November 2nd, 2009
by pepo
Would you pay $30 a month for iTunes-based television streaming? According to Peter Kafka at All Things Digital, Apple is making the rounds to TV execs to get them on board with a plan to offer their programming via iTunes on a subscription basis.
Kafka says that if any company is willing to make the jump, it’s Disney. They were the first to offer its downloads of its ABC programming on iTunes (though it was late to the party with Hulu).
If it pans out, it might give the Apple TV (essentially an iTunes media extender) a boost or at further justify the purchase for heavy users of the iTunes ecosystem.
If enough networks sign up, will you be ditching your cable box for iTunes? Will it make Apple TV worth another look?
Source: All Things Digital
New details on Microsoft’s Zune HD are cropping up soon after official looking product shots hit the ‘net.
What’s shaping up to be a shot across the iPod Touch’s bow, the newest Zunes are expected to sport a 16:9 OLED screen, complete with capacitive multitouch functionality, and an HDMI port for easy connectivity to TVs and home theater systems.
Curiouser and curiouser…
Source: PC World
If Internet chatter is any indication, you’ll be able to stroll down to the Sprint store on May 17 and pick up a Palm Pre. Sure it’s a rumor, but some factors like a new round of employee training and a vacation blackout during May are lending credence to the rumblings.
We’ll know soon enough if the rumors are true. For now, prep your fingers for webOS…
April 6th, 2009
by Rafael Hernandez
You just can’t keep a good, widely used and loved operating system down, or so te theory goes. Microsoft may, or may not, have extended their cutoff date for Windows XP sales. Their XP downgrade program allows a company to offer their customers the option of giving up their Vista license for a shiney XP one.
There’s no word on whether or not they’ll be allowing Windows 7 downgrades but one could imagine system vendors to take full advantage of the deal in order to load up their new fangled netbooks with XP.
Source: PC World
Images and technical details on ATI’s upcoming Radeon HD 4890 card have surfaced on the Chinese forum PC Online. So far it looks like the core will sport clock speeds of 850MHz–1GHz limit utilizing Overdrive–and memory will zip by at 3.9GHz. A 40nm die shrink is also suspected.
Visit PC Online (Google Translate) for a couple more angles on the pixel pushing silicon.
[via Trusted Reviews]
February 16th, 2009
by Rafael Hernandez
ATI isn’t very comfortable sitting in second place to Nvidia in the “fastest graphics card” match up so they’re busy at work prepping their new Radeon HD 4890 or so the rumor mill would like for us all to believe. bit-tech has some supposed information for everyone to digest, hopefully it’s all true because it sounds like a beast of a graphics card:
As a point of comparison, a standard Radeon HD 4870 has a GPU clock speed of 750MHz and an effective GDDR5 memory clock speed of 3.6GHz. The site also claims that the GPU will have a comparatively high operating voltage of 1.3V, but makes no mention of an increase in the number of stream processors or texture units, meaning that the GPU would just offer a hike in clock speeds.
When we first looked at the Radeon HD 4870, we noticed that there were two spare solder pads next to the card’s Vitec 59PR9853 multi-phase inductor, which regulates the voltage of the GPU, so a larger VRM could be installed on an existing RV770 PCB to accommodate a new GPU with a higher voltage.
A nice stopgap until their next generation of chips are released.
