Nvidia GTX 480 in 3-Way SLI is a power hungry monster

Hardware.Info managed to snag not one, but three Nvidia GTX 480 cards and mashed them together (translated) in a 3-way SLI shootout against three ATI Radeon

HD 5870 in triple-CrossFire. A dual-CrossFire 5970 was thrown in for good measure too.
For a large number of tests, even the dual-CrossFire 5970 configuration held its own, as well as the triple-CrossFire. As of this writing, GTX 480's are available in very low quantities and many gamers will find it difficult to snag one until Nvidia ramps up production

Thinkpads and MacBook Pros working an Earthquake Detector Laptop

While all new smartphones today have accelerometers, it's still a rarity for laptops; but researchers are putting those laptops, as few as there are, to use by turning them into tremor detectors.
PC laptops such as ThinkPads and all Apple MacBook Pro laptops feature an accelerometer that's used to park the heads of hard drives in case of sudden movement. It's a safety feature that helps to keep your data from a scary hard drive crash, but researchers are putting that technology towards earthquake detection.

AMD's first Fusion is now in the hands of AMD's customers for testing purposes.

AMD at its recent financial conference call revealed that it is now sampling its CPU+GPU Fusion designs, both internally and with partners.
"We plan to commence volume production in the back half of this year. We do now have internal samples of both of our initial Fusion designs, we are learning quite a lot, and are quite happy with what we see, and we started sampling to select customers, one of those two designs," said Dirk Meyer, chief executive officer and president of AMD, during the quarterly conference call.
The two new designs are Llano and Ontario, with the former being the one that's being sampled to select customers (perhaps even Apple). Less is known about Ontario, except that it'll be aimed at mobile devices rather than traditional computing.

HD in Your Hands

VIA Technologies has launched its latest DIY PC kit that puts HD video in the palm of your hand. The VIA ARTiGO A1100 is a tiny PC that crams a 64-bit processor, HDMI and VGA connectivity, and five USB ports into a rather small, hand-sized PC chassis. The kit retails for a meager $243 USD, however VIA said that the first 10 customers will get an "early bird" discount price for $199 USD.
So how small is this thing? 5.7-inches x 3.9-inches x 2-inches. The VIA ARTiGO A1100 kit includes the 1.2 GHz VIA Nano processor, the VIA VX855 media system processor, a Gigabit Ethernet port, an additional USB device port, three audio jacks, and options for wireless IEEE 802.11 b/g connectivity and an SD card reader module.

Google vs. Apple: Copycats Battle

So there you have it. Google will release its own tablet to steal a piece of the iPad pie. Lately, it seems, Google puts quite a bit of effort into annoying Apple. Conceivably, Google has already become the new Microsoft by trying to be everything to everyone and this upcoming tablet may just be another example of how Google is much more a content provider than a hardware company. But there is also a real chance that Google can succeed and beat Apple’s iPad—the iPad isn’t as new and magical as Apple claims it is and it has weaknesses. Google has all the necessary pieces in place. So what if Google gets it right?

The tablet PC business is probably one of the most attractive unlocked secrets in the IT industry. It isn’t as innovative and groundbreaking as Apple says it is. There is a history of innovation and failure. Think about the Webpads of the early 2000s, some of which were actually quite good for their time, and I would even point to Alan Kay’s vision of the Dynabook in 1972, which really should be considered as the origin of the

Nexaria 3G/4G Router Ships in May

Earlier this month, Nexaria Wireless announced that its new NexConnect SOHO 3G/4G router will ship sometime in May. The device will provide a fast, secure Wi-Fi service to a home or office from any wireless carrier available in North America including HSPA and HSPA + networks from AT&T, Bell, Rogers, Telus and T-Mobile, and EVDO RevA networks from Sprint and Verizon, as well 4G WiMAX from Clear.
Nexaria said in a press release that the router's overall automated setup is quite simple, offering an "intuitive user friendly i3 GUI and desktop gadget." Other features of the SOHO router include multiple user access to the Internet, 300 Mbps speeds with 802.11n 2x2 MIMO Wi-Fi service, and a faster 3G/4G connection than using a data card on a laptop computer

.

Worlds Fastest, Cheapest Internet

Despite how often we hear that the U.S. lags behind other countries in terms of internet speed

(which is still true), the fastest internet in the world, according to a report from Akamai Technologies, is in Berkeley, California at an average speed of 18.7Mbps.
In fact, the second and third fastest internet offerings in the world are also in the U.S., in Chapel Hill, NC (average speed: 17.5Mbps) and Stanford, Calif. (average speed: 17.0Mbps) Of course, the obvious linkage there is that the internet is tied closely to those using the access granted by educational institutions with fast internet connections, clearly skewing the average upward.

No http:// in Future Chrome

Now this is something that I find really interesting. We all know and love Google Chrome/Chromium (and if you don't, you're demonstrably wrong), but Google recently made a change in the developer version that ruffled some feathers: the URL field will no longer show the "http://". This made a lot of people very upset.
For a while now, Mobile Safari has been doing something similar, although I do think in that case, it's about saving space. On Mobile Safari, the scheme is hidden until you tap the URL field to edit. The developer version of Google Chrome takes this a step further, and omits the scheme completely. Bug reports were filed, and in true internet fashion, discussion ensued.
A few things need to be made clear about Chrome's implementation of this feature. The first thing that jumped into my mind was this: some applications, whether they be web or real ones, actually require you to add the scheme (for instance, to autoparse URLs). Google claims to have solved this issue by adding the scheme to your clipboard when you copy and paste URLs from the URL field, however, this behaviour is currently broken in many clipboard implementations. Another thing that you should be wondering about now is what they do with other schemes like ftp, https, and gopher. The solution here is decidedly simple: those will still be shown.

Google Chrome OS Netbooks to be $300 to $400

Google, with Chrome OS, plans to move into the operating system in a bigger way that its Android software is taking over smartphones not called the iPhone. Speaking at the Atmosphere Cloud Computing forum, company CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that Google is rewriting some of its software so that it'll work with Chrome OS – so that Google can sooner start using its own software and not rely on tools from Microsoft or Apple.
Google figures that any challenges the company must go through to switch software will be experienced by other businesses planning on doing the same. In short, Google is using itself as a test case.

"At Google we're getting ready to deploy these essentially Android and Chrome-based devices that are in development, so we want, of course, to eat our own dogfood which is how we sit here and build things. …