OCC TECH NEWS
For the last several years Stanford University has been studying the mechanics of protein folding - or how proteins in the human body assemble themselves. As part of this research scientists are also looking at what happens when that process doesn't happen the way it's supposed to. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious side effects which include many well known diseases such Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Mad Cow, CJD and ALS. Simulating the way proteins fold, though, takes massive computer resources, far beyond what would be possible using resources normally available to researchers. Stanford developed an ingenious approach to the problem by developing a distributed computing model where the computational requirements are broken down into many small pieces. Volunteers around the world download the client software from Stanford and use their computers' idle cycle times to work on the problem and return the results back to Stanford. Recent advances in processor technology and the use of stream processing on GPUs has enabled Stanford to make tremendous leaps in their research, none of which would have been possible without the participation of users around the world.
OverclockersClub is proud to be a part of that process with our Folding@home team. We are extending an open invitation for all to further Stanford's research efforts by downloading the Folding@home software from Stanford's site and be part of the OCC team (team number 12772) as we work together to better understand the role proteins play in these diseases. As a show of our commitment to the project, OCC will be running another contest sometime in February so now is the time to get those machines folding!
Click here to discuss this item in the OCC forums.
OCC's mega Christmas giveaway Contest is now concluded. This year we had 60 prizes to award to our forum members as a way of saying thanks to all who made 2008 such a great year. So, without further ado, here is the complete list of winners:
Grand Prize Full System donated from CyberpowerPC winner is: TheWacoKid
Here is the list of runner up prizes:
From Sapphire:
1 X 4870 512MB - d3bruts1d
1 X 4850 - flareback
1 X 4830 - road-runner
5 X 4670 - kurosen, sYstEmATiC, Fireonice, O(V)eGA_l2el), philbrown23
From Thermaltake:
Spedo Case - mattwalter85
850 Watt PSU - werty316
3 X BlacX - Fanatic, Hemidare, JJRKOC
From Mushkin:
Triple Channel Memory Kit 6GB - Compxpert
From Palit:
5 ATI 3850's - Gr4vitas, Sparkyftw, Fight Game, nVidia_Freak, CheeseMan42
From MSI:
X58 Platinum - Crow47
Eclipse SLI - ekiM
From OCZ:
1 X DDR2-800 Reasper 4GB Kit - BKen
2 X Elixir Keyboards - Andrewr05, redtigerdragon
2 x ATV 4GB Flash Drives - ciddono, soundx98
2 X Behemoth Mouse Pads - Zerox12, turophiliac
From Sigma:
Raidmax Aztec - Rud3bwoy
Raidmax Icecube - capthowdy575
Unicorn Case - XiXVenomXiX
Phantom Case - kevinz90
From In Win:
GD Metal Suit Case - airman
Stealth Bomber Case - baz000ka j0e
From Coolermaster:
1 X RC-690 - Wormy
1 X Real Power Pro 750W PSU - r3d c0m3t
1 X Hyper Z600R - DLS2008
From NZXT:
Tempest - Krow
Avatar Mouse - PUTALE1
Whisper - hornybluecow
From Crucial:
3 X 4GB Kits of Crucial Ballistic Tracer Red - lucky13*, robAP, evanin
From Corsair:
2 x TWIN2X4096-6400C5DHX - Dynamic, incrysis
2 x CMFUSBMINI-4GB - ocmooz, virus
From Super Talent:
5 X 8GB Pico USB - Fangsss, Harima, K7leafclover, LovermanOwens, pr0pht133
From ECS:
9600GT - Avo345
From OCC:
Corsair HX520W - xPETEZx
Patriot 2GB of DDR3 1866 - Slick2500
Asus Striker II Formula - tomcat42071
From Bosco:
750Gig Harddrive - Slugbug, viperk1
Thermaltake Case - SuppA-SnipA
Congrats to all of the winners and a special thanks to the sponsors who made this possible.
Merry Christmas guys!
Dave
Ever wondered what might be going on at OverclockersClub that you're missing out on? Want to be some of the first to find out about OCC's contests and other unique content? OverclockersClub announces the return of our newsletter designed to give faithful readers advance notice of the good stuff. We won't be bombarding your mailbox with everyday items, but when it's something really unique or time to give away some free hardware you'll be the first to know. To sign up, head on over to our subscription page and join now!
January 6, 2009
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held annually in Las Vegas is one of the hi-tech industries highlights of the year, giving companies the chance to show off products that will be introduced over 2009 (and beyond). Around 130,000 people are expected to travel to the show this year, which starts this Thursday 8th and runs until Sunday 11th January. Attendance last year stood at around 140,000 and considering the current economic climate a number close to that would be something of an achievement. Over 2,700 companies will be promoting their wares and Steve Ballmer will be handling the task of the opening keynote (previously delivered by Bill Gates). Naturally OCC will be attending the show again this year, bringing you information on what you can expect from the players in the PC industry. Look out for our coverage, which will start when CES kicks off later in the week.
Logitech, maker of peripheral equipment such as mice, keyboards and webcams, today announced it is cutting 15 percent of its salaried workforce. Blaming the deepening economic slowdown, Logitech said it is seeing weakening demand across all geographies and channels. With customers reducing inventory levels, Logitech said it expects the situation to only worsen in the coming months and the cuts are an attempt to further reduce its cost structure in light of what they expect to be an extended downturn. Logitech employees over 9,000 people worldwide with offices in Switzerland, Asia and the U.S.
Today Samsung announced its new 2.5 inch 100GB solid state drive (SSD) targeted toward data centers looking for a high-performance alternative to 15,000 RPM SCSI and SAS drives. The SS805 SSD have enhanced performance giving it a sustained read rate of 230MB/s, making it ideal for I/O intensive application such as online transaction processing and video-on-demand services. Samsung used single-level cell NAND flash memory and interleaving along with eight parallel channels along with an optimized controller to increase performance. Samsung claims that with a sustained read/write rate of 230/180MB/s that the new SSD can process IOPS 10 ten times faster than the fastest SAS on the market. Availability is sometime this quarter but no ricing details were released.
January 5, 2009
Even with the Consumer Electronics Show, Pentax showed off two new cameras that are known as the P70 and the E70 before hand. While both feature advanced Face Detection, which can detect up to 32 faces in .03 seconds, the cameras with offer different megapixels and be different sizes. The Optio P70 comes with a 12-megapixel lens, a 4x optical zoom, and a 2.7-inch screen. It can also shoot video footage at an astounding 720p quality; though will only offer a lowly 15 frames per second. The Optio E70 will be able to take pictures up to 10-megapixels with a 3x optical zoom and a 2.4-inch LCD screen. Neither the P70 nor the E70 cameras features a viewfinder, and they sell for $199.95 and $139.95 respectively.
Since Sony cut jobs before Christmas, at a total of about 8,000. It also planned, according to the New York Times, who quoted Kazuharu Miura that it had already cut 4,000 jobs throughout the world, while also terminating another 5,000 just in the country of Japan alone. The Times is reporting now that Sony’s plan to restructure is just is not enough after the drop in the Japanese currency and other currency world wide. Even though it seems like major restructuring is needed for the electronics company, spokesman Atsuo Omagari is stating that they do not plan to make anymore additional restructurings plans at this point in time.
This week, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Seagate along with semiconductor supplier Symwave, plan to show off their own FreeAgent external storage hard drive that features a USB 3.0 port. People attending the show are going to be, as expected, surprised at the speed that the new standard is going to deliver, as it blazes at a speed of 4.8Gbits/s. Symwave announced that it is honored to be working with Seagate to show off the new USB 3.0 speeds and plans to keep on delivering new and exciting products to consumers down the line as demand grows for high-speed storage solutions.
A new trojan has been making its way around torrent sites called Troj/Qhost-AC, and it's unlike any virus you've probably ever encountered. There's no spyware or malware and it provides a simple message; "downloading is wrong." The trojan modifies the hosts file of your computer so that it redirects two of the most popular torrent sites, The Pirate Bay and Mininova, to yourself (127.0.0.1) and causes popups and audio messages stating that "downloading is wrong." Some people think the MPAA or RIAA may be responsible, but we'll probably never know where the trojan originated from. For those that happen to get infected, however, thankfully the fix is fairly simple.
If you have an iPhone, you're probably already syncing your e-mails, contacts and calendar, but what about other files? Thanks to the Soonr app, released today in the App Store, you can now sync everything from Excel documents to text documents to pictures. Soonr supports 30 file types and allows you 500MB of storage in a "personal cloud" that automatically grabs the latest versions of your files without requiring you to upload files every time. In addition, Soonr lets you preview files and even print to remote printers. Best of all, it's free to all iPhone/iTouch owners.
After a 17-year old Ohio teenager was banned from World of Warcraft, he contacted Blizzard's help desk to get his account reinstated. According to reports, he told them he was suicidal and WoW was all he had to live for. Blizzard didn't reinstate the account but did call emergency services. When the police and paramedics arrived, the teen said it was all a joke and he was using the threat of suicide to get what he wanted. The police didn't find the joke all that funny and charged the teenager with a first-degree misdemeanor.
Seagate announced today that it's newest lineup of hard disk drives, the 7200.12 family, are shipping with the world's highest areal density of 329 Gigabits per square inch. In a 3.5" format, that works out to 500GB per platter. That allows the 7200.12 products to squeeze 1TB of capacity onto just two discs with a sustained data rate of up to 160MB/s. The previous generation of drives used three platters in a 1TB capacity model. As with the previous 7200.11 generation drives, the latest are SATA 3.0 Gbps, spin at 7,200RPM and offer 16- and 32MB of cache. The lineup currently comes in 1TB, 750GB and 500GB models.
Rumors around Steve Jobs' health have been circulating for months now. Each time a new one pops up Apple stock takes a hit. Some of those rumors have, of course, proved totally unfounded. The concern gained ground recently when Jobs decided not to give the keynote address at Macworld. Today, Jobs put investors' fears at ease by saying that doctors have finally determined the cause of his recent weight loss. The problem stems from a hormone imbalance, the remedy for which is simple, but will take some time to control. Jobs assured investors he will continue on as Apple's CEO and the board of directors voiced their full support of Jobs. Apple's stock rose more than 3 percent in early trading today.
January 4, 2009
With the multimedia company experiencing a drastic amount of revenue lost recently, a staggering $19.7 million, it is cutting nearly 2,700 jobs. This is obviously in direct effect with the net loss it experienced, which is the lowest revenue in a total of five years. This has happened because of the demand for its music players falling, or so Creative is currently claiming. While the job cuts represent roughly half of the company’s work force, it still seems to be ready to deliver the Zii product or product line at the next upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, which is right around the corner.
While phishing websites are always on the security list for users, the common social network site known as Twitter has recently taken a hit. The link, which tells you that you have a funny blog about you on Blogspot, redirects users to a phony Twitter login page that steals your password once the unknowing person has entered it. Once it has your password, the hoax website may use your account to send the initial link to more people that are following an account, or an account that is following other users. Both the Twitter Eng and Ops teams are aware of the problem, but to be safe, members of the site are being advised to not click on any links.
January 3, 2009
G.Skill, manufacturer of memory for computers along with a few solid state disk drives, has announced new low latency DDR3-2000 kits known as Perfect Storm. This memory is rated at CL7 while bringing the 2,000MHz speed it comes with, unlike its other memory counterparts that were rated at both CL9 and CL8. The rated CAS latencies are at 7-8-7-20, though there is no official word yet on how loose these timings may or may not be to system overclockers. The new Perfect Storm memory kits are said to be available in 3GB and 6GB models with a outstanding G.Skill lifetime warranty.
While benchmarks have not yet been run against Vista and XP with Windows 7, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet did attempt to find out how it ran in some real-world tests. His research showed that the new beta of Microsoft’s operating system beat out both Windows Vista and Windows XP in multiple speed tests, while only failing at a select few. These tests include boot up time, shut down time, file maneuvers, installations, and other tasks. The tests systems including a AMD Phenom 9700 setup with ATI graphics, and a Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 with an NVIDIA graphics chipset. While these results could be both proven and disproven in a various amount of situations, it is interesting to see how much focus the operating system team is having on performance.
Even through Internet Explorer is still the most used internet browser and has been for some time, it is now losing its share. Net Applications has recently found that Firefox has just stepped over the twenty-one percent usage while Microsoft’s own browser has fallen below seventy percent. Even other browsers such as Chrome and Safari are experiencing gains, as the Apple browser went just over seven percent while Chrome went over one percent since it is out of beta. While users have been reporting instability with Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7, it seems as if more users will continue to stray away from the long time browser and switch over to others that only sport more speed and compatibility, but more features.
Called the first of its kind, the BT-1 which is designed to be Mac compatible, was debuted just yesterday. The webcam streams H.264 encoded video at a resolution of 640 x 480 as well as AAC-encoded audio at 48 kHz. While the device runs off its own wireless Bluetooth battery, it can be charged from a included USB cable and also comes with a flexible mini-tripod that allows users to change camera angles on the fly with ease. Ecamm plans to retail the device to $149.99 sometimes in the area of March. The BT-1 requires Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later to be compatible and work with Macintosh systems.
A team of scientists lead by the University of Glasgow have been given a grant of nearly half a million pounds ($725,000) to help with the development of nanostructures that could be used on digital imaging sensors. By creating these tiny patterns or structures in the metal film on a CMOS (Complimentary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) sensor, the sensitivity to light could be improved. That means higher quality images as well as the possibly of improved color discrimination. The project is expected to continue into 2012.
January 2, 2009
While the Atom right now is currently found inside of both smaller screen and smaller size notebooks and netbooks, it may change in the near future. This is keeping users of larger notebooks from using the processor inside of their own computers. Gadget Mix is reporting however that Hewlett-Packard is attempting to negotiate with Intel to let them use the Atom processor in notebooks that carry a screen larger than thirteen inches. Dell already has its Mini 12 powered by the Atom chip, so it will not come to much surprise if Intel lets HP use it in their larger sized notebook personal computers.
Just recently, Wikipedia has raised enough money to operate itself until the end of June. This money that was donated to the website will go to updating the infrastructure than mainly runs Wikipedia. Many users who use the online encyclopedia are happy to see the funds raised, because of its overwhelming popularity since users constantly refer to the website. While the initial donation goal was $6 million dollars, viewers of the website offered up a total of $6.2 million. In other related news, it seems that the website has a total of 250 millions viewers each and everyday that it is up.
In 2001, Sony partnered with Toshiba and IBM to create the Cell processor for its upcoming PlayStation 3 console. Sony wanted a brand new processing architecture, so the three companies committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not to mention the additional costs of building two production facilities. The target launch date for the PlayStation 3 was Christmas 2005. Little did Sony know that in late 2002, IBM would be approached by Microsoft to create the chip for its upcoming rival game console, the soon-to-be-named Xbox 360. IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft the specs for the Cell processor and told IBM to create a chip based around that core. The main benefit? Microsoft avoided a bulk of the R&D cost it would have otherwise had to spend. In addition, Microsoft backed up manfacturing capacity through a third party, so when the first iteration of chips had a problem, Sony had to wait six weeks to get those first chips, whereas Microsoft didn't, thus helping Microsoft hit its target launch for the Xbox 360 in November 2005. Now you may be thinking that IBM was in breach of contract, but Sony, IBM and Toshiba all agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell processor to other clients. Sony probably didn't even stop to consider that such a deal would be hammered out before it was completed, nor to its primary competitor. But I'm pretty sure any companies entering into similar deals will ensure the contract clearly states "upon completion" from now on.
January 1, 2009
With Dell, along with other electronic companies, it has developed location based business practices that allow people of a certain geological area to use their technology on a somewhat different level than others. This usually isn’t one of the greatest ideas of business practices, as people get left out. But now, Dell will be moving its business sales units to a size organization instead of a geology type setup. This will allows Dell to be more in-tune with their consumer base, as it will contain a large enterprise unit, a public unit, and a small and midsize business unit. These reorganizations practices have already taken place, and will continue to align its financial reporting as always with the new and improved structure.
A-DATA, the company that have brought consumers with all sorts of tech products to aid their computing needs, will be launching a product that allows solid state disk drives to be used in seven support RAID models. The company claims that a user who has two or more SSDs can use then in JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, Span, SADE33, SAFE50, or GUI, all with one click of a switch. This will allow owners of SSD drives to experience even faster speeds than they have with the new RAID setup, and the hardware that A-DATA is releasing for this to happen mounts to a 3.5-inch slot, just as a regular hard drive does. Both versions will be available around the first-quarter of this year, and the version that does not include RAID will run about $30, while the enclosure that features RAID functionality will cost around $60.
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