Sunday, June 15, 2008

Intel Shows Off Its Enviro-lovinâ Side

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/earth2tech/~3/311881603/


Amidst the smaller semiconductors and new personal area networking technology breakthroughs showcased by Intel at its Research Day earlier this week were some silicon tools that could help track greenhouse gases and reduce power consumption inside devices. The chipmaker also showed off some of its low-wattage chips that will consumer less power and therefore lead to longer battery lives in portable electronics.

We’ve covered the low-power chips before, but two notable breakthroughs might be of interest to environmentally minded readers. One is a way to make a cheaper, more portable laser using silicon rather than specialty materials. Using silicon makes it cheaper to manufacture the laser; it also reduces the amount of heat it generates. That means the laser doesn’t need a bulky cooling technology attached to it, hence the added portability. Such a laser could have uses in the medical and telecommunications fields, as well as be used to detect greenhouse gases. Get it small enough and cheap enough, and precisely measuring your carbon footprint becomes possible.

The other breakthrough involves managing power across an entire device by recognizing when certain aspects of a machine such as a CPU, radio or USB port are active or not, and then shutting inactive portions of the machine down. It’s similar to turning off the lights in a room when you leave. Intel calls it Platform Power Management. Already chips are now designed to cycle their speeds up and down depending on the workloads demanded of them, so this isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. It’s a move already being made in corporate data centers using software from startups such as Cassatt and Verdiem. I suppose if they’re managing power consumption in hundreds of machines, Intel can seek to micromanage inside each one.

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Google Tools Will Tell You If Your ISP Is Slowing Down Your Connection [Google]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/312058734/google-tools-will-tell-you-if-your-isp-is-slowing-down-your-connection

And I was starting to feel unfulfilled by the stuff coming out of Google's labs. Its senior policy director, Richard Whitt, says that they're cooking up software that'll tell you if your ISP is screwing with or slowing down your connection because you're hogging too much bandwidth, and what exactly they're doing to it. (There's already some available, BTW, since Whitt didn't mention a release date.) But it's not necessarily because they believe willy nilly in net neutrality.

Google just thinks that you have a right to know what your ISP is doing. If your ISP won't tell you, you should have the tools to figure out. In fact, according to one article cited by Hot Hardware, when net neutrality first started becoming an issue, at first Google considered just going along with ISPs: "We would come out fine—a non-neutral world would be a good world for us." Do no evil, eh? [Hot Hardware via /.]


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Intel wastes our time and yours with SL and WoW clients for MIDs

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/312188728/

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Don't get ahead of us here, Intel isn't building full-featured Second Life and World of Warcraft apps for handheld Mobile Internet Devices. Instead they're using a new "Interactive 3D Streaming" tech to control and view the game remotely -- similar to some to that Telekinesis app we saw playing WoW on the iPhone last year, but Intel seems to be much further along. Their Xeon 5400 server can handle 14 clients simultaneously, but we're guessing this won't be cost effective for Blizzard anytime soon -- though we can imagine quite a few addicts rigging up similar systems for themselves. The sad news here is that Intel might've just discovered the best use for a MID yet.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
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Saturday, June 14, 2008

Five Best Photo Sharing Web Sites [Hive Five]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/310505113/five-best-photo-sharing-web-sites


The first consumer-priced, one-megapixel digital cameras hit the streets just over 10 years ago, and today digital cameras are everywhere—hell, one megapixel is tiny for even our cell phone cameras. As a result, we snap picture after picture without giving a thought to the price of film, which means you've got hundreds of pictures to share with friends and family. On Tuesday we asked you to tell us your favorite photo sharing web site, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Hit the jump for the low-down on the five best photo sharing tools the web has to offer, then cast your vote for the site you like best.

SmugMug

SmugMug is a premium photo sharing web site with an emphasis on professional photography. That's not to say that the site's not also perfect for the weekend photographer, as its attractive and user-friendly interface is tempting for any level of photog. The biggest hurdle for new SmugMug users is that the site has no free account (though there is a 14-day free trial), and the minimum price for an account is $40/year. However, SmugMug users—many of whom are former Flickr die-hards (there's even an import tool called Smugglr)—seem very pleased with their choice.


Personal Web Site



If you're willing to roll up y! our slee ves and you've got some hosted web space, you can host your digital photos on your own web site. Granted, it may seem like a lot more work compared to the other options, but hosting your photos on a personal site means you've got total control, and some free, open-source options for rolling your own hosting solution are often as robust on features as their counterparts. If that sounds appealing, we've already walked you through how to set up the free Gallery2 (pictured above) on your hosted web server. You may also want to check out Jalbum (pictured at the top of this article).


Flickr



Flickr was originally conceived in 2002 as a video game-screenshot sharing web site, but it quickly blossomed into a full-fledged photo sharing site with a bustling community. The now Yahoo-owned site offers free accounts with limitations placed on photo uploads and other features, while the $25/year Pro account promises unlimited uploads, storage, and sets. Flickr, like many of the others, also recently added video sharing to their repertoire.


Picasa Web Albums



Picasa Web Albums are the online counterpart to Google's popular, Windows- and Linux-only desktop photo organization software, Picasa. Despite its late entry to the photo sharing game in mid-2006, Picasa Web Album's seamless integration with Picasa and Google accounts quickly gained the service a large following. A free account with Picasa Web Albums gives you 1GB of free storage space, and you can buy extra storage that's shared with your Gmail account for anywhere between $20/year for 10GB to $500/year for 400GB.


Photobucket



Once upon a time, Photobucket was a favorite among internet users looking to quickly host an image and share it online at sites like eBay and MySpace or on blogs and message boards. While that's still true, Photobucket has added several features to keep users coming back to the site for managing photo albums and videos.


Now that you've seen the best, it's time to vote for your favorite:


Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.


Honorable mention goes to social networking web site Facebook and the online artist community deviantArt.

Whether or not it made the short list, let's hear more about your favorite in the comments.


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Use a Fluid Webapp for User Agent Tricks [Mac OS X Tip]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/311122091/use-a-fluid-webapp-for-user-agent-tricks

fluid_app.jpgIf you're a Mac user who's been intrigued by the things you can score by pretending Safari is an iPhone, such as free full magazines and Starbucks web access, the Tech-Recipes blog points out that you can save yourself the hassle of enabling and switching over your browser's user agent. Simply install the webapp creator Fluid and create a specific stealth-iPhone agent within Fluid's interface. Now you can keep a shortcut to magazines, your email, or whatever needs a work-around tucked away for when it's really useful.


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