The humble but able Ethernet cable forms the basis of the proposed HDBaseT standard
The guys over at DailyTech are reporting on an up and coming new A/V standard that, unlike most new A/V standards, actually makes sense.
The beautifully simple new standard, which is called HDBaseT, is turning to the humble and ubiquitous Ethernet cable to provide a cheap and easy way to pipe HD and 3-D video around your home. We assumed that such a simple and common sense idea would have been dreamt up by an unknown startup company looking for some positive headlines but HDBaseT has been developed by a industry group that includes LG, Samsung, Sony and Valens Semiconductor.
Netbook News has come up with this video footage of an Android tablet powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor. The video only shows off footage of Gridiron game BackBreaker, but there are enough details to grab our attention.
The Tegra 2 is a next-generation, ARM Cortex 9 processor, which is a generation ahead of the chipset found inside the Apple iPad.
The prototype on display is said to have 1GB of RAM, a front facing webcam and microphone, a MicroSD slot, 2 USB slots and possibly a slot for loading in a SIM card.
Nvidia has announced that it is in cahoots with various partners, including Alienware, Asus, Dell, Microsoft and Toshiba, in order to bring 3D PCs to the world. Speaking at the Computex expo in Taipei, Nvidia also welcomed Asus chief Jerry Shen to the stage to announce three new 3D capable PCs.
“Asus has a strong track record of pioneering new categories of PCs, as we did with the netbook,” said Shen.“Now Asus is very bullish on developing the 3D PC category by shipping notebooks, desktops and an all-in-one PC equipped with Nvidia 3D Vision. We believe that all entertainment-based PCs will become 3D capable within a few years.”
Qualcomm’s has just started shipping its latest generation chipsets to manufacturers. Offering two application processor cores running at 1.2 GHz, integrated graphics core and 1080p video encoding those should become available on high-end smartphones in the near future.
The Snapdragon MSM8660′s integrated graphics core supports OpenGL 2.0 and allows 1080p video recording and playback. The maximum display resolution support is extended to 1280×800 pixels with 24-bit color. The other features of the chipset include an integrated GPS receiver and dual-mode HSPA+/CDMA and 1xEV-DO Rev. B capabilities.
A look at some of the high-density server and networking gear inside the Weta Digital data center used to render the animation for the new James Cameron movie "Avatar." (Photo: Foundry Networks Inc.)
It takes a lot of data center horsepower to create the stunning visual effects behind blockbuster movies such as King Kong, X-Men, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and most recently, James Cameron’s $230 million Avatar. Tucked away in Wellington, New Zealand are the facilities where visual effects company Weta Digital renders the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth and Pandora at a campus of studios, production facilities, soundstages and a purpose-built data center.
A set of company slides leaked to the press reveals that NVIDIA is claiming the upper hand in tessellation performance. With this achievement, NVIDIA is looking to encourage leaps in geometric detail, probably in future games that make use of tessellation. NVIDIA’s confidence comes from the way its GF100 GPU is designed (further explained here). Each GF100 GPU physically has 16 Polymorph Engines, one per streaming multiprocessor (SM) which helps in distributed, parallel geometry processing. Each Polymorph Engine has its own tessellation unit. With 15 SMs enabled on the GeForce GTX 480 and 14 on the GeForce GTX 470, there are that many independent tessellation units.
A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users. Not normally the kind of thing you’d expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one, if timed a bit oddly. The world of hard disks is set to change, and the impact could be severe. In the remarkably conservative world of PC hardware, it’s not often that a 30-year-old convention gets discarded. Even this change has been almost a decade in the making.
An optional update to Windows closes a number of hacks that counterfeiters have used to bypass the product activation technologies built into Windows 7. With the update, Windows will try to restore Windows to its proper state, as well as marking tampered versions as non-genuine copies of the operating system.
Microsoft said on Thursday that it is planning an update to Windows 7 that will close a number of loopholes that counterfeiters had used to thwart the operating system’s built-in anti-piracy measures.
Willow Garage is organizing a workshop at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2010 in San Francisco to discuss the intersection of computer vision with human-robot interaction. Willow Garage is the hardware and open source software organization behind the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the PR robot development platform. Here’s a recent video from Willow Garage of work done at the University of Illinois on how robots can be taught to perceive images:
