Posted on Wednesday, 31st December 2008 by Indus
On Sunday, the Dell Inspiron Mini 12, a larger version of the Mini 9, makes its debut—in Japan. Dell had reached an exclusive agreement with VIC Camera, Kojima, and SofMap—all Japanese retailers—to make the early announcement overseas. According to Dell, the Inspiron 12 will ship in the United States by mid-November. The Mini 12 is officially the first netbook to house a 12-inch widescreen; the largest so far have been 10-inch models such as the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 and the MSI Wind. The screen offers 1,280-by-800 resolution, higher than the typical 1,280-by-600 netbooks. Its shape is like a wedge, measuring 9.0-by-11.8-by-0.92 inches, becoming thicker towards the back. The weight starts at 2.7 pounds, with a 3-cell battery. A 6-cell battery will be available later on and will likely bring the weight over 3 pounds.
Like the S10 and the Wind, the Mini 12’s feature set includes three USB ports, a multicard reader, Ethernet, VGA-Out, and a 1.3-megapixel camera. Hard drives aren’t the meager solid state ones offered on the Mini 9; you have a choice of 40GB, 60GB, and 80GB spinning drives. Although it doesn’t have the antenna infrastructure to support WWAN, an empty slot is available for it, like on the Mini 9. In the meantime, the Mini 12 has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in. Like the Mini 9, the new Mini uses Intel’s Atom platform: The 1.33-GHz Z520 and the 1.6-GHz Z530 Atom processor are both available come November. The Mini 12 is one of the few systems to run Windows Vista Basic, which will be the only choice for operating systems at this time. The Vista system starts at $550.
Source: Computer World
Tags: Dell launched new subnotebook: Inspiron Mini 12, india, industalk, Tech News
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One day after Microsoft issued a rare emergency Windows security patch, the bad guys have a few new ways to take advantage of the bug. By Friday, security researchers had identified a new worm, called 
MSI announced its U115 “hybrid” netbook on Tuesday. What’s a hybrid netbook? One with the ability to use both a solid-state disc drive as well as a spinning hard drive, apparently.MSI didn’t release a price or a ship date for the U115 netbook, which includes a 10-inch display and is designed around Intel’s 1.6-GHz Z530 Atom processor and its “Menlow” chipset platform. Other specs include the usual 1 Gbyte of RAM, 802.11b/g/n wireless, Bluetooth EDR, a few USB ports, either a 1.3-Mpixel or 2.0-Mpixel Webcam, and 4-in-1 card reader. MSI didn’t draw any overt comparisons to the MSI Wind, the company’s more famous netbook offering. The real innovation, at least according to MSI, is the 8- or optional 16-Gbyte SSD working in conjunction with the 120-Gbyte or optional 160-Gbyte rotating hard drive.
Downloads of a new build of Microsoft Corp.’s upcoming Windows 7 operating system have soared in the last two days, with thousands of systems now pulling pirated copies from BitTorrent sites. Searches today on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, returned multiple listings of Windows 7 Build 7000, which Microsoft identifies as a beta candidate in the filename. The torrent is a disk image of the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate; a 64-bit version is not yet available. The most heavily trafficked Windows 7 BitTorrent on Pirate Bay showed more than 4,300 seeders and about 7,500 leechers.
A team of U.S. and European computer security researchers have used a cluster of several hundred Sony PlayStation 3 video-game machines to exploit a basic weakness in the software system used to protect commercial transactions made via the Internet. The attack is possible because a handful of commercial organizations that provide components of the basic security infrastructure of the Internet are using an older security technology — despite years of warnings that it is now potentially obsolete. The flaw would make it possible for a criminal to redirect a Web surfer to a fake bank or online merchant without being detected by the security mechanism embedded in today’s Web browsers. It could also be used to subvert e-mail communications and other applications that use cryptographic software for authentication and security.
Breastfeeding or nursing represents a way to feed infants and it’s also a natural part of being a mother. But the popular networking Facebook removed all the photographs which showed this type of mothers nursing their infants. And this wasn’t left unpunished as on Saturday many activists gathered round in front of Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters in order to make protests connected to this censorship. Yet, the Website clearly stated that they had no problems with breastfeeding and that they only try to keep away images of fully exposed breasts. But the activists think that the images aren’t obscene and shouldn’t be taken off the Website, even if Facebook’s decision is irreversible.
