Friday, March 27, 2009
For our young bloggers out there...
The Youth Bloggers Network is officially joining the Teens in Tech network. They have been communicating with CEO Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens in Tech over the past month or so, discussing the best course of actions for both of their endeavors to take. They decided that by joining forces, their projects could help each other vastly. They figured that YBN and TinT complement each other very nicely. TinT offers a place where teens can get set up with a free blog, while YBN offers a community for young bloggers to collaborate, communicate, and grow their blogs and projects.
*~*~*
What is WiMax?
WiMAX, is the cutting-edge network technology is the successor to Wi-Fi and is presently only open through Sprint to residents of Baltimore. However, that strictly limited availability should expand notably during 2009 and 2010 as communications giant Sprint extends its WiMAX reach to a number of major cities across the country.
"Sprint continues to lead the wireless industry by harnessing the power of WiMAX," enthused Spring 4G vice president Todd Rowley in an official statement.
"The availability of Sprint 4G in more places this year and our aggressive expansion of Sprint 4G service demonstrates our commitment to provide 4G capabilities and devices nationwide for our business, consumer and government customers," he added. "These capabilities enable significantly enhanced performance and productivity for our customers."
Specifically, 2009 will see the technology rolled out in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle, while 2010 will introduce Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington D. C. into the 4G mix.
*~*~*
Looking for a BlackBerry Bold but don't want to pay the full price for one? Well, if you're willing to accept a refurbished unit, then AT&T certainly has a deal for you. The carrier is currently offering refurbished BlackBerry Bolds for free, as long as you're willing to commit yourself to a new 2-year contract. Considering that the price of a normal refurbished BlackBerry Bold is $199.99, it's quite a good deal. It seems that this promotion is only valid for a very limited time, so check it out as soon as you can.
*~*~*
Intel engineers are detailing the inner-workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.
During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.
This is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said.
The centerpiece of the chip's core is the vector unit, used to process many operations simultaneously. "The interesting part of the programming model is the SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector unit and the instructions that go with it," he said. "We want to show off this big new vector unit and the instruction set," he added.
He described what the vector unit can do and how it works with the scalar unit. "(The vector unit) can do 16 floating point operations every single clock. That's a lot of horsepower. Even in just one of these cores--and we have a lot of these cores. So it's a very high-throughput unit. The good thing is that it's independent of the scalar unit. You can issue instructions on the scalar unit and vector unit at the same time. The scalar unit is extremely useful for calculating addresses, doing flow control, doing housekeeping--and keeps all those miscellaneous tasks off the real powerhouse, which is the vector unit."
*~*~*
It looks like Blizzard is stirring the pot again for some juicy developments behind the scenes. As some of us probably know, they're currently working on (or at least maybe still in the planning stages) five games. They are, in no particular order:
* StarCraft II
* Diablo III
* a new World of Warcraft expansion
* a next-gen MMO
* and a yet to be revealed game
This last item was first hinted in a statement from Blizzard's COO, Paul Sams, back in 2006. At that time he said, "I wouldn't be surprised to see a new franchise from us at some time in the future; there's certainly a desire to do so."
Now it seems that we're getting some developments on that new game that they've yet to be revealed. Two new job postings from Blizzard indicate that they're looking for software engineers (one for gameplay, another for client) to work on "an unannounced title."
rumor has it they are talking with Microsoft about being part of the next-gen Xbox 360, which they want to be more RTS-friendly.
The Youth Bloggers Network is officially joining the Teens in Tech network. They have been communicating with CEO Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens in Tech over the past month or so, discussing the best course of actions for both of their endeavors to take. They decided that by joining forces, their projects could help each other vastly. They figured that YBN and TinT complement each other very nicely. TinT offers a place where teens can get set up with a free blog, while YBN offers a community for young bloggers to collaborate, communicate, and grow their blogs and projects.
*~*~*
What is WiMax?
WiMAX, is the cutting-edge network technology is the successor to Wi-Fi and is presently only open through Sprint to residents of Baltimore. However, that strictly limited availability should expand notably during 2009 and 2010 as communications giant Sprint extends its WiMAX reach to a number of major cities across the country.
"Sprint continues to lead the wireless industry by harnessing the power of WiMAX," enthused Spring 4G vice president Todd Rowley in an official statement.
"The availability of Sprint 4G in more places this year and our aggressive expansion of Sprint 4G service demonstrates our commitment to provide 4G capabilities and devices nationwide for our business, consumer and government customers," he added. "These capabilities enable significantly enhanced performance and productivity for our customers."
Specifically, 2009 will see the technology rolled out in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle, while 2010 will introduce Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington D. C. into the 4G mix.
*~*~*
Looking for a BlackBerry Bold but don't want to pay the full price for one? Well, if you're willing to accept a refurbished unit, then AT&T certainly has a deal for you. The carrier is currently offering refurbished BlackBerry Bolds for free, as long as you're willing to commit yourself to a new 2-year contract. Considering that the price of a normal refurbished BlackBerry Bold is $199.99, it's quite a good deal. It seems that this promotion is only valid for a very limited time, so check it out as soon as you can.*~*~*
Intel engineers are detailing the inner-workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.
During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.
This is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said.
The centerpiece of the chip's core is the vector unit, used to process many operations simultaneously. "The interesting part of the programming model is the SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector unit and the instructions that go with it," he said. "We want to show off this big new vector unit and the instruction set," he added.
He described what the vector unit can do and how it works with the scalar unit. "(The vector unit) can do 16 floating point operations every single clock. That's a lot of horsepower. Even in just one of these cores--and we have a lot of these cores. So it's a very high-throughput unit. The good thing is that it's independent of the scalar unit. You can issue instructions on the scalar unit and vector unit at the same time. The scalar unit is extremely useful for calculating addresses, doing flow control, doing housekeeping--and keeps all those miscellaneous tasks off the real powerhouse, which is the vector unit."
*~*~*
It looks like Blizzard is stirring the pot again for some juicy developments behind the scenes. As some of us probably know, they're currently working on (or at least maybe still in the planning stages) five games. They are, in no particular order:
* StarCraft II
* Diablo III
* a new World of Warcraft expansion
* a next-gen MMO
* and a yet to be revealed game
This last item was first hinted in a statement from Blizzard's COO, Paul Sams, back in 2006. At that time he said, "I wouldn't be surprised to see a new franchise from us at some time in the future; there's certainly a desire to do so."
Now it seems that we're getting some developments on that new game that they've yet to be revealed. Two new job postings from Blizzard indicate that they're looking for software engineers (one for gameplay, another for client) to work on "an unannounced title."
rumor has it they are talking with Microsoft about being part of the next-gen Xbox 360, which they want to be more RTS-friendly.
Labels: ATT, blackberry, blizzard, blogging, graphic, intel, sprint, wimax, WoW
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