Apple introduces new MacBook Pro with Retina display

Apple has unveiled an all new 15-inch MacBook Pro featuring a stunning Retina display, all flash storage and quad-core processors in a radically thin and light design. Measuring a mere 0.71 inches and weighing only 4.46 pounds, the completely redesigned MacBook Pro sets a new standard in performance and portability for pro users.

The new MacBook Pro Retina display is the world's highest resolution notebook display with over five million pixels, three million more than an HD television. At 220 pixels-per-inch, the Retina display's pixel density is so high the human eye cannot distinguish individual pixels from a normal viewing distance, so text and graphics look incredibly sharp. The Retina display uses IPS technology for a 178-degree wide viewing angle, and has 75% less reflection and 29% higher contrast than the previous generation.

Featuring a precision engineered aluminum unibody design and an all flash storage architecture, the new MacBook Pro is the lightest MacBook Pro and nearly as thin as a MacBook Air. Flash storage that is up to four times faster than traditional notebook hard drives enables the all new MacBook Pro to play four simultaneous streams of uncompressed 1080p HD video from internal storage. The flash storage architecture also delivers improved reliability, instant-on responsiveness and 30 days of standby time.

The MacBook Pro with Retina display features the latest Intel Core i7 quad-core processors up to 2.7GHz with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.7GHz, Nvidia GeForce GT 650M discrete graphics, up to 16GB of faster 1600MHz RAM and flash storage up to 768GB. Two Thunderbolt and two USB 3.0 ports allow pro users to connect to multiple displays and high performance devices, and a new HDMI port offers quick connectivity to HDTVs. Read More

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Apple Updates MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Introduces iPad-Like MacBook

At its Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple introduced laptops influenced by the iPad with new Intel and Nvidia technologies. A super-thin next-generation MacBook, says Apple, is the best notebook it’s ever made.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference kicked off with a number of device introductions, including updates to its MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineups, as well as an iPad-like, next-generation laptop that Apple—in a move as awkward as deciding to call the third-generation iPad “the Pad,” instead of the iPad 3—is calling the “the next-generation MacBook."

The latter—the most fun of these notebook announcements—is as thin as the MacBook Air, at 0.71 inches. In building it, Apple executives said they figured out how to eliminate the need for a separate glass cover. It weighs 4.46 pounds and features a 15.4-inch display that, like that newest iPad, is a Retina display with a resolution of 2880 by 1800 pixels. It’s the world’s highest-resolution notebook, according to Apple.

“The pixels are so small that your retina cannot discern them,” Apple’s Phil Schiller told the WWDC crowd, according to the live blog from The Verge. Read More

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Enterprise Networking: IPv6: 10 Things You Didn`t Know About Internet Protocols

The Internet Society, an international nonprofit organization that advises on Web standards, policy and education, has selected June 6, 2012, as the World IPv6 launch day. This date will mark the beginning of a new phase in the life of the Internet, when IPv6 begins to become a normal part of the Internet experience for everyone—taking over from IPv4. Last year, the Internet Society declared June 8, 2011, as World IPv6 Day to give enterprises and Internet service providers (ISPs) a chance to “stress test” the next-generation Internet protocol to see what works, what breaks and what they need to do to seamlessly migrate their networks to IPv6. It also served as a wake-up call that it’s time to upgrade the World Wide Web. On that day, more than 200 Web companies—including giants Facebook, Google and Yahoo—worked with ISPs and content-delivery networks to conduct the first global-scale trial of IPv6. For a 24-hour period, participating companies around the world enabled IPv6 on their main services. Operating systems—including Apple Mac OS X, most versions of Microsoft Windows and most major Linux distributions—have supported IPv6 addresses for a number of years. In fact, since IPv6 addresses are enabled by default in the operating system, if the network has the capability to assign an IPv6 address, the user machine most likely already has an IPv6 address, James Lyne, director of technology strategy at Sophos, told eWEEK in 2011. At some point, the entire Internet infrastructure has to move to using the newer address space, since the differences in the protocols mean that computers with IPv4 addresses cannot communicate with machines with IPv6 addresses. The Internet Society says that time is now. eWEEK takes a look at some of the key differences between IPv6 and IPv4. It also identifies some information you may not know about IPv6. Read More

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Intel launches next wave of Ultrabook with new 3rd Generation Core Processors

MUMBAI: Intel today displayed its newest wave of ultra sleek Ultrabook systems powered by 3rd Generation Intel Core processors and made with the world's most advanced 22nm 3-D tri-gate transistors.

With a price range beginning from Rs 50,000, these new Ultrabook devices are responsive and more secure to better protect personal information. The new chips also offer increased media and graphics performance, long battery life and more choice in stylish designs.

A special feature is the enhanced security Intel Anti-Theft technology that lets people automatically disable the system if it is lost or stolen. Available in 11 languages and in major markets worldwide, people can activate free, limited-time Intel AT service subscriptions from Absolute Software, McAfee, Norton and Intel on an Ultrabook right out of the box. In India this service is currently being offered by Croma.

Just about a month ago, Intel had introduced the quad-core 3rd Generation Intel Core processor family, delivering dramatic visual and performance computing gains for gamers, media enthusiasts and mainstream users alike. 

"Similar to the introduction of Intel Centrino nearly a decade ago, this is a time of revolutionary change in personal computing," said Debjani Ghosh, Managing Director, Sales & Marketing Group, Intel South Asia. "The innovation will continue in the coming years as Intel and the industry aim to raise the bar for personal computing experiences, evolving to more natural and intuitive interactions. Personal computing as we know it today will suddenly seem old fashioned."

She added: "Intel Insider technology, when combined with Intel Wireless Display (WiDi), will allow streaming of premium HD movies from a 3rd Gen Intel Core processor based PC or Ultrabook to an HD television, without cables, thereby delivering the ultimate movie-viewing experience to consumers, with stunning image clarity." Read More

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HP Bursts CloudSystem

HP's CloudSystem is now being expanded such that burstable cloud demand can be delivered via Amazon, Saavis or HP's own cloud services infrastructure. With CloudSystem, enterprises can manage demand for their workloads and move them to public or private cloud infrastructure as needed.

The new HP CloudSystem Matrix software is the orchestration layer, providing a graphical user interface for server admins to setup, deploy and manage cloud workloads.

"The HP Converged Cloud is all about making available a set of choices for our customers," Magdy Assem, Vice President Horizontal Solutions at HP, told InternetNews.com . "I have yet to find a customer that is going all private or all public in the cloud."

While HP's CloudSystem is about developing a hybrid cloud approach it is however somewhat limited from a virtualization approach. Currently HP is only supporting a pair of virtualization technologies. Read More

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IPv6 Traffic Growing at Google, Facebook

In terms of IPv6 traffic, that also is now beginning to grow, though it's still currently standing at approximately 1 percent of all Internet traffic. According to Google Engineer Erik Kline, there has been a rapid growth of IPv6 at Goggle. For Google, IPv6 traffic has grown by 150 percent in the last year.

"At this rate, approximately 50 percent of users will have IPv6 in six years," Kline said.

Comcast’s John Brzozowski, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for IPv6 said that on his network there was a 3.75 percent increase in IPv6 traffic compared to World IPv6 Day in 2011.

Facebook also participated in the World IPv6 Launch. Donn Lee, network engineer at Facebook said his site has seen over 27 million active Facebook users that have IPv6.

"That's a number that is three to five times what it was on World IPv6 Day, twelve months ago," Lee said.

For Content Delivery Network Akamai, the IPv6 traffic growth has been even great.

"The amount of traffic we have over IPv6 is a function of how many customers we have that have content available over IPv6 as well as how many end-users there are,"Eric Nygren, Chief Systems Architect at Akamai said. "We've seen both of those go up such that the amount of traffic, we're serving over IPv6 this year is over 100 times as much as we were serving during World IPv6 Day last year." Read More

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Why Cloud Pricing Comparisons Are So Hard

Public cloud computing companies all perform similar functions, so why is it so hard to compare the value of one cloud infrastructure service with another? There's a variety of reasons, but one of them is that vendors don't want you to be able to do too direct a comparison.

Each service supplier assembles a compute package that's different enough from the others that a comparison is difficult. Microsoft, for example, surpasses Amazon in CPU strength and storage. But in another important measure, Amazon offers more RAM for larger server sizes while matching Microsoft in the smaller sized servers.

Confused? The problem is there's no standard "serving size" when it comes to cloud computing, so IT pros have to juggle the many variables of RAM, local disk, CPU power, and more themselves. Is it a better deal to get lots of CPU but less RAM? The answer depends on what the cloud customer is trying to do with that computing power. For companies weighing public cloud options against running the computing services in-house, it complicates the calculation. Read More

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Intel's New Xeon Powerhouse: 5 Key Facts

Aside from that other little announcement out of Cupertino, one of the worst-kept secrets in the tech world was the impending release of Intel's successor to its vaunted Xeon 5600 series processors--the chip that's currently the power plant for the cloud. The new E5's Sandy Bridge micro architecture is well known as it debuted on Intel's desktop and laptop lines over a year ago, and its successor, the Ivy Bridge generation, will show up on consumer devices in a couple months. Formerly known as the Sandy Bridge-EP, the new E5-2600 series chips further cement Intel's preeminence atop the processor landscape. Here are a few reasons why.

1. More Power Scotty. Not only does the E5-series increase the top Xeon core count by a third, from 6 to 8 per chip, it almost doubles the L3 cache from 12 MB to 20 MB at only a slight loss in clock speed. The 8-core part tops out at 2.9 GHz. Intel claims these combine to yield an 80% performance improvement and they have a slew of benchmarks to back up the claim. While we hold a skepticism toward benchmarks that would make Mark Twain proud, this is an impressive list with 13 records for two-socket systems and two overall records for system-level energy efficiency (workload/watt). Read More

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Six Good Reasons to Download Firefox 13

Between its use of SPDY by default and speed gains through Mozilla's “Project Snappy,” Firefox 13 has been generating excitement for some time already. Now, the final version of the software is here at last.

Mozilla on Tuesday launched this latest version of its popular free and open source browser, which comes packed with numerous significant new features that promise to make life better for users in myriad ways.

If you already use Firefox, this new update will likely be on its way to you automatically through Mozilla's now nearly silent update process, which debuted in the Windows version of Firefox 12.

If you've been using something else to browse the Web, though, this would be a great time to give Firefox a fresh look. The video below offers an overview of what's new, but here are a few key reasons why Firefox 13 is well worth checking out. Read More

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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” Launches, Sets Sights on the Enterprise Desktop

Running the Unity GUI, Precise Pangolin users can opt to run office applications remotely with virtualization, use browser-based programs, or run the many native productivity programs. Commercial support is optional and consists of audit, compliance, and ongoing maintenance; users can choose between covering all deployed machines with Canonical’s support or just a select group.

Canonical also mentioned in the press release that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is certified with almost two dozen laptops and desktops, with more being added to the list all the time, so users can expect strong compatibility and performance.

As always, the most beautiful part of any Ubuntu distro is the price tag ($0.00), so head over to Canonical and give Precise Pangolin a spin. Read More

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Corsair Vengeance K60/M60 and K90/M90 Input Devices

Dedication. Diligence. Sacrifice. These are the words that describe us here at Hot Hardware, because when we set out to review these Corsair Vengeance gaming keyboards and mice, we sent the family off to bed night after and night and worked deep into the early morning hours. We spent many--many--hours testing, testing, and testing some more, all for you, dear readers.

Granted, the primary testing method was gaming, but that counts as work in this industry.

We’re also typing this review with the keyboards (in turn), and after spending some quality time with the Corsair Vengeance K60 keyboard/M60 mouse and K90 keyboard/K90 mouse combos, we’re fans of all four devices. Read More

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Intel Debuts New Smartphone Chips at MWC

Intel launched its Medfield platform only six weeks ago, but the company is moving ahead with plans for additional processors based on the 32nm SoC. At Mobile World Congress today, Santa Clara announced plans for two additional system on a chip (SoC) designs to flesh out its product roadmap. The current Z2460 that we covered in January will be augmented by the Z2000 at the low-end and a new dual-core chip, the Z2580. Of the two, the Z2000 will ship in retail products in the second half of this year, while the Z2580 won't be available for purchase until early 2013. 

The already-launched 1.6GHz Z2460 is also getting a performance nudge; the core is now officially capable of a 2GHz maximum frequency rather than the 1.6GHz Intel specified originally. As far as we know, all current manufacturers are sticking with 1.6GHz, but the option is there for those who want to push the present design. The low-end Z2000 is a single-core Atom clocked at 1GHz with no Hyper-Threading; it'll ship with a companion XMM 6265 modem that supports HSPA+ but no LTE. Read More

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REPORT: SECRET CYBERWAR AGAINST IRANIAN NUKES BEGAN UNDER BUS

In an attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. and Israel initiated a series of cyberattacks against an Iranian enrichment plant, according to The New York Times.

The U.S. has recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons but to this point has not admitted using them. Suspicions were raised with the discovery of the "Stuxnet" worm in 2010. The Times reports that the worm was part of a program, begun under President George W. Bush, that aimed to disrupt the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. It was released onto the web due to a programmer’s error.

A new cyberweapon called Flame was recently discovered to have attacked Iranian computers, and while The Times says that Flame was not part of the program used against Iran, officials declined to say whether the U.S. was responsible for it.

It is not clear how effective the attacks had been. Administration officials say Iran’s efforts have been set back by 18 months to two years, but other outside experts are more skeptical. Read More

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ENERGY INVENTORY MISSED 500 DATA CENTERS

The Energy Department’s July 2011 inventory of its data centers neglected to include more than 500 centers managed by contractors, the department’s internal auditor said Thursday.

Energy told the Office of Management and Budget that month it was operating only 58 federal data centers, excluding at least 520 contractor-operated centers totaling 314,000 square feet, the department’s Inspector General Gregory Friedman said in the report.

“We noted that omissions of contractor-operated data centers continued despite OMB’s request that the department resubmit an updated and complete final inventory prior to Dec. 31, 2010,” the audit said.

The 520 uncounted facilities all meet an old OMB definition that included only data centers larger than 500 square feet, Rick Hass, Energy's deputy inspector general, told Nextgov.

In October 2011, the Obama administration expanded the definition of data centers to also include everything from smaller centers down to server closets. Under the new definition, the number of uncounted data centers at Energy could be significantly larger.

Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel expects to save $5 billion dollars by closing and consolidating government data centers. Read More

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INTERNET TRAFFIC REPORT: GET READY FOR THE ZETTABYTE

If you follow global data traffic trends, it's time to learn a new word. A zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, and it succeeds the exabyte to describe the unimaginably gigantic amount of data zooming around the world's broadband networks.

According to a report released on Wednesday by Cisco, by 2016 the world's 19 billion global network connections will generate 1.3 zettabytes of data. To put this spike in perspective, this represents more traffic than the total amount of data generated between 1984 and 2011, Cisco says in its Visual Networking Index Forecast.

This explosive growth is being driven by a rise in the number of users, an increase in the number of connections per user, faster connections, and--most critically--what users are doing online. Video is taxing the world's fixed-line and wireless broadband networks.

By 2016, the connected world will include 4.5 billion mobile users, up from 3.7 billion in 2011. Residential fixed-line users will total 2.3 billion, up from 1.7 billion last year. The Cisco report predicts steep growth in Internet adoption in South America and Africa, where penetration has been lagging. India is expected to show some of the fastest growth in wireless broadband. The report predicts that in much of the developing world, broadband access will be more ubiquitous than electricity. Read More

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Apple Inoculates OS X Leopard Against Flashback

In the wake of the Flashback malware outbreak that last month infected more than 600,000 Macs, Apple Monday pushed two security fixes for users of OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Flashback was the largest-ever malware outbreak involving OS X users, and at its peak exploited over 600,000 Macs. The malware spread by targeting a Java vulnerability that was first disclosed in a Windows security notice in February 2012. Apple last month released Flashback eradication software for its current Mac operating system, 10.7 Lion, as well as for 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Now, the 10.5 Leopard version of Apple's new Flashback Removal Security Update will likewise search for multiple Flashback variants, including SabPub. "This update removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware," according to the update's release notes. "If the Flashback malware is found, a dialog will notify you that malware was removed. In some cases, the update may need to restart your computer in order to completely remove the Flashback malware." Read More

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Dell, HP Caught In Apple-Amazon Crossfire

It was a bad week for Dell and Hewlett-Packard as both companies reported results that disappointed Wall Street.

Dell reported that profit fell 33% as sales were hurt in part by what one analyst termed the Apple effect as consumers and businesses embracing the bring-your-own-device model are picking Apple products. Dell is in the midst of transitioning out of consumer and low-margin products into servers and services for the enterprise, but the popularity of Apple is hurting Dell's bottom line, at least in the short term.

The Apple effect is also dinging the other personal tech giant: Hewlett-Packard. HP is in the process of cutting 28,000 employees as Meg Whitman (the latest in a revolving door of CEOs) tries to sort out the consumer, enterprise, and commercial businesses. The Apple effect is in full bloom in the consumer sector and may even be reaching into the once high-profit margin printer business. I'm positing the widespread use of tablets means fewer documents are getting printed, but I can't back that up yet. Read More

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