Recent Comments:
Westinghouse's 56-inch D56QX1 Quad HD display on sale for $50,000 {Engadget}
Jun 21st 2008 12:57PM They've had monitors like IBM's T220 for several years. You would drive them using multiple DVI connections from a Nvidia Quadro. Today, you can probably drive these Quad HD panels using just 2 dual link connectors from a Geforce in span mode. And the T220 looked great, QUWXGA at 22" with ppi like staring at dye sub prints, or a bigger version of a Nokia N770 tablet, the pixels aren't too small to see at a couple feet when used for text and icons. Blow that up to 56" and it's sharp, but not much better PPI than most notebook LCDs.
Christian Dior / ModeLabs pop out another absurdly overpriced handset {Engadget}
Jun 7th 2008 3:57PM 10991
14 from the girls
1372 from the big cats
9604 from the small cats
1 from the leg of the trip
NVIDIA continues to hate on Intel, promises sub-$45 integrated chipset {Engadget}
Apr 26th 2008 12:44AM Just went to Frys, where intel charges $1500 for their 500 million transistor chip on a 45nm process. Compare that to $600 for a 1billion transistor chip on a process that has a lower yield, plus the pc board, the memory, the packaging, and the manufacturing. Who's the bigger scrooge?
Fujitsu's MHZ2 CJ series drives take crypto seriously {Engadget}
Apr 24th 2008 4:12AM Yeah I want to see them freeze, then unsolder the bga chips off the pcb and cold resolder them onto another to read their contents without heating it back up.
Eee PC 900 gets dissected, looks about the same as the Eee PC 700 {Engadget}
Apr 20th 2008 8:12PM Well, the life-form actually lives inside the Intel chip package, they're natural habitat is much warmer than ours, so the packaging is heated to a good 60-70c before they come out of "hibernation".
FireWire: over a billion ports served {Engadget}
Apr 9th 2008 11:22PM I think USB has the Bandwidth, since DV is about 30mbps (straight DV, not one of the higher bandwidth versions). The problem with USB though is that it doesn't have the arbitration and control protocols (at least initially, don't know about now) to ensure that your FW device can continue to stream at speed since it's physically coming off a tape spinning at a certain speed, so it doesn't appreciate interruptions. USB devices don't do such a great job so lets say you needed to transfer some files from a USB drive attached to the same root hub, it can cause an interruption from other devices on the chain. Not an issue if you have enough overhead and some buffering, but that's why they throw 480mbps at you, to minimize the impact of these interruptions. That works as long as you have lots of overhead, but once you start transferring large amounts of data, it degrades quickly. If you transferred from say a USB camcorder to a USB hdd, it passes all the way to the computer, and back out to the HDD. Firewire on the other hand can actually transfer from a Firewire camcorder to another Firewire VCR or HDD attached to the same cable directly without passing through the PC since it has multiple "Masters" meaning the Camcorder can talk directly to the VCR. It's really quite elegant compared to USB which like it's name, was meant to be a really fast shared Serial port.
FireWire: over a billion ports served {Engadget}
Apr 9th 2008 10:22PM I love firewire, I have various Firewire DVD-RW drives which I use, I can plug them into any of my PCs and notebooks. Very important on notebooks since they don't have that many USB ports, and lower CPU utilization over firewire. I also use a Sony VGP-XL1B firewire changer, 200 disk DVD-RW changer, that doesn't work over USB. You can daisy chain. I can gather all my firewire drives together and simultaneously burn to all of them.. all from a single firewire connector on my notebook. I have a couple firewire HDD enclosures. Again, performance is better than over USB2.0. Finally, one of the best features is whenever I install XP on a machine, the first thing I do is network it over Firewire to a notebook bridged between firewire and Ethernet. I can then download all the appropriate drivers to get the video and network card running without all the hassle of burning it on a CD or flash drive, etc. On a Mac, I can mount a the Mac like an external HDD over firewire. If only there had been no firewire licensing fee from the beginning, it would have kicked USB all over the place just because of daisy chaining, and shared performance over a single link.
Sony looking to stuff Blu-ray recorders in select LCD HDTVs? {Engadget}
Apr 7th 2008 4:24PM Meh you guys are not looking at the target consumer, who is already receiving complaints that a non-flat TV detracts from the decor. Now, the wife finally agrees to a flat screen because it doesn't stand out or occupy cabinet space / require special furniture, and now you're going to have to hook up an external BD recorder with an hdmi cable, and a flat 1' deep surface to put it on? These people don't care about the serviceability or the inability to ship one part to be repaired, repairs never even enter the equation. Watching media from a HDD? Not in the equation, they want to borrow a disk from a friend and put it in, they don't spend the time to download media, or install AnyDVDHD to rip a disk, they simply get them from Netflix or off the shelf at Target. They don't spend time reading Engadget or caring about anything besides their kids, house payments, and their sports teams. Watching a movie or recording a TV show is just commodity tech, and if it can be don e elegantly, they prefer it.
Windows 7 to arrive next year, says Bill Gates {Engadget}
Apr 4th 2008 7:16PM That and the 2000-XP switch. XP came out around 2001, since I guess 2000 didn't sell that well. But what did XP have over 2000 for the first couple years? More glitzy desktop, and um.. that's about it. XP used more memory, and didn't bring that much to the table over 2000. Lots of people bitched about XP since it used more ram than 98 and 2000 without any substantial benefits. Same thing with 98, it really didn't add anything to 95, you could still run all the same software, though 98SE dealt with the large HDD problem a year or two later.
I have a feeling that Windows 7 will do the same thing, address the issues that users thought make Vista uninteresting as a self-upgrade. By then, all the hardware sold for the last 3 years will be at least compatible from a driverbase, hopefully all the x64 driver issues will be ironed out (I still can't use Palm Desktop to pull up my old contacts), and the average system will ship with 4GB because ram's so cheap now. Then all the features that were skipped in Vista will have a chance to be completed, and people will get not bitch as much when they get Windows 7 preinstalled. By then, the critical issues with Vista will be mostly fixed, and businesses will start buying Vista preinstalled (or downgrading) while giving Win7 the wary-eye. Then Windows 8 will come out after a long delay (with tons of newness, a new audio/graphic layer that breaks all old hardware APIs, DX11 will switch to raytrace/voxels which won't run in Win7, and everyone points and laughs at the new winlogon replacement that uses videocams and voice recognition), and the bitching will begin all over again until Win9.
Buffalo's DriveStation Combo4 external HDD touts four interfaces {Engadget}
Apr 3rd 2008 3:37PM Mainly so you can daisy chain the drives, not to plug into two computers. You daisy chain firewire devices so you don't have to buy those pesky hubs like with USB.
