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OCAU News |
First up, Overclock3D have reported on something important if you own a Kingston solid-state drive: "Kingston have discovered a technical issue with their SSDNow V100 solid-state drive. A small percentage of their drives have been shown to hang at BIOS and fail to boot. Kingston has developed a firmware update to address this issue." There is a firmware fix at Kingston's site.
Paul Baran, one of the Internet's engineers, arcitects and inventor of "packet-switching" technology has passed away at the age of 84: "As the father of packet-switching -- the basis of all online information exchanges -- he was initially scoffed at by major communications players like AT&T, who thought the tech was too advanced to be realized at the time."
In news that everyone saw coming, the iPad 2 has sold out in Australia. Apparently there seems to be some confusion as to what stock levels are accurate, and many people are pointing the finger at Apple, claiming that the company was aware of limited stock supplies whilst still going ahead with the launch. "Long-time Australian Apple watcher Matthew Powell, editor of MacTheMagazine.com, said Apple persisted with its announced March 25 launch date despite knowing that it did not have anywhere near enough stock to deliver on orders - particularly those placed online - in a timely fashion." Didn't this happen with the original iPad launch? I think it's fair to say that demand always outweighs supply when Apple manages to whip up the masses into a frenzy. Thanks to IntelInside for the link.
We've seen a lot of video cards released and reviewed lately, (including reviews from our own DigitalMonkey), but Xbit Labs felt it was time to compare the two big guns, the AMD Radeon HD 6990 and the nVidia GeForce GTX590. "There is always a constant and tough struggle for supremacy among the manufacturers of computer components like CPUs, graphics cards, system memory modules, coolers, etc. There is fierce competition in each price category, especially among top-end products. The graphics card market is a vivid example of that." Okay, so it's not like 'Eye of the Tiger' would be playing in the background when you're pitting video cards against each other, but still, you gotta love a prize fight like this. You can find our reviews of the AMD Radeon HD 6990 here and the nVidia GeForce GTX590 here.
After you've bought one of the monsters from either AMD or nVidia, you're going to want a nice screen to use with it, and Samsung is about to release a new display model with a new technology called PLS (Plane-to-Line Switching) - "Samsung have been very tight-lipped about their upcoming PLS (Plane to Line Switching) technology that they are launching to try to compete with LG Display’s IPS (In Plane Switching) technologies. Nonetheless they have quietly released a little information about the upcoming SA850 ... he SA850 is aimed at ‘professionals’ who are ‘sensitive to image quality’ and will be the first series to showcase the PLS panel technology." Thanks to ikonZor for the link.
In medical news, the blog, MedJuice has covered two areas of tech that are making themselves useful: the Microsoft Kinect can be used for hands-free manipulation of images, which is useful for surgeons who need to keep their hands sterile; and Stanford University has been handing out iPads to their medical students, hoping to see an increase in productivity from the students. "Stanford University were handing out iPads to their medical students, and now we get to see the fruits of their labours. The video below outlines all the uses they've found for their iPad - listening to lectures while annotating the PDFs of the slides, using QuickOffice and syncing with the cloud - the list goes on."
Over in America, AT&T has admitted that it purposely 'crippled' the speed of two of its 4G phones: "AT&T has admitted that it clipped the wings of its 4G network and is the reason that two recently released phones, the Motorola Atrix 4G and the HTC Inspire 4G, have dismal upload speeds. Carrier reps on Facebook have promised that AT&T will fix the problem with a software update to the phones in April after many complaints were made to the Better Business Bureau." However, the article doesn't say why the throttling was in place.
Finally - and this is most cool - we have two quadcopters juggling balls with each other (you in the back, stop sniggering). Watch the video to appreciate how pretty damn awesome this is, although it's sad to admit that two toys can play tennis better that I can.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
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