For the past decade, golf has been in the middle of a technology “Golden Age”, thanks to graphite shafts, titanium drivers, and golf balls with multiple personalities. Oh, what a difference they made. The ball launched higher and farther and depending on the club, spun hardly at all or like the dickens.

The was depressing for most amateurs was their game wasn’t really getting any better. The pros and those habitual regulars saw their scores drop and confidence sore. Yet the weekend, warrior hackers got left behind. Now it’s their turn.

The way golf is taught is changing in a dramatic and profound way. The use of high speed cameras, video cameras, and sophisticated computer software used to analyze a golfer’s swings on the pro tour became common. Now it’s trickled down to the rest of us.

A golfer now slips into a sophisticated vest fitted with sensors. These sensors measure specific body positions at every significant point of the golf swing, and the software program records the data and analyzes it.

An incorrect swing can be quickly identified by viewing the swing. The program instantly provides a color coded rating system and audio feedback.

Want to compare your swing to your favorite pro? No problem. The program has a database of 150 pros, but the comparisons can be both revealing and humbling. Not only does your lesson end when you leave the store, but you can check it out later on the Internet. One chain that offers the high-tech lesson is GolfTEC, with over 115 stores across the U.S.

Remember, it’s not just an awesome golf swing that will drive your scores lower. focus more energy on improving your body. Making yourself stronger, faster and more flexible will mean an improved range of vision. Along with a strong mental state, will translate into better, longer and more accurate golf shots.

Researchers from the University of California, backed by technology titans Intel and Microsoft, said Tuesday they are embarking on a project to bring the power of supercomputers to people’s laptops and mobile devices. New research labs at UC Berkeley and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will seek to push the boundaries of personal and business computing into the next era, when computer chips will have dozens or hundreds of cores performing different tasks simultaneously.

The technology will allow PCs to “think” more like people and perform such tasks as identifying people, recognizing and responding to speech and making video games vastly more realistic.

“My favorite example is having a cell phone in your shirt pocket, kind of peeking out,” said David Patterson, who is heading up the UC Berkeley lab. “It can recognize the face of someone approaching and can kind of whisper in your ear who it is. If it’s a student you had in class three years ago, you can say, ‘Oh, hi, Bill,’ and be a social success.”

Another application could be much better voice recognition, where a laptop could record a meeting and spit out an accurate transcript. More sonically rich music could be another result.

Megan Langer, an Intel spokeswoman, cited health benefits, such as a device that could show the impact of a meal and exercise on your cardiovascular system.

“It’s really trying to address the next generation of computing and could very easily change dramatically the way we do things and what we do with computers,” said Rob Enderle, a Silicon Valley technology analyst. “From a practical standpoint, when you start talking about artificial intelligence, one of the first areas to get applied is video games. They will get more realistic, more like people.”

Microsoft and Intel are committing $10 million to each of the two campus research labs over five years. UC Berkeley has applied for another $7 million in state and UC matching funds, and an additional $8 million will come from University of Illinois.

These efforts may well fuel the continuing evolution of computing technology. Intel’s duo-core chips, now in many computers, are simply the beginning. The company’s research prototype now has 80 cores, and there is no theoretical limit to the number, said Langer. The more cores a computer has, the faster it will solve problems, say researchers.

The challenge is keeping up with “Moore’s law,” named after Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, who championed the idea of computer technology doubling performance every 18 months to two years while getting cheaper.

“The typical programmer tends to think about a problem in terms of a linear solution,” said Nathan Brockwood, a research fellow at Insight 64, a market research firm in Saratoga. “The idea of thinking about things in parallel — how you divide a task into lots of elements and make them all proceed in parallel — is something that is still alien to most programmers and even to most people who are still coming out of the universities.

“The future of the industry relies upon having more programmers that can take advantage of this new hardware architecture.”

Then computers will run cooler and use less power, enabling them to gain abilities without overheating, researchers say.

Tuesday’s announcement marks the official start of the university labs. The groundwork has been laid at Berkeley, which had a strong idea it would be selected from among 25 top-tier universities applying for the grant.

In addition to Patterson, the Berkeley lab will have seven full-time faculty members and 50 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers.

“This is a once-in-a-career opportunity to recast the foundations of information technology and influence the entire IT industry for decades to come,” said Patterson, a professor of computer science and a pioneering expert in computer architecture.

Langer said ideas could start flowing out of the labs within 18 months, and actual products might take seven to 10 years. Analysts pointed out that it takes only one or two ideas to reach success.

“You put a whole lot of very smart people looking for a solution to these kinds of complex problems together,” Brockwood said. “They don’t all need to find a solution. You just need one or two to find a solution. Once they start to make those fundamental breakthroughs … everyone piles on.

“It’s a little bit like watching ants pile on your floor and scour your food. It’s not like all the ants need to find the food. But they’ll all be there.”

Article by: Mark Melnicoe – Sacramento Bee

$3000 for two quad-core processors from the Penryn family, $650 for a special mainboard and $200 for memory. This is the hot, new exclusive dual-processor platform for enthusiasts from Intel. However, do investments like that really make sense for the sake of unattainable performance? Do we really need all this power under our PC’s hood? Sure we do.

Although Intel Skulltrail including two quad-core Penryn processors has no analogues or competitors these days, it is extremely interesting to check out. Let’s see how good this monstrous system actually is and how valuable it is going to be from a practical standpoint. Our today’ article will try to answer the following question: can Intel Skulltrail become a really useful platform or it is interesting only as a vivid example of Intel’s financial power. Full article

No, this doesn’t mean you can bring in your broken down PC and have it pimped to the max. Nor will you see this on an MTV episode. However, considering the luxury appearance of the computers in question, plus and the large amount of money required to get them, your chances of actually owning one is as close as getting featured on the hit TV show.

Tokyo Japan’s Zeus Computer has crafted a line of luxury desktops that bring a new definition to “over the top.” First on the menu is the “Jupiter” model, made of pure platinum. Next is the “Mars” model, molded in solid gold, according to Tokyo-based Pink Tentacle.

Respective prices of 80 million and 60 million yen–or $760,000 and $570,000. The specs, as if they really mattered include: a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, a 1 TB hard drive, a 256MB GeForce graphics card, and a Blu-ray DVD drive.

I’m fairly sure that most people, even the ultra-rich can come up with a long list of things that you can spend nearly a million dollars on. More importantly, something you can feel more sensible about. Can you even think of a market for platinum and gold computers? I seriously doubt even Bill Gates has a computer like this.

Adding bling to gadgets isn’t new. Gold-plated iPods do exist, and Dolce & Gabbana released a Motorola RAZR version of their own . Given those examples, you could say that the arrival of pimped-out PCs was inevitable. And now, they’re really here.