many

CodePanic's FileMany is a free tool that scans your hard drives for duplicate files, which you can then choose to move, delete, or ignore. It uses a variety of customizable criteria to distinguish actual duplicates from merely similar data to help you avoid the regrettable error of deleting the wrong files. Even if duplicate files aren't a big issue, running FileMany before you clean or defragment your drives can make the process faster and help reduce errors. And if you boot from an SSD, especially a smaller one, FileMany can help you keep your free space free and … Read more

Aspiring game designers and robot aficionados unite!

One of the most prominent independent game developers in the Boston area, Demiurge Studios, is getting ready to launch its newest downloadable game, Shoot Many Robots, but not without seeing a few of your ideas first.

Announced to implore budding concept artists to show off their skills, the contest "Design Many Robots" asks creative minds to sketch their own vision of the ultimate battle robot by April 4.

The most creative and all-around awesome entries will earn a free trip to Demiurge Studios to see their creations come to life--not literally, of course.

But the victorious robots do get to appear in an expansion pack of the game, which is set to launch later this year. Assemble the full details and rules at ShootManyRobots.com. … Read more

In a perfect world, all 100-watt-per-channel amplifiers would be equally powerful. If we were talking about cars instead of amplifiers, you might suppose all cars with 300 horsepower are equally fast. But the weight of the car, gearing, and suspension tuning all play their parts, so performance expectations have to be based on more than just a single specification or number.

Before we go any further, I'd like to point out that the power spec's prime relevance lies in determining how loud a given set of speakers can play. Assuming the speakers can handle power, feeding them more power will produce louder sound levels. Sound quality is another matter, and isn't always associated with power, so the more powerful amp isn't necessarily the better-sounding amp. A few months ago I wrote a rave review of a 3.5-watt amplifier that sounded wonderful with my Zu Essence tower speakers. So just a couple of watts can sound amazing, and play louder than you'd think. Amplifier-speaker matching is more than a numbers game; knowledge of what works with what is a valuable commodity, so if you're lucky enough to have access to a top-notch hi-fi dealer or an experienced audiophile buddy, don't be afraid to ask for advice. … Read more

The How many? iPhone app is a lot like me: useless, but a lot of fun. The concept is pretty simple. The app presents objects, lots of them, in lists called "packs." You pick one item and it calculates how many of another item that first item equals. For example, one MacBook Pro (15.4-inch?) equals 18 iPhones.

Why is this important? It's not; it's stupid, and kinda fun. There are a few categories, like animals, electronics, fruit, and "general," which is something of a grab bag. You can sort by volume or by … Read more

We love tabbed browsing, but we often find ourselves with tons of tabs open. Sometimes they're simply things we forgot to close when we were done with them, but other times they contain pages that we want to return to. TooManyTabs for Chrome is a clever browser extension that helps you hang on to the tabs you're not done with without all the clutter.

TooManyTabs isn't the most intuitive application we've ever used, but after a bit of experimentation, it was pretty easy to figure out. It appears as an icon to the right of Chrome'… Read more

In a world where almost everything is online, from e-mail to credit cards, social networking to car insurance, keeping passwords both secure and manageable is no easy task. Security experts recommend that you not use the same password for everything, and that you incorporate a mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation. Who can remember so many different nonsensical passwords? Fortunately, there's Efficient Password Manager, a simple and effective way to keep track of passwords for just about everything.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, reminding us a bit of Microsoft Outlook. There are separate sections in which … Read more

Today's receivers are so jam-packed with features they can be a hassle to set up and use. Even entry-level models boast features that flagship models from even just five years ago never had.

Is that a good thing? No manufacturer offers a receiver that's dead simple to use, sounds great, and has adequate connectivity to hook up a cable box, Blu-ray player, and one or two other sources.

Do you base your buying decision on the features lineup? Does the one with the most features win? Does your receiver really need to be THX Ultra2 Plus-certified, with four … Read more

Intel's future Larrabee graphics chip is still just a PowerPoint presentation. But one worth noting because it's likely one of the most important projects inside the world's largest chip manufacturer.

That doesn't mean Larrabee will be a slam dunk. Intel has a checkered past in the discrete graphics chip market and this 10-year-old CNET article about Intel's 740 graphics processor reads eerily like some of the chatter about Intel's Larrabee today.

But Intel is older and presumably wiser now. (Though of course that remains to be seen.) Here's a quick look at how Intel depicts the future Larrabee architecture graphically. … Read more

Intel has disclosed details on a chip that will compete directly with Nvidia and ATI and may take it into unchartered technological and market-segment waters.

Larrabee will be a stand-alone chip, meaning it will be very different than the low-end--but widely used--integrated graphics that Intel now offers as part of the silicon that accompanies its processors. And Larrabee will be based on the universal Intel x86 architecture.

The first Larrabee product will be "targeted at the personal computer market," according to Intel. This means the PC gaming market--putting Nvidia and AMD-ATI directly into Intel's sights. Nvidia and AMD-ATI currently dominate the market for "discrete" or stand-alone graphics processing units.

As Intel sees it, Larrabee combines the best attributes of a central processing unit (CPU) with a graphics processor. "The thing we need is an architecture that combines the full programmability of the CPU with the kinds of parallelism and other special capabilities of graphics processors. And that architecture is Larrabee," Larry Seiler, a senior principal engineer in Intel's Visual Computing Group, said at a briefing on Larrabee in San Francisco last week.

"It is not a GPU as many have mistakenly described it, but it can do most graphics functions," Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, said in an article he posted Friday about Larrabee.

"It looks like a GPU and acts like a GPU but actually what it's doing is introducing a large number of x86 cores into your PC," said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer, alluding to the myriad ways Larrabee could be used beyond just graphics processing. In addition to the PC, high-performance computing and workstations are two potential markets that were also mentioned.

Intel describes it in a statement as "the industry's first many-core x86 Intel architecture." The chipmaker currently offers quad-core processors and will offer eight-core processors based on its Nehalem architecture, but Larrabee is expected to have dozens of cores and, later, possibly hundreds.

The number of cores in each Larrabee chip may vary, according to market segment. Intel showed a slide with core counts ranging from 8 to 48, claiming performance scales almost linearly as more cores are added: that is, 16 cores will offer twice the performance of eight cores.

The individual cores in Larrabee are derived from the Intel Pentium processor and "then we added 64-bit instructions and multi-threading," Seiler said. Each core has 256 kilobytes of level-2 cache allowing the size of the cache to scale with the total number of cores, according to Seiler. And application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Microsoft's DirectX and Apple's Open CL can be tapped. "Larrabee does not require a special API. Larrabee will excel on standard graphics APIs," he said. "So existing games will be able to run on Larrabee products."

So, what is Larrabee's market potential? Today, the graphics chip market is approaching 400 million units a year and has consolidated into a handful of suppliers. "And of that population, two suppliers, ATI and Nvidia, own 98 percent of the discrete GPU business." according to Peddie.

"And the trend line indicates a flattening to decline in the business...However, Intel is no light-weight start up, and to enter the market today a company has to have a major infrastructure, deep IP (intellectual property), and marketing prowess--Intel has all that and more," Peddie said. … Read more