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> they copied the front style

Totally copied, indistinguishable, I say.

Also, Samsung never could have thought about such a design, of course. It's totally Apple's invention to have minimalistic cover design with only picture of product

> Other than being black, the two US-style power bricks are the same. You're just clutching at straws here.

Nope, there are still slight differences in shape. Also, what shape would you expect a power adapter to be, spheric? Clutching at straws is saying that Samsung (imprecisely) copied power adapter - what sense would it make? Confusing the customer? "I know this AC adapter, it surely must be iPad, I'm buying!"

Anybody else think thunderbolt is a technology looking for a solution?

USB is cheaper, almost as fast, and ubiquitous. There are probably literally millions of USB devices that work with a USB port.

Thunderbolt has one RAID box you can buy, and now VI is really stretching the bounds of credulity to come up with another use for it.

I'd bet a month's pay that Apple will start removing Thunderbolt ports from Macs in 2014

Absolutely correct. The existing version of Thunderbolt isn't even optical, so the speed benefit isn't there.
It's the senseless quest for "one cable to rule them all" as usual.

If you want an external PCIe bus that you can attach all sorts of controllers to (like USB, Parallel, Serial, HDMI, Displayport, Assbadger, whatever), why not just use external PCIe?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/news/2008-06/ati_xgp_x8_connector.png
http://www.ixbt.com/video3/images/guide/pcie_ext.jpg
http://www.ioi.com.tw/images/products/cat_113/l_1130004_01.jpg

All Thunderbolt is is external PCIe with a controller to fold in some common protocols (USB, HDMI, DisplayPort, etc.). Yet for some reason we need a new cable, a new name, a new port, the whole 9 yards.

This always kind of weirds me out. I mean the way people talk about doom 3 as if they played it for the first time 3 years after it came out and then compared it to other games of the time.

Doom 3 gave people a first glimpse of what every other game that came after it had to aspire to. Yes I agree that some aspects of the story/gameplay could have been more thought out, but again, for it's time it was totally state of the art. It was the most visually compelling game out there. And that first scene when you could hear the other marines screaming over the radio for help, having the world falling in around you.. scared the hell out of me the first time I played it.

2004 GTA San Andreas;
http://www.helloclan.eu/images/reviews/images/gta-san-andreas.jpg
Halo2
http://www.bungie.net/images/news/inlineimages/halo2cine2.jpg
Doom 3
http://www.ixbt.com/video2/images/r9700pro-oc/doom3-2.jpg

Take a look at those images and tell me you don't notice the difference.

Just read this series of articles to see how the Atom hype is just... well, only hype.
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-1.shtml
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-2.shtml
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-3.shtml

Just read this series of articles to see how the Atom hype is just... well, only hype.
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-1.shtml
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-2.shtml
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-3.shtml

Just read this series of articles to see how the Atom hype is just... well, only hype.
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-1.shtml
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-2.shtml
http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/intel-atom-architecture-3.shtml

Truth hurts, eh Nokia fanboys?

I've owned Nokia phones. They were great in the 90s. Then they took forever to start shipping quad band handsets, and I switched to Sony Ericsson. Then they went through that period where most of their designs looked like they were put together by crack-smoking monkeys.

Then came Maemo. The N770 looked interesting. I saw them drop support for it and bring out the N800. I actually bought one of those, and they dropped support for it and brought out the N810. Then they dropped support for that and brought out the N900, with a smaller screen. Meanwhile, Maemo was GTK... then it was switching to Qt... and now it's dead, replaced by MeeGo. No doubt in another year they'll drop all support for fixes for the N900, and a year after MeeGo is released they'll drop it for something else, and all the while they'll be asking why developers aren't interested in their platform and users aren't interested in their phones.

You should store them in the plastic containers they came in: http://www.ixbt.com/storage/scsi2005/roundup/fujitsu-pack.jpg These plastic boxes are anti-static and the bumps provide a modicum of shock absorbance. You might also want to add a (fresh) silica pack to prevent moisture from building up.

For those who can read Russian IXBT has graphic card roundups updated quite regularly.Among other things it compares performance/price and potential longevity of the cards. To understand the comparison tables you do not even need Russian.

they can at most carry .5 ounces of microfilm which then requires a microfilm reader

Coincidentally "Soviet Russian" hardware site http://www.ixbt.com/ turns 10 today too =)

Really? You don't remeber the first hard drive mp3 players? The Creative Nomad was the best thing out there, and it was awful (back in the good old usb 1.1 days). The reality is that apple saw an opportunity to make one of the first good HD based mp3 players. It's entirely possible that they see a similar kind of opportunity with the iPhone.

IMO there has not been a good fully convergent device. There have been decent phone/mp3 devices. And RIM has had the phone/email market locked up for a while now. Even though they are marketed as being fully convergent phone/email/mp3 devices, the MS devices are just and excercise in mediocrety, and people put up with them because it's their only option. Apple sees an opportunity to define the consumer oriented convergence device market, it should provide a good quality phone/mp3/email device and it also claims to provide a uniquely high quality internet experience.

If the iPhone is half as successful as apple hopes it will be it will at least raise the bar for the rest of us. And I do own a pearl and I do love it for what it is (email/phone and crappy internet). I recongize it's limitations and could easily list dozens of things it could do better. Hopefully competition from Apple (or anyone else for that matter) will improve things.

This means that in 6 weeks Sony managed to outsell the XBox360 in its first few months of sales. Despite the massively higher price tag. Despite HD not being as new and shiny.

The NPD figures are USA only too. The Wii would have sold more but Nintendo shuffled some half a million into Europe for a launch there.

The figures on nexgenwars.com are clearly pulled from thin air though.

It basically just takes time and research to estimate the numbers as closely as possible.

Now for the new consoles it is a little harder since there is no previous sales data to go off of. What I do for these is research how many they are expecting to have on launch and by the end of the year. For the launch counter I get it to around the number expected, and then I slow it down to pace it so that it will reach a good estimate for the end of the year, and as usual I will adjust anything if any official word comes in.

I don't know about number 3, but 1 and 2 were a fact of life with Sony's minidisc players. You could only access the device with the supplied software, ironically called OpenMG Jukebox (which incidentally was orange and purple, had been quite blatently translated from Japanese by a non native speaker of English, and had the worst interface of any application I have ever used before or since). Music copied to the minidisc was converted to ATRAC3 format, and could not be copied back to the computer, ever -- even the exact same computer that had just copied the music onto it. I bought an iPod a few months later, it was that awful.

Is there any reason why the Sony NW-S205F looks like a probe? Here it is with earphones. I can't wait for the integrated phones! Slogan: Popular with the inmates! Batteries not included.

I think the problem may have to do with the fundamental concept of a computer being an exposed motherboard with a series of slots that house exposed cards. This goes all the way back 30 years to the first micro bus standard (S-100) through most subsequent computers.

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/6757/ images/chassistop.jpg

http://www.oldcomputers.arcula.co.uk/files/images/ intl103t.jpg

http://www.infodip.com/pages/axiom/bus-passif/imag es/ATX60206.jpg

http://www.infodip.com/pages/axiom/bus-passif/imag es/ATX6021_4.jpg

http://www.ixbt.com/mainboard/epox/8npa-sli/board. jpg

This is indeed a practical and economical solution to the idea of putting together and updating your computer. It's really a holdover from the hobbyist days and people have gotten used to it, but it's not really consumer-friendly.

The cartridge approach as used with videogame consoles is better.

I think Atari had the right idea with how it implemented expansion on the 800.

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/cartports3.JPG

The only exposed surfaces were the card edges and the slot. Then you just close the lid.

You see this kind of design approach applied currently to flash memory. If you follow the evolution of the MMC card up through SD and into MINI SD and MICRO SD adapters, imagine the same approach taken with bus specifications. Older cards could be used with newer bus specifications via adapter sleeves. But you'd standardize on a singular form-factor. When you open up your PC, all of the guts would be hidden behind the casing except for the mating surfaces for the cards. All cards would be enclosed.

I don't see this happening because computer technology is by definition transient, disposeable. So nobody wastes money on ergonomics like this. Bus standards change so frequently that you can't even keep your motherboard that long anymore let alone your cards. So you might not even swap cards that much for the lifecycle of the PC beyond the initial system setup.

What I'd really like to see is more effort spent on coming up with a universal backplane that would be more future-proof, maybe something more passive where the glue that binds everything together was itself a module you could swap out. That way maybe the underlying frame could last much longer before becoming obsolete.

Diagram:

http://www.ixbt.com/cpu/images/amd-athlon-64-x2-48 00/a64blockscheme.jpg

Russian web-site www.ixbt.com has monthly 3d video report featuring the newest NVidia and ATI cards as well as the newest drivers. See here. Although the text is in Russian you can still read the diagrams (like this) which they provide. They compare quality in games (provide screenshots showing bugs), performance and price.

Russian web-site www.ixbt.com has monthly 3d video report featuring the newest NVidia and ATI cards as well as the newest drivers. See here. Although the text is in Russian you can still read the diagrams (like this) which they provide. They compare quality in games (provide screenshots showing bugs), performance and price.

c-pen AFAIR
http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pretec /open.jpg

http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pqi/is /ready.jpg

http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pny/cl ose.jpg

c-pen AFAIR
http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pretec /open.jpg

http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pqi/is /ready.jpg

http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pny/cl ose.jpg

c-pen AFAIR
http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pretec /open.jpg

http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pqi/is /ready.jpg

http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashdrives/p12/pny/cl ose.jpg

According to this this benchmarks (the article in Russian, but you probably can read the tables and figures), GF6800GS is better than ATI X1600XT.

Sony VCRs used to quite distinctive. They had (perhaps they still do) a big jog dial that one could use to quickly find a video frame-- turn it slightly to the right, and it steps through the video frame by frame. Turn it farther to the right, and it fast forwards the tape, with speed dependent on how far one had turned it.

It looks really quite similar to the ipod wheel.

But it looks as though sony changed the design for its laptops.

The jog dial is now a cylinder, with an access of rotation parallel (rather than perpendicular) to the front panel.

If you look at the Intel D915GUX, you'll see the unpopulated pads near the SATA headers:

http://www.ixbt.com/mainboard/images/roundup-i915g -sep2k4/d915gux-board.jpg

If you look at photos of the same region of an Apple X86 Developer MLB, you'll see a chip.

I'd like to see the kernel output from an attempt to boot on one of those..

They're $109 at Fry's, d00ds. You can take it back when you're done.

GSOD, but prettier I assume.

I am completely amused at people that complain about the visual design of the new XBox. It's a box that hangs out under your TV, who gives a shit if the design is boring? And where were these people when Sony introduced this ugly ass thing?

I can't believe I let myself get dragged into this ridiculous discussion.

Since then, we have K3B and the new Gnome whatchamacallit, that both do the same thing, better, support more formats, and are not hindered by little things like CSS.... Sooo, how seriously can they be taking this product?

2 MB L2 cache doesn't do much by itself, give that Dothan core a 533 MHz FSB instead of the 400 MHz Banias was on and it starts to shine (and of course the power consumption goes up too). Speaking of which, AMD Turion 64 (and Athlon 64) have memory controller in the core not in north bridge like Intel processors, so that 25/35W CPU power envelope includes MC overhead too.

BTW, most 512 kB L2 Athlon 64 CPUs run circles over P4 3.6+ GHz with 2 MB cache in gaming benches, so cache alone means squat ;)

And it looks like it's going to be two years until Pentium M range gets 64-bit core. AMD Turion 64 already has 16/16 INT/XMM registers, SSE/SSE2/SSE3 support etc.

Thats a difference that simply fades away over time, a ten your old renderfarm can't really do much more then a PC from today. Sure a PC can't do exactly what the renderfarm can, but thanks to better algorithms it can get results extremly close to that of the renderfarm with much less wasted CPU/GPU (no need to render hundreds of polygons when a single one with normal or parallaxmapping will do). PC also don't need to do renderings at cinema useable resolutions which reduces the work they need to do even more. If you compare the ten year old Toy Story with todays Doom3 there really is not much difference when it comes to the rendering quality, a little to less polys here and a unsharp texture there, but thats something that will quickly disappear in the next years. Beside from that, such issues are exactly my point, in a movie a blury texture doesn't matter, you simply don't move the camera close enough so that the viewer notices, in a game players will stick there noise into the wall, so even if the PC renders better then the movie, the results will be worse. Interactivity ruins the results today far more then the rendering power.

But in all seriousness, this is good news since the 7650 (same series 60 symbian OS) is a really cool looking and small phone and would benefit from this as well.

But in all seriousness, this is good news since the 7650 (same series 60 symbian OS) is a really cool looking and small phone and would benefit from this as well.

"We have just posted a very difficult guide to turning your ATI Radeon 9500 into a 9700..."

Um. Maybe I'm just stupid, but something looks a little odd to me. On the second image on the page they have pictures from five different views. That includes on looking at the bottom and one at the top of the phone. The silhouettes in those two pictures are completely different! How did they do that?! Or isn't it the top and bottom? This is the image by the way.

Nice review though!

Regards / ushac

I wonder if his wife knows there's a picture of her only in underwear?

Noticed how the "Sound OFF" thingy in the upper-right corner of the "unenhanced" picture is clearer than in the FAA16X antialiased one ?

Noticed how the "Sound OFF" thingy in the upper-right corner of the "unenhanced" picture is clearer than in the FAA16X antialiased one ?

The article may be in russian but the pictures arent, take a look at this:

depth adaptive tesselation apparently by not rendering triangles at a distance (that wont be 'seen' at that distance) the card only displays 17,794 triangles instead of 165,150 it has to render without 'depth adaptive tesselation'.

There's not a lot of info on google about "depth adaptive".

It looks like the technology will allow for much higher framerates than so far possible..

Just look at the pictures :)

I suppose I could have posted the larger screenshot instead. Here.

Look closely at the lower right corner of this screenshot. This is the one without the 16xFAA too. Pretty disappointing really.

Here is the screenshot from 3DMark 2001.

For those too lazy to look it shows a paltry 3 FPS.

Another case of a moderator on crack. The story is about a video card that lets you have three monitors, like in this picture. You could have 'Surround video Porn' with this product, and I think the poster above was making a joke about that. I thought it was funny.