So, you read Brian Shul’s description of the thrill to fly the SR-71 Blackbird in a real mission over Lybia, and now you want to try it yourself. Well, no problem! First, you need its top secret flying manual.
Wait, why do I need a special web browser? I mean, I get there’s been a long standing digital divide between black America and the technological world (controlled by The Man). But do I really need are packaged piece of software whose name evokes the Jim Crow era?
I just got off the phone with Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC, who confirmed that the rumours of Voodoo’s demise were not just premature but “nonsense,” but said “HP is asking us to integrate into the larger execution engine.” Rahul is comfortable speaking both plainly and in business-ese—what we take this to mean is that Voodoo will merge manufacturing with HP’s core in Asia, unify other non-design aspects of the business, and shut down a good chunk of the operation in Calgary, Alberta. “Typically we don’t comment on layoffs specifically,” says Rahul, who adds that he himself will not be leaving Canada.
HP is one of the first out the door with Nvidia’s right-off-the-presses GeForce GTX 280 in its Blackbird 002 Exhilaration edition. Also making up the Blackbird‘s refreshed guts are an nForce 790i Ultra motherboard (’cause the GTX 280s are in SLI), 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, quad-core Core 2 Extreme processor (QX9770). Naturally, all of this is liquid cooled so it doesn’t melt a hole in your floor.
The Blacbird 002 by HP looked like the gaming PC to have, with smart design including that aluminium stand. Maximum PC just gave it a 7/10 score for two main reasons: Vista OS hurts its game performance, as does its SLI implementation hacked up to use twin ATI cards…slower ATI cards. Will Smith, EIC, says his top pick is still the XPS, “It’s just faster.” [MaximumPC]
newVideoPlayer("blackbird.flv", 475, 376); Tonight in New York, VoodooPC co-founder (and HP employee) Rahul Sood shows off his newest miracle of PC science, the Blackbird 002. It’s a little long (7min 30sec or so) so you might want to grab a beverage. –Video by Richard Blakeley
