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Monday, August 11, 2008

Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird's Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting [Olympic Fail]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/362000018/blue-screen-of-death-strikes-birds-nest-during-opening-ceremonies-torch-lighting

Well this is just perfect. At the exact moment Li Ning was rounding the lip of the Bird's Nest during the amazing torch-lighting climax, someone snapped this photo of our good friend the BSOD nestled amongst the Nest's steel twigs. Perhaps an Opening Cermonies IT dude spit out his coffee on the machines in the server room when Li took to the sky? Another question is what a projection screen is doing inside the Nest at that location, but I think the better question is what wasn't going on inside the Nest's roof—did you see that thing during the ceremonies? Lights! Fireworks! LED screens! Everything! Anyway, if only one image of this perfectness existed we'd be skeptical, but thankfully, someone has grabbed more from a different angle that pretty much seal the deal.

UPDATE: And it's been confirmed on the NBC broadcast by commenter cirby on his DVR. Fo' real!

Click for high-res:

Ouch! More super-zoomed images for error message decoding here:
[Powerapple Forum (Chinese, original pic), and Rivercool (alternate angle pics) via Dvor ak - props to Dvorak commenter Improbus for "Olympic Fail"]

Read more pan-Gawker coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games.

Fastest Graphics Card Alive ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Gets Official Tomorrow [Ati]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/362461925/fastest-graphics-card-alive-ati-radeon-hd-4870-x2-gets-official-tomorrow

ATI's Nvidia-slaying Radeon HD 4870 X2, previewed last month, will get official tomorrow at SIGGRAPH says the WSJ, who notes that some reviewers are calling it the most powerful card around. It's an interesting test of ATI's graphics card strategy: Cheaper, less power-hungry GPUs that can be easily strapped together (like the dual-GPU 4870 X2) versus Nvidia's penchant for obscenely powerful single GPUs. The best part? Whoever you go with, you can't really go wrong anymore.

DIY SSD adapter takes 6 SDHC cards, the cake

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/361888115/

Filed under: Storage

Seems everyone is coming out with a cheap, do-it-yourself SATA adapter to convert all your extra flash memory cards into a makeshift SSD. This time, we're looking at the ¥10,000 (about $91) PhotoFast CR-9000. The 9.5-mm tall, 2.5-inch, 3Gbps SATA adapter accommodates up to 6x SDHC cards and should fit into most slim laptops. That's enough slots to make a 192GB SSD (using 6x 32GB cards) for a bargain $900 or about $270 for a 48GB SSD based on a quick calculation of SDHC cards found on-line. While performance depends upon the weakest card of the lot, Impress Watch was able to squeeze a respectable 111.4MBps reads and 55.17MBps writes from their RAID 0 setup using class-6 rated, MLC-based, SDHC cards. That's nothing like the performance of the latest MLC-based SSDs but not bad for what you pay. Still, with SSD prices in freefall, these DIY adapters are quickly becoming less and less attractive.

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Indilinx trumpets SSD controller with 230MB/sec read speed

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/362037340/

Filed under: Storage

With SSDs, there really is no "fast enough." In the never-ending quest for more speed, Indilinx has just introduced its Barefoot solid state drive controller with 90-nanometer process technology. Said device has reportedly shown the "fastest read speed (230MB/sec) of all the products currently available in the market and supports the capacity up to 512GB with multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash." Additionally, it plays nice with SATA 2.0 and flash memory from Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix and Intel / Micron. Sadly, mass production isn't scheduled until Q4 of this year, so now you can sit on that vanilla HDD even longer as you wait for the future to arrive. Ugh, what a tease.

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VIA ditches motherboard business, focuses on processors

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/362073948/

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

It looks like VIA has finally had enough of the schoolyard fights with Intel and tauntings with hair dyers, as it has just dropped word over the weekend that it's quitting the motherboard chipset business in order to focus on processors and chipsets for motherboards that use its own Nano CPU. According to Custom PC, this is actually a move that VIA had seen coming all along, with vice president of corporate marketing saying that, "one of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear." Of course, that also means that VIA is putting most of its "chips" in one basket (yes, we said it) and, as Slashdot points out, it leaves other third-party chip manufacturers like SiS with some tough questions to ask themselves.

[Via Slashdot]

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