HP Pavilion dm4 Battery www.all-laptopbattery.com |
Posted: January 8, 2018 |
So, there you have it people: evidence. Real, real evidence from, er, a small group of consumers. HP will hope those people remember when they come to refresh their Macbooks in say, three or four years.We sent an email to Alan in Apple’s PR function and will let you know if/when he gets back to us. History has shown that it is probably best to not hold your breath. Bleeding-edge early adopters of Windows Mobile 10 have some more balm for their Continuum pains.Microsoft's Continuum lets you connect monitors, keyboards and mice to Windows Mobile phones to convert them into PCs. It fits in with Microsoft's universal app concept: software should just work wherever you're using Windows 10, on a desktop, laptop, tablet or cellphone.The Continuum-ready devices launched so far lack native support for x86 apps, though, being ARM-powered devices. The gadgets require some sort of virtualization solution to run apps for which there is not yet a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version available.Until HP launches its Workspace service, you've been stuck with trying to get a Citrix client running in the phone's Edge browser.Citrix's arch rival VMware, now a Dell company, has just emitted a rough mobile beta for its Horizon suite into the Windows store, which will allow some Horizon sites to kick the tyres. (Horizon provides remote-desktop capabilities to users of VMware's virtualization technology.) The client only supports remote desktop protocol right now, according to the community forum. From our Continuum hands-on – here – we concluded that some virtualization is mandatory to get any work done, given the dearth of UWP apps. Continuum also needs to mature to support overlapping windows, we found. Selling a computer with pre-installed software is not an unfair commercial practice and there is no requirement to list the costs of the software, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled.The CJEU, Europe's highest court, was ruling on a case between Vincent Deroo-Blanquart and Sony. Deroo-Blanquart bought a Sony laptop in 2008, but refused to subscribe to the operating system's end-user licence agreement, arguing that he wanted to be reimbursed for the cost of the pre-installed software.Sony refused to do so, but offered a refund if Deroo-Blanquart returned the computer.Deroo-Blanquart brought legal proceedings against Sony, looking for €450 for the pre-installed software, and €2,500 in damages.The French Cour de cassation, which is hearing the case on appeal, had asked the CJEU whether supplying a computer with pre-installed software, with no option to choose a version without it, constitutes an unfair commercial practice. It also asked whether it is a misleading commercial practice to fail to indicate the price of each item of software. The CJEU said that it is not necessarily an unfair commercial practice to bundle computers with pre-installed software, so long as such an offer is not contrary to the requirements of professional diligence and does not distort the economic behaviour of consumers.The national court will have to decide whether, when a consumer has been informed before the sale that the model of computer is not marketed without pre-installed software and that he is therefore free to choose another model of computer, of another brand, with similar technical specifications and sold without software, the ability of that consumer to make an informed transactional decision was appreciably impaired, the CJEU said.As to whether Sony should have given individual pricing for the software, the CJEU said this was not necessary.A commercial practice is to be regarded as misleading if it omits material information that the average consumer needs in order to make an informed transactional decision, the CJEU said.Failure to indicate the price of each item of software is not likely to cause the average consumer to make a transactional decision that he would not have taken otherwise, the court said, and so does not constitute a misleading commercial practice, it said.
It's been a number of years since an Apple PR staffer secretly admitted to one of our reporters that The Register was on a blacklist.We also learned that they were under strict instructions never to admit to the blacklist – presumably because it would make one of the world's largest companies look, you know, pathetically petty.And so, for a decade now, we have played a game where we ask Apple's US office for review products or to attend launches or go to events and they respond with silly expressions like I'm sorry, but we cannot accommodate your request or all the seats are taken or the current favorite you are on our media waitlist.Back in June, I decided it was time to stop playing the game. Or, more accurately, play a different, more persistent game in which we encourage Apple to either get over itself and kill our blacklisting or simply admit it and stop the pretense. Amid the Kaby Lake noise this week, Intel slipped out six processors, codenamed Apollo Lake, for cheapo netbooks, tablet-laptop mutants and small PC boxes.These are 14nm low-power system-on-chips that use the x86 Goldmont architecture, and are branded Pentiums and Celerons.In April, Intel axed its Goldmont-based Broxton Atoms that were due to go into smartphones, and separately canned the Goldmont-powered Willow Trail Atom line that was aimed at tablets – but it allowed the netbook-friendly Apollo Lake family to live on.The Pentium J4205, Celeron J3455 and Celeron J3355 are aimed at desktops, while the Pentium N4200, Celeron N3450 and Celeron N3350 are aimed at slabtops and netbooks.All of them have 2MB of cache, six PCIe 2 lanes, 12 to 18 GPU execution units depending on the model, LPDDR3 and LPDDR4 interfaces, and hardware decoding for H.264, HEVC, VP9, VC-1 and WMV9. The SoCs also have the usual builtin USB 2 and 3 controller, SATA ports, and so on.The kicker really is the included VP9 and HEVC/H.265 acceleration, allowing your battery-reliant device to stream high-def video from YouTube et al for longer before your charge runs out.Intel has had to down-clock its Apollo Lake CPU cores from the previous generation Braswell, also 14nm, to keep the power usage at a sensible level while integrating ninth-generation HD Graphics, the beefier video decoding, and other bits and pieces. Apollo Lake's max power consumption is 10W versus the 6.5W by Braswell, which uses eighth-gen HD Graphics. To make up for this reduction in frequency – down from the Braswell's 1.6GHz base – Chipzilla has had to pack various optimizations into the Goldmont architecture. According to SYSmark 2014 benchmark figures seen by Anandtech, the Apollo Lake N4200 is 30 per cent faster than the top-end Braswell N3710 in terms of CPU performance, and 45 per cent faster in terms of GPU performance. Given that there's a decent improvement, Goldmont is obviously doing something right to offset the drop in clock speed.Our sister site The Next Platform has just published loads of interesting details on 64-bit ARMv8-compatible desktop, laptop and server processors designed by Chinese upstart Phytium.The first engineering samples for three 28nm CPUs – the Earth architecture FT-1500A/4 and the FT-1500A/16 and the Mars architecture FT-2000/64 – are back from TSMC's fab and were seen running Kylin Linux at California's Hot Chips conference last week. China's Google Baidu is among organizations testing them. We're probably going to see this in volume production in the final quarter of the year, or shortly after.
The FT-1500A/4 has four Xiaomi cores running between 1.5 and 2GHz, with a 2MB L2 cache spread across the cores and 8MB of shared L3 cache, and builtin 1GbE controller, two DDR3 controllers and a PCIe 3 controller. It's aimed at PCs and light servers, and consumes 15W. The The FT-1500A/16 has 16 Xiaomi cores, with an 8MB L2 cache spread across the cores and 8MB of shared L3 cache, and two builtin 1GbE controllers, four DDR3 controllers and a PCIe 3 controller. It's aimed at PCs and light servers, and consumes 35W. The FT-2000/64 is a 100W chip with 64 Xiaomi cores, 512KB L2 cache per core, and a 128MB L3 cache, plus 16 DDR3 memory controllers. Phytium said that Mars chip with 64 cores running at 2GHz was able hit 570 on the integer and 482 on the floating point parts of the SPEC_CPU20006_rate test. That is a 15.2 per cent hit on expected integer performance and a 17.6 per cent decline on expected floating point performance, TNP's Timothy Prickett Morgan reports. IFA 2016 August 31st was press day one ahead of the IFA event in Berlin, which means vendors lining up to show off their latest efforts in (mainly) consumer electronics.Acer kicked off the madness, unveiling the world's first laptop with a curved screen, though you should think twice before letting the 8 kg Predator 21X gaming laptop anywhere near your lap.This thing has a 21 curved 2560x1080 screen driven by dual NVIDIA GTX 1080 SLI GPUs, each with 16GB RAM, while the main board sports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, 7th Gen Intel Core i7, up to 4 SSDs as well as a hard drive, and five fans to keep it from melting.Acer also talked up the benefits of eye-tracking, built into the Predator 21X as well as several monitors. It is another input for gaming, and one example use was to increase the light on dark portions of the screen when you look in that direction.Despite general weakness in the PC business, Acer CEO Jason Chen assured the press that thin ultrabooks are a growing market, and its engineers have taken that to heart. The Swift 7 ultrabook is just 9.98mm thick, with 13.3 screen, 7th Gen Core i5, and a claimed 9 hour battery life. It is the first laptop under 1cm according to Acer.
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