Computers

Editor’s note: Craig Le Grice is a member of BIMA‘s Executive Committee, and Chair of the organisation’s Silicon Roundabout group, he is an industry advocate for entrepreneurship and next generation talent. Follow him on Twitter: @craiglegrice. Silicon Roundabout, Tech City, Old Street Roundabout – whatever you call it, the still-gritty area of East London has been getting a lot of attention recently. Cited as the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley in California, it’s bustling with technology startups and attracting a lot of focus from both in and out of the UK. Indeed, the Government invested £50m earlier this year to continue developing the area’s prominence as David Cameron attempts to make the area globally renowned for digital innovation. But the area has its critics too. Despite there being more than 600 companies based there (according to Government funded TCIO), most of the products, tools and services that make it to consumer, critic and investor acclaim still come from the San Francisco Bay Area – Silicon Valley. For me, Silicon Roundabout has five major areas of development to continue trying to crack in order to match its West Coast USA rival: Investors Infrastructure Community Talent Identity Investors It takes much more than just money to build a centre of excellence, but it’s a vital place to start. Silicon Roundabout has attracted many great venture capital firms, private equity experts and dedicated banks (with the likes of Silicon Valley Bank arriving in 2012). But it needs more. Major funders have to properly understand the sector, and start investing. The UK, as a whole, still lags behind its US friends when it comes to funding startups. Our government has injected millions of dollars into the technology sector but the majority has reached the large, established firms – often structured as tax breaks rather than the physical cash required for growth. Private investment is there. But much of it is spectrumised – designed to support very small companies at seed stage (with deals at the sub £250k level) or large established businesses exiting the startup stage, if not yet fully mature. The mid-level space – where companies raise the money that catalyses real ‘growth’ – A rounds and B rounds – is still vastly under catered for when we compare Silicon Roundabout to Silicon Valley. It’s this acceleration stage that creates the early success stories associated with the startups emerging from California that we read about. Infrastructure Every company needs infrastructure, but startups especially so. One element of Silicon Valley that delivers a specific and unique DNA is its migratory effect. It’s exceptionally easy to bring people to the area – with hundreds of companies moving from other parts of the US to call it home each year. Silicon Roundabout is still a cool part of East London. It now needs to connect in a deeper and broader way to the rest of London and other technology pockets of the UK such as Manchester, Croydon, Newcastle, Edinburgh etc. Logistically, compare getting from Palo Alto to SFO international airport to the journey from Old Street to LHR. Much has to be done in this space – including better linkage to London City airport – to connect non-UK people and companies to the area efficiently. Community Tech startups are unlike most other companies, in most ways. As such, people working in technology need to be surrounded by peers and a real community of equals, experts and comparative disciplines. It is imperative that we continue to support the communities and sub-communities (like Silicon Drinkabout, TechMeetups, TechHub, Google Campus etc.) around Silicon Roundabout that foster and nurture relationships, building a united ecosystem. Support for these must come from individuals, corporates and government bodies equally. Talent One of the most frequent grumbles from within the technology community is the scarcity of great talent. And, while the UK is catching up with the US, it’s s

Many of those set-top boxes hidden under televisions are already running Linux. And despite their lack of CPU power, they're all more than capable of recording and playing several channels at the same time, as well as streaming the data across your local network. The Raspberry Pi is perfectly suited to this, too, and with the appropriate hardware it can be turned into a powerful low-cost digital video recorder, complete with media streaming, scheduling and time shift.8 great Raspberry Pi projects created by kidsThe appropriate hardware is the key phrase in the previous paragraph, because a painless installation is mostly dependent on your television-grabbing hardware 'just working'. Fortunately, Linux has support for a great many such devices built in to the kernel, so many will work without modification. And while these instructions start from the command line, we've split the entire tutorial into 10 different steps, hopefully making the project as easy to follow as possible.Raspberry Pi tutorial: how to do moreAt the end of this project, you'll find yourself with a fully-fledged digital TV recording platform, capable of recording multiple programmes from multiple sources, all running from the humble Raspberry Pi. It's the perfect backend for the just-released XBMC, which you'll be able to use as a front-end from any other computer on the same network. 1. Our hardware We tested and configured two USB receiver devices, one for grabbing terrestrial digital television through an aerial and another for grabbing the data from a satellite feed. We'll include instructions for both. For DVB-T (terrestrial) reception, we used a Sundtek MediaTV Pro, for DVB-S (satellite) reception, we used the Sundtek SkyTV Ultimate. The latter includes a 12v power adaptor that also needs to be connected. But here's the most important requirement: these USB devices must be attached to the Raspberry Pi through a powered USB hub. We wasted two days trying to configure the system, firstly without a hub and secondly with an incompatible hub. In both cases, everything appeared to work but the devices wouldn't find any television channels in a scan. Switching to a powered hub compatible with the Raspberry Pi solved the problem, so we can't emphasise this point enough. Plug a hub into a power supply, connect your USB receiver to the hub and the hub to the Pi. And don't forget to connect the aerial or satellite feed to your receiver. 2. External storage We're assuming you've got a Raspberry Pi pre-configured and updated with the Raspbian distribution. We're also assuming it's connected to the internet and that you're typing your commands into the console directly or over an SSH session. Our next consideration is going to be where you store the television recordings. We'd recommend connecting an external USB hard drive, as the constant read/write access will test the average SD card to its limits. To add storage like this, simply plug the device into a spare USB port and check the output from the system logs by typing tail /var/log/ messages. You'll see output similar to usb 1-1.3.4.2: New USB device, and you'll need to look for the device identifier, which should look something like sda: sda1 – sda is the device itself, while sda1 is a partition. Type sudo mkdir /mnt/storage to create a mount point and sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/storage/ to connect it to your external device. 3. Install the drivers Depending on the television hardware you're using, this step might be unnecessary. If you've chosen a device that's compatible with Linux and requires no additional driver files, then you can simply plug in your device and move on to the next step. For our Sundtek devices, we need to download and install a driver. This is easy. From the Raspberry Pi command line, type: wget http://www.sundtek.de/media/sundtek_netinst.sh chmod 777 sundtek_netinst.sh sudo ./sundtek_netinst.sh The final line will execute the script that's downloaded in the first line. It will then detec

Up to the £1,000 (AU$1,530, US$1,500) mark, there's are a huge variety of different specs you can throw into a PC and still come out with a decent gaming rig. Just look at the Daw Computers machine and the Vibox Power FX. Above that price point though, things stagnate very quickly. From here until the crazy-priced machines with their hex-core Sandy Bridge Extreme and octo-core Xeons, it's all about the Core i7 3770K and whatever overclock the SI can squeeze out of it - and, of course, the Z77 motherboard. This Wired2Fire machine comes slap-bang in between the lower-end machines, like the Daw and Vibox rigs, and the top-tier Titan machines that are starting to pop up everywhere. But when you compare it with those £2,000+ (about AU$3,000+, US$3,000+) rigs, the only real difference you'll see is in the choice of graphics card that's been used. At the £1,600 (about AU$2,460, US$2,430) Wired2Fire is targeting with the Diablo Phantom, you're moving away from the cheaper machines that will usually sacrifice some general niceties for top CPU and GPU combos and are getting a full gaming PC with all the benefits you'd expect from a premium rig. That means that as well as the ubiquitously overclocked 3770K, you've got a quality Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, a huge amount of quick Corsair Vengeance system memory and lots of data storage, as well as two Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB SSDs. The Diablo Phantom has taken the odd step of using a RAID array to give the SandForce-powered Kingston HyperX 3K drives a bit of a speed boost. But the extra boost from RAID is negligible when you start to include the problems of incompressible data handling you get with SandForce. Rough edges The NZXT Phantom chassis that Wired2Fire has used in this build is visually striking but somewhat disappointing. It looks pretty funky from a distance, but when you get up close you can see the plastic of the orange detailing hasn't been finished that well. However, it does run much quieter than the DinoPC Titanosaurus Rex. BenchmarksCPU encoding performanceX264 v4.0: Frames per second: Higher is betterDIABLO PHANTOM: 51.44TITANSAURUS REX: 51.61DirectX 11 tessellation performanceHeaven 4.0: Frames per second: Higher is betterDIABLO PHANTOM: 23.7TITANSAURUS REX: 35.2DirectX 11 1080p gaming performanceCrysis 3: Frames per second: Higher is betterDIABLO PHANTOM: 50TITANSAURUS REX: 66Unfortunately, the active cooling doesn't seem to be sufficient for the chip to run stably at the 4.7GHz it came clocked at out of the box. We managed an initial successful run of Cinebench, but further runs fell over and even once we'd taken it down a notch to 4.6GHz (which is what all our benchmarks were run at afterwards), the X264 test struggled to complete. VerdictOnce it's running, this is a decent rig, and although it's not quite in the same league as the Titans, it's not far off - especially when you consider it's substantially cheaper than the DinoPC and can still happily knock around 2,560 x 1,600 gaming.

The specifications for the upcoming NVIDIA GTX 770 graphics card have been revealed. Unlike the GTX 780, which is based on the new GK110 architecture, the GTX 770 is based on the GK104 architecture like the previous generation. It is going be a rebranded GTX 680 with higher clocks. It has 1,536 CUDA cores and a core clock of 1,046 MHz, which goes up to 1,085 MHz with NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0. It will be available in two variants, one with 2 GB and one with 4 GB of memory, both with a memory clock of 7,000 MHz, which is paired with a 256-bit memory interface. The card will need a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCIe power connector, and it has a TDP of 230 W. The cooler is apparently going to be the same as the one used on the GTX Titan, which should keep the card rather cool and quiet. Two DL-DVI, an HDMI, and a DisplayPort output has been fitted on the board, so it should work with most modern monitors. Performance has been estimated to be anywhere from 10 to 20 percent faster than AMD's HD 7970 GHz Edition; though in some games, like Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, and Max Payne 3, the GTX 770 will be on par or a little faster. A price has not been revealed yet, but it is expected to be around the same as the HD 7970 GHz Edition. Source: Fudzilla

Intel's new "Beacon Mountain" ADE supports Intel Atom- and ARM-based devices running Android 4.2 and up.

What a week! Google I/O 2013 kept us busy and then last night it was Yahoo and Tumblr trying to get it on. I am just surprised I even had time to breathe, forget reading. But somehow I managed and here are seven gems I can recommend for your reading pleasure. If he ran your hometown basketball team, you loved him. If your team was on the other side, then you had no time for Phil Jackson. And even though he has bowed out of the game, basketball won’t leave him alone. The New York Times Magazine tries to answer why. The legend of Malacrianza, Costa Rica’s Killer Bull. What a great read by Ashley Harrell and Lindsay Fendt. Depositor’s haircut: James Meek goes to Cyprus and finds out what went wrong. Probably the best thing I read this week. Inside Indian generic drugmaker, Ranbaxy: Fortune investigates and finds some nasty stuff. And much of it not legal. BitCoin’s winner’s curse and the auction theory about bubbles, Vitaly Gordon, a data scientist with LinkedIn writes. Jockeying for position: How boxers and briefs got into men’s pants. Please don’t tell me you don’t want to read this piece. Will you pay higher price for ethical clothing? I know I will, and I will actually buy less if I have to in order to do the right thing.

Debating the merits of Nokia's decision to go Windows Phone-exclusive is liable to spark an outbreak of vicious bickering in these parts.But you can't deny that Nokia's Lumia handsets are slowly getting better and better. Whether or not you like the brightly coloured designs, Windows Phone 8 has become a fantastic OS and so we were happy this week to have our first taste of the new flagship Nokia Lumia 925.That wasn't all either – we've played with some fun toys in the last seven days so have a browse and make sure you haven't missed anything exciting…Hands on: Nokia Lumia 925 reviewThe Nokia Lumia 925 is a tricky beast to rate. Nokia tells us that this is a phone designed for the more technologically minded, the person that wants the latest and greatest handset from the brand. However it seems that person would be disappointed by the Lumia 925, with its average specs and minimal upgrade from the 920 - at least when it comes to the internals. But there's no doubting that it's going to be a market-leading cameraphone, and with things like the dedicated camera button (sounds obvious, but makes a huge difference) the 925 is definitely going to be a front runner for anyone that wants one of the most powerful portable cameras around.Samsung PS64F8500 reviewFirst impressions of the Samsung PS64F8500 in action are little short of dazzling. Literally. The huge screen defies not only every plasma TV we've seen before but even our expectations of what plasma is capable of by serving up extreme levels of brightness that actually manage to rival those that have proved so useful in making LCD the most popular TV option. Even more amazingly, these unprecedented plasma brightness levels remain seemingly completely intact if you turn all the lights in your room up to max, because Samsung's new on-screen filter design stops plasma cells being 'infiltrated' by ambient light.Hands on: BlackBerry Q5 reviewThe BlackBerry Q5 is one for the aficionados who can't afford, or refuse to splash cash on the highly priced Q10, with the solid BlackBerry typing experience at the heart of everything it does. Without knowing the price it's difficult to say how it will stand up against other handsets, but anyone who isn't a BlackBerry fan and is in the market for a reasonably priced smartphone probably won't be taken with the Q5. That said if BlackBerry manage to price the Q5 low enough it would make it a seriously attractive proposition with its decent power under the hood, HD display and rapid internet browser. We're just going to have to wait and see.And this week's other reviews...Cameras and camcordersNikon Coolpix S5200 reviewNikon Coolpix S9500 reviewPanasonic HX-WA3 reviewAVSamsung BD-F6500GamingHands on: Nvidia Shield reviewMonitorsViewsonic VX2770Smh-LED reviewPhilips Brilliance 928X4QJAB reviewPhilips Brilliance 278G4DHSD reviewNEC EA244WMi review

New submitter TheJish writes "The RPiCluster is a 33-node Beowulf cluster built using Raspberry Pis (RPis). The RPiCluster is a little side project I worked on over the last couple months as part of my dissertation work at Boise State University. I had need of a cluster to run a distributed simulator I've been developing. The RPiCluster is the result. I've written an informal document on why I built the RPiCluster, how it was built, and how it performs as compared to other platforms. I also put together a YouTube video of it running an MPI parallel program I created to demo the RGB LEDs installed on each node as part of the build. While there have certainly been larger RPi clusters put together recently, I figured the Slashdot community might be interested in this build as I believe it is a novel approach to the rack mounting and power management of RPis." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KeywordPhrase: TSSDR Affiliate Tech Reviews for May 18, 2013HIGHLIGHT REVIEW  Kingston MobileLite Wireless Portable Card Reader @ TechnologyX As technology advances faster and faster, data keeps getting bigger and bigger. Even mobile devices such as smartphones and cameras have large storage requirements. High-definition video and pictures are taking more and more space, and carrying around bulky external drives and notebooks to off-load media [...]This content was created by The SSD Review - The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource |

EVGA has teased its dual-fan "Active Cooling Xtreme" (ACX) graphics card cooler.