hardware

Update at 4:03 p.m. PT: This story has been modified with response from Microsoft.

The first person who figures out how to build an open-source driver for Microsoft's much-hyped new Kinect motion controller could win a $2,000 bounty offered by a leading open-source hardware developer.

Kinect, which launched today, is currently available solely for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and may well someday be extended to the Windows platform. But for New York-based Adafruit Industries, that's not enough.

And that's why Adafruit--led by MIT Media Lab alum Limor Fried and Make magazine Senior Editor Phillip … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week the most updates are with hardware-monitoring and management utilities, with one for data recovery and another for system tweaking utilities.

Hardware The main utilities this week are with those that manage the system's hardware, either by providing information … Read more

Replacing hard drives in laptops isn't new, and neither is converting old drives into external backup drives. Yours Truly did both those things about a month ago, taking my MacBook's stock 80GB drive, replacing it with a 250GB drive, and then taking the old drive and adding it to a bus-powered 2.5-inch enclosure to make a portable 80GB HD I can take anywhere.

Other World Computing has new kits that combine both a new drive and an external enclosure, as well as all the tools you'll need to do the upgrade and build the external.

What'… Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week the big updates are with data recovery utilities, but there are a couple of hardware and maintenance utilities as well.

Data recoveryDisk Drill is a relatively new data recovery package that is in development to be released as … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there are updates for maintenance utilities, SMART status monitors, and virtualization utilities among others.

Hardware

In Hardware utilities, the SMARTReporter utility for monitoring the status of the computer's internal diagnostics has been updated to fix problems with e-mail … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software announced significant new steps for its browsers today, including the release soon of Opera Mobile for Android phones and extensions technology in the upcoming Opera 11 for computers.

In both those cases--and also in the Opera Mini browser for less capable phones--the browsers will come with a major new feature: hardware acceleration to speed the display of pages and operations such as scrolling and panning. That change is essential to keep Opera relevant in a highly competitive industry.

Android is aligned well with Opera's business strategy. First, Google's mobile operating system, unlike Apple's iOS, … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems.

In the past week only a few troubleshooting utilities have been updated, and these are primarily the ones that could help you manage hardware issues.

Hardware

The first hardware-based utility is SwitchResX, which can be used to fine-tune monitor display outputs … Read more

Google is among the browser makers rushing to accelerate their software by tapping into the power of a computer's graphics hardware, but it appears that ability will have to wait for Chrome 9.

Just as Google branched off the code that will become Chrome 8 work early this morning, indicating that it's time to iron out the bugs to release a stable version of Chrome 7, programmers also pushed back a lot of hardware acceleration features until Chrome 9.

Among the items on the hardware acceleration to-do list pushed back from Chrome 8 to 9 yesterday are support for large layers, opacity fixes, a variety of Canvas issues for 2D graphics, and support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) abilities to create reflections, drop shadows, and cutouts called masks. Hardware-based video decoding was pushed back to Chrome 9 a few days earlier.

Hardware acceleration, a flagship feature of Microsoft's IE9, is a top item for browser makers eager to stay competitive, speed up their products, enable new features impossible without it, and tackle mobile computing performance challenges. It's not an easy matter, though, with complications from the wide range of graphics hardware computers come with and the inconsistent software support they come with. … Read more