Toshiba LCD goes nuts for resolution

Some flagship products make us stand and dance with glee, others cause us to double over in agony. Frankly, we do not know how to categorize Toshiba's latest LCD monitor which has an incredible 3,840 x 2,400-pixel resolution.

When it comes to resolution, more may not be merrier. In this case, squeezing this many pixels in a relatively small 22-inch display seems to be the doings of a mad optometrist who believes myopia is good. The densely packed pixels mean that text will be too small to read confortably. Though we do congratulate the Japanese maker for making this technological advance, the sad fact is this 2,079,000 yen (S$26,338.65) LCD makes no sense, as other specifications such as its 235cd/m2 brightness and 300:1 contrast ratio are under par for its price.

No news on when, or even if, this panel will make it outside Japan, but at this cost we doubt many will be holding their breath for this panel.

Apple ships patches for iMacs, MacBook Pros

If you haven't been prompted already, iMac and MacBook Pro owners should wander over to Apple's downloads page and install new patches released Friday.

Apple confirmed that the iMac patch corrects the freezing issue reported by some users, and it's encouraging people to download that patch as soon as they get a chance. The patches are for the latest iMacs introduced in August, and there are separate versions for those running Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) and Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5).

There's also a MacBook Pro update that is said to improve "graphics stability" for owners that are using the 2.2GHz or 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo chips. There's only one patch, and it applies only to Tiger as the graphics stability issues fixed by the patch were corrected in Leopard.

The patches are available here on Apple's support site, but you can also find them by clicking the "Software Update" menu choice under the Apple menu. They might also be waiting for you the next time you boot.

Via CNET Crave

Buy Mac Office 2004, get 2008 almost free

For those of you who have been eyeing Mac Office 2004 but are concerned that you have to foot out another few hundred bucks for the new Mac Office 2008, here is some good news.

If you buy the older 2004 version now, you will be eligible to get the latest version for free when it goes gold in January next year. The only catch is you have to bear the S$37 (US$26.33) shipping fee. You can check out the new features of Mac Office 2008 at the official Web site.

USB turntable takes iPod for a spin

Starting some time around the last holiday season, it seemed for awhile that the USB turntable was at the top of gadget lists everywhere. So it makes sense that Ion, one of the original manufacturers, would look to repeat that success again this year with a new model.

Enter the iPod USB Turntable, which not only connects to the computer but turns vinyl tunes into digital files and transfers them directly to the fifth-generation iPod and second-generation nano through a built-in dock. It's yet another excuse not to throw out those moldy LPs in the basement. Besides, you know you've been eyeing that Record Flattener anyway.

Via Crave CNET

Sony's Folding@home project gets Guinness record

It's a small thing, but Sony got some good news today related to its troubled PlayStation 3 video game console. In fact, the system helped set a new Guinness World Record.

The record was set by Stanford University's Folding@home project, a distributed computing system utilizing PS3s among other computers, to help scientists study the effects of a process called "protein folding" on a series of serious diseases.

Well, Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last month, meaning that it surpassed a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. By comparison, the well-known SETI@home project has topped out, according to Wikipedia, at around 265 teraflops, or 265 trillion floating point operations a second.

What has Sony excited is that it seems that much of the computing power behind Folding@home comes from the excess cycles of many hundreds of thousands of PS3 users' consoles. More than 600,000 PS3 users have signed up to be part of the project, the company says.

Any Guinness record is cool, of course, and Sony is probably very happy to have some good news come out of the PS3 program, since the much-ballyhooed console has struggled in its first year on the market and still finds itself in third place in the next-generation console wars behind Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii.

But while those machines may be outselling the PS3, neither can lay claim to a Guinness world record that reflects an attempt to help out with real science.

And though that may not translate into huge sales for Sony, at least it's some great PR spin fodder.

Via Crave CNET

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