Nokia Aknowledging Fanboy Concept Work

For ages, fanboys have pumped out concept renderings of different products and stamped a well-known corporate name on them to lend an air of legitimacy. The worst of these have been pure flights of fancy with no attention paid to "design DNA"—some of the more ridiculous faux-Apple-branded concepts come to mind—while the best have incorporated well-recognized design elements, using a certain angle here, the proper font there, to suspend disbelief.

Sony Open Planet Ideas Winner - Greenbook: Giving you that extra push to do some good

Say you're sitting around on a Saturday, with no obligations other than bumming around the house and poking at old projects you've been "meaning to get to" for months. You debate the idea of actually doing something meaningful with your weekend, maybe even with some quick volunteer work, but where do you go? Even if you had considered this on some Saturday, the extra effort required to identify a volunteer organization might have burned away any energy you were ready to expend.
Ay, there's the rub: How can people quickly and easily connect with the thousands of charities, nonprofits and groups they might want to help, even for just a few hours?
Paul Frigout considered this problem and created Greenbook, the winning concept from the Sony Open Planet Ideas Challenge.

SOURCE  Core77

AMD Radeon HD6790 Review : GTX550 Ti Killer?

The HD 6790 is set to beat the GTX550 Ti, which is quite a failure by nVidia, performing even worse than the previous generation's GTX460. It is based on AMD's 40 nm "Barts" GPU which is the very same graphics processor used in the Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870. Next to that this product comes with a full 256-bit wide memory bus giving it very nice memory bandwidth and really, aside from slicing some shader processor clusters and ROPs away, this is a R6800 series card.

Armed with plenty of power for a products in the 125 EUR (RM544) range this product could be just what the doctor ordered for gamers on a budget, have a quick peek at the actual reference sample and then let's head on over into the review.

SparkFun intros IOIO for Android, a hack-free breakout box to get your mind spinning (video)

Meet any seasoned techie, and they'll likely spin whimsical tales of computing's early days, and the challenge of finding a practical use for a device with seemingly limitless potential (you know, like feeding your cat while you sleep). A new product from SparkFun promises to bring this old-school awesomeness into the smartphone age: introducing IOIO (pronounced yo-yo), a breakout box that enables any Android 1.5+ device to control electronic circuits from within Android's applications. Designed in collaboration with Google, Spark's PCB connects to your phone over USB, working its magic through a Java library that hooks into your apps. This DIY paradise will begin shipping in a few weeks, and can be yours for $49.95 on pre-order. We've already witnessed some clever mods with IOIO, and when it sent a real alarm clock ringing, we couldn't help but smile. Crack one yourself after the break.

AMD Radeon HD6990 vs nVidia GTX590

A short history lesson on dual GPU cards.

Most consumers don't even need dual GPUs with single GPUs more than enough for gaming purposes. However, some people like to be extreme, and dual GPU cards are the most extreme cards one can buy in the market. Right now we are looking at dual GF110 and dual "Caymans", essentially giving you two slowed down GTX580 or two HD6970 respectively.

SPECIFICATIONS

	GeForce GTX 590	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 6990	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturing Process	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC
Die Size	2 x 520 mm²	520 mm²	2 x 389 mm²	389 mm²	389 mm²
Transistors	2 x 3 billion	3 billion	2 x 2.64 billion	2.64 billion	2.64 billion
Engine Clock	607 MHz	772 MHz	830 MHz	880 MHz	800 MHz
Stream Processors / CUDA Cores	1024	512	3072	1536	1408
Compute Performance	2.49 TFLOPS	1.58 TFLOPS	5.1 TFLOPS	2.7 TFLOPS	2.25 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	64	192	96	88
Texture Fillrate	77.7 Gtex/s	49.4 Gtex/s	159.4 Gtex/s	84.5 Gtex/s	70.4 Gtex/s
ROPs	96	48	64	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	58.3 Gpix/s	37.1 Gpix/s	53.1 Gpix/s	28.2 Gpix/s	25.6 Gpix/s
Frame Buffer	2 x 1.5 GB GDDR5	1.5 GB GDDR5	2 x 2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	853 MHz	1002 MHz	1250 MHz	1375 MHz	1250 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	2 x 163.9 GB/s (384-bit)	192 GB/s (384-bit)	2 x 160 GB/s (256-bit)	176 GB/s (256-bit)	160 GB/s (256-bit)
Maximum Board Power	365 W	244 W	375 W	250 W	200 W

With the current top single GPUs  being so powerful, things will only get better when doubled, right? Read more on the GTX590 and how well it performs in SLI vs the HD6990 in Crossfire here.

For the AMD HD6990 review, please click here now.


SOURCE: Tom's Hardware, Guru3d, Guru3d

ASUS Rampage III Black Edition

If one thing is a fact then it's that the X58 chipset is technology that keeps on living on the edge. Quick match tells me that the X58 chipset is now roughly two and a half years old. And it is still alive and very much kicks ass big-time! While P67 for Sandy Bridge is the equivalent kickass product, the X58 based motherboards give you some advantages, and that would be the Core i7 socket 1366 processor, including the 6-core Nehalem based processors of course.

Apple exploring hybrid e-ink/LCD display for iDevices

A recently published patent application suggests Apple is exploring ways to incorporate e-ink display technology into its iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. And unlike other e-ink devices, Apple's hybrid system would be able to display sharp text in a range of lighting situations without sacrificing the ability to display full color, video, and graphics.

The application, Systems and Methods for Switching Between an Electronic Paper Display and a Video Display, was originally filed in October 2009. It describes a hybrid system that employs a combination of "electronic paper" with a more traditional color LCD or OLED display to gain the advantages of both display types.

Nanoparticles successfully take down MRSA bacteria

Traditional antibiotics like doxycyclin and vancomycin—the kind that many bacteria can now resist because of their overuse—work by getting inside the bacterial cell and interfering with essential cellular processes. Charged peptides have been proposed as alternatives, since they work by electrostatically interacting with the negatively charged bacterial cell wall, poking holes in the bacterial cell membrane and thereby killing the bacteria.

Nederberg et al. made charged polymers out of cyclic carbonates, which are nontoxic and biodegradable. Their degradation produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, and they degrade slowly, so they have prolonged antimicrobial functions inside the body and long shelf-lives outside of it. Because of their amphiphilic nature—they have a positively charged region, which is hydrophilic, but also a hydrophobic region—these nanoparticles spontaneously form small spheres in water, so they can hide their hydrophobic parts inside.

The nanostructures were effective against Gram-positive bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, and had an efficiency comparable to that of conventional antimicrobials at their best, all while leaving red blood cells alone.

When injected into mice, the antimicrobial nanoparticles did not exhibit any significant toxicity over the test period, which lasted for fourteen days. It's not yet exactly the nanotechnological immunomodulation described by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age… but it's getting close.


VIA  Arstechnica
SOURCE  Nature

Symbian Is No Longer Open Source

Nokia recently clarified via a blog post the status of Symbian's code. Though Symbian was an open source platform in the past, it no longer is. That doesn't change the fact that it continues to be available under license to hardware makers and software developers so that new products can be brought to market. Nokia said it will continue to work with its OEM and developer partners, but those parties will no longer be able to contribute back to the Symbian source code. Nokia said, "The Nokia Symbian License is an alternative license which provides an access to Nokia’s additional Symbian development for parties which collaborate with Nokia on the Symbian platform."


VIA Phonescoop
SOURCE Nokia

Study: Computer Gamers less likely to go to a University

A recent study at the University of Oxford indicates that those who play computer games are less likely to reach University level education.

As ZDNet reports, those who play video games on a regular basis and who have little or no other extracurricular activities were found to have slim chances of going to a University. Both males and females suffered a 5% drop in their likelihood of attending a University.

However, those who read a book for pleasure, spent some time at a movie theater watching a movie, or participated in something artistic at least once a month, had a higher chance of attending a University.

However, there is one thing to note. This study uses data from 1970 to the present. Gaming has changed over the years with the inventions of the Wii and the Xbox Kinect. Games are now more brain stimulating rather than one-dimensional. If Mr Taylor used current data reflecting the change in the gaming climate from the past few years, perhaps his findings might be a little different.


SOURCE  Winbeta