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OCAU News |
Apparently Joel Johnson and Rob Beschizza from Boingboing.net have discovered an unidentified chip inside the headphones on Apple's third-gen iPod shuffle. This chip has been the subject of DRM speculation, however, according to Apple this mysterious chip is part of their "Made for iPod" licensing program. A mysterious chip in the new Apple iPod Shuffle that became the subject of rumours over the weekend has been explained away as just a mundane control chip for the new audio player. However, the design of the chip is indeed defined by Apple as part of its "Made for iPod" program, meaning that it's unclear whether Apple will try and defend it as its own intellectual property.
Apple held a special 'invite-only event' at Apple's headquarters in California, USA where they unveiled their next-generation operating system for its iPhone. The next-gen mobile OS for Apple's mobile communications devices will bring Bluetooth connectivity, turn-by-turn GPS navigation, and greater integration with external peripherals, as well as cut and paste, improved sync, and support for MMS messages.
An associate professor of physics at Lehigh University, Ivan Biaggio has developed a new organic material, "composed of small organic molecules with high nonlinear optical susceptibilities", that could unlock the full potential of optical telecommunication and data processing. Biaggio uses an analogy to explain the new material and how it helps increase the transmission speed of data in optical networks. He says, "The next time an overnight snow begins to fall, take two bricks and place them side by side a few inches apart in your yard. In the morning, the bricks will be covered with snow and barely discernible. The snowflakes will have filled every vacant space between and around the bricks. What you will see resembles a phenomenon that, when it occurs at the smallest of scales on an integrated optical circuit, could hasten the day when the Internet works at superfast speeds."
It would now seem that NVISION '09 hasn't been cancelled but rather "delayed". "Since the economy is affecting everyone's ability to travel, this year we plan to focus our attention on the core of the GPU development community with a more concentrated event," NVIDIA's Derek Perez told Ars when we asked him about this morning's DigiTimes report that NVISION '09 has been cancelled. "Details will be announced soon on this developer event, as well as the next NVISION."
ATI has rolled out their monthly graphics card driver update in the form of Catalyst 9.3 with the latest iteration bring us support for yet to be released Windows 7. Both NVIDIA and ATI already have drivers for the beta version of Windows 7, released to the public at the start of the year, but, now, ATI is claiming official support with Catalyst 9.3 - the first unified Vista/7 software package.
It appears that Google has re-introduced Chrome to the beta channel. Since we took the "beta" tag off Google Chrome in December, we've been updating two release channels: developer and stable. With our latest release, we're re-introducing the beta channel for some early feedback — and if you're reading the brand new Google Chrome blog, you are probably just the person to give it a try.
First pictures along with confirmed specs of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 4890 have surfaced. There really isn't much to say about this "new" card, as AMD has only done some minor changes to the PCB, mostly to cope with the extra power demands for the higher clock speeds compared to the Radeon HD 4870. The expected clock speeds have also been confirmed with the GPU clocked at 850MHz, which is 100MHz faster than the Radeon HD 4870. The 1GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 975MHz (or 3,900MHz effectively), resulting in 75MHz or 300MHz faster than the Radeon HD 4870 depending on how you want to count. More pictures here...
ExtremeTech take a look at the graphics performance between Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Through lots of Windows OS updates and many driver revisions, most of the kinks have been worked out, and Vista is now quite stable and a good performer. But the damage has been done, and the OS will forever have a reputation for being a big, bloated, slow performance hog that crashes all the time. In no area was this more apparent than with 3D graphics.
Facebook has been awarded a massive $873 million in damages from a Canadian spammer, however, they are unlikely to see much of that money. The spammer was identified as Adam Guerbuez of Montreal, owner of Atlantis Blue Capital, but it's unlikely Facebook will be able to get much of the awarded cash. However, Facebook says it will bleed Guerbuez dry anyway, just to make a point.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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