Guest writer Gary Sims is a freelance technology consultant from the UK. He is the senior blogger of the Hi-Tech Squad.

Pentax has just launched the Optio P80 the successor to the fashionable and popular P70. The new P80 doesn’t stray much from the original design of the P70 and at first glance you could just think that Pentax have justed added a new coat of paint to an old product. In fact the Pentax has kept the same 12-megapixel sensor and 4x optical zoom found on the Optio P70 but the P80 does have some new features to boast about.

Pentax has improved the Automatic Face Detection and can now recognize faces at an angle or tilted to the side. The Pentax Optio P80 has a Digital Wide mode for panoramic shots and a Frame Composite Function, which tacks on a decorative photo frame to an image. The Pentax Optio P80 can also reach 6400 ISO, but at a smaller resolution.

The Pentax Optio P80 will ship in September for $200 and will be available in Black, Pearl and Mint.

Guest writer Gary Sims is a freelance technology consultant from the UK. He is the senior blogger of the Hi-Tech Squad.

NVIDIA today announced that HP’s most powerful and expandable workstation–the HP Z800 Workstation–is now configurable with up to two NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs).

Tesla is NVIDIA’s first dedicated General Purpose GPU. General-purpose computing on graphics processing units is the technique of using a GPU to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the CPU. The model for GPU computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a heterogeneous computing model. The sequential part of the application runs on the CPU and the computationally-intensive part runs on the GPU. From the user’s perspective, the application just runs faster because it is using the high-performance of the GPU to boost performance.

Based on the massively parallel NVIDIA CUDA architecture, Tesla GPUs are taking the high performance computing (HPC) industry by storm, delivering performance increases to critical codes across multiple fields.

“The adoption of Tesla GPUs is the fastest of any new processor technology in the history of HPC(1),” said Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla business at NVIDIA. “We are delighted to see a leader such as HP begin to ship Tesla GPU-enabled systems into the market and to help accelerate the work of their customers.”

For more information on NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing solutions, please visit: http://www.nvidia.com/tesla

Guest writer Gary Sims is a freelance technology consultant from the UK. He is the senior blogger of the Hi-Tech Squad.

The 14 day Mac Sale starts today. For a limited time only you can get $450 Worth of Apps for $49.99. The bundle of 10 applications combines the products of both established Mac powerhouses and startup indie developers.

The highlights of the bundles applications include:

• REALBasic Personal – The exceptional rapid development environment. Designed to appeal to newcomers to software development and also old hands looking for another tool to add to their arsenal.
• Iris – A new image manipulation app with a beautiful user interface. It’s uncluttered user interface makes it a joy to work with on everything from photos to logos.
• Interarchy – The ultimate file transfer tool. With support for FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDAV and more.
• Flux – The powerful web design application. Flux supports just about everything your can throw at it from XHTML/CSS to JavaScript and Flash.

Other applications included are Scribbles (a sketching program), TaskPaper (task manager), WriteRoom – (full screen word processor), Stuf (a clipboard manager tool), Mariner Calc (a lean and mean spreadsheet) and HoudahSpot (which adds the missing “Advanced” function to Spotlight).

The basic principles behind the Mac Sale are 1) give an honest and fair deal to all developers and 2) to have an “all killer, no filler” line-up. Read the rest of this entry »