Content and news by Rob Williams

REDMOND, Wash. — June 15, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.

You can read the full press release here. Well, it’s been fun with you at the top Bill. It surely won’t feel like the same Microsoft afterwards. You can read related news posts at DailyTech and Ars Technica. You can also check out News.com to see a video of the announcement, where Gates insists he is not retiring, rather simply stepping down.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA, Jun 16, 2006 (CCNMatthews via COMTEX News Network) — ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY) (NASDAQ:ATYT), a global leader in PC graphics, today announced that its Radeon® graphics processors family have been selected to power DEPO Computers’ entire line of home and multimedia Ego PCs for the back-to-school season. Starting in late August, DEPO Ego systems powered by ATI’s Radeon® X1300, Radeon® X1600, Radeon® X1800 and Radeon® X1900 GPUs will be available in major Russian retail stores as well as at DEPO.RU e-tail store.

You can read the full press release here.

Cases & Enclosures
• Cooler Master Mystique 631 – PC Apex
• MSI Mega mPC 945 SFF – SFF Tech
• Thermaltake Eureka Aluminum Full Tower – Big Bruin
• Zaward Quattro Cooler – Technic 3D

Cooling
• Zalman VF900-Cu Heatpipe Graphics Card Cooler – Rojak Pot

Memory & Storage
• Corsair 1GB XMS2 8500 DDR2 – PC Perspective
• OCZ 2GB DDR2 PC2-5400 Special Ops Edition – Legion Hardware
• Seagate Barracuda 750GB 7200.10 – Viper Lair

Motherboards & CPU’s
• Intel Core2 Duo Preview – T-Break

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• Cooler Master iGreen 500W PSU – Modders-Inc
• Everglide s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones – FastlaneHW
• NZXT Precise 650 Watt Power Supply – Overclockers Club
• Ripper XXL, Pro HS and Mouse Tape – XS Reviews

Video Cards & Monitor
• ASUS EAX1300PRO 256MB – Virtual-Hideout

Etcetera & Contests
• AOpen miniPC MP915-B “Mac Mini” System – PC Stats
• Casio Exilim EX-Z60 Camera – Digital Trends
• Computex 2006 – Tech Report
• FujiFilm FinePix F470 – ByteSector
• Motorola V3im – UK Gamer
• Nintendo DS Lite – Gideon Tech
• Contest: GamerzStuff Giganta Lazer 4 Mouse Mats – XS Reviews

June 15, 2006–Midway Games Inc. (NYSE:MWY – News), a leading interactive entertainment publisher and developer, today announced it has acquired the retail publishing rights to select games from Epic Games’ catalog of existing Unreal® PC titles, including critically acclaimed and top-selling titles Unreal Tournament® and the original Unreal. Since its debut in 1998, the Unreal franchise has sold more than seven million units worldwide. Midway also announced plans to publish the first-ever compilation of Unreal and Unreal Tournament titles, Unreal® Anthology, scheduled to ship this fall for personal computers at a U.S. suggested MSRP of $29.95.

p>For the price, you will receive UT1 with it’s expansion pack, Unreal II, Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004. Not too shabby. Source: Blues News.

ESRB president Patricia Vance told the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, “After a game ships, if disclosure is found to have been incomplete, recent enhancements to the ESRB enforcement system will soon allow for the imposition of fines up to $1 million.

I agree to an extent. Game publishers shouldn’t hide anything, because obviously it doesn’t seem to pay off in the end. But 1M? That’s outrageous. One other part I find odd, is the fact that they rarely play the games they rate, because they are ‘too lengthy’. At last check, games are shorter than they ever have been.

DDR and DDR2 memories are classified according to the maximum speed at which they can work. But, besides the speed, there is another information that tells you the memory performance: timings. Timings are numbers like 2-3-2-6-T1, 3-4-4-8 or 2-2-2-5, the lower the better. In this tutorial we will explain you exactly what exactly each one of these numbers mean.

This is a great article if you want to better understand ram timings better. It may even help you understand why your memory overclock can sometimes go horribly wrong.

Ars Technica: What’s your job in the Xbox division? What does a typical work day for you involve?

Matt Lee: I’m an engineer in the Game Technology Group. My job is to help game developers make better Xbox 360 games. I’m one of about a dozen people who share a similar role here, and each of us have certain specialties. Mine are graphics programming and content pipelines, but we have CPU experts, networking experts, audio experts, and more—everyone overlaps to some degree. We also have a content team that reviews artwork and gameplay in the same way I review code and performance.

Ars Technica has a very lengthy interview which covers almost every area of the Xbox 360. Give it a read especially if you want to know what goes on behind the scenes during development.

It seems that with the rise of user-generated video, a lot more people are learning about the fun of licensing rights. The RIAA is apparently sending out cease-and-desist letters to YouTube users who dare to put up videos of things such as themselves dancing to music they haven’t licensed.

The scariest thing is that these fools actually send C&D letters to the users! How they can remotely claim ‘losses’ for such a thing is ridiculous. If anything, these videos help promote whatever song is being used, certainly not hurting it. Well, unless you are the numa numa guy.

A team manager for Windows for 5 years has decided to write a blog-essay about what caused Windows Vista project to miss the due date. Philip tells us in the blog, that Windows developers are writing an average of 5000 lines of code (which is *only* 1200 lines less than the national average of 6200 lines of code per year). He addresses issues like the Vista code being too complicated, the processes the developers have to follow too complex and a lot more.

Of course this is a complex system, but how does that cause the date to slip? It’s simply poor date prediction, in my opinion. Read more at Slashdot.

AOL has re-launched its Netscape.com portal as a place where user participation is balanced by moderator control. The renovated site will feature community-driven news and user-submitted video, guided by editors called anchors. “The hive mind sometimes doesn’t do a thorough job,” says Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a blog network acquired last year by AOL.

The updated site appears in a similar layout and has similar funcionality as Digg, except AOLs attempt is far more ad-driven. The most popular story at the time of this post is, “AOL copies Digg”. Source: Slashdot.

Fremont, CA (June 14, 2006) –Corsair® Memory, the worldwide leader in design and manufacture of high performance memory, today announced that the new TWIN2X2048-6400C3 is the system memory behind three new overclocking world records in 3DMark06, 3DMark05 and 3DMark03. Using the Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3 2GB kit rated at true low latencies of 3-4-4-9, Vince Lucido – also known as K|ngp|n, was able to make his mark on Futuremark’s Hall of Fame.

You can read the full press release here.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – June 14, 2006 – AMD (NYSE:AMD) announced today that
AMD Opteron(tm) and AMD Athlon(tm) 64 processor based systems and AMD
Turion(tm) 64 mobile technology have achieved YES Certification from
Novell, further validating the company’s commitment to interoperability
and customer-centric innovation. Novell YES Certification demonstrates
the highest level of compatibility and interoperability with Novell
products, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The certification
assures users that systems powered by AMD processors are compatible
with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and backed by support offerings from
both Novell and AMD

You can read the full press release here.

And so, another long awaited game appears. This year, in May, Deep Silver along with JoWood, launched the sequel to the famous Spellforce: Order of Dawn. The differences between the two are great, and that in a good way. Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars brings us a new campaign, new gameplay and more important, better graphics.

Check out the full review at BytePress.

Cases & Enclosures
• Lian-Li PC-G50B – techPowerUp!
• Shuttle XPC SN27P2 SFF Socket AM2 Barebones – PC Stats

Cooling
• MNPCTech Billet Machined Fan Grills – ModTheBox
• Thermalright Ultra-90 LGA775 – PC Modding Malaysia
• Titan NK32TZ AMD Athlon & Intel Pentium Heatsink – A1-Electronics

Memory & Storage
• A-DATA my Flash USB Fingerprint Disk 512MB – Hexus

Motherboards & CPU’s
• Abit AT8 32X Crossfire Xpress 3200 – Legit Reviews
• AMD vs. Intel, Will the Best CPU Please Stand Up? – PC Stats

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• AlphaGrip AG-5 – techFEAR
• Kingwin 600w Mach 1 Power Supply – Virtual-Hideout
• Razer Krait – Cooling-Station
• Razer MANTIS Speed Mat – Cyberwizard Pit
• Swissbit S.BEAT MP3 Player – Think Computers

Video Cards & Monitor
• CMV LCD Monitor – A True Review
• Gigabyte X1900 XTX – Bjorn3D
• Nimzy Vibro Blaster – Technic3D

Etcetera & Contests
• Computex 2006: Girls – techPowerUp!
• Dell XPS M1710 Flagship Gaming Laptop – BIOS Magazine
• Samsung MM-a900 – Digital Trends

Santa Rosa systems will revolve around Intel’s Merom processor — the successor to the current Core Duo and Core Solo processor family — now called Core 2 Duo. Intel’s next-generation chipset for Santa Rosa is codenamed Crestline, and is based on Intel’s 965 chipset family. Crestline will deliver dual integrated graphics capabilities or support for discrete graphics using the GMA X3000 graphics engine. DDR2 667MHz/533MHz will be the standard memory of choice and Crestline will support either 800MHz or 667MHz FSB configurations. Paired with Intel’s ICH8M, Crestline will also support Intel’s Robson NAND flash module technology that will be introduced when Santa Rosa launches.

This may not sound that interesting right now, but if Intel knows what they are doing, it could turn out to be a great product. If anything, you should check out the preset dimensions for these systems, in addition to the sound level.

At a discussion of flash memory technologies to be included in Windows Vista and “Longhorn” here at TechEd 2006 this morning, Microsoft’s program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayres confirmed to TG Daily that inclusion of hybrid hard drives will be a requirement for mobile systems that carry the Vista Premium logo, beginning in June 2007.

The good thing is that you are able to run Vista without such a drive, although it will not be ‘designed’ for it. The bad thing is, that these flash drives are looking to be extremely expensive. Either way, it just shows that Vista requires a beast of a machine to run reliably as seen in todays site article.

It’s no secret that Windows technology evangelist Robert Scoble (of Scobelizer blogging fame) is leaving Microsoft for a startup, but Microsoft Watch’s Mary Jo Foley has the first exit interview with Scoble. Topics range from what Microsoft could have done to keep him spreading the word and building out MS’s Channel 9 community site, where he sees MS going and more.

Scoble was pretty vocal and influential on matters, so it’s almost sad to see him leave Microsoft. He was not even been there long, but he became a stature there very quickly. It will be great to see where he takes his startup, though.

One of the biggest security updates for more than a year is being released by Microsoft to fix 12 software flaws. Nine of the updates apply to the Windows operating system and one is deemed critical, a rating reserved for the most serious security problems. At least one of the loopholes being patched is already being actively exploited by malicious hackers.

This should have been posted about -yesterday-, but I am slow. If you are a WinXP user, go on and download the new updates. In other news, Microsoft will be ceasing support for Win98 and WinME next month.

NVIDIA could be in for a rocky summer thanks to IBM. It’s been reported that IBM will no longer make the AGP bridge chip that NVIDIA uses on its entry-level graphics cards. While PCI-Express graphics cards have pretty much taken over in the graphics market, AGP-based solutions are still quite prevalent — especially given the fact that Intel has been dumping 865 chipsets with AGP on the market.

It’s really unknown how this will affect NVIDIA or the consumer, but there is still a lot of life left in AGP. Chances are likely that NVIDIA will find another manufacturer, so it may turn out that nothing significant will happen.

Intel tries hard to push the memory marchitecture known as FB DIMM, Fully Buffered DIM memory and targets the super-expensive server market. Qimonda demonstrated four of said FB DIMM modules in an Intel Dempsey server motherboard and the board was running just fine. We also learned that not too many people wanted to buy many of these modules as they are as expensive as Aston Martins.

Just how expensive are these , is what I want to know. ECC DDR2 is expensive to begin with!