Today, Samsung Electronics, announced that it has developed the world's first four gigabit (Gb) DDR3 DRAM chip, using 50 nanometer (nm) process technology.

With more and more data centers seeking a reduction in the number of servers they use, the development of low-power 4Gb DDR3 has become critical in reducing data center costs, improving server time management and increasing overall efficiency.

Using just 50 nanometer process technology, the 4Gb DDR3 DRAM chip runs at 1.6Gbps and is highly efficient consuming 40% less power, gulping only 1.35 volts to operate, in contrast to 1.5 volts consumed by the other DRAM chips. The 4Gb can be used in servers, desktop PCs, workstations and notebooks, given that it can be produced in chips in 16GB RDIMM, 8GB UDIMM and SODIMM modules.

DDR3 is 8 times faster than DDR2 memory and uses 30% less power. The new 50nm 4GB chip comes 5 months after Samsung introduced the first 2GB chips built using the 50nm process.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research and analysis firm, the worldwide DDR3 DRAM market will account for 29 percent of the total DRAM market in 2009 and 75 percent in 2011. In addition, IDC estimates that 2Gb-or-higher DDR3 DRAM will make up three percent of the total DRAM market in 2009 and 33 percent in 2011 (units in bits).

If Samsung goes on to use its dual-die package technology, then its hoping for a breakthrough that will allow for 32GB DDR3 memory modules, giving a double boost to the chip capacity presently.

Read more...

Google Earth has proved its use many a times and now its been really interesting that it helped the Swiss police finding out massive fields of weed. Swiss authorities announced today that they had found a large marijuana plantation while using Google Earth.

The discovery was part of an ongoing investigation that has so far led to the arrest of 16 people and the seizure of 1.2 tons of marijuana with a street value of $2.5 million USD. Cash and other valuables were seized as well with a value of over $800,000 USD.

The head of Zurich police's specialist narcotics unit, Norbert Klossner, said the field was in the northeastern canton (state) of Thurgau. The plantation is about 7500 square meters and was hidden inside a larger field of corn. "It was an interesting chance discovery," said Klossner.

Read more...

Ma.gnolia is a free, public service for saving links to websites. Most users rely on it as a bookmarking storage service, or a place to save links that they may want to revisit later. Links can be saved privately or shared publicly, so that they can be browsed by other users looking for new destinations.

Unfortunately, there was a meltdown at the website Ma.gnolia on Friday morning. The service lost both its primary store of user data, as well as its backup. The site has been taken offline while the team tries to reconstruct its databases, though some users may never see their stored bookmarks again.

The failure appears to be catastrophic. The company can't say to what extent it will be able to restore any of its users' data. It also says the data failure was so extensive, repairing the loss will take "days, not hours."

On Friday morning, company founder Larry Halff issued an apology on the homepage along with the following note:

"Ma.gnolia experienced every web service's worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members' bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can't provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours."

In light of today's outage, many are questioning the reliability of web apps and web-based storage in general.

Read more...

Most of us assume that a deleted or lost email can never be recovered back. But there are ways to recover the deleted email back. There are two different types of email and fortunately, both types are recoverable. Overall email recovery is fairly simple process. First we must ascertain what type of email we are using. It should be either web based or client based. Free email addresses such as those provided by Yahoo or Gmail are web based. This means the place where your emails are stored in on the huge server for these companies. The other prevalent form of email is a locally based email client. These systems send, receive and store emails right on your computer.

Each of these email types requires a different approach for email recovery. Browser based emails use a general data recovery program for email recovery. All one need to do is have the program scan for damaged files in the temporary internet files folder and the software will bring up any files marked placed in marked as available space allocations.

Client based email systems like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express require email recovery programs built specifically to recognize their files and retrieve them.

Read more...

The UK Film Council, has set a website to which will vastly speed-up and simplify movie searches. Movie buffs can now get information as to which film is being shown at which cinema hall on a new website. Internet users can search for movies as well as where and how they can be watched on this site.

This website also gives cinema listings, DVD sale and rental options, and suggests legal download sites. More than 30,000 films-including action movies, thrillers, classics, and Bollywood hits-are said to be part of the catalogue. The website not only searches the film, but also brings up all the formats it is available in. It even provides information on proximity, price, and popularity.

Movie buffs can read a synopsis of the film, watch the trailer, and even click through to book tickets or buy or rent the DVD. Just in case a film being looked for is unavailable in the UK, the user can sign up to receive an email alert when it finally reaches these shores.

"This new site is going to transform how consumers find the films they want to watch - we will soon wonder how we ever coped without it," Sky News quoted Peter Buckingham, the head of distribution and exhibition at the council, as saying. "We have turned what was often an incredibly time-consuming, frustrating process into one that makes it much easier for film fans to see films in the UK," he added.

Read more...

There are times when you need some help on keeping track of the emails that you send by way of delivery notifications or read receipts but currently, none of the web-based emails, including Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail and many others, offer any kind of delivery notifications or read receipts except rediffmail.com.

Even when you send a message using Microsoft Outlook, Eudora or Lotus Notes (that allow you to request read receipts), the Internet email service would simply ignore the request and you may never get to know if the message was read by the recipients or delivered at all.

There are three ways by which you can know whether your mail has been read by the recipient.

First one is by using a service called SpyPig. It is a simple and freeware online email tracking system that sends you a notification email as soon as the recipient opens and reads your message. The notification email will have details about the IP address and the number of times your email has been read.

Using SpyPig is very simple. Open the SpyPig website and type your email address where you wish to receive the notification and the message title in the notice form. Then choose the tracking image which you want to embed in the email and select the number of times you want to receive notifications.

Next, click the button to create and activate the SpyPig tracking image. Now, just drag and drop the tracking image in your outgoing email message. For SpyPig to work you and the recipient must use HTML-formatted email rather than just a plain-text or rich-text formatted email.

The second option is by using Statcounter. Create a free account in it and go to the install code options, choose invisible tracking button and HTML only counter. Statcounter will now provide you an HTML image snippet that you have to insert inside the body of your HTML email message.

This will be a white GIF image which will be invisible to the human eye and as soon as your friend opens up your email, your statcounter logs will be updated. You will know the details like IP address of his computer and the date time when the email was opened.

The above option won't work if the recipient has configured his email client to block downloading of images from the internet automatically.

The third and the final option is by using Google Analytics. It involves embedding a tracking code as an external link in your email message. Whenever the recipient clicks on that link, Google Analytics will record that the link has been clicked thus indicating that the email has been read.

The advantage of this method is that no image is downloaded on the client's side but it could fail if the recipient doesn't click the hyperlink.

Do leave comments telling which trick helped you better.

Read more...

Intel has scheduled to give its first public look at an 8-core Xeon processor in less than two weeks at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. We knew when Intel launched its quad-core Nehalem line-up that it had plans to pack even more cores into a single die. Intel will be taking the opportunity to show off Octo-Core Xeon processors.

The unnamed chip will double the core count of existing Xeons and is based on the same 45 nanometer manufacturing process and Nehalem architecture that underpins the Core i7. The shift adds Hyperthreading and will let even a single-socket Xeon processor theoretically address as many as 16 simultaneous program threads at once by putting two threads on each core.

Intel isn't expected to release the 8-core processor at the event, which often touches on roadmaps rather than production hardware. However, quad-core Nehalem Xeons are expected to arrive in the early part of the year and will be fundamentally similar outside of their reduced multi-processing.

Read more...