may the force be with you

Although Dell's acquisition was widely anticipated, Alienware chief executive Nelson Gonzalez said that his company will remain a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell, continuing its own brand, design, sales and marketing, and support. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For consumers, the purchase will mean that Alienware will now access Dell's well-known supply-chain efficiencies, ideally reducing wait times for new PCs that Alienware executives said have swelled to as much as a month or more. Interestingly, the deal also means that a PC containing a processor from Advanced Micro Devices will finally contribute to Dell's bottom line.

Gonzalez said that to expand Alienware's product line with more, highly-tuned boutique products, the company needed more resources. Although the company sells its PCs to customers in Japan, Korea, and Asia, Alienware didn't have the cash to fund the worldwide expansion it needed, he added.

"We were at a crossroads, we were at a point in time where we had to make a decision to go public or to perhaps merge with another entity if it made sense," Gonzalez said. "There were very few organizations out there that we would do this with—and there's only one that I could think of, and that was Dell, just because of the similarities in terms of the direct business model, and that we have a lot of similarities with the [company]. The problem is that we were at these crossroads, we needed to raise capital, and we had never raised capital at this company from day one."

"We needed to get bigger, and we needed to release more products," Gonzalez added. "We do our own designs and our own form factors, and that costs a lot of money, frankly."

That won't come at the expense of the Alienware brand, however. Gonzalez said that Alienware PCs would not carry a Dell logo, and that he would report directly to Jim Schneider, Dell's chief financial officer. "I think that you'll find it very hard to find the Dell name on the [Alienware] web site," he said.

"The reality is that you're not going to see a whole lot of changes," added Mark Vena, Alienware's vice president of marketing and the former chief of Dell's Dimension consumer PC business.

The Dell-Alienware deal was first "reported" by a blogger and rival, VoodooPC chief Raul Sood, who predicted that a then-rumored deal would make sense. "Why the potential for a Dellienware and not another? Alienware is widely considered to be the volume leader in gaming, they have scale," Sood wrote.

Somewhat ironically, Dell announced the Alienware acqusition on the same day as it released the Dimension XPS Renegade, its own boutique PC sporting a ramped-up design, four graphics chips, an overclocked CPU, even a physics accelerator – and a price tag above $9,000, aimed at the well-to-do enthusiast that Alienware, Falcon Northwest, and its competitors covet. Unsurprisingly, Alienware PCs will also use the Ageia physics chip.

And that means competition will undoubtedly occur, Gonzalez said. "Dell is going to do what they do," he said. "I'm sure they have no plans of eliminating the XPS," he said. "They're going to have their lineup; we're going to have ours."

The Alienware and Dell Renegade lines will "complement, not compete with one another," said Jess Blackburn, a Dell spokesman. Alienware will not sell Dell PCs, but may sell Dell peripherals, he said.

What Alienware does plan is a further expansion into the server and Media Center PC market, with a few specialized sidelines, such as government offerings. While Gonzalez readily admitted that Alienware would never develop a business PC, he added that the company plans to launch a new all-in-one PC in a few weeks' time. A specialized home media server is also in the cards, as is an aggressive push into the high-end workstation space, Vena added.

Customers of both product lines will also be able to tap into Dell's financing options, Vena noted.

Being added to the Dell organization also means that the company can take advantage of the Dell supply chain and its relationships to suppliers like ATI, Intel, and Nvidia. According to Vena, customers were being forced to wait up to five weeks for new PCs using the latest technology, a trend that he said should be far easier to buck now that Alienware can tap into Dell's supply chain.

Finally, the deal also allows Advanced Micro Devices to finally gain access to Dell, the last major PC OEM that existed as an Intel-only shop. While the deal doesn't mean that Dell will ship an AMD-based PC under its own label, the deal could provide a way for AMD to move closer to Dell over time. Gonzalez appeared to be one of the few people in the PC industry that said he didn't care, however.

"We're completely agnostic to any one vendor," Gonzalez said. "We talk about performance."

source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1941376,00.asp

# posted by dark master : 3/23/2006 10:00:00 AM  0 comments

This is Einstein's Twin Paradox, and although it sounds strange, it is absolutely true. The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. Rocketing to Alpha Centauri—warp 9, please—is a good way to stay young.

Or is it?

Some researchers are beginning to believe that space travel could have the opposite effect. It could make you prematurely old.

Above: Albert Einstein's theory of Special Relativity says that time slows down for fast-moving space travelers, effectively keeping them young. Space radiation acting on telomeres could reverse the effect. [More]

"The problem with Einstein's paradox is that it doesn't fold in biology—specifically, space radiation and the biology of aging," says Frank Cucinotta, NASA's chief scientist for radiation studies at the Johnson Space Center.

While the astronaut twin is hurtling through space, Cucinotta explains, his chromosomes are exposed to penetrating cosmic rays. This can damage his telomeres—little molecular "caps" on the ends of his DNA. Here on Earth, the loss of telomeres has been linked to aging.

So far, the risk hasn't been a major concern: The effect on shuttle and space station astronauts, if any, would be very small. These astronauts orbit inside of Earth's protective magnetic field, which deflects most cosmic rays.

But by 2018, NASA plans to send humans outside of that protective bubble to return to the moon and eventually travel to Mars. Astronauts on those missions could be exposed to cosmic rays for weeks or months at a time. Naturally, NASA is keen to find out whether or not the danger of "radiation aging" really exists, and if so, how to handle it.

Science is only now beginning to look at the question. "The reality is, we have very little information about [the link between] radiation and telomere loss," says Jerry Shay, a cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. With support from NASA, Shay and others are studying the problem. What they learn about aging could benefit everyone, on Earth and in space.

A Lit Fuse

Like the fuse of a time bomb, telomeres are long strands of repeating DNA that shorten each time a cell divides. When the telomeres become too short, the cell's time is up: It can no longer divide, a state of affairs known as "replicative senescence."

Without this built-in fuse, human cells would be able to continue growing and dividing indefinitely. In fact, scientists believe that cells evolved telomeres as a way of preventing the out-of-control cell growth of cancerous tumors. Because of telomeres, most human cells can only divide 50 to 100 times before the time bomb goes off.

Right: Telomeres (white) cap the ends of human chromosomes (gray). Image credit: U.S. Department of Energy Human Genome Program. [More]

One current theory of aging holds that, as the cells of a person's body start to hit this telomere-imposed limit, the lack of fresh, new cells causes the typical signs of aging: wrinkled skin, failing organs, weaker immune system, etc.

Whether or not telomere loss actually causes aging remains a matter of debate, Shay notes. The fact that shortened telomeres go hand in hand with aging is well documented. People with shorter telomeres, for example, are known to not live as long on average as people with longer telomeres. But mere correlation doesn't prove whether telomeres are in fact the cause.

"It's hard to prove cause and effect in these things. But I think there's a sufficient number of these correlative studies from a variety of different investigators that one has to start believing that short telomeres are a marker of aging," Shay says.

Recent research, performed by Frank Cucinotta and colleagues, showed that iron-nuclei radiation (a chief component of cosmic rays) does indeed damage the telomeres of human cells: reference.

To prove this, they exposed laboratory dishes containing a kind of human blood cell called lymphocytes to beams of both iron nuclei and gamma rays. Until recently, such a thorough analysis of telomere damage would have been prohibitively time consuming. But a new cell-staining technique called RxFISH (Rainbow cross-species Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization) allowed Cucinotta and his colleagues to look at many telomeres simultaneously.

Left: Human chromosomes revealed by RxFISH. Image credit: NASA/JSC. [More]

"We had this surprising result that iron particles are much more damaging to telomeres than gamma rays," Cucinotta says. He suggests that this difference might be due to the wider path of damage caused by iron nuclei. Telomere strands wrap into elongated loops, like little knots on the ends of chromosomes. Gamma rays can only strike one side of these loops or the other, but iron nuclei can affect both sides at the same time, inflicting lasting damage on the telomere—possibly causing its complete deletion. This explanation is still speculative, however.

The task now is to quantify the risk telomere damage might pose to astronauts, so that mission managers and the astronauts themselves can make informed decisions about the risks they face. In all likelihood, the effects will be modest, Shay says.

"We're talking about subtle things. These people are probably not going to wind up in wheelchairs or something like that from being in space," Shay says.

For example, astronauts who have had the greatest exposure to space radiation, such as the Apollo astronauts who traveled to the Moon, tend to get cataracts about 7 years earlier than other astronauts, on average. Cataracts are a common symptom of aging.

Right: Iron nuclei are especially damaging to telomeres. [More]

Of greater concern is possible aging of the brain and spinal cord. Experiments with rats have shown that brain tissue is vulnerable to "aging" by iron-nuclei radiation--this according to research by Jim Joseph of Tufts University and Bernie Rabin at the University of Maryland. (See references below.)

"It is looking more and more likely that this could be a problem for long-term space travel," Cucinotta says.

However, if scientists can tease apart the exact ways that iron-particle radiation affects telomeres, they may be able find a way to avoid or correct it. The solution could be as simple as a pill containing DNA-repair molecules. "There are many ways that we can intervene," Shay says.

One way or another, NASA plans to keep their astronauts feeling young.

# posted by dark master : 3/23/2006 09:58:00 AM  0 comments