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Integral Intros USB 3.0 SSD

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Integral ssdIntegral launches the USB 3.0 Portable SSD-- the first external solid state drive (SSD) from the company making use of the USB 3.0 interface.

Around the size of a credit card and weighing just 41g, the drive features read speeds of up to 230 MB/s and write speeds of up to 140 MB/s. Being an SSD, it is shock-proof, silent and more durable than regular portable HDDs.

The USB 3.0 Portable SSD is available in 128, 256 and 512GB sizes and is compatible with both Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8) and Mac (OSX 10.2.8 and above) PCs.

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The End to Showrooming: Price Matching

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Best Buy USA counters the showrooming trend as it kicks off a "Low Price Guarantee" scheme on both online and brick and mortar stores-- effectively matching prices with all N. American and 19 online competitors.

Best BuyThrough the scheme the retailer promises it will match the prices of qualifying products should customers find lower prices on the likes of Amazon, Newegg, TigerDirect and hhgregg, even if it will not match online prices with 3rd party vendors (aka Marketplace vendors) on online retailer websites.

Customers will also get matched prices post-purchase should Best Buy lower the price within 15 days of purchase.

Not on the price-matched online retailer list is eBay, which trades at great discount to Amazon.

"Best Buy is the only retailer to offer a Low Price Guarantee in addition to having a full range of the latest and greatest devices and services, a sales force dedicated to providing impartial and knowledgeable advice and full support for the life of the product," Best Buy claims.

Nvidia Latest is Titanic

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Nvidia reveals what it claims is the fastest single-GPU graphics card yet-- the GeForce GTX Titan, a card bringing Nvidia's Kepler technology to the high-end consumer segment.

GTX TitanThe Titan carries 2688 CUDA cores (around 1000 more than the previous Nvidia single-GPU flagship, the GTX 690), a GK110 GPU and 6GB DDR5 RAM, allowing it to reach performances of up to 4.5 teraflops (single precision) or 1.3 teraflops (double precision).

Cooling comes through a combination of vapor chamber and extended fin stack promising "whisper-quiet" performance without extreme temperatures.

The card is actually a reworked version of the Tesla K20, the graphics card found in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer (if alongside 18687 other identical cards).

The GTX Titan will be available by end February 2013 for all of $1000.

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HTC Reveals One X Successor

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Just days before Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2013 HTC unveils its Android smartphone flagship-- the HTC One, a 4.7-inch successor for the One X mobile family.

HTC OneUnibody construction is in aluminium with an optically bonded 4.7-inch LCD display featuring 1920 x 1080 resolution and 468ppi pixel density. Inside are a 1.7Ghz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chip, 2GB RAm, 32 or 64GB of internal storage and a 2300mAh battery. Jelly Bean is the Android version of choice, as reskinned with the latest version of HTC Sense UI.

Connectivity options include HSPA, LTE, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac wifi and IR (allowing use as a TV remote control via HTC Sense TV app).

HTC claims the One offers "the best audio experience" through "BoomSound," the combination of x2 front-facing stereo speakers (apparently with the biggest sound chambers in a phone), integrated Beats Audio technology and a dual-microphone HDR recording option.

An End to PC Crashes?

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A development by University College London (UCL) might just bring an end to the infamous blue screen of death-- a "systemic" computer able to instantly recover from crashes by repairing corrupt data.

crashThe researchers say the self-healing computer takes inspiration from the apparent chaos of nature. The computer divides context-sensitive data and instructions into small systems (each with own memory allocation) before choosing the order tasks are executed via pseudorandom number generator.

Systems carry out instructions simultaneously, with computation results emerging from random interaction. It sounds like something that shouldn't work, but apparently it not only does, but does so much faster than expected.

"[Natural] processes are distributed, decentralised and probabilistic," UCL computer scientist Peter Bentley tells New Scientist. "And they are fault tolerant, able to heal themselves. A computer should be able to do that."

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