The alaTest Blog

All of the current generation gaming consoles have been out since about 2005 (or 2006 in the case of the PS3). Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 focused heavily on performance, each outpacing their predecessors (the original Xbox and PS2) significantly, achieving roughly 300 million polygons per second in performance. Nintendo, on the other hand, chose to focus on revolutionizing the console interface, making the Wii only slightly faster than the GameCube, obtaining about 100 million polygons per second. The Wii wasn’t anywhere near the league of performance found in the Xbox 360 and PS3, but Nintendo still had an advantage. Neither Sony nor Microsoft intends to replace their current consoles until well into 2015. Nintendo has something prepared for 2012: “Project Café.”

Read more on the Nintendo Wii 2

It’s almost that time again: E3 2011 is just around the corner, and excitement is in the air. The who’s who of electronic entertainment will be there, including Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft to name a few. Every year, E3 manages to surprise us with something big, but just what is expected this year? Let’s take a look.

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We recently reached a new milestone in computer science when Watson, IBM’s latest super computer, competed against Jeopardy’s world champions and won. Watson was made up of 90 networked servers, each with a 3.5GHz Eight-core CPU, each core capable of processing 4 threads at once. Compared to a conventional computer, that’s like 2,880 CPUs! Watson also had 15TB (15,000GB) of RAM.

You may think that the human contestants stood no chance against even a normal computer, but the trick is getting a machine to understand human language. That’s why Watson has so much power; it all goes towards translating the question and deciphering the answer from a few Terabytes of data (Watson was not allowed to access the internet).

Back on May 12^th, 1941, German engineer Konrad Zuse introduced the Z3, the very first programmable computer. In honor of the 70th birthday of the world’s first computer, we posed the question: could it be possible to build Watson back in 1941?

Read more on the Z3 vs Watson

It seems we can’t even go a week without hearing about a new Android phone coming to the market. Just the other day, the Nexus S 4G was released on Sprint. Shortly before that, the Droid Charge hit Verizon Wireless.T-Mobile got in on the action with the G2x prior to that, and AT&T had the Atrix 4G and Inspire 4G to compete with Verizon’s Thunderbolt released right around the same time. The Droid Incredible 2 came out somewhere between all of that too. Well, as you’d expect, more Android phones are due to hit the market soon, and we have a list of some of the most anticipated.
Read more on new Android smartphones

With so many wireless capable devices these days (Wi-Fi TVs, Smartphones, Laptops, Printers), nearly everyone has begun setting up their houses with Wi-Fi. It’s easy to do; all you really need is a wireless router, but finding the perfect router isn’t quite as easy. With terms like Wireless-N, 54G, Dual-Band, WEP, and WPA just to name a few, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when buying a new router. We’re here to clear up all that confusion. Read more on Wireless Routers

There’s no doubt that both the Android and iPhone platforms are by far the most popular smartphone choices today, and one of the major contributing factors to their success was their expansive app library. Because applications are such an integral part of both of these platforms, we decided to take a look at their respective app store – because what good are the apps if you can’t find them? So here it is, Apple’s App Store versus the Android Marketplace.
Read more on The Battle of the App Stores