Sierra Corporation, IT Services and Support

February 2008 Newsletter

Dell’s PowerEdge Blade Servers

IBM and Hewlett-Packard now have new competition when it comes to makers of blade servers – Dell has launched its PowerEdge blade servers.

The M-Series is Dell’s fastest working and most power-efficient servers. "Going greener can be a reason for an upgrade," states Richard Doherty, cofounder and director of Envisioneering Group. The M1000E enclosure for the PowerEdge M600 and the M605 blade servers supports different network connections such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand; it also allows customers to add or improve on network hardware to speed-up networking. The PowerEdge M600 blade server supports up to two quad-core Intel Xeon processors, as well as, processors in the Xeon 5400 series that run up to 3.16GHz. These products are now available worldwide.

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 X 2 Graphic Card

Top

AMD has launched their new state of the art Radeon graphic card to the industry, consisting of two graphic processors on a single card. Two Radeon HD 3870 processors are connected to each other using a technology called “integrated cross fire Technology.”

With the boosted clock speeds on both GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), this will be one of the fastest graphic cards in the market today and mainly they are addressing PC game lovers. The use of this dual chip format will allow over one trillion calculations per second.

This PCIe Radeon HD 3870 uses a 55nm manufacturing process, which allows it to reach high clock speeds and low power utilization. It is a major enhancement over the other Radeon graphic card models, such as Radeon HD 2900 XT. The Radeon HD 3870 has 320 stream processors, 16 ROPs and is clocked at 775 MHz. It has 512MB of 256-bit 2.25 GHz GDDR4 Memory and also supports second generation PCIe.

According to the AMD development team, there is no similar offering from the other graphic card manufactures yet. AMD has listed this card for $449 and according to them; other manufactures will have to struggle to match the price when they come up with a similar product.

Adding SmartArt to an Excel 2007 Spreadsheet

SmartArt is a great new and easy feature in Excel 2007 that lets users create graphical descriptions for their spread sheets. It can be accessed by simply clicking the SmartArt button on the Ribbon - it can also be accessed by click on the Insert tab on the ribbon and then clicking the SmartArt button to choose a graphic. This provides a choice of 80 layouts that are divided into 7 categories. These Graphics are designed to display list, process and hierarchy. This can be customized for color and alternative styles including 3D imagery. The size can be increased by clicking on the sides of the image. The Dialogue box for entering appropriate text to correspond with your selection is also included in this feature. By using the layout-dropdown function the graphics can be altered at a later time as needed.

Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Best Of

Top

The Consumer Electronics Show of 2008 hosted several first releases for the new year on January 7th in Las Vegas. These are just a few of the many products that have been introduced to start off the new year!

On January 7th, 2008, Matsushita Electric Industrial introduced its 150-inch plasma television at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and announced its future release for 2009. This 12-1/2 foot television has been named the largest one yet - in the world – beating Panasonic’s 103-inch T.V. which was released last year. This T.V. is claimed to have a 4x better resolution than full high-definition 1080p picture quality. Representatives have mentioned that one of its main uses, for the public, will be for its display as a billboard. The retail price is still undecided.

Also on January 7th, Polaroid Corporation showed off an updated portable printer for images on cell phones and digital cameras. They introduced an 8-ounce printer that functions properly and delivers without ink. With the help of Zink Technology, instead of having to reload regular paper, it heats up the paper and activates the dye crystals, causing the crystals to melt, which gives us an outcome of a high quality image – absolutely no ink involved. The new Polaroid printer will be selling for about $150.

To get an idea of how this inkless printer works, you can go to: http://zink.com/assets/how_it_works/

On Wednesday January 9th, CES presented a $100 memory card that won top spot in the Last Gadget Standing assembly – a traditional event CES holds. Eye-Fi Inc.’s wireless card lets you skip the hassle of plugging the camera into your computer to upload images. This device holds 2GB of memory and uses Wi-Fi to pop the pictures right up onto the computers and photo-sharing sites, immediately! There are just a few requirements you must have for the Eye-Fi Memory Card to work:

Internet connection to set-up and WiFi network for wireless transfers,
Works with virtually all digital cameras accepting SD memory cards,
Works with 802.11b and backwards
compatible 802.11n wireless networks,
Eye-Fi software works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X (10.3 and 10.4),
Eye-Fi software works with Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (Windows only), FireFox 2.0 (Windows and Macintosh).

Sony introduced to the U.S. its first organic light-emitting diode product – super-thin OLED TV in the U.S. The XEL-1 t.v. contains the technology which allows extremely high picture quality to play on a super-thin screen. Producers have purposely made it possible for the pixels on the screen to turn “near-perfect” black when turned off, as opposed to other flat screens which do not show a perfect black. There are both 11-inch screens as well as 20-inch screens, and the largest being 40” which will begin to sell this month, January 2008 starting at $2,500.

Another interesting and fun creation is the ‘Rolly’ – an mp3 player that actually dances to the music it plays! This Sony product rolls around, flashes lights and moves its “arms” up and down, all to the jingle it plays. It almost looks like the 2007 Miuro robot speaker, except it doesn’t follow you around and does not show any physical signs of “dancing”. This egg-shaped music dancer is selling at $350.

A new GPS system that does much more than direct you, has been introduced but is not due to release until later this year. It connects to the internet and looks up certain information such as, movie times, current news headlines, stock figures, and gas prices. This system was also created to help find different ways to get through traffic, it actually shows you where to get off in order to skip the wasted time sitting in your car for hours. It finds a parking spot for you and even makes phone calls! The modified Garmin nuvi 880 GPS system is starting at $1000.

GO TO PREVIOUS NEWSLETTER / BROWSE ALL NEWSLETTERS