802.11n chipset maker promises 600 Mbps throughput
Nearly one year ago, a Sunnyvale company called Quantenna announced that it had secured approximately $25 million to begin its development of various "next-gen" wireless technologies. Today, the company is ready to break a big barrier.
Quantenna's QHS 802.11n chipsets have a 4x4 MIMO antenna system with Transmit Beamforming, with the stated goal of being used in the streaming of high-definition multimedia content or in HD IPTV setups.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is the beginning of something...just a beginning
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for Windows from FileForum now.
Web users who are expecting a major shift in philosophy in the first round of Firefox betas, may want to wait for the developers to have their say. For now, there are a few helpful features, but one really useful one remains on the way.
New legislation could postpone February DTV transition
Legislation now proposed in the US Congress would effectively postpone the February 17, 2009 date for the switchover to all-digital TV. Today, the NAB came out in support of that measure, with Nielsen data to back it up.
More than 21.5 million US households -- or one in five -- are still either completely or partially unprepared for the upcoming transition to all-digital TV on February 17 of next year, the Nielsen Company said on Wednesday. That same day, the National Association of Broadcasters endorsed proposed legislation in the US Congress that would enable an extension of the quickly encroaching deadline, now only four months away.
Nvidia announces 9400M integrated GPU
Nvidia's GeForce 9400M, the integrated GPU featured in every new Apple notebook unveiled yesterday, has today been officially announced on its own.
The integrated 9400M supports Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, and offers 16 CUDA parallel cores with 54 gigaflops of processing power. Nvidia claims its performance is five times better than Intel's GM45 Chipset in 3DMark Vantage bench tests.
The Windows name: Is there special significance to '7?'
On Monday, Microsoft confirmed that its nomenclature for Windows marketing will revert to an earlier time, when numbers were enough to convey meaning. Now, already, the company is having to explain its own logic and its numerology.
It could, for all intents and purposes, just be a number. But previous editions of Windows, including the one we're on now, have been given so-called "aspirational names" whose significance and symbology were the subject of some sustained gushing from Microsoft's marketing department in the past.
With increasing traffic, AOL eyes 'social network aggregation'
With unique visitors and page views on the rise for September, AOL is giving much of the credit to last month's e-mail aggregation move. Now, another sort of aggregation appears to be in the works.
It's too early to tell whether the demise of AOL Journals and Hometown will make much of a dent. However, AOL.com's unique visitors rose by 12%, total visits by 15%, and page views by 34% for the month of September, according to comScore's Media Matrix report.
Adobe launches 'Astro,' Flash Player 10
Download Intel Flash 10 Player for Windows from FileForum now.
Today, Adobe has launched Flash Player 10 after nearly six months in public beta, the day after Microsoft released Silverlight 2, Flash's most high-profile competitor.
Intel says it's positioned for the coming economic storm
Of the American corporations that will be impacted -- some severely -- by the global economic downturn, Intel will be best positioned to withstand the storm due to its very low debt position, its senior executives told investors Tuesday.
So the only uncertainty facing Intel in the coming quarter and thereafter is not how much liability it will suddenly face, but how much demand for CPUs and technology products will drop. This from both CEO Paul Otellini and new CFO Stacy J. Smith, during the company's quarterly third quarter conference call.
Mint sweetens the deal with investment tracking
Personal finance tracker mint.com, which picked up a "Best of Show" Tuesday at Finovate, has released its collection of investment tracking tools from closed beta.
The free personal-budgeting site, which also reports signing up its 500,000th user sometime in the past few days, thus adds a fancier set of financial-planning tools to its previous abilities to parse data from checking, savings and credit-card accounts. Mint CEO and founder Aaron Patzer describes the additions as making the site "more mainstream" -- and increasing its appeal to users over 35.
Intel, OLPC lose to NComputing in the race for India
Lower-cost virtualization -- priced at just $70 per seat -- wins out over laptops in a bid to deliver computer education to 1.8 million schoolchildren in an Indian province.
Undercut on pricing by virtualization vendor NComputing, former partners turned rivals Intel and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) each got edged out this week on a deal to bring computing to 1.8 million schoolchildren in India.
Academic libraries pave a new path away from Google
What's bigger than Google? The vision of librarians, according to the academic institutions banding together to create HathiTrust -- a "universal library" built in part on Google's scanning efforts.
HathiTrust (pronounced haw-TEE -- it's the Hindi word for elephant, that animal that famously lives long and never forgets) launched Tuesday. It's a project of the member universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the University of California system. The CIC has been working with Google since last year to digitize books held in libraries at member schools; the UC system signed on with Google in 2006, and the University of Michigan's MBooks (now folded into HathiTrust) has underway since the school announced affiliation with the Google Books Library Project during its launch in 2004.
First public Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 builds now downloadable
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for Windows from FileForum now.
6:08 pm EDT October 14, 2008 - This afternoon, two Mozilla spokespersons confirmed to BetaNews the official availability of Firefox 3.1 Beta 1, which should include some features that could catch it up with IE8 Beta 2.
Apple has a surprise competitor in notebooks: Samsung
Samsung is actually known as an innovator in the notebook computer field, having equipped some models with solid state drives as early as two years ago. But it hasn't made its notebook presence known in America until today.
While the requisite drooling over the new MacBook Pro's slick glass surface goes on in Cupertino this morning, there's a tsunami under way in notebook computing, and its source appears to be Seoul. Samsung today announced it is storming onto the US notebook market with a complete lineup whose marketing structure has already been tested elsewhere in the world, and with price-competitive models that have intriguing features and a promise for quality.
Pioneer gets in on the Qflix direct-DVD-download act
Sonic Solutions announced Qflix download and burn technology for DVD nearly a year ago. Now, following Dell's lead, Pioneer has announced its own Qflix compatible burners.
Today, Pioneer announced two Qflix DVD/CD burners: the internal DVR-2920Q,
and the external DVR-X162Q. Both drives incorporate Sonic Solutions' Roxio Venue software, which was designed to create protected DVDs from legally purchased downloads, as stipulated by The DVD Copy Control Association in 2006. The drives will begin shipping this month, and carry an MSRP of $69.99 for the internal model, and $114.99 for the external, a scant $5 cheaper than Dell's.
Analysts: Will $999 MacBook have an impact?
Apple today finally broke the $1,000 barrier on MacBooks, yet it didn't break out a sub-$800 notebook or netbook. Will people forced into penny-pinching still be willing to pay what some call the "Apple tax?"
At a hyped-up Cupertino launch event today, Apple dashed the hopes of a lot of users, introducing the expected new models of its existing MacBooks, but not rolling out a rumored sub-$800 notebook or netbook.
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