Intel Corp. expects a draft specification for blade servers to help vendors cut their development costs and push the space-saving systems into new markets.
Developed by the Server System Infrastructure (SSI) Forum, the draft Modular Server Specifications were unveiled Monday in Taipei, where many of the world’s largest hardware makers are based. Similar to a reference design, the the board, chassis and power supply vendors that are doing the actual development — it gives them a common point of reference to bring to market platforms that can easily integrate with other vendors’ products,” said Patrick Buddenbaum, blade marketing director at Intel’s Server Platforms Group, in a telephone interview.
(Full article ‘Intel backs specification for low-cost blade servers’)
Editor’s Note: On the first day of our overclocking marathon, we tried overclocking Dell’s factory-overclocked XPS H2C with very modest success. Yesterday, based on requests from many of you, we overclocked our high-end build from May’s System Builders Marathon; it did very well indeed. Today we build a brand new low-cost PC designed for optimal overclocking and see how far we can push it to maximize its performance. Tomorrow we’ll sum up the performance of the three PCs in our overclocking experiments and show you which of the three is the best from a price performance perspective.
As we mentioned in our original system builder marathon, the budget specification we first came up with didn’t cover overclocking.
(Full article ‘Overclocking Marathon Day 3 - A Budget Build’)
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program moved a step closer to providing low-cost laptops to children in developing nations by giving the go-ahead to the mass production of its XO laptop. However, the computers are expected to be out in October, one month later than originally planned.
The prices for the laptops are $176 each, with the price expected to go down to $100 sometime next year, according to a spokesman for the project. There will be 3 million laptops available in October, and they will be distributed to children by the governments of participating countries, which include Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda, Tunisia, the U.S.
(Full article ‘One Laptop Per Child project sends laptops to production’)
This is the second article in a series of four buyer’s guides that focus on consumer-oriented printers available for use with computers. This guide covers the most popular of the so-called multi-function copied, or MFC, inkjet printers, and continues our special emphasis on units suitable for home or SOHO use. Upcoming follow-on installments will cover color- and monochrome-laser printers. Our previous installment covered 11 Color Inkjet Printers.
The print engine in the MFC printers we examine in this Buyer’s Guide is the same as the one we previously looked at - namely, a color inkjet that typically combines three sets of color jets (one for Cyan, another for Magenta and a third for Yellow, in accordance with the more printer-friendly CMY color model) along with a four set of jets for black.
(Full article ‘Multi-Functional Inkjet Printer Buyer’s Guide’)
Despite of widespread criticism, Microsoft Windows Vista operating system (OS) is continuing to gain popularity, according to estimates. In fact, Vista not only eats the dinner of Windows XP, but also manages to bite Mac OS share.
According to Net Applications, a provider of web tools, the share of Microsoft Windows Vista OS among computers used to browse the Internet was 4.52%, up a little less than a point from the previous month. The market share of Windows XP was 81.94%, Windows 2000 held 4% share, MacOS (PowerPC-based) was used in 3.52% of the cases, whereas modern MacOS (Intel-based) had 2.48% market share. Other operating systems, such as Linux, captured 3.54% of the market.
It is interesting to note that all the OSes, but Windows Vista and Linux, lost some share in June to the two competitors.
(Full article ‘Microsoft Windows Vista’s Market Share Increases’)