A hacker collective named SwaggSec claims to have hacked Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic components maker. Foxconn assembles hardware for Apple as well as game consoles, such as the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Wii. According to SwaggSec’s open letter, the hack appears to be retaliation for Foxconn’s notorious working conditions. More »
from Kotaku
The reason people are so pumped about solid-state hard drives right now is because they’re super-speedy. But if you think your SSD is fast, just wait until a new breed of laser-based hard drives comes to market. More »
from Gizmodo
How do you fancy a 20 percent boost to your processor’s performance? Research from the North Carolina State University claims to offer just that. Despite the emergence of fused architecture SoCs, the CPU and GPU cores typically still work independently. The University hoped that by assigning tasks based on each processor’s abilities, performance efficiency would be increased. As the CPU and GPU can fetch data at comparable speeds, the researchers set the GPUs to execute the computational functions, while the CPUs did the prefetching. With that data ready in advance, the graphics processor unit has more resources free, yielding an average performance boost of 21.4 percent though it’s unclear what metrics the researchers were using. Incidentally, the research was funded by AMD, so no prizes for guessing which chips we might see using the technique first.
from Engadget
Microsoft has published the specification for C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism), its new system for heterogeneous parallel processing in C++. When Microsoft first announced C++ AMP in June last year, it said that it wanted to make the AMP specification open to all.
AMP has been developed by Microsoft with input from AMD and NVIDIA. Microsoft’s implementation allows AMP programs to use both the main CPU and Direct3D video cards (via the company’s DirectCompute API), though the specification should also permit OpenGL/OpenCL-based implementations.
from Ars Technica
Now that’s awesome!! I’m setting mine up!! 
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Google Cloud Print is an under-appreciated service that can send print jobs from virtually anywhere to a connected printer in any other location. Normally that involves tedious configuration on your network, but Cloud Print can do it in just a few minutes. It’s really easy to set up, and there are a few things you can do to extend its support beyond the browser to make all your printing tasks a lot easier. Here’s a look at what it can do, how you can set it up, and how to make it even better. More »
from Lifehacker
We’ve been bugging AMD for years now, literally: show us what GPU-accelerated software can do. Finally, the company is ready to put us in touch with ISVs in nine different segments to demonstrate how its hardware can benefit optimized applications.
