Seen back in January at CES, the 17.5mm thick LG X300 netbook’s formally been announced as going on sale this month to our South American, Asian and Middle Eastern friends. It’s worth considering if you’re wanting a Windows 7 netbook. Cast your mind back a few months, and you’ll recall it caused quite a storm due to its slinky size. Its 11.6-inch LCD screen doesn’t have much of a bezel to speak of, and the chiclet tiled keyboard is close to full-size.

Seen back in January at CES, the 17.5mm thick LG X300 netbook’s formally been announced as going on sale this month to our South American, Asian and Middle Eastern friends. It’s worth considering if you’re wanting a Windows 7 netbook. Cast your mind back a few months, and you’ll recall it caused quite a storm due to its slinky size. Its 11.6-inch LCD screen doesn’t have much of a bezel to speak of, and the chiclet tiled keyboard is close to full-size. Check the press release below for the full story on the Dell Adamo -like netbook. (I say Dell Adamo rather than the MacBook Air, due to how square and tray-like it is).

It may be small, but it’s HD-compatible when connected to a monitor or TV, and has all the trimmings you’d expect from a larger machine. An Intel Atom D510 1.6GHz processor and NM10 Express chipset are combined with an Nvidia GT218 graphics card, and connections-wise there’s five USB ports, VGA out, a LAN port, memory card reader and of course the HDMI-output. Inside, there’s a 2.5-inch HDD—though at what capacity it hasn’t been said yet—and an optical drive. Shuttle will put it up for grabs sometime in the next couple of months, though for how much it’s your guess.

Nevermind the war against viruses—they’ll kill each other before we even update AVG. A Russian Trojan horse program, known as Spy Eye , has stolen data from its competitor Zeus, and replaced PC infections with its own botnet-badness. It’s still a lose-lose situation for anyone with an infected computer, with one botnet being replaced with another, but it’s pretty unheard of for one to take on another like this. Spy Eye’s campaign against the bigger, badder Zeus is called “Kill Zeus,” and while it doesn’t feature Uma Thurman in a slinky yellow jumpsuit, it will be sold to online crims who access your online bank details and any money it can find in your accounts, with Spy Eye going for around $500 to each person.

Whoa, a Microsoft employee just published details on Windows 8 on their blog, claiming it will be “completly different from what folks usually expect of Windows,” [sic] and that internally, they’re calling it “Windows.next.” Shown above is a leaked Windows server roadmap from last year , that marks 2012 as being the year of a “major release,” with “codename - Windows 8″ mentioned. The employee spoke on the blog about the codename: “So how am I referring to the next version of Windows without saying that many words – well simple – Windows.next:) This is definitely not the official version but a version that is becoming common along my circle” On what to expect: “The minimum that folks can take for granted is that the next version will be something completly [sic] different from what folks usually expect of Windows – I am simply impressed with the process that Steven has setup to listen to our customers needs and wants and get a team together than can make it happen. To actually bring together dozens and dozens of teams across Microsoft to come up with a vision for Windows.next is a process that is surreal! The themes that have been floated truly reflect what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs and the way they use them. It is the future of PCs… ” We already knew Microsoft would be shifting its attention to Windows 8 this July , so while this latest slip-up doesn’t elucidate much, at least we can mull over what the employee means by a “completly different” Windows. Does he mean it won’t have a built-in spellchecker? [ MSDN via Microsoft Kitchen via SlashGear ]

Makes sense to me. I propose we jump over five, six, seven, and eight, and go straight to nine. [ The Next Web ]

Our iMac review included a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo chip inside, but we received the top-of-the-line iMac housing the more promising 2.8GHz Core i7 processor. Do more cores make up for lower clock speeds? Yes. Often 2X to 3X . The Basic Differences in Chips First off, I should note that the Core i7 chip has what Intel calls a “turbo mode.” That is, when it’s not utilizing all of its cores, it can dynamically overclock itself up to 3.4GHz on whatever single core is in use.

Almost exactly a year ago we noted DARPA pouring nearly $5 million into an IBM project to develop a computer capable of emulating the brain of a living creature. Having already modeled half of a mouse’s brain , the researchers were at that time heading toward the more ambitious territory of feline intelligence , and today we can report on how far that cash injection and extra twelve months have gotten us. The first big announcement is that they have indeed succeeded in producing a computer simulation on par, in terms of complexity and scale, with a cat’s brain. The second, perhaps more important, is that “jaw-dropping” progress has been made in the sophistication and detail level of human brain mapping. The reverse engineering of the brain is hoped to bring about new ways for building computers that mimic natural brain structures, an endeavor collectively termed as “cognitive computing.” Read link will reveal more, and you can make your own cyborg jokes in the comments below. Filed under: Science IBM simulates cat’s brain, humans are next originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:11:00 EST

The Core i5 iMacs are fast , but early benchmarks of the Core i7 model suggest a 35 percent performance boost, even though the upgrade only costs $200 extra. Timon-Royer’s telling graph uses results from the Geekbench Website. [ Timon-Royer via MacRumors ]

Electronista has benchmarked the new Quad Core i5 chips in the new iMac, and comparing his scores to mine, its pretty clear we’ve got almost 2x some scores in some CPU/memory tests. Specifically, using his charts and mine, it wasn’t hard to recognize the jump in the multithreaded, 64 bit results from geek bench in the categories of integer, floating point and memory streaming tests, as well as the threaded tests. (Memory tests were slightly faster, the others were drastically so.) Interesting, as the Core i5 chip is clocked at 2.66GHz and the Core2Duo iMac I tested runs at 3.06GHz. (The turbo boost function, which overclocks the Core i5 chip to up to 3.2GHz when running non-multithreaded apps, should be kicking in performance here, too.) Interesting, but two things to remember: Core i7 chips are coming out for the iMac shortly and will run at 2.8GHz and have hyperthreading so the 4 cores emulate 8. And there are still not many (if any at all) major OS X apps that can take advantage of Snow Leopard’s multicore support. [ Electronista's tests , Gizmodo's iMac Review ]