Thursday, September 21, 2006

The Internet Is a Menace for Children. Children at Risk on Social Web-Sites

11:39 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

A magazine claims children using hugely popular social networking web-sites, such as MySpace.com and Bebo.com, face bullying, unsuitable advertising and pornography.

“Children are spending hours every week on networking sites, building up their profiles and chatting with friends. However what might seem like innocent fun has a darker, more sinister side,” said Jessica Ross, editor of Computing Which? magazine.

MySpace boasts a global community of nearly 80 million users while Bebo said it had visits from two million British and Irish users in April alone, with over half aged between 13 and 18.

The Which? report said the freedom afforded to users on the sites meant they risked being abused by people claiming to be younger and also provided a “ripe environment for ‘cyber bullying’”, Reuters reports.

The magazine’s researchers said they had set up an account on MySpace, pretending to be a 14-year-old child, without having to any provide proof or age or identity.

“Teenage users need to be aware that there is no way of knowing who is behind the face of a ‘friend,”’ Ross said.

The report added that the mother of a 14-year-old U.S. girl was suing MySpace for $30 million after claiming her daughter was abused by a 19-year-old she met through the site.

• Reuters: Children at Risk on Networking Web Sites: Report.

Multi-GPU without Wires: Feasible? CrossFire and SLI Dongle-less/Bridgeless Performance Analysis

11:35 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Since it first introduction in late 90s by 3dfx, multi-GPU technologies always incorporated some sort of connecting bridge or dongle, which provided extra bandwidth or synchronized workloads between graphics cards.

Recently, both ATI and Nvidia brought to the market multi-GPU solutions which didn’t require any additional interconnections. Hexus.net has carried out an investigation to determine exactly how much performance boost can contemporary multi-GPU setups get while operating with and without bridging devices.

“First things first. Bridgeless SLI... why bother? If the golden fingers are there, use them. On high end cards it clearly makes a difference, and with SLI there’s no faffing about with master cards, so it’s really no big deal. Still, if there’s a problem with the bridge, we’ve shown the performance impact, which is in some cases substantial,” writes Hexus.net.

“For CrossFire, there’s a little more appeal to not having a dongle. It’s not the dongle itself that’s the problem, it’s the expense of a CrossFire Edition master card. Take the X1900 GT, which at the time of writing weighs in at around £120-150, depending on bundle, cooling and what not. A CrossFire edition card to go with that could be £220 or more. So we must ask if the sacrifice made with dongle-less CrossFire is worth the ~£100 saving? It all depends on whether you want the most from your multi-GPU solution, or if all you really need is a boost that’s good value for money. If you’re after the latter, we reckon a pair of X1900 GTs might be the wiser option,” concludes the author.

“Problem is, on our i975X test bed, CrossFire performance and indeed the impact of not having a master card varies so wildly, that the benefit you’ll see really will depend on what games you play. We’d like to think ATI can make performance differences a little more consistent between dongled and dongle-less CrossFire, but we’ll have to wait and see,” adds the author.

• Hexus.net: CrossFire and SLI Dongle-less/Bridgeless Performance Analysis.

A Decade Away from Next-Generation Battery. New Battery Tech Still Years Away - Report

11:32 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., Hitachi Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and MTI Micro Fuel Cells are among those racing to develop fuel cells, which produce electricity from an external supply of fuel as opposed to a battery’s internal storage capacity. They are leading the charge for more efficient power systems to keep up with changes in consumer gadgets. Laptops, once used primarily for creating documents and spreadsheets, are now hubs for power-eating tasks like video conferencing, hosting websites and interactive games.

At the same time, consumers are starting to watch full-length movies on pocket-sized digital players, or view live television on mobile phones, which also puts a serious stress on battery.

“There is nothing in the near term that can satisfy all the requirements that have to come from a battery. It has to be light, small, last a long time and relatively safe. They haven’t come up with a chemical combination yet that can satisfy all those requirements,” said NPD Group analyst Stephen Baker.

The prevailing technology to power gadgets is lithium-ion batteries, which experts view as relatively safe despite last month’s recall of a total of some 6 million notebook PC batteries by Dell and Apple.

In time, fuel cells will be able to supply 10 times more power, and will be instantly recharged. But mass deployment is years away, after a long period of testing and tweaking, analysts said.

”The next step is fuel cells, but (they) are a little way away. In five to 10 years, fuels cells will become an integrated replacement for conventional batteries,” said Jim Tully, chief of research at Gartner.

• Reuters: New Battery Tech Still Years Away.

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