Nvidia Unveils Next Generation Kepler GPU Compute Engine

Nvidia touts massive improvement in performance in its latest Tesla GPU compute products, including an upcoming 7.1 billion transistor monster GPU compute engine

   May 15, 2012 5:15 pm

Nvidia launched its latest line of Tesla GPU compute engines at the company’s Graphics Technology Conference in San Jose today. One model shipping immediately is based on the existing GK104 chip used in the recently released GTX 680. Dubbed the Tesla K10, the board delivers as much as 4.6 teraflops of single precision floating point performance, roughly three times the single precision FP of the older, Fermi-based Tesla. The card can also handle an aggregate memory bandwidth of 320GB per second. This board is targeted towards oil exploration, signal processing and seismic processing applications.

5 Great Android Apps for Cloud Admins

If you administer cloud servers or services, such as those from Amazon Web Services or Rackspace, you might be relieved to learn that you don't need access to a notebook or desktop PC to perform routine administrative tasks.
Install one of these five apps--AWS Console, Android AWS Manager, Decaf Amazon EC2 Client, Rackspace, or ConnectBot--on your Android phone or tablet, and you can manage your cloud infrastructure from anyplace where you can access the Internet.

The best camera bargains right now

courtesy pcworldBy Tim Moynihan

For the most part, the digital-camera landscape is mapped out in $200 increments. Every $200 you're willing to spend represents a nice step up in camera capabilities.
Here's how it generally shakes out: For $200

Use Google Voice to Send Text Messages From a Tablet

Last week I offered up three things you should know about Google Voice, including its very cool option of sending and receiving text messages from within your browser.
Reader George followed up with this question:

"Read your column on texting through Google voice from a PC. Can you do the same with a tablet on Wi-Fi, no charge?"

Find the Best Netflix Streaming Movies With A Better Queue

For a service that has famously worked so hard to help you find movies you might like, Netflix is actually a little weak in the recommendations department.
Suppose, for example, you're trying to find something fun for the whole family to watch. By clicking your way into Netflix's Watch Instantly section, you can head to the Children & Family section, then filter the choices by one of a handful of categories: age, "animal tales," Disney, and so on.
But what if you want to narrow the selection to a particular range of years? And show only those movies that received an especially good rating?

The Bootable Maintenance Flash Drive

Fixing your friends' computers? Carry a bootable PC toolkit in your pocket.

I enjoy being the tech hero. Relatives and friends come to me with their computer problems, and more often than not, I help them. Their problem gets solved, and my ego goes up a notch. (I can vouch for that last one. --Ed.)
It helps to have the right tools--and unless a friend has a hardware problem, all of those tools fit onto a single flash drive. If a person's system is sufficiently sick, I can boot a Linux variation called PartedMagic from the flash drive. From there, I can retrieve files off an unbootable PC, check the condition of the hard drive, and scan for malware.

Safely Remove USB Drives Just by Unplugging Them

Most Windows users have become conditioned over time to never unplug a USB flash drive or hard drive without first clicking Safely Remove Hardware in the System Tray.
Why is that necessary? In theory, it's to ensure that Windows isn't busy reading from or writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupted data or even a damaged drive.
As it turns out, however, you can safely sidestep Safely Remove Hardware with little to no loss of performance. In fact, this option may already be enabled on your system, and you just didn't know it. Yep, you may have been wasting extra clicks all this time.
Do this:
1. Plug your USB drive into your PC, then open Device Manager. (Note: These steps are based on Windows 7. Things might look different in previous versions of Windows.)
2. Expand Disk Drives, then find the entry for your removable drive. On my system, for example, it's called "USB2.0 Flash Disk USB Device."
3. Right-click that entry, then click Properties.
4. Click the Policies tab; you should see something like this:

5. If the first option, Quick removal, is already selected, you're good to go. As noted in its description, "you can disconnect the device safely without using the Safely Remove Hardware notification icon." If Better performance is selected, switch to Quick removal and click OK.
So, what are giving up by disabling write caching? According to the test results posted at 7tutorials, almost nothing. The performance impact was negligible. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it's worth a few milliseconds to avoid the hassles of having to mess with Safely Remove Hardware all the time.
Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com, or try the treasure trove of helpful folks in the PC World Community Forums. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

How to Create a Bootable Mac OS X Flash Drive

Creating a bootable thumb drive that will run Lion and fit in your pocket is easy. This simple guide walks you through the necessary steps.

By David Daw, PCWorld    Apr 18, 2012 6:00 pm

A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends. It's also extremely useful for keeping your basic setup consistent across multiple computers, if you find yourself switching hardware regularly

Create a Bootable Linux Flash Drive in Three Easy Steps

A flash drive is one of the single most useful tools a person can own. With it you can back up critical data, transport large files, rescue a malware-infested PC, and even run an entire operating system.

Regarding this last option, awhile back I explained how to put Windows 8 on a flash drive. (It works with Windows 7, too.) Today, let's talk about putting Linux on a flash drive.

How to Convert an Old PC into a Modern Server

Your old desktop PC gave you years of reliable service, but eventually it couldn't keep up with modern tasks and applications; so you went out and bought something newer and faster. Now you need to decide what to do with the old clunker.

You could e-recycle it--hand it off to a responsible company that will dismantle it and recycle the parts--but what do you gain from that aside from feeling good about being environmentally responsible? Allow us to suggest another solution: Repurpose the old hulk as a local server. You can use it as a repository for automatic PC backups, or set it up as a file server that you and your employees can access while you're on the road. Those are just two of the roles that an older PC can perform that are of far more benefit to your business than having the machine collect dust or head for the dump.