Latest Radio

Creative introduces new SoundWorks Radio CD 745

Creative Europe recently announced its latest sound system called SoundWorks Radio CD 745. It's more than just a radio, it features the award-winning speaker design, its two stereo speakers, combined with a powerful, built-in subwoofer produces incredible clarity and excellent bass claims Creative.

A built-in AM/FM tuner allows you to save 24 station presets, and the slot-loading CD player even plays MP3/WMA tracks while displaying their titles on the blue backlighted LCD. Also it includes dual alarms with snooze button and sleep mode, a remote control, a line input and an optional dock that can host your iPod.

The SoundWorks Radio CD 745 is available on Creative's shop for 349.99€.

Most expensive things in the world

Do you know what is the price of the most expensive potato in the world? Or would you take a ride in most expensive car in a world? If you couldn’t get that opportunity, you can see here the list of most expensive things in the world.

Most expensive woman in the world is - Jennifer Lopez

Why? Her gorgeous body is insured at one of New York’s insurance companies for a sum of 1 billion euros.


Most expensive movie is – “Titanic”

For his filming they spent more than 200 million dollars



Most expensive advertising campaign is for – “Pepsi

In the year 2002, “Pepsi” hired Britney Spears to advertise its products. Commercial that was 90 seconds long, was paid 7.53 million dollars

Most expensive election campaign is for – Mayor of New York

That record was set by Michael Bloomberg, while he was running for mayor of New York City in 2001. Each of 744757 votes for him cost 92 dollars 60 cents. The whole election campaign cost Blumberg 62 millions dollars.

Most expensive city in the world is – Tokyo

Life is nowhere that expensive as in Tokyo.

Most expensive car in the world in serial production is – “Maybach 62”

Everything that you need is in this car. Such luxury has a price, and that is 360000 euros.

Most expensive shoes are – high heel shoes

That was created by Stuart Weitzman, famous designer of the internationally famous, high-end shoe company, Stuart Weitzman Inc. They have 642 carat rubies on them, and theur price is 1.6 million Euros.

Most expensive lunch is - a lunch with billionaire

And it was paid by David Einhorn of “Greenlight Capital”. On an auction he paid 250100 dollars for a lunch with his idol Warren Buffett.


Most expensive painting is - Slaughter of the Innocents by Rubens

In 2002 it was bought for 75.3 million euros.

Most expensive cigarettes in are – “Treasurer”

One pack of this brand is approximately 24 euros. It is sold only in specialized stores.

Most expensive potato is – “La Bonnotte”

Sort "La Bonnotte" from France, 1 kg costs about 500 euro.

Most expensive coffee is - "Kopi Luwak"

Sort "Kopi Luwak" from Sumatra. A quarter of a pound costs about 75 dollars. An unusual small animal lives on Java and Sumatra coffee plantation – its name Luwak (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). It eats only ripe coffee-beans. Luwak cannot digest a coffee seed and gets rid of it naturally. Local aborigines gather such coffee seeds carefully and the most expensive coffee in the world is prepared of them. This drink’s rich taste is explained by special qualities of an animal’s digestive juices.


Most expensive suit is - American astronaut costume

It costs 9 million dollars and is at the same time the most expensive piece of clothing in the world.


Most expensive stock share is - "Berkshire Hathaway"

One share of an American investment company "Berkshire Hathaway" costs more than 64 thousands Euro. "Berkshire Hathaway" controls lots of companies, working in different branches of traditional economics, including financial services, candy manufacture, publishing industry, jewellery business, manufacture of furniture and carpets, manufacture of building materials and many others. "Berkshire Hathaway" holds large share holding of «Coca-Cola", "American Express", "Gillette", "The Washington Post" companies.

Most expensive hotel is - "Burj Al Arab"

7 stars hotel "Burj Al Arab" in Dubai. You will have to pay 770 Euro for the most modest room, and royal apartments will cost you 7700 Euro.

Most expensive stadium is - "Stade de France"

"Stade de France" near Paris. In 1998 a national French team won world Championship here. Its construction cost 460 millions Euro.




Most expensive footballer is - Zinedine Zidane

In 2001 a French player passed to from “Juventus” to “Real Madrid” for a record sum of 68.7 million Euros.

Most expensive bra is - Victoria's Secret

It costs 15 million dollars. A German cover girl Heidi Klum showed it on one of fashion shows in New York.


Most expensive comic is – about Tim and his dog

Comics about a boy named Tim and his dog. One collector paid 100 thousands Euro for an original of a title picture of “Black Island” edition.


Most expensive brand is – “Coca-Cola”

Its value is 68.9 billion dollars, what is almost 60% of the whole company’s value.


Most expensive doll is – “Barbie”

Price is 100 thousands Euro. She wears a dress, decorated by real diamonds.


Most expensive book is - “Codex Leicester

By Leonardo da Vinci, written in mirror writing on expensive paper with lawn finish. Bill Gates bought it for 24 millions dollars.

Most expensive travel is to – Space

American businessman, Dennis Tito, and computer millionaire from South Africa, Mark Shuttleworth, paid 20 million dollars to be on International Space Station.













The $99 Apple TV Wireless HD Digital Media Player Preview

Unboxing Apple's New $99 Apple TV

It's hard to believe that Apple announced the Apple TV (iTV) back in 2006 and then released their first player back on March 21, 2007. Apple has finally started shipping their second generation Apple TV this week and we got a pair of them that just arrived from Shenzen China today. This player is rather interesting from a cost perspective alone as it retails for just $99. This is a far cry from the original $299 price tag brought by the first generation player. To help cut costs Apple removed the built-in storage feature, but as a result the new Apple TV is a quarter the size of its predecessor and is all black. The new Apple TV is all about streaming data (think Apple AirPlay) and it has built-in 802.11n wireless networking and a 10/100 base-T ethernet port to help keep they 720p content flowing smoothly. Unfortunately, the Apple TV has still has a maximum video output of 720p, which means that you won't be able to do 1080p streams from iTunes or Netflix. For most people 720p is just fine, but remember the Apple TV supports just HDMI video out only. In fact the Apple TV has just five ports on it: HDMI, power, optical audio, mini-USB (diagnostics only) and ethernet ports. Also remember without a hard drive being built-in, there's no way to sync content from your computer to the Apple TV, so playback requires a Mac or PC with iTunes 10.0.1 or later to be running to watch anything not coming from the Internet this also includes video content on your networked attached storage server (NAS). We will go more into the details of the player when we review it, so let's take a look at the pair of players that we just got from Fedex. We've been busy taking photos and doing an unboxing video for you, so let's get to it.

First up is the unboxing video for those that like to check out the packaging and initial set up. We'll post some pictures and a bit more detail via text after that.



The new Apple TV ships in a box that's just 7" x 4.5" x 3" and as you can see from the shot above it doesn't even need a shipping box that big! Apple claims the new second generation Apple TV is 80% smaller than the previous generation and we don't doubt them on that. The actual dimensions of the player itself is 3.9" x 3.9" x 0.9", and it weights in at just 0.6 lbs. Its no wonder that the Apple TV has been dubbed 'The Puck' by many in the IT industry already.
The retail packaging of the Apple TV is minimalistic like normal. Since there isn't much to talk about here we'll go ahead and talk about how the Apple TV comes with iOS and that it has already been jailbroken and we should be able to see some interesting apps on the device really soon. We just have to wait for apps to be written for the Apple TV now that it has been jailbroken. If we had to guess a Twitter app will more than likely one of the first apps out the door as who doesn't want Twitter in the living room?

The back of the Apple TV talks about how you can watch HD content and stream video from Netflix and Youtube, music from iTunes or take a look and photos on Flickr.
With the shrink wrap and slide the cover of the retail box packaging off you'll be able to get your first glance at the Apple TV! As you can see Apple includes nice pull tabs to help remove everything from the retail box.
Once you remove the Apple TV from the box you'll find the super slim all aluminum Apple TV remote. You don't have to use this remote though as you can control the Apple TV using your iPhone or iPod touch by downloading the Remote app free from the App Store. Eventually we might not need basic remotes for most devices as smartphones appear to be replacing them in this decade.
Here you can see all the contents that come bundled with the Apple TV! Besides the player and the remove you also get the setup guide and the power cable.
Taking a closer look at the power cable we noticed two things: the first being the fact that there is no power brick converting the AC power to DC and that the player uses just a two prong cable. This means the Apple TV has the power supply built-inside the player. That is very impressive when you think about how small the device is. The Apple TV uses the Apple A4 processor with 256MB of RAM, which is the same as the Apple iPad and the 4th generation iPod Touch. We've heard that the Apple TV consumes just 6 Watts of power during use and if that is true this could be the most energy efficient media player on the market today.
he Apple TV remote is very basic as you can see from the image above.

You always have to have a Software License Agreement sticker some place and Apple stuck it on the plastic that you need to remove in order to use the player.
For some reason Apple wrapped a piece of tape around the entire player that covered up all of the ports, so you need to remove that tape before you use it for the very first time.

Once the tape has been removed you can finally see the five connectors that we talked about on the device earlier. Once again they are the power, HDMI, mini-USB (diagnostics only), optical audio and ethernet ports. Let's take a look at the Apple TV powered up and see what it can do!


SandForce SF-2000 Series SSD Controllers Detailed



SandForce is making some news today by announcing the availability of the SF-2000 Family of SSD Processors (controller) optimized for SSDs deployed in mission-critical Enterprise and Industrial computing applications. This new SSD controller features a SATA III 6Gbps host interface, DuraClass Technology, 60,000 sustained random read/write IOPS (Input-output Operations Per Second) and sustained sequential read/write performance of 500 Megabytes per second. Yes, you are reading that right! This new controller will be able to max out the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 bus at 500MB/s read/write!



SandForce was also kind enough to take a picture of one of their new SF-2000 series controllers for us, so what you are looking at in the picture above is one of the very first engineering samples. The SF-2000 series controller above was made week 40 of 2010, which is this week! The new SF-2000 series is a different die than the original SF-1000 series as the controller now measures 14x14mm versus 13x13mm on their first series. SandForce declined to comment on the transistor count.

SandForce recently announced that they closed $25 million in Series D funding last month and we were informed by the company that the money is going to helping bring the SF-2000 series to the market. SandForce also said that the SF-1000 series controllers have done extermely well in the market and that they have sold less than a million, but well into the high hundreds of thousands of SF-1000 series controllers in just the past year.


The key changes in the SF-2000 series controller is most obviously the updated SATA III 6Gb/s interface, which helps push performance up to 60,000 IOPS for 4K Random Read and Write data transfers. It also pushed the sequential Read and Write performance numbers up to 500MB/s and SandForce confirms they have hit those numbers in their test lab just this week with their first production run silicon that they just recently got in from overseas. SandForce will have three model numbers in the SF-2000 series; the SF-2600, SF-2500 and the SF-2300.

SandForce SF-2000 Series Controllers:

  • SF-2600: For SAS Drives
  • SF-2500: For SATA Drives
  • SF-2300: For High Heat Industrial & Military Applications w/ quick Secure Erase functionality

SandForce also increased the incoming encryption on the SF-2000 series controllers by keeping the existing AES-128 engine in CTR mode and adding in an additional AES-256 engine in XTS mode. They also have improved SAS support and are able to run non-512B (byte) sectors through the controller without any issues. Before it used to create a problem with the bridge chip as the host has to write to two different sectors. This requires more time and cuts performance by up to half. This is why most people don't use bridges in current designs. SandForce was able to let the data pass through and be written in one step, which is a big deal for Enterprise users. The SandForce SF-1000 series also didn't support Asych/Toggle/ONFi2 specifications/interfaces and those have been added in the SF-2000 series. SandForce says that the SF-2000 series controller can do 166 Mega Transfers (MT), which is 4 times on what today's SandForce drives can do. Last, but not least is the power management improvements that SandForce did on the SF-2000 series controllers. They have more options in the firmware for their partners to set that allows throttling and so on. Moving down to 25nm MLC NAND Flash offers a power savings, but moving up to the faster SATA III 6Gb/s interface uses more power according to SandForce. They said that an SSD with an SF-2000 series controller will use roughly the same amount of power as an existing SF-1000 series based SSD. No changes were done to DuraClass technology in the SF-2000 series controller.