — which until recently were conducted through IRC channels and wikis — have expanded with the increased number of social communities. And today more than ever, FOSS developers are actively seeking enterprise adoption of their code.


Another change is the emergence of sites like Ohloh, a free community resource, which was specifically designed to support and encourage social development and to allow developers to give each other kudos (literally). The figure above also lists the contributors for a project called Restlet, a Java REST framework for web developers. Shown on the page are the developer profiles, kudos and code commitments to the project.

While social development isn’t a challenge for Gen Y developers, it still presents management challenges for enterprises, especially larger ones. Moving at web speed and using social tools still requires some adjustment. For example, new college hires expect to be community participants, yet large enterprises may not be comfortable with this level of transparency. Although open source projects are based on the notion of transparency, collaboration and meritocracy, some corporate policies may prohibit or limit this philosophy, just like some corporate cultures may resist the trend toward openness in development.

Social interaction and social development offer tremendous new opportunities for developers and enterprises. The advent of social media tools has changed the nature of community participation as much as search. If you and your organization have not joined the growing number of “social developers,” now is the time to start.

Disclosure: Ohloh is owned by the author’s company.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Goldmund

More About: features, open source, Social Media, software, Web Development

Lightroom 3.5 supports high-end compact cameras


Adobe Systems has updated Lightroom and Photoshop to support a number of new small, higher-end cameras from Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, and Pentax.


The software packages handle the raw photos that higher-end cameras can produce, offering higher image quality and better flexibility at the expense of convenience. And as new cameras arrive, Adobe must build support for the new models proprietary formats.


Lightroom 3.5 of and version 6.5 of Photoshop's raw-image plug-in (available on Adobe's download site) now can support a host of new compact interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) that lack SLRs' bulk-inducing reflex mirror. In addition, it supports high-end medium-format cameras from Hasselblad, Phase One, and Phase One's Leaf subsidiary. The full list:


• Fuji FinePix F600EXR


Sony's NEX-5N is among the new cameras that Lightroom 3.5 supports.


(Credit:
Sony Electronics)


• Hasselblad H4D-60


• Leaf Aptus II 12


• Leaf Aptus II 12R


• Nikon Coolpix P7100


• Olympus E-P3


• Olympus E-PL3


• Olympus E-PM1


• Panasonic DMC-FZ150


• Panasonic DMC-G3


• Panasonic DMC-GF3


• Pentax Q


• Pha... [Read more]

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