instruments

First, there was "The Imperial March" and now, there's "House of the Rising Sun."

The traditional folk song is just the latest tune to be covered by an unlikely group of musicians: old computer equipment. YouTube user bd594 assembled a handful of old tech to re-create the tune made famous by the English rock group The Animals in the mid-1960s.

In his video description, bd594 explains that he used an Atari 800XL with an EiCO Oscilloscope to play the part of the organ, while the combination of an HP Scanjet 3P, Adaptec SCSI card, and an Ubuntu v9.10-powered computer provided the "vocals." The guitar section was performed by a Texas Instrument Ti-99/4A computer with a Tektronix Oscilloscope, and a hard drive powered by a PiC16F84A microcontroller created the bass, drum, and cymbals section.

Each instrument was recorded separately and then mixed; bd594 insists no sampling and audio effects were used in the recording session. What results is a pretty impressive and fresh take on the song. … Read more

Aside from a couple hulking memory chips, Texas Instruments owns the interiors of Amazon's Kindle Fire.

iFixit's teardown shows an abundance of TI silicon, with flash memory storage and system memory from Samsung and Hynix, respectively.

Keep in mind that a system-on-a-chip (SoC) like TI's OMAP 4430 already packs many of the core device features onto one piece of silicon. But the Kindle Fire also attaches a number of less glamorous TI chips to the SoC for things like power management and audio. … Read more

The $199 Amazon Kindle Fire is expected to put pricing heat on tablet market. And it's not just the iPad that will feel the pressure, according to an analyst and a cost analysis report today.

"It establishes a new price point for the low to mid-range tablet. Apple will likely have to respond," Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, said in a phone interview.

A report today from UMB TechInsights says Amazon will make a profit on hardware sales of its Kindle Fire "but probably only a third to a quarter as much as the Apple iPad and [BlackBerry] Playbook," according to estimates from TechInsights that show the Kindle Fire's bill of materials at $150.

That kind of profit margin loss-leader stance "can be viewed as a major blow to all Android tablet manufacturers who really have no way to compete since the channel mark-up would require [that] companies put their tablets at or below cost to beat the Kindle Fire price--and they still all lack the content that the Amazon storefront has," according to the report, citing Jeffrey Brown, vice president of business intelligence at TechInsights. … Read more

Intel will be as strong as ever despite the emergence of an alternative platform for Windows 8.

That's my forecast after bouncing between Northern and Southern California this week and attending two major tech conferences--the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco and the BUILD conference in Anaheim.

In the course of three days, I spoke with and listened to plenty of analysts, experts, and industry people. Though the tablet and laptop threat from the ARM camp of Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Nvidia is real, I believe Microsoft and ARM hardware companies have a pretty high mountain to climb.

Let'… Read more

Apple's iPad will likely have to contend this year with new Android tablets sporting the latest high-speed silicon coming off production lines in Asia.

Nvidia is on the record saying that tablets powered by its quad-core Kal-El chip are arriving this year. "Kal-El-powered tablets are coming this fall, and phones around the CES 2012 timeframe," Nvidia said in a statement to CNET on Friday.

It's safe to presume that Nvidia isn't just blowing smoke. Its processors today power all of the most popular Android Honeycomb tablets, including the Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, … Read more

Welcome to Smartphones Unlocked, my new monthly column designed to explain the ins and outs of smartphones to help you better understand how they work. The world of smartphones is fast-paced and can sometimes be confusing and difficult to keep track of all the new technology in these devices, particularly if you're new to them, so if there are any topics you'd like to see covered here, please feel free to e-mail me at bonnie.cha@cnet.com.

There are a lot of things to consider when buying a smartphone--operating system, screen size, keyboard or no keyboard, camera--but … Read more

Here's something you can't get with an iPad: 250GB of internal storage. Archos' upcoming Android "Honeycomb" 3.2 tablet will pack a 250GB hard disk drive that's been tweaked to perform more like a flash drive.

The Archos G9 will sport a 250GB Seagate Momentus Thin 2.5-inch hard drive--a mere 7 millimeters thick. Though not as compact as a 1.8-inch HDD (like Apple once used in its MacBook Air and iPod), it's not as expensive either.

And Archos has tweaked the Seagate drive a bit to allow it to perform more like … Read more

Village Instruments has said on a Facebook post today that it plans to design and sell a Thunderbolt-based external graphics card enclosure for use with Thunderbolt-equipped Macs. Anandtech first reported the announcement, which came as a result of a positive response to a poll Village Instruments originally posted on Facebook last week.

A Thunderbolt-based graphics card enclosure, which Village Instruments is calling the ViDock Thunderbolt, would ostensibly give Mac users the ability to upgrade the graphics capability of any Mac laptop or desktop with a Thunderbolt port. Presumably it might also work with Apple's new Thunderbolt Cinema Display.

Using … Read more

Texas Instruments and Google are hooking up on Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android that will run on both phones and tablets.

Though TI has been a player in Android phones (most notably the Motorola Droid series), it has been largely absent from Android tablets, which are populated with Nvidia's Tegra chips mostly. That is expected to change with Ice Cream Sandwich, however, which will finally fuse the phone and tablet versions of Android into one.

Ice Cream Sandwich will allow developers to create apps once. The operating system, due in the fourth quarter, will be smart … Read more