Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, June 16, 2008

Nikon readying D90 for launch?

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/312547556/

We don't have much to go by, but the image above image might just be the Nikon D90, successor to the well-received D80 -- then again, it might be a photoshop, too. (The more we look at it, the more the area in/around the D90 badge looks pretty sloppy.) According to Nikon Rumors, it might be due as early as tomorrow; we'll let you know if the kit goes from rumor to reality.

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Sunday, June 15, 2008

landscape photos

http://www.outdoor-photos.com/

Clouds and waves

+126

Author: ХARTA-BARTA

Tags: sea, waves, foam, rocks, sky

about the sturdy wooden bridge

+145

Author:

Tags: rock, black and white, river, bridge

Enchanted sunset

+84

Author: Dmitry Lyalin & Julia Razumeeva

Tags: shore, rocks, silhouette, lake, dusk

Rush

+119

Author: Krzysztof Sebastian

Tags: rush, lake, fog, morning, spring

Yalta. cold whisper of the sea..

+92

Author: sinyaya boroda (gulyayev yuri)

Tags: clouds, shoreline, fog, rocks, sea

Random 5! » More photos » Next photos »

Intel Shows Off Its Enviro-lovinâ Side

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/earth2tech/~3/311881603/

Amidst the smaller semiconductors and new personal area networking technology breakthroughs showcased by Intel at its Research Day earlier this week were some silicon tools that could help track greenhouse gases and reduce power consumption inside devices. The chipmaker also showed off some of its low-wattage chips that will consumer less power and therefore lead to longer battery lives in portable electronics.

We’ve covered the low-power chips before, but two notable breakthroughs might be of interest to environmentally minded readers. One is a way to make a cheaper, more portable laser using silicon rather than specialty materials. Using silicon makes it cheaper to manufacture the laser; it also reduces the amount of heat it generates. That means the laser doesn’t need a bulky cooling technology attached to it, hence the added portability. Such a laser could have uses in the medical and telecommunications fields, as well as be used to detect greenhouse gases. Get it small enough and cheap enough, and precisely measuring your carbon footprint becomes possible.

The other breakthrough involves managing power across an entire device by recognizing when certain aspects of a machine such as a CPU, radio or USB port are active or not, and then shutting inactive portions of the machine down. It’s similar to turning off the lights in a room when you leave. Intel calls it Platform Power Management. Already chips are now designed to cycle their speeds up and down depending on the workloads demanded of them, so this isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. It’s a move already being made in corporate data centers using software from startups such as Cassatt and Verdiem. I suppose if they’re managing power consumption in hundreds of machines, Intel can seek to micromanage inside each one.

Google Tools Will Tell You If Your ISP Is Slowing Down Your Connection [Google]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/312058734/google-tools-will-tell-you-if-your-isp-is-slowing-down-your-connection

And I was starting to feel unfulfilled by the stuff coming out of Google's labs. Its senior policy director, Richard Whitt, says that they're cooking up software that'll tell you if your ISP is screwing with or slowing down your connection because you're hogging too much bandwidth, and what exactly they're doing to it. (There's already some available, BTW, since Whitt didn't mention a release date.) But it's not necessarily because they believe willy nilly in net neutrality.

Google just thinks that you have a right to know what your ISP is doing. If your ISP won't tell you, you should have the tools to figure out. In fact, according to one article cited by Hot Hardware, when net neutrality first started becoming an issue, at first Google considered just going along with ISPs: "We would come out fine—a non-neutral world would be a good world for us." Do no evil, eh? [Hot Hardware via /.]

Intel wastes our time and yours with SL and WoW clients for MIDs

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/312188728/

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Don't get ahead of us here, Intel isn't building full-featured Second Life and World of Warcraft apps for handheld Mobile Internet Devices. Instead they're using a new "Interactive 3D Streaming" tech to control and view the game remotely -- similar to some to that Telekinesis app we saw playing WoW on the iPhone last year, but Intel seems to be much further along. Their Xeon 5400 server can handle 14 clients simultaneously, but we're guessing this won't be cost effective for Blizzard anytime soon -- though we can imagine quite a few addicts rigging up similar systems for themselves. The sad news here is that Intel might've just discovered the best use for a MID yet.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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