Monday, March 09, 2009

Intel's upcoming mobile chips to squeeze 3GHz out of Penryn, bring high-performance ULV to the masses

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/08/intels-upcoming-mobile-chips-to-squeeze-3ghz-out-of-penryn-bri/


Yeah, we've had just about all the Atom we can handle, and it looks like Intel's just about ready to help us back away from the difficult choice of sexy form factors for low prices and sexy form for exorbitant prices. Intel is working on Montevina Plus, which will push Penryn laptop chip technology past the 3GHz mark, while subsequently sending ULV chips into the mainstream, showing up in laptops ranging from $599 to $1,000, instead of the $1,500+ premiums they currently usually command -- great news for ultraportable lovers that actually want to get a few things accomplished on the road. Intel also sees 2009 as the year of the nettop, at least in emerging markets, and will naturally be pushing Nehalem all over the place -- with the way chip roadmaps are planned, the economic downturn naturally won't be messing with any planned rollouts for the time being.

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Intel's upcoming mobile chips to squeeze 3GHz out of Penryn, bring high-performance ULV to the masses originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 07:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony's Vaio P benchmarked in all its magnificent and diverse forms

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/08/sonys-vaio-p-benchmarked-in-all-its-magnificent-and-diverse-for/


Thanks to the work of the gang making time over at their Vaio P forum, the folks at Pocketables have been able to compile benchmarks of all the various configurations of the ultraportable. Including the three models available domestically (which all sport a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520) and the various 1.6GHz Z530 and 1.86GHz Z540-based machines available elsewhere, this ragtag group of benchmarksters have come to the conclusion that the main factor when it comes to the machine's performance is the disk drive type. "Yes," writes Jenn Lee, "the faster CPUs give the ALU/FLU numbers a noticeable bump up, but it's not as significant as the increase seen between a HDD and SSD." Hopefully this is some small comfort to those of you who are miffed that the 1.86GHz model isn't available in the States. Of course, now that we've seen the Vaino we're so over Sony's sassy'n'classy non-netbook, but if you're morbidly curious the read link tells the whole sordid tale.

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Sony's Vaio P benchmarked in all its magnificent and diverse forms originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 16:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cisco said to be buying Pure Digital for around $500 million

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/cisco-said-to-be-buying-pure-digital-for-around-500-million/


Believe us people, popularity pays off. Just ask Pure Digital CEO Jonathan Kaplan, who is reportedly scrambling for ways to spend $80 million of the $500 million Cisco Systems is about to hand over in order to acquire the company. Granted, none of this has been confirmed just yet, but TechCrunch has it that the deal is all but done. Reportedly, Cisco's interested in bringing the firm into its portfolio in order to further push high-bandwidth using services. Obviously, user generated HD video fits pretty perfectly into that agenda. We suspect we'll be hearing more on the subject as the work week begins in earnest, but it sure sounds like Linksys is about to get a new cousin.

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Cisco said to be buying Pure Digital for around $500 million originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple touch-screen netbook in Q3?

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/apple-netbook-in-q3/


Boom: Apple netbook in Q3 -- that's the rumor being spread by the Commercial Times / DigiTimes tag-team of electronics tattlers. Apparently, Wintek will supply the touch-panels to Quanta computer who'll be tasked with assembling Apple's netbook. Take this one with a grain of salt though -- while these two Taiwan-based magazines tend to be accurate with insider info related to Taiwan-based companies like Acer and ASUS, they can often be wide of the mark with rumors related to foreign companies. Unless of course we missed the launch of the Blu-ray Xbox 360 and G5 PowerBooks.

[Image courtesy of Frunny]

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Apple touch-screen netbook in Q3? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Obama's Plan to Digitize Medical Records Draws Criticism from Doctors [Healthcare]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/vfv37Dvq_C4/obamas-plan-to-digitize-medical-records-draws-criticism-from-doctors

Digitization of medical records is one of Obama's most prominent talking points: he claims modernizing records will save lives and billions of dollars at the same time. But some doctors aren't taken with the idea.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, Dr. Anne Armstrong-Coben expresses concern that the modernization of medical records may not be as obviously beneficial as it seems. For one thing, there's no unified system yet, and the likeliest candidate (Google Health) isn't subject to the now-outdated Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the national privacy statute. Creating an easy-to-learn and effective system is a huge undertaking, from construction to installation to training, and not everybody is confident it can be done properly.

A buggy or confusing system could result in more mistakes, not less, as Dr. Armstrong-Coben points out. "I have seen how choosing the wrong box can lead to the wrong drug being prescribed," she writes. Older generations of doctors may have trouble adjusting to a totally digital system, and there are bound to be mistakes made by even the computer-savvy before digitization becomes ubiquitous.

On the other hand, Dr. Armstrong-Coben complains that full digitization may make the doctor-patient relationship less personal, a point not likely to hold much water with digitization proponents. The potential money and lives saved far outweigh the loss. She reminisces, "I loved how patients could participate in their own charts - illustrating their cognitive development as they went from showing me how they could draw a line at age 2 and a circle at 3 to proudly writing their names at 5." Unclear, however, is why she can't just keep a notebook in which her young pediatric patients can ! draw.

Obama's plan will cost about $100 billion, a huge chunk of the stimulus package, but some experts claim it will save two to three times that yearly. Those savings could go toward universal health care or simply flow back into the hospitals for better equipment.

Doctors like Armstrong-Coben bring up an interesting point: this is a new frontier and a massive project, and it won't be as simple as handing doctors a new iMac and watching the savings roll in. But it's a necessary step; just because it's going to be hard doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. [NY Times and CNN]



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