Friday, November 21, 2008

ASUS Eee Top climbing to 20- and 22-inches by June

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/21/asus-eee-top-climbing-to-20-and-22-inches-by-june/


Like the Eee Top all-in-one PC but 15.6-inches is just too wee for your taste? Fine, you'll have the chance to grapple with 20- and 22-inchers, according to ASUS CEO Jerry Shen, sometime in the first half of 2009. Drop Windows 7 into these touchscreen monuments to mediocrity and we're in.

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ASUS Eee Top climbing to 20- and 22-inches by June originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gigantic LED display board goes live at Walgreens in Times Square

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/21/gigantic-led-display-board-goes-live-at-walgreens-in-times-squar/


Remember that LED display board that was scheduled to be lit up at Walgreens in Times Square? You know, that 17,000-square foot one touting 12 million LEDs? Sure you do. The board, which was designed by D3 LED, was finally activated in the heart of New York City, and its creators are asserting that it's one of the most complex in existence. If you're wondering if this is worth a trip up (along with having a peek at the giant tree in Rockefeller Center), you might want to hit the read link first, but you should probably understand that almost nothing in NYC can hold a candle in terms of magnitude to downtown Dubai.

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Gigantic LED display board goes live at Walgreens in Times Square originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Android Teases Me

by Steve Smith , Thursday, November 20, 2008

IF YOU WANT A GLIMPSE of a wildly promising mobile future, grab some geek buddy's T-Mobile G1 phone and fire up the ShopSaavvy app. Integrated with the phone's camera, you can aim the device at any product UPC code and pull down product details, online pricing and shopping opportunities, Web site references, and reviews, when available. Of course suppliers like Mobot and ScanBuy have been working with this sort of visual search model for a while, But I have never seen the mobile scanning process implemented so smoothly and with such tight integration with the hardware. Best of all, the process delivers information that is rich and relevant to the user, not just to an advertiser.

My iPhone can't do that...

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Amazonâs CloudFront Could Storm Rival CDNs

Source: http://gigaom.com/2008/11/18/amazons-cloudfront-could-storm-rival-cdns/

Today Amazon Web Services launched the beta version of its content delivery network service called CloudFront. As Om mentioned in September when the service was announced, this is a good move for Amazon, and something that may put the hurt on fellow CDNs such as Limelight and Akamai. Amazon will charge a usage-based fee, rather than a long-term contract, bringing CDN prices even lower for smaller web players who don’t have the scale to negotiate lower prices. Here’s how it works from the release:

The service caches copies of content close to end users for low latency delivery, while also providing fast, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver popular objects to end users at scale. CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon S3, where users store the original versions of objects delivered through the service. Customers need only put their objects into an Amazon S3 bucket and then register that bucket with the new service using a simple API call, which then returns a domain name used to access content through the network of edge locations.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, explains all about CloudFront on his blog.

A content delivery service that would extend Amazon S3 has been something that is very high on the wish list of our customers. They were already successfully using Amazon S3 for some of their content distribution needs, but many wanted the choice to do so with even lower latency and with higher data transfer rates to any place in the world.

He goes on to explain:

Using Amazon CloudFront is dead simple. Many of our private beta customers have reported that it only took them 10-15 minutes from the moment that they first signed up for the service to the moment that Amazon CloudFront was distributing their content.

The second Amazon Web Services principle that sets Amazon CloudFront apart is that no upfront commitments are necessary and you only pay for what you have used. There are no upfront fees or high volume requirements and no negotiations are necessary because we have published low prices from the start.

The second point is the more disruptive one. When Amazon announced its CDN in September we wrote,

Akamai is less likely to be impacted in the near term, but it further commoditizes the CDN business and forces a big shakeout in the industry, taking down the small and the weak. Akamai has been focusing on value-add services, as a way to stay ahead of the commoditization of the basic CDN services.

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With prices ranging from 17 cents per gigabyte for the first 10 terabytes sent out a month, to 9 cents per GB for everything over 150 TB, the service seems to undercut the pricing offered by other CDNs for small to medium sized customers. It might be a good thing that Akamai’s looking at diversifying into online advertising.

GigaOM Briefings Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

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SC08 Video: Put a Green Supercomputer on Your Desk

Source: http://gigaom.com/2008/11/18/sc08-video-put-a-green-supercomputer-on-your-desk/

I’m intrigued by the idea of personal supercomputers such as the Cray CX1, which was unveiled earlier this year, as well as the Dell Workstation that was given a teraflop boost using an Nvidia Telsa card. So I jumped at the chance to chat with SiCortex, a maker of high-performance computing systems that in March announced a 72-core workstation that runs at 300 watts. The company just closed a $37 million round of funding in September and also has a larger HPC system as well. For more, check out the video.

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