Written by kurniawan on Friday, December 5th, 2008 in News.
Multiple Image Resizer .NET allows you to process individual images or folders of images. You can resize, add borders, crop, overlay text, overlay images and/or rotate and flip images. MIR .NET handles a variety of input and output image formats. (more…)
Written by Shawn Brown on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 in News.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced today that their fourth-quarter revenue would be much weaker due to widespread weakness particularly among customers. Shares have recovered much of the 8percent premarket drop, but investors and analysts are seemingly unfazed.
Cody Acree, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus said, “the market was not surprised given the state of the PC industry, which is being crippled by poor demand.” AMD along with rival Intel have made virtually all the microprocessors for the world’s 1 billion PCs. Acree went on to say AMD has done a great job of making itself a better competitor to Intel. I think this has nothing to do with AMD individually, this is fully macro.”
AMD is expecting revenue from operations ending December 27th, to decline around 25 percent in the 3Q to around 1.19 billion. The average 4Q analyst revenue estimate is 1.53 billion according to Reuters Estimates. Earlier this year AMD cut 500 out of the 15,500 jobs to try and cut costs.
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Written by Shawn Ingram on Friday, November 28th, 2008 in News.
Section: Computers, Mobile Computers, Hardware
By now, we all know the standard specs for netbooks. So many companies use the Intel Atom CPU, it’s sometimes easy to forget there is another major competitor in the field. One of the few netbooks to use something other than Intel processors was the original HP Mini-note. HP used the VIA Nano CPU, partially because the Atom wasn’t available yet. VIA has recently shown where the Nano chips are going, but it is going to take a while.
The dual core version of the Nano isn’t due out until June 2010 according to VIA’s roadmap. However, there isn’t much information on the dual core Nano aside from the fact that it will feature a “new process technology” and it will be compatible with current motherboards using VIA Nanos.
Most of the improvements for the VIA Nano are set for June 2009. Improvements include increased front side bus speed, virtualization, and 64 bit processing. The chips will also change from the current 90nm process technology to 65nm.
The improvements will be nice for those that use VIA Nanos, but it’s hard to see the roadmap and think that Intel will beat VIA to the punch with dual core chips. Sure, dual cores aren’t everything, but everything concerning multiple cores seems to get everyone excited recently. Intel has no real reason to stop developing the Atom either way, but it is nice to see some competition in the market with a company that isn’t AMD or ARM.
Read [Electronista]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Written by Adam Berger on Friday, November 28th, 2008 in News.
Section: Peripherals, Storage, Features, Contests
It’s Black Friday, you slept through your alarm, and are now scouring the web for the leftover deals (ie. non HD LCD TVs). Well why not sit back, relax, and enter to win some free drives from Seagate? Whether you give them away to your mother-in-law as a present or keep them for your movie collection, nothing beats free.
Winners will get their choice of either a FreeAgent Desk 1TB or FreeAgent Desk for Mac 1TB as well as a 500GB FreeAgent Go or 500GB FreeAgent Go for Mac portable drive. The FreeAgent Go for Mac has FireWire 800 and USB ports comes in a silver and white design. It matches the look and feel of a MacBook. The FreeAgentGo (non Mac) is much slimmer and comes in Red, Forest Green, Sky Blue, Tuxedo Black and Silver.
For a chance to win all you need to do to is answer following questions in the comment form at the bottom of this article:
What do you have on your computer that you could not live without, if you lost it?
Only one entry per person. Entry valid by answering the required question as well as leaving your email address in the comment form. We’ll pick a random winner from all the entries received by 11:59PT on Friday December 6. Click here for the full list of Dabbledoo contest rules.
You can also enter to win one of the ten hard drive bundles at these sites once they post their rules:
Full Story » | Written by Adam Berger for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Written by Chris Davies on Friday, November 28th, 2008 in News.
Given the usual refrain that accompanies any new netbook announcement - “under the hood there’s Intel’s N270 1.6GHz Atom processor…” - you’d think the silicon company would be happy with their lot in life. However it looks as though they’re not so sure; Stu Pann, vice president in the sales and marketing group at Intel, has described netbooks as “not something you’re going to use day in and day out.”
The issue, according to Pann, is of positioning in the marketplace and the intended buyer. What was perhaps intended to open up new segments - such as developing markets, where traditional notebooks are too expensive and over-complicated - has instead begun cannibalizing entry-level laptops in existing markets.
“We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids, and there is some of that. It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook. We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market” Stu Pann, VP of sales and marketing group, Intel
Pann went on to criticise the netbook form-factor as unsuitable for regular use, claiming: ”if you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size, it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out.” The Intel VP was speaking at an IT supply chain conference.
[via CNET]
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Written by Sue Walsh on Friday, November 21st, 2008 in News.
Section: Computers, Mobile Computers, Laptops
New England Patriots QB Tom Brady has announced he is teaming up with the One Laptop Per Child project and buying 1,500 of them to send to children in Uganda. They will be shipped to his sister Nancy who works with the Infectious Diseases Institute there.
“One Laptop Per Child is an education-based charity located in Cambridge whose mission is to provide many of the world’s poorest children with their own computer,” No. 12 writes. “After meeting with the group, I committed to buying 1,500 laptops and sending them to my amazing sister who is doing a mission in Uganda right now and will hand deliver them to the kids she and I met last year.”
The $199 mini laptops, called XOs, have 7 inch screens that swivel and fold down, turning the laptop into a tablet, 3 USB ports, an SD slot, webcam, built in Wi-Fi, and are solar powered. They run on Linux with a simple interface called Sugar, and have a 433-MHz AMD Geode CPU, 256MB of 166-MHz DDR333, and 1GB of flash memory. They are clearly not cutting edge technology, but for kids who’ve probably never used a computer before in their lives, it’s enough.
Right now Amazon is offering a “Buy One Give One” promotion. For $399 you can buy an XO for yourself and give one to a poor child overseas. Check out Amazon.com for more details.
Read [Boston Herald]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Written by Brenda Stokes on Friday, November 21st, 2008 in News.
AMD is working hard to make their clock speed relevant again with their latest Shanghai architecture for their Phenom II processors. In fact, these quad-core desktop processor chips bring official clock speeds up to 3GHz and make it so 4GHz is possible overclocking while just using fan cooling alone.
Extreme cooling methods improve performance even more. Dry ice as a cooling method provides for about 5GHz and liquid nitrogen provided 6.3GHz. These are some seriously impressive improvements, if you ask me.
Apparently, they were made possible by decreasing the size from 65nm to 45nm, which reduced heat and power usage. You can expect the Phenom II to be released early next year. It should be interesting, because this will definitely relight the flame beneath the AMD/Intel competition. AMD has the whole budget thing on it’s side, too.
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Written by Brenda Stokes on Friday, November 21st, 2008 in News.
S3, the graphics label for VIA, announced their Chrome 500 series graphics chips yesterday, offering up a competitor to the Radeon HD 4350 line as well as other budget cards that provide features at a much lower price.
This new hardware sports a newer unified shader processor that provides support for DirectX 10.1+ as well as OpenGL 3. Other specs include a 500MHz memory processor, 620MHz core and a stock card decoding Blu-ray. The Chrome 500 is also rather quiet.
You can already get acquainted with the Chrome series by means of the Chrome 530 GT. It features 512MB of memory, an HDMI output, a dual-link DVI and up to a 2048 x 1536 resolution. It costs $45, acting as a mid range card among the current low-end competition from AMD.
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Written by Tech & Gadgets Editors' Blog on Friday, November 21st, 2008 in News.
Posted by: Nik Taylor
I recently spent a couple of weeks merrily snapping away with Nikon’s new S60 point-and-shoot. If you’re after a gadget that gets you noticed, this is a no-brainer. Every time I got the camera out of my pocket, someone wanted to take a closer look. It’s a striking piece of kit.
The main reason is the massive, 3.5-inch touchscreen that fills the entire rear of the camera. The front is similarly minimalist as well, so the whole thing looks very sleek. There are only two actual buttons on the camera, and both are housed on the top. One turns the thing on and off, the other takes pictures.
Every other function is accessed through the touchscreen. So it needs to be a good one and, thankfully, the S60’s is. My fingers struggle to work with tiny buttons, but I had few problems tapping my way through the S60’s menus.
You get the usual bonuses of having a touchscreen – for instance you can scroll through the pictures by merely sliding your fingers across the screen. I particularly like the focus feature. As you line up a shot with the screen, a quick tap on the relevant area tells the camera where to focus. It's handy if you don't want the camera to auto-focus on the most obvious item in the shot.
But that's probably about as involved as you'll need to get in the picture-taking process. This is a camera firmly aimed at the casual snapper. Even the standard point-and-shoot features are tucked away in the menu system.
Megapixel junkies will be delighted to note that the S60 is packing 10 of those, while it also has a 5x optical zoom.
All the pictures below were taken on the S60, using its automatic settings.
The results I got were mixed. What I loved was the colour reproduction, when taking pictures in good light. Photos taken in daylight are vivid and full of life and vibrant colours.
Even in dark situations, the camera does well to pick out colours. There are some gripes, however. Blow up your pics to 100% on your computer and you’ll notice graininess that could be an issue if you plan to print your images at large sizes.
Also, the built-in image stabilisation does little to deal with photos taken without flash in low light. Unless you use a tripod in these situations, you’re still going to get a blurry shots.
I was a little disappointed with the video camera function. Though playback is decent when viewed on the camera, when you move the file onto your computer you’ll find it looks grainy. The microphone is a bit of a problem too. It's easily obstructed while filming, muffling the sound you get. This video was taken while standing next to an eight-foot tall speaker stack, yet the music is barely audible.
If you’re in the market for a simple point-and-shoot camera that looks the business, bear the S60 in mind. It takes bright, colourful pictures that are plenty good enough for printing at normal photo size. However, if you’re on the lookout for something more versatile, don’t be swayed just because this has a touchscreen. The Nikon S60 is available online for around £250.
Written by JG Mason on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 in News.
Section: Video, HDTV, Computers, Web, Websites
BJ’s, the land of bulk buys, is looking good for Black Friday this year according to a flyer I just got handed. The deals range from in-store deals to online deals at bjs.com (how there were able to secure that domain name I’ll never know). Here is a look at the deals:
TVs
Computers
Storage
Misc
It appears no coupons are necessary for the online deals. A quick look over at bjs.com shows there are many other deals available now.
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
