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Showing posts from February, 2011

Intel's Light Peak to Debut Thursday

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The technology world loves rumors, in fact, I think that they live, breath, eat and sleep rumors. I feel that if there were no internet rumors, then we would have a lot of depressed computer people out there with nothing to do to fill their free time. It's quite sad really. But, alas, we have another rumor floating around the internet that all the little techies are drooling over and that is the rumor that Intel will officially launch its Light Peak high-speed connection technology this Thursday. This great speculation comes from Intel telling the media that it will "host a press briefing to discuss a new technology that is about to appear on the market." CNET apparently has "an industry source familiar with details of the event" and says that it will indeed be Light Peak. Other speculation surrounding this news is concerning whether or not this launch will have anything to do with the new MacBook Pros also set to be launched on Thursday. Rumors have been circul

New Fab 42 from Intel

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On Friday, February 18, Intel announced that they will be constructing a brand new $5 billion fab in Arizona. The fab will be used for the manufacturing of chips using a 14-nm manufacturing process and leading edge 300-mm wafers. In the statement that Intel released on Friday, it was said that the new fab would be called Fab 42. Construction of the facility will begin sometime in the middle of 2011. Intel is saying that Fab 42 will be "the most advanced, high-volume manufacturing facility in the world." It should be finished in 2013. The announcement about Intel’s latest investment was made on the same day that President Obama toured an Intel facility in Hillsboro, Oregon. While at the facility, Obama decided to go ahead and name Intel’s chief executive Paul Otellini as a member of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Going along with this, it is definitely not coincidental that the new fab that Intel is constructing will create "thousands of construction and perman

Google Searches Drop while Bing Searches Rise

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In the great search engine war, two competitors reign supreme above all others, Google and Bing. While there are a lot of search engines out there, none get the attention or press like these two. Google has its name everywhere and you can hardly flip through the channels without seeing a commercial for Bing. But exactly how close are these two competitors when it comes to number of users? Closer than you might think, actually. Even though Google is still the leader of the U.S. search engines, it did see a drop in market share slightly in January whereas Bing continued to pick up more steam. For the first month of 2011, Google's portion of all searches dropped by 1 percentage point to 65.6%. While this was happening to Google, Bing's portion of searches jumped up 1.1 percentage point to 13.1%. This left the other search engine Yahoo flat with a 16.1% cut of all searches in January. These numbers are right in line with a pattern that for the past several months has plagued Google

'Jeopardy!' Contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter Face Off Against Watson, the Super Computer from IBM

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It will be a battle fit for the record books, one that will go down in history alongside Gettysburg and World War II. Only this one will not be fought with swords, guns or armies, but with little clickers and incredible knowledge. That's right, I am talking about the epic showdown set to take place on Jeopardy! this coming Monday which pits two of the show's biggest all-time winners, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, against Watson, a computer designed by IBM. If you are not familiar with the popular game show that tests contestants' knowledge in a wide range of categories, then you will not know who Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter are. To put it simply, Jennings won a grand total of $3,022,700 on the show coming in second only to Brad Rutter who took home a total of $3,255,102. Needless to say, these gentlemen are extremely smart and ready to test their wits against the ultimate competitor, technology. According to Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the

Intel Design Flaw Affects HP Availability

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The tech world has been buzzing over Intel's second generation of processors known as "Sandy Bridge", but now they might be buzzing in a slightly different way as a major design flaw is stirring things up with not only Intel but other technology companies that have invested in devices using the processors. HP has stated that the availability of some of their devices will be "impacted" by the design flaw in the chips that was recently disclosed by Intel. This flaw will also delay a product presentation by HP that is scheduled to take place in San Francisco next week. According to a statement by Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, "We are postponing the business notebooks briefing on February 10 as the availability of HP products will be impacted by the flaw outlined by Intel." Intel said in a statement on January 31 that it will incur $1 billion in missed sales and higher costs to fix this design flaw. This flaw is also affecting PC makers like Samsung,