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Latest OCAU News

Proluma Geeky Self-Portrait Contest! (0 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 9-February-2010 14:07:47 (GMT +10) - by Agg

You might remember our recent messiest desk competition during which Proluma gave away one of their fancy dual-monitor stands to the person with the most horrifying desk.

Well, we're doing another competition now, to win one of the first Proluma triple-screen stands in Australia! This will naturally max out your geeky desktop, so the prize will go to the person who posts the geekiest self-portrait picture in this thread. Make sure you have an OCAU screenshot or an "OCAU" sign or something proving it's you.

I'll pick the geekiest, funniest or otherwise arbitrarily "best" top 10 and we'll run a poll to decide the winner. 2nd and 3rd place will score a couple of OCAU 10th Anniversary stubby coolers too. Entries close at the end of February, so get geekin'! Thanks again to Proluma for another cool prize.

OCAU Buzziness (2 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 9-February-2010 13:53:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg

OCAU is the third buzziest channel for tech brand mentions, it seems. Wait, what? A company called Brandtology do a "Digital Brand Index" to see which websites in Australia have the most mentions of the "top 65 tech brands" - we came up third after Twitter and Whirlpool.

You can download the press release and full report if you're keen.

Tuesday Afternoon (19 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 9-February-2010 13:39:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg

It's been nearly a year since Wolfram|Alpha appeared on the scene, but my question is: is anyone using it? It seems like a cool idea but whenever I try to get anything out of it, I find myself shouting at page after page of Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure how to compute an answer from your input messages. So if you think it's cool and use it all the time, tell us about it in the comments.

PureOC have a guide to unlocking the X2 555 BE. How does a full-featured Phenom II X4 CPU for $99 sound? AMD's new dual core hotrod, the X2 555 BE, is actually an X4 in disguise and just needs a bit of help to unlock those two extra cores for all the performance goodness you can dream about at bargain prices. We successfully unlocked the X2 555 BE and we'll tell you how today and show the resulting performance increase.

IBM has been demonstrating graphene transistors that might replace silicon one day, thanks metamorphosis. IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. The prototype devices, made from atom-thick sheets of carbon, operate at 100 gigahertz--meaning they can switch on and off 100 billion times each second, about 10 times as fast as the speediest silicon transistors.

Ashley spotted a video on a car ciggy lighter gadget that gives your buzzbox the sound of a throaty V8. It's a bit more clever than it seems at first, because it actually pipes the V8 sound to your stereo and reacts in sync with your throttle use. Could be quite amusing to install one in my bongo van.

Mysrh sent in this pictorial history of Windows. November 1985: Windows 1.0 launches, after four years in development as "Interface Manager".

HWZone have a 7-way CULV notebook battle. If you're still undecided on which Intel CULV notebook to get, then don't give this article a miss as we scope out the latest 13-inch models to see which one's really worth dragging the wallet out for. Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI and Toshiba battle it out in this shootout.

We haven't heard about the Large Hadron Collider much lately, but it is doing sciency stuff, although not at full power yet. The Large Hadron Collider is capable of creating collisions up to 14 TeV, but scientists are gradually easing the machine up to that level to try to avoid safety issues that have arisen in the past. ... During the collider’s next run in March, researchers hope to create collisions of 7 TeV, says Roland. The success of the latest effort “makes us extremely optimistic about the detector,” he says. “It performed beautifully during the run.”

Tuesday Morning Reviews (3 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 9-February-2010 03:12:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Power Supply:
Ultra X4 1050W on TechWareLabs.
Ultra X4 1600 Watt Full Modular on Tweaktown.

Storage:
Dynatron Azenx P-Secure Secure HDD Enclosure on Pro-Clockers.
Team Group Xtreem-G1 120GB Solid State Disk on Tweaktown.

Motherboard & CPU:
USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps Tested On Gigabyte P55A-UD6 on MadShrimps.
i5 661 32nm Clarkdale on BIOSTAR TH55XE on OC.com.
Foxconn Inferno Katana P55 LGA1156 board on NinjaLane.
Gigabyte GA-H57M-USB3 LGA1156 board on Guru3D.
Intel Core i5 661 Dual Core LGA 1156 CPU on ThinkComputers.

Video Cards:
MSI N240GT-MD512 OC/D5 on Bjorn3D.
EVGA Geforce GTX275 CO-OP on BenchmarkReviews.
ASUS ENGT240 on OCClub.

Cooling:
Arctic Cooling Accelero XTREME 4870X2 VGA Cooler on PCShopTalk.
Noctua NF-P14 FLX Case Fan on VerdisReviews.

Prebuilt:
ASRock ION 330HT NetTop HTPC on Futurelooks.
HP Pavilion Elite HPE-140f desktop on TechReviewSource.

Misc:
Samsung PN58B850 58 inch Plasma TV on Tweaknews.
Antec Nine Hundred Two Ultimate Gaming Case on LegitReviews.

Endeavour Launch (23 Comments) (link)
Monday, 8-February-2010 19:37:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The Space Shuttle Endeavour is about to perform what will probably be the last ever night launch for a Space Shuttle. The countdown clock is at T-9 minutes but they're about halfway through a 45-minute "built-in hold", after which the countdown will resume and, weather permitting, the Shuttle will launch in about half an hour from now.

More info on the NASA Shuttle Page, and you can watch the launch on NASA TV.

Monday Morning (18 Comments) (link)
Monday, 8-February-2010 01:39:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The Shuttle Endeavour's launch has been delayed, and should now go ahead in about 18 hours or about 7:14pm Sydney time, I think. Shuttle Endeavour and its crew will deliver to the space station a third connecting module, the Italian-built Tranquility node and the seven-windowed cupola, which will be used as a control room for robotics. The mission will feature three spacewalks.

South Africa's Kulula airline has painted (at least) one of their planes in a quite clever explanatory colour scheme. Now every traveler can even learn where the black box is. If you find yourself looking for one, by the way, I think they're usually orange.

The FBI seem to be proposing that ISPs be required to keep records of website visits by their customers. Motta pointed to a 2006 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which called for the "retention of customer subscriber information, and source and destination information for a minimum specified reasonable period of time so that it will be available to the law enforcement community." Recording what Web sites are visited, though, is likely to draw both practical and privacy objections.

Tweaktown have an SSD Optimisation Guide. Today we are going to cut through all of the hype and discuss proven methods that will allow you to get the most out of your high performance desktop or notebook.

JD spotted this (PDF) 49-port USB2.0 hub, in response to the power-only 80-port one from a few days ago.

Meanwhile if I can't have a flying car, I can at least walk to work in a mech, thanks James. Except I work from home, damnit. Imagine taking it through a drive-through, though. Stride menacingly to the second window please..

PCPerspective have some info on Intel's upcoming tera-scale technologies. We have been talking about tera-scale technologies since 2006 when it comes to Intel research programs. The name is perhaps more grandiose than the actual idea: as data sets increase in size the need for computing technologies to handle this amount of data will need to be created. It is no secret that the CPU as it exists today simply can't handle the massive amounts of parallel information that will soon become normal operating procedure.

stmok sent word of an Internet Explorer issue. Our investigation so far has shown that if a user is using a version of Internet Explorer that is not running in Protected Mode an attacker may be able to access files with an already known filename and location. These versions include Internet Explorer 5.01 Service Pack 4 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service 4; Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4; and Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on supported editions of Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Service Pack 3, and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Protected Mode prevents exploitation of this vulnerability and is running by default for versions of Internet Explorer on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.

Byteside have two new shows: the Tech Show: Byteside blasts into 2010 with a little subject called 'The Future', the Tech show explores some of the big ideas we'll be thinking about a lot in the coming decade. We explore the current hot ideas, from ebooks to iPads and 3DTV, to what happens next when the Internet is truly everywhere. And the Games Show: We start the new decade by exploring what might happen in the coming ten years. When might we see another generation of consoles? Where are the best new ideas in gaming going to come from? And is smellovision getting set for primetime?

Google are getting a bit Star Trek, with plans for a speech translating phone. “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. To truly work as well as Trek's "universal translator", it has to make the aliens' lips move so they even look like they're speaking English. ;)

Monday Morning Reviews (2 Comments) (link)
Monday, 8-February-2010 00:38:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg