Microsoft has released a first public version of a search engine that allows Internet users to search through "tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books."
The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a new solar cell that can convert more than 40% of sunlight into electricity. The cell, made by Boeing-Spectrolab, uses mirrors and prisms to boost the sunlight going into the cell. The DOE says the cells could be sold for $3 per watt and make electricity for 8 to 10 cents per KW/hour.
Forget about the $650 liquid-cooled 1.15 GHz memory you may have just ordered for your rig. Turns out that the OCZ PC2-9200 FlexXLC devices aren't cutting edge anymore, just two weeks after their announcement. Bragging rights for the memory with the highest clock speed are moving over to Kingston's HyperX PC9600 modules, which are clocked at 1.2 GHz. The company also offers a PC-9200 version (1.15 GHz).
Toshiba announced that it has developed a new version of its 1.8" hard drive, offering a capacity of 100 GB. The new drive, which is first to reach triple digits in its segment, is expected to roll out to mobile PCs starting next month and could also make its way into the next-generation video iPod.
Santa Clara (CA) - Innovative Silicon, which made waves earlier this year by announcing a license agreement with AMD, today said that the second generation of its Z-RAM technology is available. The memory could be used as foundation for much denser L2 cache integrations in microprocessors.
A malicious QuickTime movie file is spreading across social networking site MySpace, embedding itself in the user profile pages of infected victims and changing links to point to phishing sites.
Sunnyvale (CA) - AMD fired up the third stage of a series of announcements this morning and announced a first batch of 65 nm desktop dual-core processors. Almost one year behind Intel, the new X2 family CPUs launch as a quartet that do not bump processor performance but lower power consumption and provide headroom for future clock speed increases.
ASUSTeK has announced that analog phone to Skype adapters will be included with its M2N and P5B TeleSky motherboards. With the adapters, users can plug their analog phones into the Skype VoIP service and make cheap or even free calls to friends.
Hynix Semiconductor today announced it has developed 512Mbit mobile DRAM in 200MHz frequency, the so-called fastest and smallest mobile DRAM, according to the company.
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins will probably be known as the most brutally honest hard drive executive in history. During a dinner conversation with Fortune's senior editor Jeffrey O'Brien, Watkins said, "We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."
Responding to developers' wishes to be able to run both Internet Explorer 6 and 7 side-by-side, Microsoft has launched a Virtual PC (VPC) image of Windows XP Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 6, and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit.
Macronix International Company (MXIC) announced on November 29 that its co-developed phase change memory (PCM) with IBM and Qimonda has proven to be applicable in sub-20nm geometries, indicating that the present physical barriers of NOR flash production on 65nm can be overcome.
And you thought the Playstation 3 was expensive: Design studio Art Lebedev announced that it will sell its Optimus computer keyboard for $1200 a piece in March of next year.
HP has rolled out the industry's first blade workstation which stores the computer safely away in the datacenter closet. The ProLiant Blade Workstation Solution is stacked vertically in blade chassis cabinets and several dozen can be placed in a standard 19" wide server rack.
Fujitsui has developed a new optical drive element that could one day achieve one terabit per square inch recording. The element is for thermally assisted magnetic drives and helps focus heat onto a hard drive platter so that a magnetic head can record more data. The new head element, along with perpendicular recording technology, will help hard drive companies increase capacities.
New York (NY) - Today at its stock trading home, the Nasdaq building, Microsoft cut the ribbon on the anticipated updates to Windows XP and Office 2003 as the business versions of Vista and Office 2007 made their official debut today.
Impressions from the Windows Vista launch in New York ...
Berkeley (CA) - Intel was first out of the gate with a quad-core processor, AMD will offer the first native quad-core chip - four processors that are integrated in one piece of silicon. The company today offered a first glimpse at a 4-way, quad-core Opteron processor system during its annual analyst conference.
