technologizer

Google is going green at a data center in Oklahoma.

The search giant announced today that it has signed a deal with the Grand River Dam Authority to transition the energy supply for its Oklahoma data center to wind energy. According to Google, the supply will be powered by 48 megawatts of wind energy from the Canadian Hills Wind Project in Oklahoma. The Project is slated to come online later this year.

Although Google has signed deals in the past to use green, renewable energy, it's the first time the company will take it from a utility provider. In … Read more

Apple's iPhone 5 beat Samsung's Galaxy S3 in a display tech "shoot-out" at screen testing firm DisplayMate Technologies.

The iPhone 5's Retina screen is the best smartphone display that DisplayMate has tested to date, according to results the firm posted today.

iPhone 5: "It is a significant improvement over the display in the iPhone 4," said DisplayMate's Raymond Soneira, who cited much lower screen reflections, much higher image contrast and screen readability in high ambient lighting -- the latter, the highest he's ever tested.

DisplayMate -- which gave the display an "A" -- also cited improved color gamut and factory calibration that "delivers very accurate colors and very good picture quality." The Retina iPad is the only thing that beats it in accuracy, according to Soneira.

Galaxy S3: While DisplayMate said the OLED display is "very good" and gave it a "B+," it fell short of the iPhone 5.

The problem, comparatively, as Soneira sees it, is that the Galaxy S III's OLED technology is still on steep development curve. OLED is "a new technology that has not yet been refined to the same degree as LCDs, particularly the IPS LCDs on the iPhones, so it doesn't objectively test or perform as well as the iPhone 5," according to Soneira.

The brightness on the Galaxy S3's display is about half of the iPhone 5 "due to power constraints resulting from the lower OLED power efficiency," among other issues, that makes for poorer image contrast and screen readability in high ambient lighting compared to the iPhone 5, said Soneira.

Other issues he cited are a "lopsided" color gamut and calibration. "For some reason Samsung has not bothered to calibrate the Color Gamut on any of its OLED displays, so they are wildly inaccurate and produce inaccurate and over saturated colors." … Read more

Microsoft wants China to curtail the use of pirated software at four of the country's state-run companies, according to a story out today from Bloomberg.

Microsoft has reportedly already issued complaints against China National Petroleum (CNPC), China Post Group, China Railway Construction, and TravelSky Technology, all of which are run by the Chinese government.

Redmond believes that more than 40 percent of Office and Windows Server client software used by CNPC is pirated, Bloomberg reported, citing information from "three people familiar with the situation."

A spokesman for CNPC declined to comment to Bloomberg on the allegation. A … Read more