Content and news by Rob Williams

Microsoft is going to make key components of its Windows Vista operating system as well as some updates to Internet Explorer only available to customers running genuine Microsoft software. The aim is to give consumers and businesses the incentive to run a genuine copy of Windows.

If you plan on using a legal version of Windows Vista, this won’t concern you. However, current WGA is rather unstable and I have known completely legit users to be hassled. I’d be happy as pie if the verification was done solely online, with nothing installed on the machine. Things are going to get fun…

According to reports, we may witness a price war in the hard drive business industry. At least this is what Seagate Technology CEO Bill Watkins said on Wednesday. Seagate is currently the world’s largest hard drive manufacturer and competes with such companies as Western Digital, Hitachi, Samsung and Toshiba. According to Watkins “If pricing doesn’t drop for us, it’ll be an upside.” Seagate is expecting stiff price cutting from its competitors through into 2007.

It’s hard to imagine large drops, because HDD’s are cheap to begin with. Either way, any price drops are welcomed… especially if you are looking for a large capacity.

Identified by their white shirts, the bullies are against everyone else: the teachers, the nerds, the jocks, the preppies… you name ’em, they’re against ’em. Luckily, Jimmy is encouraged to stand up for himself and the other kids, and while players can certainly have moments of questionable judgment themselves (through pranks and razzing), being a bad kid isn’t supposed to be tolerated. Again, this probably isn’t the game you thought it was.

Normally a game trailer would not make headlines, but rules don’t apply when the game is produced by Rockstar. Will there be controversy? Do you even have to ask? I personally think the game is ridiculous, but even if it flops we can be assured that Jack Thompson will bully Rockstar.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA(R)), the owner and producer of the International CES(R), the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow, announced today that it is forming an advisory committee to solicit gaming industry feedback and explore the viability of a West Coast event in late spring 2007 focused on the gaming and entertainment marketplace.

It appears that they will be striving for the same goals as the ‘old’ school E3. Like E3, a potential convention would reside on the West coast, and take place in the Spring. Seeing as CES is the most popular tech convention on this side of the Earth, a potential gaming convention is certainly viable.

Cray and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science announced today that Cray has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The systems and multi-year services contract, valued at over $52 million, includes delivery of a Cray massively parallel processor supercomputer, code-named “Hood.”

Hood is comprised of thousands of Opteron processors, running on finely tuned kernels. I have to wonder just how awesome it would be to play around with such a beast. 1,000 instances of Super Pi anyone?

Sunnyvale, Calif. – August 10, 2006 – AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced
broad software industry support for its upcoming Next-Generation AMD
Opteron(tm) processor family, which provides the ISV (independent
software vendor) and open source software development communities with
hardware support for the development of the next evolution of
business-class enterprise applications.

You can read the full press release here.

Markham, Ont. – Aug. 10, 2006 – Novell today announced simplified branding to make it even easier for customers to identify the right Linux* product for their needs. SUSE® Linux, Novell’s award-winning community Linux distribution, will now be known as “openSUSE*,” echoing the name of the Novell-sponsored open source Linux project, openSUSE.org. Novell’s enterprise Linux products will continue to be designated “SUSE Linux Enterprise.”

You can read the full press release here.

Cases & Enclosures
• Icy Dock MB122 Drive Enclosure – Think Computers
• iStar D-Storm D300 3U 19-inch Rackmount Chassis – PC Stats

Cooling
• Zalman CNPS9500 AM2 Quiet CPU Cooler – Viper Lair
• Zalman Reserator 1 Plus Passive Computer Water Cooling System – Tweak News

Memory & Storage
• JetArt Ram HeatSinks (CK5000) – DragonSteelMods

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• Iriver T10 1GB MP3 Player – XYZ Computing
• Pioneer DV-490V DVD Player – Digital Trends
• SteelSeries SteelPad 5L Mouse Pad – A True Review
• Thermaltake Toughpower 700w Power Supply – Virtual-Hideout

Displays & Video Cards
• MSI NX7900GT-VT256E-HD HDCP-enabled Geforce 7900GT – PC Stats
• NGO NVIDIA Optimized Driver v1.9145 – NGOHQ

Complete Systems, Competitions & Etcetera
• AA Navigator Ultimate/ Navigator Software – UK Gamer
• Slim Devices Squeezebox 3 Wi-Fi Network Music Player – Hexus

The distro formally known as RR4 is soon to be released, and we have taken a hard first look at what’s being offered. Based on Gentoo, Sabayon already has a solid base. Add superb Live DVD functionality and a complete installer, this is one distro worth watching.

A major security hole has been found in Ruby on Rails. Upgrading to version 1.1.5 is extremely urgent, and all previous versions except those “on a very recent edge” are affected. Details on the exact nature of the flaw will be coming soon, but the rails team has decided to wait a short time before disclosure so that people can have a chance to upgrade their servers before would-be-assailants are armed.

If your server runs Rails, upgrade the software right now. They don’t say “Major” just for the fun of it.

Sometimes I wonder how Apple CEO Steve Jobs can sleep at night. He appears to spend half his waking hours ridiculing Microsoft’s admittedly behind-schedule operating system, Windows Vista, for copying Mac OS X features. But this week at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), he announced ten new features for Leopard, the next version of OS X, most of which will seem more than vaguely familiar to Windows users. I’m not dim: Microsoft does copy Apple on a fairly regular basis. But seriously, Steve. Apple’s just as bad.

This is going to be a never ending debate, to say the least. Paul makes some great points here, and I seem to agree with all of them. On the other end of the spectrum, there are also people who believe that Microsoft should be ‘learning’ from Leopard. Read both articles then conjure up your own conclusions.

Although he was alarmed by AOL’s haphazard release of its subscribers’ online search requests, Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt said Wednesday the privacy concerns raised by that breach won’t change his company’s practice of storing the inquiries made by its users.

I don’t agree with such practices, and we can hope that Google never chooses or be forced to release such information. The moral of the story is that if you want to have more privacy online, you should look into proxies and the like. Hiding your identity from the start is the best protection.

The benchmarks compare ATI’s Radeon X1950XT in CrossFire against NVIDIA’s Quad SLI. The test setup used for NVIDIA’s Quad SLI is a Dell XPS 700 system equipped with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, 1GB of DDR2-800 memory and two GeForce 7950GX2 graphics cards for four total GPUs. The ATI CrossFire test system is identical with the Quad SLI system except the nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition motherboard was swapped out for an early Radeon Xpress 3200 (RD600) motherboard and two ATI Radeon X1950XTX/CrossFire graphics cards.

If these benchmarks are realistic, then it will be a superb competitor to the GX2. According to the results, the 1950XTX even beat out Quad-SLI at the highest resolutions available today. It’s hard to believe at this point, but as always, time will soon tell.

Parallels announced this week that it is working on a new version of Parallels Desktop for Macs that will allow the virtualized guest operating system to use 3D acceleration hardware in real time. The company said that while it’s not available yet, it plans to introduce 3D acceleration so that those who want to run 3D applications in a virtualized Windows XP do not have to dual boot their Intel-Macs to do so. Best of all, Parallels said that 3D acceleration will be “fast.”

With TransGamings Cider on the horizon, it’s going to be a hard sell here. Although, both products use different schemes to get things done, so one is bound to be much more realible, and faster than the other.

Intel’s Keith Packard announced earlier today that Intel was open sourcing graphics drivers for their new 965 Express Chipset family graphics controllers. From the announcement: ‘Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset family includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. By open sourcing the drivers for this new technology, Intel enables the open source community to experiment, develop, and contribute to the continuing advancement of open source 3D graphics.

This is a very smart move by Intel. Early thoughts on the latest drivers don’t seem that impressive, but they are on the road to recovery. Now when is NVIDIA and ATI going to follow suit? ;-)

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 9, 2006 – Eicon Networks Corporation (“Eicon”) and Intel Corporation today announced that they have signed an agreement for Intel to sell the assets of its media and signaling business to Eicon. The acquisition is expected to allow Eicon to become a leading player in the media processing and signaling market segment. The sale will enable Intel to focus its investments on its core communications and embedded businesses, including Intel® Architecture and network processors, modular communications platforms and optical modules.

You can read the complete news release here.

Mississauga, ON, August 9, 2006 – Nikon Canada Inc. today introduced the Nikon D80 Digital SLR. Incorporating Nikon’s latest digital and photographic technologies, this new high-performance digital SLR camera – including an interchangeable-lens with automated operation and advanced features — is designed to satisfy photographers’ passion for creating beautiful photographs and preserving special moments.

Well, here it is! If you have your reading glasses on, and a full cup of coffee, you can read the long press release right here.

Cases & Enclosures
• Cooler Master Mystique 631 – Modders-Inc
• ENlight LP791 LCD PC Chassis – Hexus
• Tt Mozart Tx Case – Overclocker Cafe

Cooling
• JetArt Thermo Eye – DragonSteelMods
• OCZ Tempest CPU Cooler – Red & Blackness
• Watercooling – Quick Install and Leak testing Guide – Overclock 3D

Motherboards & Processors
• DFI Infinity NF UltraII-M2 – PC Modding Malaysia
• Overclocking The AMD 4200+ AM2 Processor Part 2 – Legit Reviews
• APPHIRE PURE CrossFire Advantage Motherboard – Virtual-Hideout
• Tyan Tomcat h1000S (S3950) AM2 – 3D Gameman

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• Bluetake Bluetooth Audio – UK Gamer
• Cooler Master eXtreme Power Duo 650W PSU – Motherboards.org
• Joytech NeoS USB Gamepad – BytePress
• Mushkin Enhanced XP650 Power Supply – Motherboards.org
• Revoltec Lightboard Advanced Keyboard – Think Computers

Displays & Video Cards
• eVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2 Black Pearl Quad SLI – Hexus
• Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT GDDR3 – Hexus
• Intel 2006-08-09 Graphics Preview – Phoronix

Complete Systems, Competitions & Etcetera
• Alienware Aurora m9700 SLI laptop – Tech Spot
• Apple WWDC Minus Reality Distortion Field and the Sony MyLo – Digital Trends (MP3, Right-Click and Save As)
• August 2006 system guide – Tech Report
• Canon EOS 30D – BIOS Magazine
• MS-Tech LV-340 Webcam – Technic3D (German)
• QuakeCon 2006 id Software Q&A – techFEAR

Another major difference was that NVIDIA launched the GeForce 7950 GX2 at retail. On the day of launch, enthusiasts could finally buy dual-GPU powered GeForce 79050 GX2 video cards from their favorite e-tailers. But, at launch, NVIDIA wasn’t quite ready to endorse Quad-SLI for the Do-It-Yourself market. Quad-SLI was only supported when purchased in a full system built by an approved partner. NVIDIA took this route to ensure Quad-SLI owners had a good experience and didn’t have to contend with incompatibilities or other potential pitfalls.

You can read the full article over at HotHardware, and have a second opinion at Guru3D. It seems that Quad-SLI is better than Dual-SLI by a nice little margin, but is it really going to be worth the extra cash?

The device–about the size of a hardback book–played “The Phantom of the Opera” as Collins pulled up a menu bar to display a few of its navigation and interactive features that can be called up on screen while a movie is playing. Collins said Microsoft’s HD DVD drive will be among the least expensive of the HD DVD players, but he declined to disclose the drive’s retail price.

If they are holding back a price, then it’s obvious it will still cost a fair bit. The player is actually larger than I personally believed it would be, but it can safely [at least I hope] sit on top of your 360 to save room.