Windows 8 may be a piece of software, but it’s spawned computers the likes of which we’ve never seen before, including desktops that turn into tablets, tablets that turn into laptops, and laptops that fold backwards into tablets once more. The software is causing a proliferation of touchscreen devices, and breathing new life into the active stylus as well. Here, we’ll show you the hottest new Windows 8 and Windows RT devices you can buy, and trace them all the way back to when they were merely rumors.
Microsoft’s Windows 7 momentum shows no sign of slowing down despite the upcoming Windows 8 release in late October. The company revealed today that it has now sold over 630 million licenses of Windows 7, up 30 million from the previous figures released a month ago. Microsoft’s Tami Reller revealed the stats during a keynote appearance at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference today in Canada.
Reller also revealed that 50 percent of enterprise desktops are now running Windows 7, admitting that most upgrades are from the aging Windows XP operating system. In comparison, Apple announced last month at it had shipped 26 million copies of OS X Lion, 40 percent of the total Mac install base of 66 million. As Microsoft looks to Windows 8…
Microsoft’s Windows 7 momentum shows no sign of slowing down despite the upcoming Windows 8 release in late October. The company revealed today that it has now sold over 630 million licenses of Windows 7, up 30 million from the previous figures released a month ago. Microsoft’s Tami Reller revealed the stats during a keynote appearance at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference today in Canada.
Reller also revealed that 50 percent of enterprise desktops are now running Windows 7, admitting that most upgrades are from the aging Windows XP operating system. In comparison, Apple announced last month at it had shipped 26 million copies of OS X Lion, 40 percent of the total Mac install base of 66 million. As Microsoft looks to Windows 8…
Microsoft’s Windows 7 momentum shows no sign of slowing down despite the upcoming Windows 8 release in late October. The company revealed today that it has now sold over 630 million licenses of Windows 7, up 30 million from the previous figures released a month ago. Microsoft’s Tami Reller revealed the stats during a keynote appearance at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference today in Canada.
Reller also revealed that 50 percent of enterprise desktops are now running Windows 7, admitting that most upgrades are from the aging Windows XP operating system. In comparison, Apple announced last month at it had shipped 26 million copies of OS X Lion, 40 percent of the total Mac install base of 66 million. As Microsoft looks to Windows 8…
Microsoft’s Windows 7 momentum shows no sign of slowing down despite the upcoming Windows 8 release in late October. The company revealed today that it has now sold over 630 million licenses of Windows 7, up 30 million from the previous figures released a month ago. Microsoft’s Tami Reller revealed the stats during a keynote appearance at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference today in Canada.
Reller also revealed that 50 percent of enterprise desktops are now running Windows 7, admitting that most upgrades are from the aging Windows XP operating system. In comparison, Apple announced last month at it had shipped 26 million copies of OS X Lion, 40 percent of the total Mac install base of 66 million. As Microsoft looks to Windows 8…
Drobo’s been delivering quality desktop storage for businesses and prosumers for awhile now, but previously, the company hadn’t dipped its toe into Thunderbolt waters. But that’s about to change with its two new units. The 5D is a BYOD desktop offering with two Thunderbolt ports and one USB 3.0 socket for connecting up to five hot-swappable, 3.5-inch drives to your Mac or PC. It also has an mSATA SSD for data-caching quickness and a variable-speed fan to keep things cool and quiet. We don’t know exactly when the 5D will go on sale — Drobo’s not telling until July — but it’ll cost under $ 850 when it does, and that price includes a Thunderbolt cable.
Gallery: Drobo Mini and 5D press shots
Meanwhile, the Mini is the first Drobo meant to be taken on the road. It packs up to four 2.5-inch drives in its front bays, plus, like the 5D, there’s an mSATA SSD nestled in its underside that serves as a caching tier to speed up your main storage — all in a 7.3 x 1.8 x 7.1-inch package weighing three pounds when fully loaded. All the drives are hot-swappable, a process made simple and easy with a trick, spring-loaded mechanism (patent pending) that lets users swap drives as they would SD cards. As for connecting the thing to your computer, dual Thunderbolt ports (for daisy chaining) and one USB 3.0 port reside round back along with the power plug and two vents for the Mini’s variable-speed fans. Ringing the front face of the Mini are five LED strips that serve as drive indicators and capacity meter to let you know when a drive has failed or you’re running out of space. Intrigued? Well, we got a sneak peek at the Mini and a little history lesson about its origins at Drobo HQ, so join us past the break for more.
Drobo debuts a duo of Thunderbolt drives: the 5D for desktops and the Mini for road warriors originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jun 2012 03:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If building your own Ivy Bridge rig isn’t your thing, boutique desktop makers Maingear, Digital Storm, Velocity Micro, and Origin PC are all announcing that they can add one of the new chips to your next custom desktop order. Also, to coincide with the release of the new chips, Maingear is updating the design for its F131 tower ($ 1,468 with a 3.1GHz Core i5-3450 and 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7770 GPU), which adds the same VRTX Cooling Technology found in the company’s Shift rig ($ 1,552 for the stock version with the same processor and GPU). Maingear is also adding a new model called the Potenza, with a similar design and the same VRTX cooling, but built on a Mini-ITX motherboard for a svelte 7.4 x 9.25-inch footprint ($ 1,368 for the same config…
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Deep in the skunk works of its Research and Labs divisions, secreted around the Seattle area, Microsoft is working on totally reinventing the way people interact with their computers. Very little is out in the open or in more than a prototype form, but the work is unquestionably being done.
Last week it transpired that Microsoft is working on building Kinect into the bezels of laptops, and after that, presumably, tablets and eventually mobile phones. But it’s not just about building out the install base for Dance Central 3. It’s enabling the next generation of awareness in our electronics. The iPhone ushered in an era where our devices know when we touch them. Microsoft is working on the next one, in which our devices will simply know us.
How do you, as a person, experience the world around you? You mostly see and hear, and to a lesser extent you touch, taste, smell. Our devices, however, are largely restricted to an extremely limited sense of touch. Why shouldn’t they be more like us?
There’s a good reason, actually: computers don’t need to be like people because computers aren’t people. For years this has held true: the computer’s primary purpose for decades was to sit still and perform calculations humans couldn’t do. Interaction with a computer was strictly input, output. You didn’t interact so much as instruct, and wait for the result.
But mobile phones and touchscreens and laptops began changing the idea of a computer into something more personal, more interactive, more two-way. And technology exists to let our devices become more human. Why not let them?
Microsoft wants to. Despite their reputation among tech enthusiasts as a sort of stodgy blue-chip still coasting on the PC explosion of the late 90s and early 2000s, their R&D sections are world-class and put out actually innovative ideas and devices all the time. The trouble, briefly stated, is that implementing these ideas as products that fit into the Microsoft ecosystem isn’t easy, and even if it were, Microsoft has no talent for it.
But this work on “Natural User Interaction,” or NUI, is more promising. People have embraced the idea in gaming: the Wii led the way and the Kinect brought the future into your living room, though the future is a little laggy and the voice controls spotty. People are simply interested in new ways of interacting with their content and devices. For years the promise of a different kind of interaction has been dangling, in the form of sci-fi shows and movies usually, and people have always been intrigued by it.
So people want it — and Microsoft wants to make it — and they have the technology. Purchasing the IP behind the Kinect was an extremely smart move, maybe smarter than they know. What started out as a way to cash in on the market the Wii had created has snowballed into an entirely new form of interacting with computers, and a way for Microsoft to differentiate itself meaningfully for years to come.
It was reported to me that one of the things the new Kinect/depth/IR sensors will do is read lips. At first it sounds silly. Why? Maybe so it can better interpret your words from across the room, or in a loud environment. You won’t have to turn the music down to search and navigate the web on your TV or tablet.
And then it becomes clear that it’s just part of a larger suite of “senses” the device would have. The new devices are to have face recognition and voice recognition, so your password will be you saying your password in your own voice, not someone else, and not a print-out of you. They’ll be able to pick you out of a crowd, say a small party, and will be able to tell when you’re giving it a command — because you make eye contact and move your lips. Again, it sounds perfectly ridiculous until it starts sounding perfectly natural.
Another feature described was a sort of 3D desktop on which you could actually grab files and place them here and there. This has been tried before, of course, and Windows 8 is looking decided two-dimensional, so it’s probably more of a research project than anything. But it’s still interesting. Think of the basic gestures you might be able to make. One was described as pulling out a drawer. In the surprisingly resilient desktop metaphor of files and folders, what could be more natural? Or perhaps raising your hand palm up to show the task bar or dock? Trace your finger in a counter-clockwise circle to undo, clockwise to redo?
User experience reflects both the needs of the user and the capabilities of the device. For a few years now we’ve been satisfied with running our fingers along a slab of glass, producing an electrical signal interpreted as a point or blob — mainly because capacitive screens got good and cheap, and nobody wants to plug a mouse into their phone. But there are many other ways of interacting with our new mobile objects and information. Soon the glass touchscreen will seem as quaint as the command-line interface.
And yet, some are no doubt thinking, we still have some command-line interfaces in use. Sure. And mice and keyboards are still better for productivity, and a pen and paper is better for sketching out ideas, and headphones are better for listening to music in public. There are countless use cases and potential applications of technology, but it’s good to recognize when one should give way or simply isn’t applicable.
Microsoft is working hard at this, and you’d better believe that Apple is too, though they aren’t nearly as open about their research. And for once, they seem to actually be missing a piece of the technology pie: Microsoft has a head start on them in the world of NUI, having purchased and developed depth and personal sensors for at least two years now. Apple can always throw money at the problem, but it’s pretty clear that Microsoft has perceived this rare advantage and will be using it as a wedge wherever possible.
This shouldn’t be taken as an indication that Windows 8 is going to be anything other than advertised, but I think it will be a test bed for some major changes coming down the line. Microsoft wants to change the way people interact with computers because it sees, hopefully not too late, that the old way, the PC way, treating a computer like a box that computes things, is on its way out in a hurry. So if computers are going to be a part of the real world, they need to be able to live in that world. Eyes, ears, and who knows what else. It’s only creepy until you can’t live without it.
[images: Matthew Fisher/Stanford, Wolfgang Herfuntner]
Looking to add a dash of extremity to your gaming existence? Maingear’s got you covered, now that it’s added a second generation Intel Core i7 CPU to a handful of its desktop offerings. Today, the company announced yet another upgrade to its SHIFT, Quantum SHIFT and F131 desktops, with the addition of the Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor. According to Maingear, this extra horsepower will provide gamers with a 34 percent improvement in performance at normal speeds, while offering similar enhancements in video editing and 3D rendering capabilities. That’s all thanks to the fact that the i7-3960X can be overclocked at a handsome 5.2GHz, with a quad-channel memory structure that brings even more bandwidth to the table. On top of that, the company has also added its own EPIC Audio Engine to this troika of rigs, using Aphex’s processing technology to offer audio that, according to Maingear, is “more balanced, more articulated, and simply put, better sounding.” The revamped desktops are on sale now, so hit up the source link for more information, or check out the full PR, after the break.
Continue reading Maingear brings Intel i7-3960X Extreme Edition chip, Epic Audio Engine to desktops, extreme gamers
Maingear brings Intel i7-3960X Extreme Edition chip, Epic Audio Engine to desktops, extreme gamers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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AMDs Bulldozer is the company’s anticipated high-power rival to Intel’s Core i7 and the company just released a slew of new information about its internals. Now, pay attention 007 — the “Zambezi for Socket AM3+” chips will include four modules, each with two cores and 2MB of L2 cache. Operating above these is a single Northbridge with 8MB of L3 cache to direct data between two 72-bit DDR3 channels and 4 x 16-bit receive / transmit HyperTransport links. Finally, the “Turbo Core” increases the whole chip’s click speed when taxed or kills power to idle cores when it’s not. Hustle on down to the source link to see the slides yourself.
[Thanks, Bertrandsbox]
More details emerge on AMDs Bulldozer for high-end desktops originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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