Stealth.Com Introduces a New ‘Ultra’ Compact Mini PC

Press release:
Stealth.com Inc. (Stealth Computer) a leading ISO 9001 manufacturer of industrial rugged computers and peripherals has released a new form factor of mini pc, the model LPC-100 their smallest to date.

The new Stealth ultra small form factor PC offers tremendous processing power in a tiny package that measures only 4.0″ x 6.1″ x 1.45″ (102mm x 155mm x 37mm) or about the size of a paperback novel. The machine weighs in at a mere 1.2lbs or .62kg. The Stealth ultra small PC outperforms most other small sized PC systems due to the integration of the latest Intel® Core™ 2 Duo mobile processors. The LPC-100 is available with a standard Intel Dual Core Celeron T3100 (1.9GHz) or optional Intel Core 2 Duo processors P8400 (2.26Ghz) or T9400 (2.53Ghz). Stealth’s space saving computer utilizes the Intel Mobile GM45 Express Chipset featuring Intel’s graphic media accelerator with superior 3D graphics performance.

“The Stealth Model: LPC-100 offers more processing power per square inch than any of the small form factor computers we have built to date. This full featured machine utilizes the latest Intel core 2 duo mobile processor technology outperforming most of today’s desktop and mobile PCs and it does so in a fraction of the space.” stated Ed Boutilier, CEO of Stealth.com Inc.

The LPC-100 mini PC features a multitude of I/O connectivity built directly into its impressively small design such as; Gigabit LAN, 3-USB, 2-Serial, 1-DVI-I Video, Audio In/Out and 2-PS/2 ports. The LPC-100 supports up to 4GB of DDR3 memory and has a built-in 2.5″ mobile hard drive with up to 500GB’s of storage space for archived data. For applications that require extra high shock, vibration and wide temperature ranges an optional SSD (Solid State Hard Drive) is available. Systems are compatible with Microsoft Windows 7/XP, Linux etc and can be custom configured to meet the exact needs of the OEM or end user. Stealth’s LittlePC products serve a demanding market where powerful solutions are being deployed in space-challenged applications around the world. Embedded Control, Digital Signs, Kiosks, Mobile Navigation, Thin-Clients, POS & Human/Machine Interface are just a few of the applications that are ideal for Stealth’s industry trusted products.

Rumor: Google Nexus Two next month

According to the latest rumor, Google is presently working on the successor to Nexus One, dubbed Nexus Two.

Tech site Neowin have been tipped by an anonymous Google insider revealing that the search giant is going to release Nexus Two within the next month. No pricing, date or any technical specifications were hinted at.

The rumor is particularly interesting as it goes against two factors: poor sales and Google’s unwillingness to venture into the hardware side of the smartphones biz.

Nexus One sold a mere 135,000 units in the first three months, and was even dropped by US telecom Sprint due to poor sales and the oncoming of HTC Evo 4G.

Also, earlier in the month Google had stated that Nexus One was only strategy to promote the Android platform, which it did successfully, and that there was no need for a successor product:

The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did. It was so successful, we didn’t have to do a second one. We would view that as positive but people criticized us heavily for that. I called up the board and said: ‘Ok, it worked. Congratulations – we’re stopping’. We like that flexibility, we think that flexibility is characteristic of nimbleness at our scale.

There has been no word from Google regarding the rumors. We won’t be taking bets but it is highly unlikely we will be seeing a new device from Google.

Source: Neowin, Pocketnow.

Microsoft readying IE9 Public Beta for September

Come September, Microsoft will give a taste of what’s it’s gearing up to regain all that browser market share they have lost to Firefox and the relatively-new Google Chrome. The Redmond giant said on Thursday that they are hard at work in readying an Internet Explorer 9 public beta for September.

This was announced at the annual Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting on July 29 by COO Kevin Turner. While an exact date is yet to be confirmed, Neowin believes the public beta will be released on September 2.

With IE9, Microsoft is looking to shake up its image for producing sub-standard browsers by supporting and featuring new technologies that will benefit developers and users both. IE9 will provide developers tools to use the power of the GPU to render pages by using CSS, DHTML and javascript. A new JS engine, codenamed Chakra, is also being built for the browser that will offer greater standard support and compatibility. Microsoft is also planning wider support for HTML 5 with its new script engine. For the users, IE9 will also feature enhanced tabbed browsing that will offer better functionality and extended tab management options; a new download manager and add-on support.

Source: Neowin.

Motorola Droid X advert takes shot at Apple

Ooh yeah. The battle for smartphone market dominance wages on, and the players involved are reserving no punches. While Apple relented in providing free cases to every iPhone 4 owner after the antenna issue became a national debate, Motorola saw it as an opportunity to strut its own stuff and take a dig at the competition in one shot.

Motorola published a new advert for its Android-based Droid X, adding in a new tag line which reads ‘No Jacket Required’, poking fun at Apple’s solution to the iPhone 4′s reception troubles.

This also a reply-back to Apple dig attempts at Droid X when they released a short video showing how to loose reception on the Motorola device. Embedded below:

Source: Neowin.

Amazon unveils new Kindle

Amazon has announced an “all-new’ version of its popular e-book reader Kindle. The new version brings a host of new features and a light, slimmer bod to the device.

With the new Kindle – which is now 21 percent smaller, 15 percent lighter, can hold a months worth of charge and features double the storage capacity – Amazon hopes that the device remains an attractive choice despite other high-end offerings from other manufacturers like the Apple iPad and similar sized tablet PCs.

Other than the design overhaul, Amazon has also introduced a slew of new features: improvements on the device’s 6″ e-ink screen, quieter page turn buttons, ability to share passages from e-books over Facebook or Twitter, an improved PDF reader, updated web browser and new Text-to-Speech capabilities.

The new Kindle will now also be available in WiFi, with users able to select from a WiFi only model ($139) or a WiFi + 3G capable model ($189). The device is scheduled to release on August 27 in 140 countries.

Source: Amazon.

Rumor: Google launching Facebook competitive

You have probably heard of Google Me, an initiative from the search giants into the alluring social networking’s million dollar market. While there is nothing concrete yet, rumors are rife again with news that Google is in talks with several casual game developers to be a part of its competitive service to Facebook.

The list of developers include Playdom, Electronic Arts’s Playfish and Zynda Game Network – a company in which Google recently dolled out in. Although little is known about Google Me, it is said that the development is already progress at the Google factory. Eric Schmidty, Google head honcho, declined to confirm any rumors regarding the upcoming service but when pushed further on if the service would be similar to Facebook, he said: “the world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing.”

With social networking being a billion dollar industry in China and Japan, and a $700 million dollar industry in the US, it’s no surprise that Google wants a slice of the pie.

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

Apple release update for Safari 5

Press release:
Apple today released Safari 5.0.1, turning on Safari Extensions and introducing the Safari Extensions Gallery. Apple introduced extensions support in Safari 5 in June so developers could begin creating extensions with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web standards. With Safari Extensions Gallery, users can quickly find extensions that add powerful new features to Safari, from toolbars that display live web feeds to sophisticated programs that filter web content. Safari 5.0.1 allows users to download and install extensions either from the Safari Extensions Gallery or directly from a developer’s site.

“Safari 5 has been a big hit, and user response to the innovative new Safari Reader has been fantastic,” said Brian Croll, Apple’s vice president of OS X Product Marketing. “We’re thrilled to see so many leading developers creating great extensions and think our users are going to love being able to customize Safari.”

“Millions of our customers already use Amazon Wish Lists to store items they want to buy for themselves or receive as gifts,” said Gianna Puerini, vice president of Worldwide Design and Community at Amazon.com. “With Safari 5, we were able to quickly build the Add to Amazon Wish List extension that lets customers add items from any website to their Amazon Wish List with the click of a button.”

“We’re excited to continue working closely with Apple to bring visually compelling Bing experiences to Safari,” said Jeff Henshaw, general manager of Bing User Experience. “The Bing Extension for Safari brings Bing search intelligence to everyday browsing with Safari. When a user selects text in Safari, Bing instantly recognizes what they might need and pops up helpful, informative tips, from real time maps and driving directions to real time translations to direct web search results.”

“Using web standard technologies and Safari’s extension builder, we developed an MLB.com extension to give fans another way to consume up-to-the-moment baseball content, including live look-ins to games, right from the Safari toolbar,” said Noah Garden, executive vice president, Commerce and Sponsorship at MLB.com.

“Our extension for Safari is a great way for readers to get all of the latest breaking news and all the important stories, blogs and columns they want to see,” said Denise Warren, general manager, NYTimes.com at The New York Times Company. “While you browse other sites in Safari, our extension checks for updates and slides in new headlines and thumbnails, so you won’t miss a thing.”

“Creating our Twitter extension in Safari couldn’t have been easier,” said Jason Goldman, vice president of Product at Twitter. “By providing features like the ability to tweet about a page and view trending topics, we’ve created a simple way to deliver relevant, interesting content to people regardless of where they are on the web.”

The Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible from the Safari menu or at extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, and there’s no need to restart the browser. Extensions can be automatically updated and are easily managed within Safari. Users can enable or disable individual extensions, or turn off all extensions with one click.

Safari Extensions are built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web standards, and can have all the power and functionality of advanced web applications. Every Safari Extension is signed with a digital certificate from Apple to prevent tampering and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions are sandboxed, so they can’t access information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer. For increased stability, Safari Extensions run solely in the browser.

Safari 5 also features Safari Reader, which presents single and multipage articles on the web in a new, scrollable view without distracting content or clutter. The Nitro JavaScript engine runs JavaScript up to 30 percent faster than Safari 4.* Built on the open source WebKit engine developed by Apple, Safari 5 includes more than a dozen powerful new HTML5 features for creating media-rich experiences, like full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video.

Facebook security troubles again, 100 million accounts exposed

Recent developments has put Facebook’s security concerns back into the spotlight.  A hacker from Skull Security complied information from 100 million Facebook accounts and published them on the web via bittorrent.

According to thinq.co.uk, the hacker used a program to harvest data from Facebook and gathered information from user accounts that had their privacy settings to allow them to be included in search engines.

This cannot be called as an hack attempt as the information was collected from users who did not bother to change their security settings. However, this again raises debate on Facebook’s stand against practices to make user’s default settings to private.

Source: Thinq.

Microsoft Street Slide: An Inception like Street View

Microsoft have developed a new tool to enhance the current functionality of its Bing Streetside street view. The new feature is called ‘Street Slide’ and will allow users to ‘move’ through city blocks, and enter and leave seamlessly as if you were flicking through a bunch of photographs.

A normal street view behaves by placing photos side by side in a constructed illusion of being there, allowing you to move through them like a slow stop-motion video.  However, it is not intuitive enough and is a clunky mess moving through a few paces. This is where Street Slide..err, slides in. Giving off a very striking Inception effect, it bends city blocks by stringing them together with panoramic photos, after which users can to flick through them like an album and choose to visit whichever place they like. For a better understanding, watch the video below.

Microsoft research will be showcasing the new tech at the upcoming computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles, CA.

Source: Neowin.

AMD Ups The Workstation Ante With A New FirePro Driver

Title: AMD Ups The Workstation Ante With A New FirePro Driver @ Phoronix
Direct Link: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15158
Summary: “Whether you are an owner of an ATI FirePro V3800 that retails for just over $100 USD, the proud owner of an ATI FirePro V8800 that goes for over $1,300 USD, or any of the FirePro products in-between, you will want to update your graphics driver when AMD puts out their next stable software update. Back in March AMD put out an amazing FirePro Linux driver that increased the performance of their workstation graphics cards already on the market (and the other Evergreen-based workstation cards that entered the market soon after) by an astonishing amount. Our independent tests of this proprietary Linux driver update found that the performance in some workstation applications had increased by up to 59% by simply installing this updated driver while other OpenGL tests had just improved rather modestly with 20%+ gains. AMD though is preparing to release another driver update for Microsoft Windows and Linux that ups their workstation graphics performance even more! We have run some tests of this new beta driver against their older driver with both their low-end and ultra-high-end FirePro products and have found the improvements again to be astonishing.”

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