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MSI’s Wind has proven, deservedly or not, to be one of the more popular netbooks. This might be down to a good combination of price, size, performance and looks. It might be because it is one of the easiest netbooks on which to install Mac OS X. Or it might be because, unlike Asus’ fractally burgeoning lineup of Eee PCs, MSI has so far offered only one model (in a variety of colors, of course).

This is about to change. The Wind’s first successor, the U120, was announced a short while ago. While that was essentially a Wind with a sharper looking case design and a 3.5G radio inside, two newly announced Winds will mix up the internals, too.

The new models are named the U110 and U115. The first surprise is the processor. Instead of the netbook favorite, the 1.6 GHz Atom N270, these new ‘books can be had with the Atom Z530. It has the same 1.6GHz clock speed, but supposedly sips less power.

Also new, and only in the U115, is a hybrid storage system. Winds come with HDDs, not solid state drives, but the U115 will offer a combination of both (paired thusly, in Gigabytes: 8/80, 16/120 and 32/160). This is, we imagine, another attempt at prolonging battery life by shifting virtual memory and other oft-used data onto the less power hungry SSD.

The result of this tweaking is, claims MSI, a ten-hour battery life. Hopefully this will be achieved with a more modestly sized six-cell battery rather than the cancerous growth that is the nine-cell, but we could even live with that if it meant true, all day independence from wall-warts.

MSI Announces Netbook: U110, U115 in addition to U120 [Netbook 3G via Laptop Mag]

See Also:

 
• Review: Just How Good Is the MSI Wind?

 

• It Lives! Gadget Lab’s Netbook Running OS X Leopard

 

• MSI Wind 2 Netbook Set for November Release

 

• MSI Unleashes Second Wind Netbook

Sadly, this amazing Wall-e sculpture is a limited edition of one, and it’s already spoken for—by Wall-e’s own Gepetto, Pixar creative chief John Lasseter, no less. It was created especially for him by English sculptors and CNC/rapid-prototyping masters Morpheus, which probably explains the hyper-detailed interlocking pieces and general laser-like precision, which is even more apparent in this close-up shot.

How much, Lasseter? How much!? [Toys R Evil]

As the seasons change and we settle into autumn, I’m reminded once more that yet another year will soon pass and that we’re all getting older. Or at least, the old people are. Check out the images below, picturing tech luminaries in their youths juxtaposed with more recent photos. You might find yourself in disagreement with the English poet John Donne, who wrote: “No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.”

Young Steve Jobs, Apple cofounder:

Jobs, older and thinner:

Young Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO:

Old Bill Gates, philanthropist:

Young Eric Schmidt, before he was Google’s CEO:

Old Eric Schmidt:

Young Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO:

Old Larry Ellison:

Young Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Not quite as young Ning cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Only one man has escaped the effects of time. That is, of course, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

A startup whose slogan is “giving technologies new meaning” lives up to that promise, with a polysyllabically dense pitch spammed to Valleywag’s tips inbox. Did you know that “the scope of Cognition’s semantic map includes over 10 million semantic connections that are comprised of semantic contexts, meaning representations, taxonomy and word meaning distinctions?” What they’re really trying to say is that they hope Google will buy them. That’s the only explanation for this press release, which requires a Stanford Ph.D. to understand it:

From: Jessica Hasson
Subject: NEWS: World’s Largest SEMANTIC Map - GOOGLE is Left Behind… The Next Phase of the Internet has Arrived
Date: September 16, 2008 10:39:19 AM PDT

Good Morning,

Today, Cognition has announced the creation of the World’s Largest Semantic Map. I’ve included the release below. We are scheduling interviews this week if you would like to speak with Scott Jarus, CEO of Cognition.

Thank you,
Jessica

COGNITION CREATES WORLD’S LARGEST SEMANTIC MAP OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WITH MORE THAN 10 MILLION SEMANTIC CONNECTIONS

Cognition’s Semantic Map provides a giant leap forward for Web 3.0 applications by bringing human understanding to computers

LOS ANGELES – September 16, 2008 —Cognition Technologies, a next-generation Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) company, has announced the release of the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language. The scope of Cognition’s Semantic Map is more than double the size of any other computational linguistic dictionary for English, . Technologies incorporating Cognition’s Semantic Map will be able to provide users with more accurate and complete Search capabilities, the ability to personalize and filter content, and improve the user experience by significantly reducing the amount of irrelevant information presented. Cognition Technologies’ lexical resources encode a wealth of semantic, morphological and syntactic information about the words contained within documents and their relationships to each other. These resources were created, codified and reviewed by lexicographers and linguists over a span of 24 years.

Cognition’s Semantic Map provides software applications with an “understanding” of more than four million semantic contexts (word meanings that create contexts for specific meanings of other related words). It encompasses over 536,000 word senses (word and phrase meanings); 75,000 concept classes (or synonym classes of word meanings); 7,500 nodes in the technology’s ontology or classification scheme; and 506,000 word stems (roots of words) for the English language. This enables applications to have a more accurate and relevant understanding of content and user interaction, and can be deployed in a wide variety of markets, including Search, Web-based advertising and machine translation augmentation, to name just a few.

“Cognition’s comprehensive Semantic Map is a critical component for the next phase of the Web’s evolution, a.k.a. the Semantic Web, or Web 3.0. It gives the computer a depth of knowledge and understanding of language far beyond the current keyword and pattern-matching technologies in place,” said Scott Jarus, CEO of Cognition Technologies. “Many experts predict that the future of information gathering will involve a combination of the Web and desktop, or ‘Webtop’ content. Our Semantic Map will enable these technologies to be more efficient and effective intermediaries in the process through such applications as Semantic Search, sentiment extraction and business analytics.”

Integration APIs (application programmer interfaces) are available, enabling other applications to rapidly and efficiently tap into Cognitions Semantic Map resources. Enterprise customers for example, can provide Semantic Search capabilities against their internally developed data repositories or content management systems.

For more information regarding Cognition’s Semantic NLP technology, please visit www.cognition.com.

About Cognition:
Cognition Technologies, based in Los Angeles, has developed a revolutionary Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology which adds word and phrase meaning and “understanding” to computer applications, enabling them to be more human-like in their processing of information. Cognition’s Semantic Map, the underlying technology developed over the past 23 years, is the largest and most extensive in existence. Applications and technologies which utilize Cognition’s Semantic NLP™ technology are positioned to take full advantage of Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web).