Content and news by Rob Williams

One of the most popular CPUs on the market right now is the Q6600, thanks to the fact that it offers four cores at 2.4GHz. But what about the Xeon’s? Their prices are also more affordable now, with their X3210 2.13GHz retailing for $260. Read on as we pit this Quad-Core against the rest of our fleet.

If you can find a Linux user who has never used the GNOME desktop environment, please let me know. Indeed, it’s become incredibly popular in the ten years it’s been around, thanks to it’s clean design and simplistic usage. One of the reasons GNOME has succeeded is due to the emphasis on keeping things simple and employing an identical look between all of the base applications. One thing is for sure, GNOME may still be a young DE, but it’s certainly matured a great deal.

“We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software.” Those were the opening lines of Miguel De Icaza’s email announcing the GNU Network Object Model Environment, better known as GNOME, exactly (in my timezone) ten years ago, on 15th August 1997.

Source: OSNews

Considering the fact that compact discs are still widely used today, it’s almost hard to believe that today marks their 25th birthday. In celebration, I think we all owe it to the format to think back to your very first audio CD purchase. That’s what the staff at Engadget did, and all I can say is Billy Joel? Seriously? Mine was Green Day – Dookie, an album I still listen to quite frequently.

Now with some 200 billion discs having been sold worldwide — and probably twice as many distributed gratis by AOL in its dial-up heyday — it would seem that the original shiny little platter is unquestionably in its golden years, with more convenient or capacious formats replacing it on almost every front.

Source: Engadget

LAX is a pretty daunting airport. It’s huge… very huge. I’ve missed flights there before, and it’s hardly fun. My problems there don’t compare to what happened this past weekend, though, where close to 20,000 passengers were stranded for a few hours due to a technical snafu. The issue? A network card that decided to die. Sure, peripherals die, but when a simple network card dies and takes out an airport, that’s not saying very much about how things are run there.

Attention airline operators: this is what you get when you buy from the lowest bidder, in this case Sewart’s PC and Bagel shop, which, while having decent bagels, makes crappy cheap-ass Peecees. Look for a full audit and upgrade at LAX soon. Poor devils.

Source: CrunchGear

AMD has no intentions of giving up on x86 yet, and has proved that with their announcement of extensions for software parallelism to help make parallel programming easier and also better optimized. The first extension, which has no tentative date, will give software access information about expired instructions and cache misses to improve performance. This “lightweight profiling” would give near real-time analysis of performance, without causing a performance hit. If you are not a developer, this announcement won’t mean much, but you can sit back and bask in the fact that AMD is still hard at work, developing new technologies.

“As we look ahead in multicore systems, we see the need for hardware and software to work together to evolve a new set of techniques,” said Earl Stahl, vice president of software engineering at AMD. “We see this as the first of a family of family of extensions, and we are working on others,” he added.

Source: EE Times

DailyTech just the other day gave us information regarding Intel’s upcoming Penryn, and now they have given us information on something even nearer-term, the X38 chipset. According to their sources, the chipset will launch on September 23, just a little over a month from now. Mentioned also is the fact that X38 is designed to support DDR3 memory natively, but DDR2 motherboards will not be uncommon.

The new chipset is a member of the Bearlake family, which saw its initial debut with the G33 and P35 Express variants last June. Intel’s X38 Express succeeds the 975X Express that made its debut with Intel’s Pentium D Presler processors. Although the Intel 975X Express launched in late 2005, the chipset shared basics with Intel’s 945 and 955X Express chipset families. Intel decided not to refresh the 975X Express with a Broadwater variant and held out for Bearlake.

Source: DailyTech

We have posted many times about AllOfMP3.com in the past, and chances are this will not be the last. The music service was in dire straits for many months before finally being shut down due to the Russian governments persuasive push. Weeks ago, we learned that the head of the service had to go to trial, to see if he was actually guilty of anything. As it turns out, he wasn’t. Add to that, AllOfMP3.com turns out to be completely legal under Russian law.

EMI, NBC Universal and Time Warner took Denis Kvasov to court claiming that AllofMP3’s cheap prices breached copyright laws. AllofMP3 went offline July 2 following continued pressure from the US Government on Russia to shut the site, including an escalation of the dispute to the World Trade Organization. AllofMP3 was also the subject of a lawsuit filed in New York last December that attempted to claim damages of $1.65 trillion.

Source: TechCrunch

We have posted a few articles over the past couple months about Intel’s Penryn, and now we finally have a set launch date: November 11. Penryn brings a lot to the table and should be quite fun to play with. Included will be SSE4, MG transistors, 45nm, lower TDPs and higher L2 cache.

DailyTech have acquired a list of the new models and also pricing. All models listed are server-based, with the top ranking X5460 clocking in at 3.16GHz. Like all Penryn Quad-Cores, it will feature 12MB of L2 cache, with a TDP of 120W. ‘E’ processors are less expensive and have a lower TDP, such as the E5405 at 2GHz that will retail for $209. Yes.. Quad-Core with 12MB L2 for $209. Progress is great.

Intel Xeon processors carrying the “E” designation feature 80-watt TDP ratings while the “X” bin processors have higher 120-watt TDP ratings. Intel does not plan to launch the low-power “L” models until Q1’08, with two models in the pipeline. Strangely, Intel never issued a formal announcement for the launch of Penryn nor has the November 11 date showed up on roadmaps. Instead, the launch date popped up on a public webpage for resellers.

Source: DailyTech

Adobe is a huge company. Maybe not Microsoft huge, but with the acquisition of Macromedia two years ago, they’ve become quite a stature in the market. They offer many different products, many you’ve probably never even heard of, that take care of many tasks. One thing their products can’t help you with, though, are your spreadsheets and slide show presentations. Wired has posted news that Adobe is pondering making a move into the office market, which they are clearly capable of doing. My brain is already churning images of what an Adobe Office would look like.

The software maker famous for Flash and Photoshop is poised to take the plunge into the lucrative world of office applications. It may sound far-fetched at first, but the stage is set for Adobe to flex its muscle in the office-app arena. The company already has a strong presence in business software with its Acrobat suite of products and interest in its new platform for web-enabled applications that run on the desktop is rising quickly.

Source: Wired

If you are looking for a lightweight MP3 player, Samsung’s K3 2GB or 4GB player is worth your consideration. It weighs just 200g, includes a bright OLED screen and proves simple to use.

LaCie is not a company many immediately think of when it comes to storage, but no one can accuse of them for not thinking big. In fact, their latest product is called Biggest S2S, and for good reason. It doesn’t hold a measly 1TB, but rather a full 5TB (5,000GB). It’s targeted towards the multi-media creation folks, and those with big pockets thanks to the $3,699 price tag. For those with even bigger pockets, you can pick up four to stack with each other to have access to 20TB.

The 5TB Biggest S2S five-disk RAID boasts a 3Gbit/sec eSATA interface, direct eSATA-to-SATA connection, burst rates of over 200MB/sec, and the ability to link up with three other S2S units on the eSATA PCI-X / ExpressCard to achieve the aforementioned 20TB solution. Furthermore, the disks are hot-swappable and the tower is hot-pluggable, and it can even be setup to beam out email alerts in the event of disk failure. The 5TB S2S is available now for $3,699 with a PCI-X card, or you can toss in an extra Benjamin and go for the PCI-E bundle.

Source: Engadget

Linux is thought of by many as being a complicated OS that can’t do much. That’s hardly true, as it depends a lot on your distro and also how eager you are to learn and accept the fact that Linux is not Windows. The latest blog post at Linux Brain Dump gives users ten commandments to live by. I agree with all of them except for the first, where they state “Thou shalt not log in as root.” How do you expect to learn Linux without using root??

If one top list wasn’t enough for you, how about “50 Reasons To Dump Windows”, which was posted the other day at Linux Haxor. Some reasons are blatantly redundant, so it could easily be a ten reasons list, but still a decent list to link your friends to.

Source: Linux Brain Dump, Linux Haxor

Doing something wrong is, well, wrong. Unless of course you are the RIAA, who have set a perfect example of how to not pay off your huge bills. Last month, they were ordered to pay Debbie Foster’s attorney fees, which stacked up to a staggering $68,685.23. Of course, they are just sitting back and hoping the courts will forget about it. If only things worked that way.

Can it be that the RIAA, or the “Big 4” record companies it represents, are short on funds? It turns out that despite the Judge’s order, entered a month ago, telling them to pay Debbie Foster $68,685.23 in attorneys fees, in Capitol v. Foster, they have failed to make payment. Ms. Foster has now had to ask the Court to enter Judgment, so that she can commence ‘post judgment collection proceedings’. According to Ms. Foster’s motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment. Perhaps the RIAA should ask their lawyers for a loan?

Source: Slashdot

Not to be outpaced by the competition, Microsoft has jacked up their free Hotmail service to offer all users 5GB of space. Do you really need that much space? No, and even Microsoft knows this when they said, “Just when you were wondering how you’d ever fill up 2 or 4 GB of mail…”. But, lots of free storage is good regardless of how you look at things. In addition to this announcement, paid users now receive 10GB of space, and performance issues have been tackled as well.

We’ve been hearing you loud and clear across the world: speed is one of the most important aspects of a web-based email service. We’ve spent more time in this release identifying what parts of the product are slowest and fixing those. We hope that you notice an improvement when this update is released to your account, and we’ll continue our work on performance in future releases.

Source: Spaces Blog

If you are familiar with hacking culture at all, you likely know all about phone phreaking and the fact that Joe Engressia was one of the most well-versed individuals on the subject, also being called the grand daddy of the hobby. He was one of the very few who could whistle 2600Hz with his mouth, as well. I’ve listened to multiple interviews with him in the past and was impressed by his vast knowledge on phreaking and hacking in general. He passed away last week of a heart attack, at age 58.

I have sad news of yet another death, that of “Joybubbles”, born Joe Engressia. “Joybubbles” wasn’t just a “handle”, but rather what he legally changed his name to around 1990. He was also known by some as “The Whistler”. Joe Engressia was one of the better known blind “phone phreaks” of the 1960s/70s-era. He even got a job with Mountain Bell Telephone in the 1970s-era, and worked for a while as a TSPS Operator in Denver as well in other areas of Mountain Bell.

Source: Telecom Gear

We’ve taken a look at a fair amount of external storage devices in the past, but here’s one that’s unique. At home, you can plug the drive in like a diskette for full S-ATA speeds, and eject it to take on the go with USB-functionality. In addition to the EZ Swap EX, we are also taking a look at Vantec’s latest NexStar offering.

Now, I’m not one to bash Vista, but it appears for some reason, many out there are dissatisfied with the new OS. Regardless of the reason(s), Microsoft has finally sucked it up and got to creating a new batch of Windows XP product keys. That really says something. XP is now well over five years old, but it’s aged quite well, thanks to it’s many updates. Since no one really has a solid reason for upgrading, why not stick with what works?

It’s not secret that a lot of folks are less than pleased with Windows Vista. And while Windows XP has been on the shelves for more than 5 years, Microsoft’s longest-reigning operating system still suits the needs of computer users. But it turns out that there’s a downside to having an operating system that’s been as popular as XP for as long as 5+ years. You eventually start to run out of working product activation keys.

Source: Download Squad

I wish I could have posted the title sans a question mark, but no one really knows whether or not this will happen. I clearly remember the day I first installed DN3D on my fresh 486/66, because I was bragging to myself about how many times I could install the game on my massive 4GB hard drive. One thing is for sure, the game was well worth the 0.8% of the drive it hogged up. If it comes to XBL, I will buy it up quick and kick some ass. Come on 3D Realms.. make it so.

This would typically be the part where we go into a discussion of when Duke Nukem Forever is coming out and wonder openly if it will ever happen. But we’ll simply give you this handy-dandy little link to our Duke Nukem Forever happy 10th un-birthday post and let you think about what you were doing ten years ago when the game was first announced. With any luck, by the time you snap out of thinking back ten years, the XBLA version of Duke Nukem 3D will be ready.

Source: Joystiq

This is a real commercial, and that’s all that needs to be said.

Via: CrunchGear

It’s no wonder I lack so much ambition… the folks at PS3Vault.com took it all. In light of the fact that the Xbox 360 has had notorious reliability problems, someone had to put the Playstation 3 through it’s paces, and the results are quite impressive. Included in the slew of tests was running the console in a 0°C freezer for a total of 108 hours and also a FREAKING SAUNA at 120°F for another 64 hours. All of this was done while the console was actually in use.. playing movies and games. The cool thing is that it passed these tests with flying colors.

So how good is the console when put under extreme operating pressure and alternating environments The total concept of the Ps3 console instills robustness, stability and durability, the overall package combines the latest chip technology and peripheral advancements. The following results of the console are noteworthy reading and were done under the following guidelines. Results were recorded accurately to provide an actual operating statistic.

Source: PS3 Vault