Google Phone

A new phone based on Android, Google's new cellphone OS was launched on Sep 23 2008.
T-Mobile has launched the G1, its priced at $179


Some of the features are
touch screen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, slide your finger to unlock, icons
on Home screen, over-the-air downloadable App store and music store,
Google Maps, full-screen Web browsing, accelerometer that rotates the
screen when you turn the phone 90 degrees

Apparently some 30 Phone companies have said they'll adopt Android.

Steve and Steve (Jobs and Balmer) here I come says Google.

Amazon Web Services + Oracle

Now AWS, has offered Oracle products (Oracle Database, Middleware and Enterprise Manager products), with this Oracle customers can now either have new license or use the existing one on the AWS, AWS has many images which are bundled with Oracle products and within minutes end users can have thier Oracle system up and running without bothering about installation, configuration etc, this is defnitely a boon to all those companies who spend tons of money on so called administrators for doing simple things.

Amazon Web services(AWS)
is the web services platform, where one can request and use IT
infrastructure services which is scalable, reliable, secure,
cost-effective and is a comprehensive solution.

Using this service one pays for only what one uses, with no obligation
to stay forever, all you need to do is sign-up for the service, as and
when your IT demand increases you can keep adding more machines and
start disbanding them once the load decreases. For startups it makes a
lot of economic sense.

AWS is a collection of infrastructure services (Below excerpt taken from http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/)

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2™)
  – A web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
  Configure an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) and load it into the Amazon EC2 service. Quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. ›Learn more about Amazon EC2™

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3™)
  – A simple web services interface that can be used to store and
  retrieve large amounts of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
  It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable,
  fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run
  its own global network of web sites. ›Learn more about Amazon S3™

• Amazon SimpleDB™
  – A web service for running queries on structured data in real time.
  This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage
  Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2),
  collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data
  sets in the cloud. Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core
  functionality of a database—real-time lookup and simple querying of
  structured data—without the operational complexity. ›Learn more about Amazon SimpleDB™

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS™) – A reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS,
  developers can simply move data between distributed components of their
  applications that perform different tasks, without losing messages or
  requiring each component to be always available. ›Learn more about Amazon SQS™

Read more on Oracle + AWS at
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/faq.html
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/oracle/
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2008/09/25/oracle-moves-into-the-cloud-with-the-help-of-amazon/

Google Chrome Explained - The comic way

Google team which worked on Chrome has this well illustrated explanation of how chrome evolved and design idea behind it.
They have put up a nice comic for this, a must read for any technologist.
Google Chrome explained.

ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series - Redefine the way you play

All the gaming and graphic development enthusiasts need not wait longer, they can have the state of art graphics card at a throw away price compared to all the competition available, AMD has releases the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series cards.
With more than twice the processing power of previous generation discrete graphics cards, ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series graphics cards deliver a cinematic gaming experience and unprecedented performance made possible through the TeraScale graphics engine, with this card in PC, one can watch Blu-ray movies and play HD content with incredible visual fidelity or take your experience to another level with new multimedia capabilities all this without any compromise in the performance.

ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series – Key Features (Source : AMD website)

• TeraScale Graphics Engine - The new TeraScale graphics engine features over one teraFLOPS, nearly one billion transistors and 800 stream processors so you can enjoy the high resolutions and fast frame rates previously only available with dual-card systems.
  
• Advanced Memory - GDDR5 memory provides twice the bandwidth per pin of GDDR3.
  
• Enhanced Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic Filtering - High performance anisotropic filtering and 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.
  
• DirectX® 10.1 - Play today while preparing for tomorrow with state-of-the-art DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities.
  
• ATI CrossFireX™ Technology - ATI CrossFireX™ technology with up to quad GPU support offers superior scalability so your system is ready to level up when you are.
  
• PCI Express 2.0 - Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications.
  
• Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) - UVD 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for even the most processing-intensive content, including VC-1, H.264 and now MPEG-2. Also, take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities.
  
• Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) - AVT allows you to convert videos to H.264 and MPEG-2 formats up to 19x faster than when using a just CPU.3 Full 1080p files can be converted to H.264 and MPEG-2 up to 1.8x faster than real-time.³
  
• Upscale Beyond 1080p - Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p display resolution and beyond.
  
• Enhanced DVD Upscaling - Watch standard DVD movies in near high-definition quality with DVD upscaling. The GPU uses post processing algorithms to enhance standard and low resolution videos and movies on your HD display.
  
• Dynamic Contrast - Dynamic Contrast automatically adjusts the contrast and brightness during scenes to consistently deliver a crisp, vibrant picture.
  
• HDMI - Enjoy the latest audio technologies using HDMI with 7.1 digital surround sound support. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of color when connected to a capable HDTV.
  
• Dynamic Power Management - ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series graphics cards deliver high performance when needed and conserve power when the demand on the graphics processor is low.
  
• More Performance Per Watt - ATI Radeon HD 4800 series delivers up to 2x the performance per watt of AMD’s previous generation
  GPUs.
  

Read the complete review of HD 4850 done by Anandtech

AMD's XGP

Imagine running three or more external monitors off your laptop, two of which are running off of a dedicated graphics card ( ie, HD 4800), the other off an integrated card. Using AMD's XGP (external graphics platform) technology you can.

Rob bushway explains how this works in his article AMD's XGP - Totally Awesome.

With AMD Graphics the options are many :)