Back in September last year, Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices did what most of the industry was already prepared for, namely the introduction of its first series of graphics processing units with support for DirectX 11. The chip maker did so by announcing their fastest cards yet, the Radeon HD 5800 series, which als... (read more)
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Some of the most interesting products we came across during our short visit at Sony's booth from IFA 2009 were the MDR-NC300D noise canceling earphones, recently released by the Japanese company (well, at least they were pretty recent at the time of our visit), which really managed to draw our attention for two reas... (read more)
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Have you ever come across a certain item that, from the moment you laid eyes on it, you felt like it really brought something innovative to its category? I mean, a device providing certain unique, never before seen features that you felt were going to change the respective product segment for good?
Well, if you have (and I'm pretty sure all of you must have felt like this regarding a gadget at some point), then you'll completely understand why we were so excited whe... (read more)
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Staples is selling a big-screen laptop with robust features that belie its low price.
Acer laptop packs a 17.3-inch 1600 x 900 screen, dual-core Intel processor, and 4GB of memory.
Acer laptop packs a 17.3-inch 1600 x 900 screen, dual-core Intel processor, and 4GB of memory.
As 17-inch laptops go, it's a lot of laptop for the money, compared with higher-priced systems from vendors such as Hewlett-Packard. Big-screen, 17-inch-class laptops priced a couple of hundred dollars above the Acer typically offer slightly faster processors and higher-performance graphics. But for the average user, there's not much difference.
And what do you get for $479? The Acer Aspire AS7736Z-4809 comes with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, a dual-core Intel Pentium Processor T4300 (2.1GHz), 4GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, 8X DVD double-layer optical drive, a Webcam, and a 17.3-inch LED display with 1600 x 900 resolution.
A 17-inch laptop with high-definition screen resolution and plenty of memory to run 64-bit Windows 7--that's nothing to sniff at.
Intel said Friday that its Larrabee graphics processor will initially appear as a software development platform only.
This is a blow to the world's largest chipmaker, which was looking to launch its first discrete (standalone) graphics chip in more than a decade.
"Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project," Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer said Friday. "As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product," he said.
"Rather, it will be used as a software development platform for internal and external use," he added. Intel is not discussing what other versions may appear after the initial software development platform product, or "kit," is launched next year.
Graphics chip analyst Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, said Intel is not hitting performance targets and this became apparent at the SC09 supercomputing conference last month.
"Justin Rattner (Intel Senior Fellow) demonstrated Larrabee hitting one teraflop, which is great but you could walk across the street and buy an ATI graphics board for a few hundred dollars that would do five teraflops." A teraflop is 1 trillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of graphics chip performance.
Larrabee, a chronically delayed chip, was originally expected to appear in 2008. It was slated to compete with discrete graphics chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit.
Intel would not give a projected date for the Larrabee software development platform and is only saying "next year."
Intel says its plans are unchanged to deliver this month the first chip with graphics integrated onto the CPU. This new Atom processor is referred to as "Pineview" (the platform is called "Pine Trail") and will be targeted at Netbooks.
Updated at 4 p.m. PST throughout.
Yahoo is adding more context to news searches, bringing photos, videos, and even tweets into its search results page.
Searchers on Yahoo--who are dwindling--will find new results for newsy events Thursday, when Yahoo launches new tabs on the Yahoo News Shortcut. You've long been able to find links to news stories about a given search query through the shortcut, but you can now find other ways of telling the story with the new tabs, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.
Yahoo may be close to finalizing a deal to outsource the back end of its search business to Microsoft, but it insists that it's still a competitive search company with its decision to focus its research and development on new ways of presenting search results. The new shortcut is one such improvement, although one that's not all that different from what can be found on Google and Bing.
The main difference is that Yahoo will now provide the option of browsing images or tweets related to a given query without having to leave the search results page to click over to the Yahoo News section, Cornett said. Bing surfaces photos and video in its News section but not necessarily in its main search results page, and Google takes a similar approach.
Yahoo is using Twitter's public API to surface tweets, which are also run through a Yahoo algorithm to determine relevancy, Cornett said, declining to provide details on exactly how that works. Yahoo has not secured access to the "firehose" of tweets, whereas Microsoft and Google just signed deals for access to that data as part of their own bid to index tweets.
Yahoo and Microsoft have finalized their agreement to install Microsoft as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo's network of sites, the companies announced Friday.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first approved a search deal in July, but the matter took a little extra time to complete.
(Credit: Yahoo/Microsoft)
The deal, first reached in July, still needs to be approved by the U.S. government before it becomes final. But the companies said in October that they needed more time to complete the deal due to the "complex nature of this transaction," and Friday's announcement is likely the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking review from expensive lawyers.
At least company executives didn't have to rack up the frequent-flier miles to finalize this year; they signed it virtually, with Microsoft's Qi Lu and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz representing their respective companies on the licensing agreement and Ballmer and Bartz inking the definitive agreement, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will provide search technology to Yahoo for up to 10 years, also gaining access to Yahoo's search technology assets and several hundred employees. It will then pay Yahoo a significant portion of the ad revenue generated alongside those searches.
A Yahoo representative declined to comment on the specifics of what held up the final approval of the deal. Both parties said they still expect the deal to become final in early 2010, although the government is sure to take a long hard look.
Ina Fried contributed to this report.
Google is turning its sights squarely on the local ad market, with plans to promote its local business listings in storefronts around the U.S.
Stickers bearing Google's logo and a QR code have been distributed to 100,000 of the most popular businesses in Google's Local Business Center database, and starting this week consumers will be able to use code-scanning applications on modern phones to look up the Google listing for that particular restaurant, store, or dry cleaner. The stickers will be prominently displayed in store windows of participating businesses, and represent a shot across the bow of companies like Yelp which offer similar branded services.
Google's Local Business Center allows pizza joints and dress boutiques to place listings on Google Maps with basic information such as hours and location and also get access to data about how Web searchers are hitting their profile, such as the ZIP code from which searches originate, said Michaela Prescott, head of geomarketing at Google. Over 1 million businesses in the U.S. have listed themselves with Google, she said.
Much has been made of Google's interest in courting the big-name advertisers of the corporate world, but the company is also very interested in the mom-and-pop stores of the world, which fit nicely into its strategy of delivering targeted advertising to specific niches. Later this week, Google plans to hold an event in San Francisco for small business owners in hopes of educating them about the services that are available on Google.
The company analyzed which local listings were generating the most activity, and declared those to be "Favorite Places on Google," and therefore eligible for the sticker promotion. Shoppers who happen by the store can scan the sticker to bring up the business' Place Page with listing information as well as reviews, photos, and links to sites with more information about the business.
Prescott said those links will include reviews hosted by Yelp, perhaps the most well-known local listing, and reviews on the Internet. Yelp also distributes window decals to local businesses that reassure visitors that "People love us on Yelp!" (whether that's true) in hopes to promoting the site as the place to look for local reviews.
Google has taken the concept a step further, however, in the use of the QR codes to link to the Place Pages. Owners of smartphones with a camera (Google specifically said that iPhone, Android, and most BlackBerry owners would be supported, but others may work as well) and QR code scanning applications will be able to launch this information in their phone's browser.
So why is Google getting into the decal business? "I think it comes down to (the fact that) mobile is fundamentally different; it is about connecting the person to the physical place," Prescott said.
Obviously, lots of people search for local information on Google, but this program gives Google a way to capture eyeballs that aren't sitting in front of a desktop or laptop PC, promoting its mobile sites and therefore driving additional traffic to ad-supported sites. Expanding its local presence also allows Google to sell even-more targeted ads to other companies, since they know they'll be advertising to people in a position to take advantage of their services.
Google has been ramping up its local presence for quite some time, but seems to be experimenting with different strategies these days. It recently suspended a trial of a program called "Local Listing Ads," which was designed as a simple entry into Google that didn't require the business to manage a regular AdWords campaign.
And it also recently introduced a service that lets businesses put coupons in the Local Business Center that smartphone owners can redeem from the screen of their device, rather than having to clip them out of a newspaper circular.
In what could be a blow to its image, Microsoft's main Bing search site suffered through an outage on Thursday evening.
Visitors to Bing.com were getting a browser error message rather than a search bar. Service was down for at least 45 minutes before being restored around 7:10 p.m. PST.
Microsoft acknowledged the issues it on its Twitter feed and said it was looking into the matter. It later offered the following explanation, posted to a Bing blog by Satya Nadella, senior vice president of the Online Services division:
The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.
As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.
We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.
A Microsoft representative did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.
The outage comes after a big week in which Microsoft announced new search abilities for Bing as well as improved mapping.
Updated at 7:13 p.m. PST to reflect site's return. Updated at 11:13 p.m. PST with Microsoft statement.
Red means danger. And orange offers plenty of risk, too. (Click for a larger view of the map.)
(Credit: McAfee)
You may want to think twice if you hit a site with a .cm extension. That belongs to Cameroon, pegged by McAfee as the world's riskiest domain.
McAfee's third annual "Mapping the Mal Web" report, released Wednesday, looks at riskiest and safest domains across the globe. The small nation on the west coast of Africa reached the top spot this year with 36.7 percent of its sites posing a security risk. Because .cm is often a typo for .com, McAfee said, cybercrooks like to use that domain to set up typo-squatted sites to hit you with malware.
The generic and widely used .com domain itself isn't much safer, according to McAfee, jumping from ninth last year to second this year in riskiness, with 32.2 percent of its sites potentially hazardous to your PC's health.
(Credit: McAfee)
Romania (.ro) is tagged as the riskiest domain for malicious downloads, with 21 percent of its sites delivering payloads of viruses, spyware, and adware. The information (.info) domain is seen by McAfee as the most "spammy," with 17.2 percent of its sites generating junk mail.
On the positive side, the government (.gov) is the safest generic domain with essentially 0 percent risk, while Japan (.jp) proved the safest country domain with a rating of only 0.1 percent. Last year's riskiest domain, Hong Kong (.hk) dropped to 34th place with a risk rating of only 1.1 percent, which McAfee attributed to the country's aggressive steps to stop scam-related domain registrations.
(Credit: McAfee)
"This report underscores how quickly cybercriminals change tactics to lure in the most victims and avoid being caught. Last year, Hong Kong was the riskiest domain and this year it is dramatically safer," Mike Gallagher, chief technology officer for McAfee Labs, said in a statement. "Cybercriminals target regions where registering sites is cheap and convenient, and pose the least risk of being caught."
Overall, looking at 27 million Web sites and 104 top-level domains, McAfee found that 1.5 million sites, or 5.8 percent, were risky. That's up from 4.1 percent from the past two years, although the comparison is not direct since McAfee said it changed its rating methodology since then.
McAfee noted that cybercriminals who create domains to scam people prefer registrars with cheap prices, volume discounts, and hefty refund policies. Crooks also like registrars with a "no questions asked" policy and that act slowly or not at all when informed of malicious domains.