A couple of years back scientists at HP figured out how to make memristors viable. Memristors were first conceived of back in the 1970's and are components that remember (for lack of a better term) how much current passed through them for a particular interval of time. They've been compared to neurons in that the more often they fire, the more likely they are to fire in the future. On the other side of the house, scientists have been trying for decades to figure out the principles (and combination of mechanisms) by which organic brains operate. They're not binary devices …
When installing the heatsink/fan assembly of an Intel CPU designed for the LGA 775 socket, do not twist the fastening pins of the cooling unit to seat them. Just use a flat-headed screwdriver to push them straight down. Twisting them is only done to remove the cooling unit!
Yesterday Intel announced the first few models of its new line of solid-state hard drives based upon NAND gate technology. Rather than using spinning metal platters that use a lot of electricity ('a lot' is a relative term - when you consider the power consumption of a laptop running off of battery power, hard drives are power hogs) they use flashchips similiar to the ubiquitous USB key that just about everyone has one of these days. The Z-U130 line will come in 1, 2, 4, and 8GB capacities, read 28MB and write 20GB per second, which isn't bad for a flashdrive …
The hacker spirit perseveres in all things, especially when it comes to squeezing every last compute cycle out of one's hardware. OC Team Italy set a new world record recently by overclocking a Pentium-4 processor core to 8.0GHz. The CPU they used in their grand experiment is a model 631, and runs natively at 3.0GHz. Their secret sauce to keep the unit from going Chernobyl? Liquid nitrogen.
On one hand, this horrifies the sysadmin in me. On the other.. rock the hell on. A round of beer's on me if I ever meet you guys face to face …
Intel has released an implementation of the draft 802.11n wireless networking protocol for laptops and other portable devices. 802.11n has five times the maximum data throughput of 802.11g, topping out at 270 megabits per second. On top of that, their 802.11n chipset uses less power than the other wi-fi implementations out there, which can give laptops an extra hour of runtime on battery, which is a huge selling point.
