Eco-conscious Internet users delight. The world has just taken a massive step forward in providing cheap, clean Internet use to the masses with the invention of the latest innovation in the world of the Web: solar powered WiFi.

The news comes from Meraki, who have just announced the launch of Meraki Solar, the first ever WiFi mesh device that has been designed to power itself.

As the world becomes increasingly concerned about the damage we are doing to our planet, innovations such as this are a necessary and timely step forward for us all. With the popularity of WiFi growing all the time, anything that helps us all to reduce our carbon footprint is a good thing.

But it is not only in terms of the environment that the Meraki Solar is a winner. It is also going to prove incredibly useful for areas where good access to power supplies is limited, such as in parks, resorts, and business districts. It also reduces the amount of cabling required to create an access point, which is usually the most expensive part of the setup.

It comes complete with a solar panel and a solar-powered battery, and is a huge step forward when it comes to the deployment of large scale outdoor networks. But like all good ideas, the beauty is in its simplicity. The self-contained unit is small and convenient, and is simply installed anywhere where the sun makes contact, whether on a roof, a wall, or a pole.

Sanjit Biswas, the CEO of Meraki, said that “Traditional outdoor wireless solutions often require expensive and time-consuming installation and electrical cabling efforts”. However, Meraki Solar allows customers to “deploy wireless in hard-to-wire areas quickly and without disrupting their businesses.”

Devices such as this are fantastic news for us all. However, Meraki have not yet answered the question of whether people living in hotter, sunnier places are going to be getting better WiFi performance for their money than those who live in, say, England, where sunny weather is something of a rarity. We can but wait and see.

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Visual Barriers Well and Truly Broken

What is the connection between gas exploration, medical imaging, and design application? Well, these seemingly random categories are all likely to benefit hugely from the latest piece of technical wizardry to come out of the NVIDIA factory.

Whether you are designing a top-end luxury vehicle, diagnosing deadly diseases, or searching far and wide for oil, it is an agreed fact that you are going to need advanced visual computing solutions.

And that is why NVIDIA has just released the NVIDIA(R) Quadro(R) FX 5800 Graphics Card, the most powerful professional graphics card in history.

Jeff Brown, the general manager of Professional Solutions at NVIDIA, claims that “the size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate” and the challenge these days is to “make sense of the mountain of data”.

He also explains that not only are “billions of investment dollars” often as stake, but so too are “people’s lives”. But NVIDIA have refused to buckle under the pressure, and have come up with a product that is essentially going to revolutionize a number of industries.

The centerpiece of all the excitement, the Quadro FX 5800 is getting everyone drooling because it will:

Offer unprecedented performance and scalability.
Allow users to make sense of massive amounts of data.
Offer up to 240 CUDA(TM) programmable parallel cores.
Introduce the first 4GB of graphics memory.

It’s all pretty impressive stuff, and praise from the industries that will benefit from it came quickly.

Nicholas Purday, the manager of Geophysical Technologies at Landmark, the leading software and technology services brand of Halliburton, stated that the Quadro FX 5800 will “allow us to move many computing-intensive processes to the graphics card”, which essentially means it will provide exceptional performance.

The medical industry was also quick to react, with Thilaka Sumanaweera, the CTO at CyberHeart, saying that “the Quadro FX cards provide us with the extreme bandwidth necessary to support our cutting-edge technology and, essentially, save lives.”

So all in all, it seems that NVIDIA are on to a real winner with this one, and if the eager customers are happy to stump up the $3,499 USD for the Quadro FX 5800, it looks like they will have something to smile about through the coming global economic downturn.

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We all know that if you tell web bloggers anything at all that’s worth knowing everyone else will know within hours, in fact minutes in most cases, so there’s some doubt as to whether the leak was accidental or not, and let’s face it, there’s nothing like creating a pre-launch buzz to get everyone talking and of course interested.  Anyway, who cares, let’s look at the specs.

The Specs

•    High resolution screen for optimal viewing
•    Click touch screen for smooth and accurate text input
•    Secure Email and Messaging Capabilities
•    Visual Voicemail
•    Full high speed html browsing
•    3.2 meapixel camera for pics and vids
•    Quad band chipset
•    Global coverage in 195 destinations around the world
•    Only available on America’s largest and most reliable 3G network
•    VZ navigator capable

Quoted as “the game changer that will have everyone interested” the blackberry storm is not just for business but for pleasure too.

The Storm will be available exclusively through Verizon Wireless in a deal similar to the one with Apple and AT&T in the States. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to establish pricing or an exact release date as yet but no doubt they will want to get it out in the next couple of weeks in order to get reap the benefits of the highly lucrative pre Christmas period.

You can register your interest and find out more about it as and when this information becomes available at www.verizonwireless.com/storm

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Sometimes, the wireless router you wind up with is just the one that was most affordable at the time. The better routers are going to cost you a little over a hundred bucks, but if you need it right away, you don’t always have a hundred bucks just laying around. So here, we hope to list the most well reviewed wireless routers around, as well as the most well reviewed wireless routers that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router

Usually costing around a hundred and twenty bucks, this one has been widely reviewed as pretty much the very fastest wireless router out there today (as of the time of this writing, anyways). You might not even need one this powerful, to be honest. Actually, the router was designed to solve the “lag” problem with online games. Online games are known as “bandwith hogs”, putting a lot more data per second through your connection than just about anything you could do with an internet browser. When gamers aren’t sending and receiving data at pretty much the speed of light, a split second of lag can throw your timing off and get you killed by other players. So this router really is ideal for gamers, but if you’re not really into online games, you probably don’t need this much power.

TRENDnet TEW-631BRP 300Mbps Wireless N-Draft Router

A little slower than the D-Link DIR-655, but still a pretty potent little router. Costing about eighty bucks, reviewers have also praised this one for great online-games performance, although there has been some criticism for the lack of a Gigabit Ethernet port for wire-only devices. You can still connect your wired devices with the 10/100 ports, but you’ll probably get a noticeably slower connection. Still, at eighty bucks, this router is a pretty good value if you don’t need the absolute highest-performance router on the market.

Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster

Very simple and easy to set up, very reliable, and compatible with most computers, the Linksys WRT54GS is generally reviewed as one of the best basic routers. It might not be the best option if you play a lot of online games, but it really does provide more than enough power for normal internet use (no matter how big of a youtube addict you are). At sixty dollars, the Linksys WRT54GS is a pretty good value, to boot. Oddly, this router is not “officially” compatible with Macs, but… there are hundreds of Mac users using this router to get online nonetheless. It’s weird that the company wouldn’t want Mac users to know that, but there you go; it works on just about any machine.

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Windows XP Home Edition

The Home Edition of Windows XP will work on just about any up-to-date computers, and is geared towards the home user who wants to communicate with friends, browse the internet, and do small scale personal projects such as playing around with digital photo editing and so on.

Minimum Requirements

233 MHz CPU
64 Megabits of RAM
1.5 Gigs of available Hard Disk space
Super VGA, at least 800×600 resolution
CD-ROM or DVD drive

Recommended Requirements

300 MHz CPU
128 Megabits of RAM
1.5 Gigs of available HD space
Super VGA
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Network adapter
Sound card and speakers or headphones

Windows XP Professional Edition

Professional Edition requires about the same as the home edition and is roughly the same operating system with a number of different features, geared towards producing professional grade work with your PC or Mac.

Minimum Requirements

233 MHz CPU
64 Megabits of RAM
1.5 Gigs of available Hard Disk space
Super VGA, at least 800×600 resolution
CD-ROM or DVD drive

Recommended Requirements

300 MHz CPU
128 Megabits of RAM
1.5 Gigs of available HD space
Super VGA
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Network adapter
0ASound card and speakers or headphones

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE)

MCE is geared more towards, as the name implies, media creation and manipulation, such as video and sound work, or playing DVDs in high resolution.

Minimum Requirements

1.6 GHz CPU
256 Megabits of RAM
30 Gigs of available Hard Disk space for mobile systems
60 Gigs of available HD space for non-mobile systems
64 MB DDR 4x AGP DirectX 9 graphics card
1024×768 resolution for 4:3 aspect ratio
1280×720 resolution for widescreen ratio
DVD drive
Internet connection

Recommended Options

TV Tuner Card
MCE Compatible Remote Control

Windows XP Starter Edition

As the name implies, Starter Edition is sort of a bare bones version of Windows XP. This OS is available in various countries throughout the world such as Mexico, and is seen as a cost effective way to equip several computers with Windows. It should be easy to do most basic computer functions with the Starter Edition, but many programs will have to be bought seperately.

Minimum Requirements

233 MHz CPU
64 Megabits of RAM
1.5 Gigs of available Hard Disk space
Super VGA, at least 800×600 resolution
CD-ROM or DVD drive

Recommended Requirements

300 MHz CPU
128 Megabits of RAM
1.5 Gigs of available HD space
Super VGA
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Network adapter
Sound card and speakers or headphones

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Even if you have a rough idea of what Wi-Fi does, more or less, you still might be at a loss if you had to answer a question regarding the subject. For example, you might be using Wi-Fi right now and not even know it, or what it is, exactly.

So, below, we’ll get into…

What, Exactly, is Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is actually the trade name of a certain type of wireless technology. Wi-Fi is most often used in home and office networks, video gaming, and mobile phones. Almost every modern PC and Macintosh operating system supports Wi-Fi connectivity, and so do most modern printers and other peripherals (to save the hassle of dealing with cables and wires). Most of the current generation of video game consoles connect with Wi-Fi as well, including the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS. Wi-Fi is popular as a way for portable game system users to connect within a certain physical distance of one another.

Wi-Fi is basically just a very convenient alternative to using a mass of tangled wires to transfer information from computer to computer, computer to peripheral, or video gamer to video gamer. Using Wi-Fi eliminates the need for switches, plugs, sensitive and fragile connectors and pins, wiring, cables, etcetera. It is simply a very easy way to connect electronic devices.

Another upside is that, within one household, several computers can be online at once. There still may be some lag, as there will always be when several20users are transferring information on the same internet connection all at once, but there won’t be an issue with a lack of ports and so on.

Hotspots

A Wi-Fi hotspot is an area where Wi-Fi based connectivity is provided to the internet or a network. Many coffee shops and libraries, for example, may be Wi-Fi hotspots, allowing visitors to work online or play video games with players in other countries while visiting the area, though a hotspot can be as small as a single room. A hotspot could also cover several square miles. Anyone who leaves their wireless internet connection unlocked by password can host a hotspot.

Wi-Fi can also work in so called peer-to-peer mode, wherein electronic devices connect directly to one another, rather than through the internet. For example, two Nintendo DS gamers could play a game together without an internet connection, or even download video game demos from download stations at a game store. Likewise, two cell phone users, depending on the model, could trade information or talk to one another directly through P2P Wi-Fi rather than by using a network.

Downsides

If there’s one major downside to Wi-Fi connectivity, it is that wireless connections tend to use more power than wire based connections. Depending on the amount of usage, this may be a marginal difference, but if you leave a Wi-Fi object on all day for example, it could really put a dent in a power bill (or eat up your batteries pretty quickly).

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Inversion occurs when the air near the ground is cooler than the air above it, a reversal of normal atmospheric conditions. When that happens, manmade pollutants are trapped, resulting in smog. The physical conditions around Los Angeles, for example, lead to frequent inversion layers over the basin. That, combined with heavy automobile pollution, consistently gives L.A. the worst air quality in the country.

But L.A. has never seen anything quite like that one week in Pennsylvania, in what became known as the Donora air inversion or, more dramatically, the “Donora Death Fog.”

In Donora, an industrial town situated about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, pollution from the nearby U.S. Steel smelting plants and Donora Zinc Works was the main culprit. Trapped in a temperature inversion, the pollutants blanketed the town during the night of Oct. 26.

The companies connived with the U.S. Public Health Service to cover up the facts of the incident and succeeded in doing so for half a century. Whistle-blowers were silenced; records disappeared. It wasn’t until 1994 that a full accounting of what happened in Donora was finally published.

To Philip Sadtler, an industry consultant sent to evaluate the disaster and who tried without success to expose the corporate cover-up, U.S. Steel was guilty of murder:

“The directors of U.S. Steel should have gone to jail for killing people,” Sadtler said shortly before his death in 1996.

In the end, 40 percent of Donora’s population of 14,000 became ill as a result of the “death fog” and the town joined a growing list of other places hit hard — and harder — by human pollution.

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One other PS2 title, Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! Meteor, cracked the top ten, but for the most part it was a DS party, with six of the top ten sellers being for Nintendo’s portable.

Will Seaman’s success be enough to convince Sega to bring the title Stateside? Probably not, more’s the pity.

We need more virtual pet Neanderthal man sims, don’t you think?

More like the Imperium Romanum review.

[Via: The Japanese Software Chart]

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More than storage space or other features, free web-based IMAP access pushes GMail over the top when compared to offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and most other web-based e-mail services.

If you log into your GMail account and head to “settings,” the tab for “Forwarding and POP” should now read “Forwarding and POP/IMAP.”

If it doesn’t, be patient, Google will be rolling out the new IMAP features across the service over the next few days.

If you’re not familiar with IMAP, it’s like POP access, but allows your changes to live on the server rather than just your e-mail client.

For instance, if you move a message in Thunderbird via POP, the movement isn’t mirrored in GMail, but with IMAP it is.

With IMAP you can access your mail via your desktop client, read mail, make changes and have those changes mirrored by any other client accessing the account.

If you access your mail from multiple machines, IMAP allows them all to stay in sync. If you don’t access your mail with a desktop client, then IMAP support won’t change the way you interact with GMail.

To enable IMAP in GMail just head to the settings page and change your access from POP to IMAP.

Then you need to configure your desktop client to connect via IMAP rather than POP — be sure to backup your client’s mail store before making changes.

The Google help center has more details on configuring IMAP settings in both GMail and on the client side.

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Cook said he estimates that 250,000 of the nearly 1.4 million iPhones Apple has sold were “bought with intention of unlocking.”

That’s almost 20 percent of all iPhones sold to date. Can Cook be serious?

The admonition came while Cook was answering questions about the price cuts that happened mid quarter and their effect of iPhone sales.

Here’s what he had to say:

We were very happy with the elasticity we saw. It enabled us to far surpass our expectation of hitting around a million units cumulatively by the end of the quarter. Some number of these were sold to people who had the intention to unlock. And while we don’t know precisely how many people are doing that, our current guess is that there was probably 250,000 thousand of the 1.4 million that we sold, where people had bought them with the intention of doing that. Many of those happened after the price cut.

Cook went on to say that AT&T [revenue sharing] payments were obviously dependent on the iPhone being locked to AT&T.

In other words Apple gets squat from AT&T unless the phone is activated through the wireless provider.

Previously Piper Jaffray analysts Gene Munster and Michael Olson suggested that the AT&T revenue sharing is likely based on the circumstances under which a person bought their iPhone.

At a minimum, the two estimate $3 a month per existing AT&T customer, for the duration of their two-year contract; this figure is said to go up by $8, however, if the person switched to AT&T for the iPhone.

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