Waspmote from Libelium brings unprecedented performance to ZigBee wireless sensor networks (WSN)

New sensor modular platform from Libelium with a radio range of up to 40 km and outstanding power consumption enables environmental monitoring in adverse conditions.

Zaragoza, Spain – January 19th, 2010 – Libelium, a technology leader in distributed wireless networks, announces the launch of the Waspmote modular platform for wireless sensor networks. With radio modules offering a range of up to 40 km and with ultra low power

We brought up the issue of underperforming Latitudes (E6400 and E6500) from Dell a few days back, and it seems that there is some good news for owners of those laptops. Dell has come up with a BIOS update to fix the problem. Aside from that performance issue, it seems that Dell has also taken the chance to sort out the issue of noisy Seagate drives in its notebooks, and the update should quiet the hard disk operation noise.

3M is one of the leading developers of pico projector technology. Recently, the company announced that they have developed a color-conversion technology that doubles the efficiency of green LEDs. Because of the specific wavelength that the color green requires, the efficiency of the green LED is significantly lower, which is why when red, green, and blue LEDs are grouped together, there are almost always two green LEDs. The new high performance LED will help improve color performance, energy efficiency, heat

Microsoft has finally given out some details regarding its next browser – Internet Explorer 9. It seems that the main thing that they will be touting is the boost in JavaScript speed, which has always been far behind the other browsers. Apparently JavaScript speed is almost as fast as competing browsers. Aside from then, the Acid3 scores have improved from 24/100 to 32/100, but it’s certainly worth noting that Chrome and Safari score 100/100 and Firefox 3.6 beta hits 92/100. Regardless of whether IE9 can match the other browsers

The Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was recently upgraded with new AMD processors that gave it enough performance to move up the top 5 supercomputers list. The Jaguar is a Cray XT5 supercomputer and is now the fastest machine in the world.

Jaguar previously used quad-core AMD processors and was upgraded to 6-core processors. The new upgrade gives the supercomputer a theoretical peak performance of 2.3 petaflops/s. The performance on the Linpack benchmark was 1.75 petaflops/second.

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Intel has made sure that their 34nm X25-M Gen 2 SSD will perform better than ever thanks to the new SSD Toolbox that will include an SSD Optimizer which allows users to monitor and manage the SSD's health more effectively. Apart from that, the 160GB model will be able to experience a performance boost to sequential write speeds of up to 100MB/sec - that's a cool 40% faster compared to what you're getting from existing firmware.

If you are the lucky owner of an uber-fast Intel SSD drive, it might just get better: Intel has just announced an SSD Optimizer firmware update to is 34nm X25-M 160GB SSD that can boost performance by %40 in sequential writes under Windows 7. If you are running under Windows XP or Vista, you can get the same benefits by installing the Intel SSD Toolbox software. The SSD Toolbox will provide better disk health management under all operating systems as well.