Tech News

The GigaPan Epic Pro was the Gigapan we were waiting for it. It’s, well, professionally epic and capable of using nearly any DSLR camera/lens available thanks to its large magnesium chassis. It was originally going to start shipping sometime in April, but apparently something changed because we just got word from the company itself that its available now. continue

Ready for another long, drawn-out copy and paste controversy to overtake your every waking moment for a year or two? Good: Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won’t be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series…

so that’s that. Kind of ironic considering that the WinMo of old has been enjoying the functionality since time immemorial, isn’t it? Of course, anything is possible going forward — they’ve said on several occasions in different talks and sessions this week that they’re already looking at a number of enhancements that were scoped out of the initial release of the platform — but for the phones you buy this holiday season, don’t expect to be copying anything between apps.

The racks and racks of servers in Internet data centers are about to get more efficient. Intel is launching a series of new server chips today that deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The new Intel Xeon processor 5600 series chips have as many as six cores, or computing brains in a chip.  They have other features that, taken together, allow a server with just one Xeon 5600 chip to replace 15 single-core servers from five years ago. The investment in the new chip can pay off in as little as five months if it is used to replace five-year-old servers, said Boyd Davis, general manager of data center group marketing at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel. The new chips are also setting performance records in server benchmark tests.

These chips are arriving at the right time. Gartner estimates that about a million servers that should have been replaced have not been replaced during the recession. Intel itself estimates that about 80 percent of existing servers should be replaced because they’re wasting energy and money in comparison to the new server chips. Intel says that the cost of not replacing 50 single-core servers with three Intel Xeon 5600 servers is $10,000. continue

Your Mac is in all probability one of your more prized possessions. Perhaps you even have more than one – a desktop and a portable, and an iPod touch or an iPhone to complete the line-up.

What’s easy to forget though is that the kit itself is only part of the story. It’s actually your data that’s really valuable. If your Mac breaks down, it can be repaired. But if a hard drive croaks or something is accidentally deleted and it hasn’t been backed up, there’s no way to ever recover it.

For most people, their Mac stores all their data, from bank account information to photo libraries, home movies and email correspondence. It’s fair to say that for many users, their entire life is on their Mac. And yet backing up is sometimes thought of as an inconvenience and something that people only start to do after they’ve already lost some important files.

Since OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple has offered Time Machine, a straightforward and hassle-free backup utility integrated into the system. It’s so easy to use that there’s no excuse not to be using it regularly. continue