Its time when we took our environment  seriously & do whatever we can to save & contribute towards saving our planet. These days almost every giant company is trying to reduce their carbon footprint. Green initiatives are coming into action here & there, but what can an individual do to help towards saving the environment.

Almost everyone these days use computers. While building/ ordering a new computer, whether it is a custom made PC or a branded one, you can make it a green pc. Going green isn’t very difficult. Many Companies out there are making green pcs these days. Check out the  brand website for the green PC options or if you are making a custom pc , you can make a list of Green components you might want to use.

An example is the western digital Green Caviar Green series of hard disk drives.

not only hard disk drives , but others components like Motherboards are also coming with green labels on them, check them out. While selecting a processor, just don’t go for the top of the line product. Calculate your usage and the amount of computing power you need & select a processor accordingly. While selecting a CPU remember to check out how much watts a processor takes and its power saving features.

Just remember every single commitment taken toward saving our environment counts. Just use the resources you really need.

Shantanu Kaushik

Call them Mini, Netbook or ultra-portables. These tiny computers have come a long way in mobile computing. These days you can use your smartphone to do almost everything, but there are certain things that you would like a computer to do. What makes Mini computers or Netbooks special & should you buy one is going to be discussed here.

What is a Netbook ?

A netbook is a hot piece of computer that can work for long hours while generating minimal heat, but with that it gives you slower performance when compared to a standard desktop/Laptop PC. You can do almost everything on a netbook, but should refrain from using high resource hungry application on it.

Options with Processors

Both Intel & AMD are giving options in mobile processors which fill the Netbooks today. While Intel Atom is a more cheap solution then AMD ( this being quite opposite when seen in Laptop/Desktop) . The Cheapest Netbook in Indian market starts nearly at 12,500/- ( which might vary in your state or region).

Should I buy a Netbook ?

Netbook is a great portable computer for word processing, Internet surfing, blogging etc. ! But the limitations come in terms of processing power. Playing Games and intensive coding or High Definition videos can be a problem, but you can watch normal DVD/CD quality videos very easily.
Buying a netbook is a perfect option if you already have a Home Desktop/Laptop computer that suffices your resource hungry application needs. Netbook is more affordable, light & portable.

Its being speculated that XBOX 360 Slim might be priced very competitively at $199 onwards. This console will feature a 250 Gigabyte of Hard disk space and an internal WiFi Card. HDMI output will also be a option.

Kinect, formerly known as Natal, ables the players to control the games they play without any physical controller, but using a camera and software. Microsoft has setup a launch date of Nov. 4 for North America Region. For rest of the world and about pricing information you have to wait will August.

Source|Original Story| Softpedia | TCN Writeup| Shantanu

A industry report by Techeye claimed that a hardware designer at Intel said that Larrabee would have changed the Graphics industry significantly as the platform was more flexible in terms of usability and programmability when compared to AMD or nVidia. Its been sometime now since we see high powered Gfx Chip by nvidia or Ati ( AMD) , As better the technology gets they wont be suporting the x86 architecture, this might give larrabee an edge to compatiblity.

“Intel is not a one-shot company. But there is a whole product plan and roadmap still in place,” an anonymous Larrabee engineer reportedly said. “Intel has the luxury of being able to release stuff in its own time, there are not too many other companies that can do that.”

AMD & Nvidia has their own advantages, Intel might just work again on the Larrabee and we might see something better, unless Intel Kills the project.

“The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not,” said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate.
By change in technology, it means that there were times when the hard drives were just few megabytes in size, and formatting them with a 512byte block partition made a whole lot sense, but what now ? when people are using 1TB ( 1024 GB) as a standard Drisk for their computing needs. This fine resolution on hard drives is causing a problem,manager said, because of the wasted space associated with each tiny block.Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.

Moving to an advanced format of 4K sectors means about eight times less wasted space but will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction.

“You can get yourself into a corner where you cannot squeeze much more onto the disk,” said Steve Perkins, a technical consultant for Western Digital.

This shift also allows manufacturers to make more efficient use of the real estate on a hard drive.

“We can put more data on the disk,” he said. “It’s about 7-11% more efficient as a format.”

Source | BBC

Technology is always something that consumes time and resources to grow out, either its HDMI or going higher into High Definition or the USB bus that gives us the basic taks related to computing, Technology plays a tricky role with everything. USB 3.0 is something pretty close to that. There were speculations of USB 3.0 to get mainstream sooner, but recently Intel’s representative speaking at CeBIT in germany cleared that USB 3.o will still take a couple of years to evolve and get mainstream. It was cleared that USB 3.0 will become mainstream only till the next version of Windows ( supposedely called Windows 8)(Unconfirmed by Microsoft)**

Microsoft current version of Windows, i.e 7, was released on octuber 22nd 2009, which proved out to be a major success. Windows 8** or the next version of Windows Client OS is yet to be time tabled, but estimates say there is a probable chance of getting a release by 2011 end or in 2012. But Intel’s representative told clearly that USB 3.0 will indeed be supported fully in the next Version of Windows. There are ongoing rumours about Windows 7 to include the support for USB 3.0 in its first service pack that is due in April of this year.

Bit ‘O’ Fact

USB 3.0 is capable of delivering dramatic performance improvements over version 2.0, which maxes out at 480Mbps. By contrast, provided that a computer’s hardware (the type of storage drive and motherboard) play nice with USB 3.0, the technology can, at least in theory, deliver transfer rates of up to 5Gbps. One of the best things about USB 3.0 is the fact that it’s fully compatible with its precursor, version 2.0.

Windows 8** Microsoft added sometime back ” Who says we will call it Windows 8″

Apple has taken legal action against phone maker HTC, alleging it has infringed patented technology. Apple issued a press release announcing it has sued HTC, According to the suit, HTC smartphones borrow key architecture and hardware elements from Apple’s handset.

below is the Re-production without change of the official press-release by Apple as taken from Softpedia

CUPERTINO, California—March 2, 2010—Apple® today filed a lawsuit against HTC for infringing on 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. The lawsuit was filed concurrently with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and in U.S. District Court in Delaware.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Apple reinvented the mobile phone in 2007 with its revolutionary iPhone®, and did it again in 2008 with its pioneering App Store, which now offers more than 150,000 mobile applications in over 90 countries. Over 40 million iPhones have been sold worldwide.

This is not the first time Apple has made a move like this, back in december of 2009 when it countersued Nokia on some similar grounds, The VP then said “Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours.”. The legal action has been filed with the US International Trade Commission and a district court in Delaware.HTC has yet to respond to requests for comment.

Official update from HTC regarding the charges by Apple : : “HTC is a mobile technology innovator and patent holder that has been very focused over the past 13 years on creating many of the most innovative smartphones. HTC values patent rights and their enforcement but is also committed to defending its own technology innovations. HTC only learned of Apple’s actions this morning via media reports, and therefore we have not yet had the opportunity to investigate the filings. Until we have had this opportunity, we are unable to comment on the validity of the claims being made against HTC.”

Source | BBC |Softpedia

Scaling back the features for marketing purposes is really not a very appetizing prospect for us. We believe that you should have the full set of features, no matter where you buy in the stack. You won’t see us scale back the memory speeds. You won’t see us scale back the I/O speeds. You won’t see us pull features. That is not our way to bring products to market,” John Fruehe, the director of product marketing for server/workstation products at AMD, said.

On the other hand, INTEL is dedicated cutting down features from its less priced desktop or server CPU’s in order to make them seem good in market. On the contrary AMD, intends to keep the same feature set so as to provide a better functioning desktop or server CPU and hence a more comfortable and satisfied customer.

“When you look at our existing AMD Opteron processors as well as our upcoming new products (Magny-Cours), you see two big themes: we don’t compromise on features and we are going to deliver the feature customers care most about: value. As you look at our products, you’ll see that as you move down the stack, from those fastest processors that everyone lusts after (but few buy) down to the value-priced processors, you’ll see the same set of features. You won’t see AMD artificially limiting the capabilities or punishing a focus on low power,” Mr. John Fruehe noted.

XbitLabs reports that, according to unofficial sources, the AMD Opteron 6000 series of processors will be made up of three CPUs with clock speeds of 1.90GHz, 2.10GHz and 2.20GHz. The company also aims to release three standard-voltage 8-core chips at 2.0GHz, 2.30GHz ans 2.40GHz, along with two high-efficiency 8-core processors with clocks of 1.80GHz and 2.0GHz. Furthermore, AMD also intends to launch a highly efficient (HE) AMD Opteron 6000 12-core chip at 1.70GHz, as well as a special edition (SE) 12-core AMD Opteron 6000 at 2.30GHz. Maximum stability for these 12-core chips will be enabled by reduced frequencies for the L3 cache memory and integrated memory controllers, compared to 6-core and quad-core chips

Story Base| Softpedia

adapters can reach the impressive throughput of up to 600MB/s per SATA port for legacy systems, with current configurations being able to maximize PCI Express 2.0 x4 bandwidth to reach no less than 2GB/s. This means that high-performance SATA HDDs and SSDs will no longer be restricted by older bus technologies, being able to reach their full potential or even break the performance barrier thanks to the large bandwidth of the PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus.

Read more at Softpedia