BLOG-RD [news y curiosities ...minute-@-minute]

The most rational and objective analysis ever about the Apple iPad

2010-01-30T11:57:00.000-05:00

Gates: $10B vaccine program could save 8.7M lives

2010-01-29T21:56:00.000-05:00

Davos, Switzerland (CNN) -- Bill and Melinda Gates announced plans Friday to invest $10 billion in the fight against a number of illnesses including AIDS and said the record donation could save nearly nine million lives.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they said the 10-year program will focus on vaccines for AIDS, tuberculosis, rota virus and pneumonia.

"We must make this the decade of vaccines," said Bill Gates.

"Vaccines are a miracle," added Melinda Gates. "With just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime. We've made vaccines our priority at the Gates Foundation because we've seen firsthand their incredible impact on children's lives."

Since stepping down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in mid-2008, Bill Gates has devoted most of his time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic organization he set up with his wife Melinda. He remains part-time chairman of the software giant.

The foundation directs most of its attention to global health, education and agriculture in the third world and has committed more than $21 billion since it was established in 1994.

The $10 billion commitment is the largest pledge ever made by a charitable foundation to a single cause, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a newspaper covering nonprofit organizations.

The couple told delegates at Davos that they used a model developed by a consortium at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States to project the potential impact of vaccines on childhood deaths over the next decade.

"By significantly scaling up the delivery of life-saving vaccines in developing countries to 90 percent coverage -- including new vaccines to prevent severe diarrhea and pneumonia -- the model suggests that we could prevent the deaths of some 7.6 million children under 5 from 2010-2019."

HTC HD2 gets a spec boost for the US

2010-01-24T22:26:00.002-05:00

Looks like European and Asian/Pacific HTC HD2 owners are getting the “shaft” this time around. According to the specs sheet of the T-Mobile HTC HD2 which is set to be launched in the US in a couple of weeks the device will feature 1Gb of Rom & 576Mb of Ram compared to the 512 Mb of Rom & 448 Mb of Ram on the current HD2 available now. Don’t be surprised if HTC/Microsoft claims that this newer version is the only one to be upgradable to Windows Mobile 7later this year even though the “Original” meets the WM7 Chassis 1 specs…

Source

Windows 7 way hotter than Vista off the line, now more popular than all OS X versions

2010-01-22T12:53:00.001-05:00

According to new figures from Net Application, Win7 is achieving a higher level of market penetration in a faster amount of time than Vista did; after a month, Vista was stuck at 0.93 percent, while Win7 nailed the 4 percent mark. After two months, Win7 jumped to 5.71 percent, while Vista was barely over 2 percent after the same amount of time. 'Course, the newest version of Windows had a holiday season to help it out right from the get-go, but there's still no denying that people are flocking to the system even now. What's most interesting, however, is that the overall market share of Windows 7 alone has now surpassed all OS X versions that are being tracked (10.4, 10.5 and 10.6)

Source

Windows 7 breaks Amazon UK pre-order volume record, ousts Harry Potter

2009-10-21T09:22:00.003-05:00

Source: Engadget

CNet: Reporters' Roundtable: What Windows 7 means

2009-10-17T07:32:00.000-05:00

Samsung Screen Resists Merciless Hammering Without a Scratch

2009-10-16T14:00:00.000-05:00

Color me impressed. Watch as this guy relentlessly beats this new Samsung flexible screen with a mallet. Amazingly, the 2.8-inch active matrix OLED—only 0.01 ounces, and 20 micrometers thick—keeps running happily, without a single scratch.

via Gizmodo

MIT takes the wrappers off autonomous, robotic helicopter with intelligent navigation

2009-10-16T12:20:00.000-05:00

via ENGADGET
Advances in autonomous helicopters have been many over the years, but as far as we can tell, there's essentially no limit to how awesome they can get. MIT's recently developed an autonomous, robotic helicopter which is also able to navigate itself intelligently through a changing environment. The helicopter, which is equipped with a dual-camera array and a laser scanner, maps its terrain in real time, identifying changes along the way. An integrated autonomous exploration module allows the heli to interact with the changing, unknown environment it is mapping. The helicopter was shown off at the AUVSI 2009 International Aerial Robotics Competition, completing five missions -- a feat not before seen in the 19-year history of the show.

video here.

DirectX 11 and how is this related to: Windows 7, Tessellation, DirectCompute, GPGPU

2009-10-15T10:07:00.001-05:00

By: Dustin Sklavos

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT DIRECTX 11? DirectX 11 brings features to the table worth getting excited about, and it's entering an environment that's far less hostile than that faced by DirectX 10. While buzz leading up to the release of Windows Vista and the fallout thereafter pretty much buried DirectX 10, Windows 7 is getting great buzz. Better still, DirectX 11 is offering more tangible reasons to support it and be excited about it, and has a better slate of titles coming up for it. Unlike DirectX 10, DirectX 11 also doesn't make a clean break with the previous generation, and will be available for Windows Vista as well.

The one good thing DirectX 10 did was push for unified shaders in graphics hardware. Now let's see what DirectX 11 is going to do with them and the rest of the chip.

HARDWARE TESSELLATION: Probably the feature that I'm personally most excited about is hardware tessellation. This feature is built into DirectX 11 class hardware (like the just recently released Radeon HD 5800 series), and can allow for substantially improved image quality in a very tangible way without a massive performance hit.

So what the heck does it do? Well, taking the understanding that 3D models in games are fundamentally constructed out of multiple triangles, tessellation breaks those basic triangles down into many smaller triangles, thus giving the appearance of a much more complex surface without the massive coding and effort required to produce that model.

AMD released a slide with their Radeon HD 5800 series promotional material that illustrates tessellation in the upcoming (and, at least in the eyes of this writer, hotly anticipated) Aliens vs. Predator game. You'll notice how the shape of the alien model becomes much more complex, and more true to the mythos, as a result.

AMD (ATI) has been pushing tessellation in their hardware for longer than you might remember, and by working with Microsoft have finally had it codified in DirectX 11. This at least stands to be a massive improvement in video quality.

PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENTS: Thanks to the proliferation of multi-core processors, DirectX 11 can now make true use of multi-threaded instructions. Instead of burying all of the DirectX calls in a single thread and thus hogging a single core, DirectX 11 can properly split work between the cores of the processor itself. Modern games have been surprisingly CPU-dependent, so this ability to take fuller advantage of modern processors can in turn help the graphics hardware perform.

Notebook users should take particular note of this improvement, as mobile quad-core processors are still very power-hungry and somewhat rarefied. Current and upcoming performance mobile graphics parts are hitting performance ceilings with mainstream dual-core processors, so any improvement is going to be an important one.

Also being inherited from DirectX 10.1 is mandatory anti-aliasing support. Existing DirectX 10.1 games are very uncommon and the feature set only works on ATI's Radeon HD 3000 series onward, but DirectX 10.1 has consistently provided substantial performance improvements with anti-aliasing enabled (see the unpatched Assassin's Creed or Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.)

And, of course, the unified shader hardware required by DirectX 10 remains a major change in how graphics hardware is produced but also an improvement as well, with GPUs being much more flexible and able to better utilize their existing resources. These unified shaders are also highly programmable, which leads to...

DIRECTCOMPUTE: The switch to unified shaders resulted in graphics hardware that's surprisingly programmable and flexible in general, to the point where it can actually be used to accelerate applications other than games. Nvidia's been pushing this particularly hard with its CUDA technology, but CUDA only works on Nvidia hardware. DirectCompute is Microsoft's answer in DirectX 11, and provides a vendor-independent means of harnessing the wealth of processing power in modern graphics hardware to handle other tasks.

Of course, this advance is probably the hardest one to see at present, but the fact of the matter is that both AMD and Nvidia are pushing general computing onto the GPU. It's easy to understand why: Graphics chips are extremely powerful, complex pieces of silicon capable of vastly improving the speed at which certain tasks are performed.

The first big push has been with video encoding, and while the road has been a bumpy one, it's yielding fruit. The Badaboom video encoder, for example, gets massive performance improvements from running off of a GeForce's shaders. Likewise, Nvidia's push has resulted in PhysX physics engine acceleration being run off of their shaders as well.

With DirectCompute finally standardizing GPGPU usage (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units) on the Windows platform (alongside OpenCL on Macs, Windows, Linux and so on), we'll see this trend push forward and become more common. I'm hesitant to refer to it as a dead end or anything else because the fact of the matter is that the processing power is there, waiting to be harnessed. AMD's pushing it hard. Nvidia's pushing it hard. And Intel's upcoming Larrabee graphics processor is even designed for that level of flexibility.

An important addendum to make here is that DirectCompute may be coming with DirectX 11, but it's compatible with DirectX 10 hardware as well. Your existing graphics hardware may yet have some additional uses in the future.

CONCLUSION: In the end, DirectX 11 looks like it's going to start keeping the promises that DirectX 10 made. Windows 7 is already a hot contender with great buzz behind it (and having been using it for months now I can assure you the buzz is warranted), and DirectX 11 is getting far more support from developers from the get-go than DirectX 10 ever did.

If nothing else pushes adoption of DirectX 11, I personally think DirectCompute is going to wind up being the big winner. Even game developers are looking at ways to use it to speed up other tasks in the game itself. It's very exciting to hear about how this technology is getting put to use.

I'd encourage anyone to upgrade to Windows 7 when it arrives, but even Windows Vista users will be getting in on this action. Still, if you're on Windows XP, the release of 7 and accompanying DirectX 11 is going to make October a great time to switch.

Videos:

Windows Phone commercial:

2009-10-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

Snow Leopard 'Guest Account' bug deleting user files?

2009-10-12T10:26:00.002-05:00

ENGADGET - Think your Snow Leopard woes are finally over? Don't go logging into that Guest account, then. A flurry of reports have surfaced around the web explaining that even an accidental login to one's Guest account within Snow Leopard could lead to mass deletion of all user files on the primary account, and when we say "mass deletion," we mean "mass deletion." The problem goes something like this: if one clicks on the Guest account after upgrading their machine to OS X 10.6, and everything hangs, there's at least a decent chance that all of your data will be evaporated whenever you surf back over to the main profile. Apple has yet to address the issue (at least publicly), but we'd probably recommend disabling Guest accounts on your rig(s) until all of this gets sorted. You know, unless you actually enjoy watching your data vanish.

Michael Jackson: This Is It

2009-10-12T10:00:00.003-05:00

...wait for the advertisement to finish...

The Coolest Car I Have Seen to Date

2009-10-09T11:06:00.003-05:00

If Nissan has its way, your next car's cockpit will look like an star fighter out of Macross or Tron.

This is the Nissan Land Glider, an electric car with two seats. it has a narrow body, which Nissan says will help reduce traffic congestion by allowing more cars in the same city space, as well as making parking easier. It has a balancing system to make it stable as it takes curves, compensating for inertia with the car's body movement.

The winner, however, is that stunning cockpit equipped with flat color screens and joysticks with touch surfaces.

Source

Video:

Finally..... the iPhone killer, the HTC HD2

2009-10-08T16:39:00.000-05:00

Some specifications:
General 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 900 / 2100
Announced 2009, October
Status Coming soon. Exp. release 2009, November
Size Dimensions 120.5 x 67 x 11 mm
Weight 157 g
Display Type TFT capacitive touchscreen, 65K colors
Size 480 x 800 pixels, 4.3 inches
- Sense UI
- Multi-touch input method
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
- Ambient light sensor
- Pick-to-mute a call
Sound Alert types Vibration; Downloadable polyphonic, MP3, WAV, WMA ringtones
Speakerphone Yes
- 3.5 mm audio jack
Memory Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Practically unlimited
Internal 448 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM
Card slot microSD (TransFlash)
Data GPRS Class 12 (4+1/3+2/2+3/1+4 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
HSCSD Yes
EDGE Class 12
3G HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 2 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Wi-Fi router
Bluetooth Yes, v2.1 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, miniUSB
Camera Primary 5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash
Features Geo-tagging
Video Yes 480P, 720 x 480 @30fps
Secondary No
Features OS Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional
CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD2850 1 GHz processor
Messaging SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
Radio Stereo FM radio with RDS
Games Yes
Colors Black
GPS Yes, with A-GPS support; NaviPanel
Java Yes, MIDP 2.0
- Digital compass
- MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+ player
- AVI(DiVX/XviD)/MP4/WMV/H.264/H.263 player
- Facebook and Twitter integration
- YouTube client
- Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, PDF viewer)
- HTC Peep, HTC Footprints
- Voice memo
- T9
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 1230 mAh
Stand-by Up to 490 h (2G) / Up to 390 h (3G)
Talk time Up to 6 h 20 min (2G) / Up to 5 h 40 min (3G)
Music play Up to 12 h
Misc Price group

Via: http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_hd2-2957.php

Nokia's 3G Booklet Netbook Spotted at Best Buy With Less Atrocious $600 Price Tag

2009-10-02T12:35:00.000-05:00

The Windows 7 netbook, which'll be a Best Buy exclusive when it first goes on sale, has a fairly standard spec set, up until a certain point: A 1.6GHz Atom processor, 120GB HDD and 1GB of RAM are nothing to get too excited about, but the 12-hour claimed battery life, built-in 3G support and GPS unit, well, thanks, Nokia, for not making this as boring as it could have been.

The inventory shot doesn't just point to a $600 price—approachable, maybe, but not exactly low—it indicates that stock was showing up at Best Buy as early as September 25th, lending credence to the idea that this might be a Windows 7 launch product, meaning you'll be able to get your hands on it as soon as October 22nd.

Source

Why is Panasonic the First to Invent a Two-Way Iron?

2009-10-02T08:57:00.000-05:00

GIZMODO - Unless my Google skills are failing me, this Panasonic 360-Degree iron is the first iron to have the pointed tip at both sides of the iron. It's been staring us in the face for 100 years, and Panasonic's is first?

By making the back of the iron pointed instead of flat, like every single other iron out there, you can go back and forth with the Panasonic NIW810CS as much as you want without screwing up your ironing pattern and wrinkling what you already pressed. Best of all, Panasonic only charges $50 for this bit of ingenuity.

Amazon

Microsoft's Anechoic Chamber: The Place Where Sound Goes To Die

2009-10-02T08:17:00.001-05:00

GIZMODO (By Wilson Rothman) - Yesterday, while touring a new building on Microsoft's campus, I came across an anechoic chamber: A room designed to eliminate all noise from outside—and in. I spent about 5 minutes locked inside, and man is it freaky.

The chamber is actually its own "box-in-box" building, like the Time Warner Center's Rose Theater. It rests on a cushion of massive springs and is linked to the rest of the building with a metal gangway and nylon netting (so you don't fall down into the gap). There are two doors, massive ones that were, according to my guide, "a huge pain to install." When I went to close one, I was startled by its resistance.

Inside, it's like the Star Trek version of the proverbial padded room, with wedges that act as sound and RF-proofing. The second massive door is covered with these, so when it is closed, the only way to tell where the exit is is the almost-hidden release lever. The "floor" isn't a floor at all: The real floor has to be covered with the same sound-damping wedges, so you actually stand on a mesh trampoline. (Good thing I didn't wear my high heels.)

The company who built it, Eckel Industries, also built Steve Orfield's lab in Minneapolis, Guinness-certified as the quietest place on earth, at around -9dBA. Microsoft says that theirs measures something quite similar to this, except on the very lowest end, where it's really hard to eliminate unwanted sound.

Since I entered the chamber with two other people, the first thing I noticed was how voices changed. They became clipped, truncated, like someone was holding the mute pedal down on a piano. The subtle atmosphere and depth associated with room reverberation that we come to expect when hearing the human voice was totally gone. No echoes, hence the term "anechoic." My own voice sounded like it was having trouble coming out of my head.

For a moment, I felt genuine disorientation, like the light-headedness you can get with low blood sugar. The guy who showed me the room said that, even though he works in there a lot, he still has moments when he loses his balance, because the ear uses sound reflections—in addition to inner-ear leveling—to position the head and body.

Microsoft uses this newly built chamber to test all kinds of hardware products—microphones on webcams, audio outputs on Zunes, even the clicking of buttons on just about anything—because if you want to hear a sound clearly, this is where you go. They bring in the Xbox and PS3 to see which one wheezes the loudest, and some people have already inquired about squeezing the slim PS3 in for a quick listen, to see what's changed. (Needless to say, Microsoft wouldn't make the results of this test public.)

I have heard that being in an anechoic chamber for too long can drive you mad, and now that I've stood in one, gently bouncing on the wire-frame trampoline, staring at the pointy sci-fi wedges and hearing nothing but the blood rushing in my head, I believe it.

ASUS EeeBox EB1501 comes packing Windows 7, Atom 330

2009-10-01T16:11:00.000-05:00

ENGADGET - We just caught a glimpse of ASUS' EeeBox EB1012 nettop last month, but it looks like the company is already doing things one better with its new, redesigned EB1501 model. As before, this one packs the increasingly common one-two punch of NVIDIA's Ion chipset and Intel's Atom 333 dual-core processor, but makes its mark by being the first EeeBox (and one of the first nettops) to come pre-loaded with Windows 7, which also means it's not shipping until the end of the month. Otherwise, you'll get the usual 2GB of RAM (expandable to 4GB) and 250GB hard drive, a built-in DVD burner, and an HDMI port to make it feel right at home in your home theater. No official pricing over here just yet, but it looks like this one will start at €399 (or about $580) when it hits Europe.

BumpTop 3D Desktop Gets Unique Multi-Touch Gestures

2009-10-01T09:48:00.002-05:00

GIZMODO - For all its new multi-touch goodness, Windows 7 only has about 7 basic gestures. So if you're all about the touch (and say, have a tablet PC) BumpTop's stack of unique new gestures could be a very good thing.

As we've mentioned in the past, BumpTop isn't a new OS or shell replacement, it just adds a 3D workspace to your desktop. The $30 mulit-touch version of the software is available now, but you'll need to have Windows 7 (and a multi-touch tablet, laptop or all-in-one PC). The good news: we're going to see a bunch of those arrive alongside the new OS on October 22.

Wi-Fi Alliance updates Certified 802.11n program, intros shiny new logo

2009-10-01T09:42:00.000-05:00

PC-World - The Wi-Fi Alliance is launching a certification program based on the completed IEEE 802.11n standard on Wednesday and looking toward a future peer-to-peer specification it is developing on its own.

Testing has now begun in the "Certified n" program, which succeeds the Wi-Fi Certified 802.11n draft 2.0 program that the industry group began two years ago. The testing begins with two labs but will expand to 13 locations within the next few weeks.

The 802.11n specification took so long to complete that in 2007 the Wi-Fi Alliance began certifying products for compliance with a draft version of the standard and interoperability with other draft-based equipment. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers finally formalized the standard earlier this month.

As it announced in July, the Wi-Fi Alliance isn't changing its fundamental test now that the standard is complete, so any product already certified under the draft version can use the new "Certified n" logo. But once a product has been modified, the vendor is expected to have it re-certified, as is the usual practice, said Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

The new program also adds certification for a few new capabilities. Equipment can be certified as "dual-stream" or "multi-stream" depending on whether it supports either two or three streams. Multiple streams, which can boost performance, can be created with the multiple antennas provided for in 802.11n. More than three streams are possible under 802.11n, but the Alliance is only testing for two or three at this time, Davis-Felner said.

The group has also set up testing for other optional features, including the following:

- packet aggregation, a technique designed to reduce the amount of overhead required for data transfers,

- "channel coexistence" measures, which allow a device to use two adjacent 20MHz channels in the 2.4GHz band without interfering with other networks,

- and space-time block coding, a mechanism for improving reliability, which prevents a client that can only use one spatial stream from slowing down a network that uses multiple streams.

NVIDIA Unveils Next Generation "Fermi" GPU Architecture

2009-10-01T09:31:00.002-05:00

NVIDIA has begun to disclose some information regarding its next generation GPU architecture, codenamed "Fermi". Actual product names or specifics were not disclosed just yet, nor was performance in 3D games, but high-level information about the architecture and its strong focus on compute performance and broader compatibility with computational applications were discussed.

The GPU codenamed Fermi will feature over 3-billion transistors and be produced using TSMC's 40nm processes. If you remember, AMD's new RV870 is 2.15 billion transistors and is also manufactured at 40nm, so Fermi will be significantly larger and more expensive to produce. Fermi will be outfitted with more than double the number of cores as the GT200, 512 in total. It will also offer 8x the peak double-precision compute performance. In addition, Fermi is the first GPU architecture to support ECC, so it can compensate for some errors and potentially scale to higher densities, and it will be able to execute C++ code.

As the foundation for NVIDIA's family of next generation GPUs namely GeForce, Quadro and Tesla - "Fermi" features a host of new technologies that are "must-have" features for the computing space, including:

*C++, complementing existing support for C, Fortran, Java, Python, OpenCL and DirectCompute.

*ECC, a critical requirement for datacenters and supercomputing centers deploying GPUs on a large scale

*512 CUDA Cores featuring the new IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard, surpassing even the most advanced CPUs

*8x the peak double precision arithmetic performance over NVIDIA's last generation GPU. Double precision is critical for high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as linear algebra, numerical simulation, and quantum chemistry

*NVIDIA Parallel DataCache - the world's first true cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand

*NVIDIA GigaThread Engine with support for concurrent kernel execution, where different kernels of the same application context can execute on the GPU at the same time (eg: PhysX fluid and rigid body solvers)

*Nexus - the world's first fully integrated heterogeneous computing application development environment within Microsoft Visual Studio

Source

Game Ported From iPhone to Zune HD in 12 Hours

2009-09-20T11:44:00.006-05:00

Gizmodo - Game maker Foundation 42 is one of the first developers to get an app working on the Zune HD, and it looks like it wasn't too difficult a process, taking only 12 hours. This is a good sign.

The game, a fun little word puzzler called Wordmonger, is already available on several platforms (iPhone, various desktop OSes) but using the XNA, Foundation 42 was able to port it over to the Zune HD. Now that we know it's not an incredibly difficult process, we've got to question Microsoft's decision to lock the Zune HD to free, first-party apps. Right now, to get Wordmonger onto your Zune HD, you have to download the developer kit and use another piece of software, rather than just heading into the Zune Marketplace and downloading the app.

We hope Microsoft is questioning the decision too—the Zune HD is a really powerful little gadget, and that Tegra chip is capable of some impressive feats. We'd love to see the Zune HD opened up for more developers, and if there's enough buzz Microsoft might eventually do just that.

Source

Zune HD a major sellout?

2009-09-20T11:37:00.002-05:00

Engadget - Let it be known: we liked the Zune HD before it was popular, before all the poseurs jumped on the bandwagon with their tight-fitting jeans and their hairstyles. If various stores on the internet are to be believed, the Zune HD is selling out in a pretty big way. Amazon is listing a 1-2 month wait for the 16GB model and a 1-3 week wait for the 32GB, Best Buy has the player listed as "backordered," and New Egg shows "sold out." Microsoft's own store doesn't seem to be having these stocking problems, but we suppose that's to be expected.

Source

Haier steps out of character, builds ultra-desirable Jian i7 ultra-thin laptop

2009-09-20T11:30:00.005-05:00

Cloned In China - Haier is going to launch its ULV platform based ultra thin notebook Jian i7. The Haier Jian i7 is only 3.2cm thick at its maximum( update: 1.88cm at average), weighing 1.4kg. we still don’t know when this notebooks is available and how much it will be priced , but the guys on zol.com.cn have got a prototype to review on their website. They even disassembled it to look close into its hardwares, and estimated it at about 6,000 Yuan (about $882). Haier Jian i7 features a 1.3GHz Intel core 2 Duo ULV SU7300 processor, 13.4 inch backlit LED, integrated Graphics, 2G DDR3 RAM, 320GB ROM, 3 USB2.0 ports, VGA port, HDMI port and a 4 cell 2900mAh Li-ion battery.

Source

Xbox 360 802.11n adapter spotted in Gears of War 2 box, longs for the comfort of your living room

2009-09-20T11:25:00.001-05:00

Joystiq - To be more specific -- and much less acronymic -- it appears that the super speedy Xbox 360 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter has been spotted on a promotional flier inside the Italian version of the Gears of War 2 Game of the Year edition. Italian gaming site Mondobox.com (translation) posted an image of the leaflet, which you can see above. Assuming it's authentic, it seems to indicate that both the original 802.11a/b/g and 802.11n adapter will continue to exist in the same market. And that, hopefully, indicates a price drop on the ridiculously overpriced original adapter.

We've contacted Microsoft about the peripheral and will update this post with new information if and when we receive it.

Source