- Qualcomm Launches Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 Mobile Platform
- AMD Launches Ryzen PRO 7000 Series Mobile & Desktop Platform
- Intel Launches Sleek Single-Slot Arc Pro A60 Workstation Graphics Card
- NVIDIA Announces Latest Ada Lovelace Additions: GeForce RTX 4060 Ti & RTX 4060
- Maxon Redshift With AMD Radeon GPU Rendering Support Now Available
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Dell Offers 32GB SSD on Select Latitude Models
Dell is jumping into the solid-state disk arena today by offering 1.8″ SanDisk UATA 5000 drives on its Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and Latitude D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. SanDisk’s 1.8″ SSD drive was first announced in early January and features patented TrueFFS flash management technology.
As much as we should be excited about SSD, it’s really difficult to be when they retail for $550 for a 32GB offering. Even as expensive as that is, it’s a lot cheaper than it was just a few months ago.
Source: Daily Tech
QuickTime, Not Safari to Blame for MacBook Hacking
The zero-day vulnerability that allowed a hacker to commandeer a brand new MacBook Pro late last week resides in a flaw in Apple’s QuickTime media player, the exploit’s author says. The revelation corrects descriptions given last Friday that the exploit targeted Safari.
Being a QuickTime exploit, it would make sense that Windows machines are also vulnerable, as long as they use the same QuickTime software that’s thrown on Macs.
Source: The Register
DX10 Gaming on XP, Linux and Mac OS X?
Alky has a long way to go before even XP users, much less Mac and Linux users, can easily convert DX10 games for use on their platform of choice, but the fact that the alpha does allegedly work for some folks is promising.
When I first heard of this, I figured it was a scam similar to CherryOS. It seems that a few people have been able to get the alpha to work, but it is far from being a simple process.
If this becomes a reality, it will give people even more of a reason to stay away from Vista. Of course it would be nice on Linux and Mac OS X as well, but there is not even a use for DX10 on Vista right now as is, let alone other OS’.
Source: Ars Technica
301 Useless Facts
If you are looking for a great way to begin the day, grab a coffee and check out this site. There are no less than 301 useless but interesting facts. Some of them could also be used as conversation starters! My favorite is, “The dot over the letter “i†is called a tittle.”
Of course, I only got up to #10, but hey, I have work to do.
Source: Single Grain
Intel Unveils Virtual Marketing Storefront…
INTEL SOLUTIONS SUMMIT, PARIS, April 25, 2007 – Intel Corporation today announced a new program that will help resellers worldwide market innovative Intel-based products in a more quick and cost-effective manner. The company has created a new virtual marketing storefront for its reseller channel and has also collaborated with Google to create an advertising program where resellers can place online ads.
Source: Intel Press Release
Intel And Micron Sampling Industry-Leading…
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and BOISE, Idaho, April 25, 2007 – Intel Corporation and Micron Technology, Inc., today announced they are sampling industry-leading 50 nanometer (nm) multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory manufactured by their NAND flash memory joint venture, IM Flash Technologies.
Source: Intel Press Release
Vonage Wins Permanent Stay of Patent Ruling
Vonage this week received a permanent stay of injunction from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D.C. that would have barred it from signing up new customers. The permanent stay enables Vonage to add new customers as the company pursues an appeal to that ruling. Existing customers remain unaffected by the company’s ongoing patent litigation, Vonage said.
Having never touched Vonage myself, I can’t say I am a fan. It’s good to see that they were granted this stay though, as Verizon seems to want to rid VoIP entirely, at least as we know it. Now Vonage can relax a little and focus more on the actual case at hand.
Source: Network World
You Mean Small Businesses Can Succeed Without Web Sites?
The [WSJ] reporter seems genuinely shocked that small-business owners would stay offline, and even more so that they could succeed after doing so. This implies a belief many people seem to have: that being online is a silver bullet that will make a small business successful, regardless of any other factors.
Business owners can succeed without having an online presence. So stop giving that hot dog vendor on the corner of Tech and Gage St. so much grief!
Source: Tech Dirt
Intel Wipes Out AMD’s 2006 Marketshare Gains in One Quarter
Intel erased all of AMD’s 2006 gains and pushed the company back under the 20 percent threshold. Analysts for JP Morgan reported that “Intel’s superior products and aggressive pricing took their toll on AMD. We expect AMD to lose additional share during (the second quarter).”
As if Intel needed more bragging right! Barcelona just can’t seem to get here fast enough…
Source: Daily Tech
Next-Gen, High Performance Processor Unveiled
The prototype for a revolutionary new general-purpose computer processor, which has the potential of reaching trillions of calculations per second, has been designed and built by a team of computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. The new processor, known as TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), could be used to accelerate industrial, consumer and scientific computing.
Considering Intel has been making waves with their teraflop processor, one to come out of a university caught my eye. This processor however is not designed for massive multi-core action, but rather to make each core just much more efficient instead.
Source: Science Blog
Lenovo to Cut 1,400 Jobs Worldwide
The company will cut 1,400 jobs globally which will represent another 5% decrease. The cuts are expected to save the company roughly $100 million USD during the 2007-2008 fiscal year. The company will also take a pre-tax restructuring charge of between $50 to $60 million USD for its first fiscal quarter which ends on Jun 30, 2007.
I’m not a businessman, but laying off people while the company is doing real well doesn’t seem to make much sense. Of course, each one of these employees earned near $70K per annum, so that’s a huge savings for the excess slack. Still, this is a huge burn to all those loyal employees (who will now buy Dells out of spite).
Source: Daily Tech
Yahoo! Does Music Lyrics
Today, however, we’re proud to announce that Gracenote has pulled together a comprehensive, consistent, and legal lyrics repository which we have licensed and integrated into the Internet’s #1 music site, Music.Yahoo.com. Now lyrics take their rightful place next to artist bios, discographies, videos, and downloads. All free to you, dear music lover.
Yahooooo! I reference lyric sites often and despise their one hundred popups, so it’s nice to see an alternative. I took a quick look and was unable to find lyrics for a few of my favorite punk bands, so it’s not that comprehensive, at least right now it seems.
Source: Y! Music Blog
D-SLR Versus Camera Phone
Ever wondered what the difference is between a 2-megapixel camera phone and a 10-megapixel dSLR camera? We’ve rounded up some of the most popular cameras and camera phones and tested them, taking pictures in medium and dark lighting conditions to see how they perform.
After laughing uncontrollably at the thought of this article, I looked through and I was actually quite impressed by some of the photos taken with the camera phone. Of course those will never match the quality of an SLR, but it’s hard to complain when it fits in your pocket.
Source: Cnet Crave
The Best Extensions for Thunderbird 2.0
The recent upgrade to Thunderbird 2.0 marked a nice evolution of the client and while it did not bring a lot of major changes it did include a few much needed tweaks. Between these changes and my general requirement of using as few extensions as possible I have found that Thunderbird does not need many extensions to get it set up properly. There are a few excellent ones out there that everyone should know about.
I’ve been looking for some good TB extensions for a while now. I still am even after reading this article, although some of them would be useful for many. Am I just that fussy?
Source: XYZ Computing
AMD Prices $2B of 6% Convertible Senior Notes Due 2015
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – April 24, 2007 – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE: AMD) today announced the pricing of $2 billion aggregate principal amount of 6.00% Convertible Senior Notes due 2015 in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. AMD granted to the initial purchasers a 30-day option to purchase up to $200 million aggregate principal amount of additional notes to cover over-allotments.
Source: AMD Press Release
Blu-ray Disc: One million served
The Blu-ray vs HD DVD format war reaches another milestone, with sales of Blu-ray Discs reaching more than one million sold since the format launched less than a year ago. According to Home Media Research, Blu-ray locked up 70% of high-definition movies sales in the first quarter of 2007 (832,530 to 359,300), and account for seven of the top ten best-selling high-def movies.
Sony execs can’t stop gloating over their decision to include Blu-ray with their Playstation 3. It certainly aided in their global domination. HD-DVD still has a chance to catch up, especially given Wal-Marts recent order for two million HD-DVD players.
Source: Engadget
Updated Barcelona Results Outperform Clovertown
So far, we the company had claimed that Barcelona will surpass the performance of Clovertown by about 40% at any given clock speed. Now the company says that it believes that Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance “over the competition’s highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency.â€
With Intel dominating the market lately, it’s good to hear of such good reports out of AMD. Now all we need are the chips in our hands and proof of these results.
Source: TG Daily
Malware Will Thrive… Even on Vista
“It’s a best effort to raise the bar and stop malware from making changes to the operating system but it’s not a security boundary,” Russinovich said of UAC, the oft-criticized mechanism that requires that all users run without full admin rights.
If I was a mischievous hacker, I’d much appreciate Mark for his hard work of giving direct examples of how people could trick others into allowing their computers to be hi-jacked. That aside, Vista is not invulnerable. The only OS that could be would have no functionality.
Source: ZD Net Blogs
Testing MythBusters’ Yawn Contagiousness Data
Just how accurate are the MythBusters? They are very thorough in most of their tests, but OmniNerd is calling them out for their particular yawning episode.
Occasionally, however, a blunder arises which can be exposed without expensive test fixture designs. Sometimes all you need is a simple understanding of statistics. MythBusters’ investigation into the suspected contagious nature of the everyday yawn9 is one such instance.
Time to get your science geek on. I’ve seen this particular segment and never thought much of it, but after reading this it makes a lot more sense.
Source: OmniNerd
Is Vista a Failure?
The Inq thinks so. I won’t act like I don’t believe the same thing though, although I’d like to stay positive. Vista has a long way to go before it becomes an OS I’d want to use, I can say that. The Inq takes a look at a few recent events that somehow denotes failure.
First is the fact that Dell began offering XP on their systems again, or at least a few of them. The second is their $3 bundles that they are offering in developing Countries. That to me right there gives me the assumption that they are trying to kill Linux off. I mean, it’s $3 to have a robust system suite that’s well supported. It’s a good enough reason for a lot of people to forget alternative operating systems if they can stick to the dominating one and remain legal.
Though I personally dislike Vista, I won’t go as far to call it a failure just yet. Things could be a lot better, however. No one can refute that.
Source: The Inquirer
FDA Considers Redefining Chocolate
The US Food and Drug Administration is considering redefining ‘chocolate’ to allow substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb.) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb.), and whey protein for dry whole milk. There are already standard terms to differentiate these products from chocolate, such as ‘chocolatey’ and ‘chocolate-flavored.’ The change was requested by the industry group Chocolate Manufacturers of America.
I’m not sure what this will mean to most people, but seeing as how they want to swap vegetable oil for cocoa butter, chances are that prices will be increased. But that will be worth it if it tastes better, right?
Source: Slashdot
ReadyBoost Goes Internal
Spanish website Chile Hardware took a visit to the Super Talent’s HQ in Santa Clara, CA and learned about a few new products, including DDR3 modules using Qimonda chips and even super low-profile modules for blade servers.
What caught my eye though, was their report on internal ReadyBoost, which is the flash-memory based swap file method that Windows Vista implements. Instead of a thumb drive, this product could be plugged directly into a spare USB-type connector on your motherboard. Fast speeds is why this is a good thing. The “modules” will come in 4GB and 8GB models and be rated for 200x (30MB/s), close to the absolute max that USB 2.0 can pass through. I’m still unsure whether ReadyBoost is worth anyones time, but this is a cool product regardless.
OCZ Technology Announces the Ultra-Quiet StealthXStream 600W
Sunnyvale, CA—April 23, 2007—OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and power supplies, today announced the new StealthXStream Power Supply. This new 600W PSU features a conservative look with a sleek, black case and fan. Designed for the value-minded consumer seeking simple, quiet performance, the StealthXStream includes OCZ’s acclaimed reliability and feature-sets with a lower price point.
Source: OCZ Press Release
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. to Offer $1.8 Billion of Convertible Senior Notes
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – April 23, 2007 – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE:
AMD) today announced its intention to offer, subject to market and other
conditions, $1.8 billion aggregate principal amount of Convertible
Senior Notes in a private offering to qualified institutional buyers
pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.
Under certain circumstances, the notes are convertible into cash up to
the principal amount and into shares of AMD’s common stock with respect
to any conversion value above the principal amount..
Source: AMD Press Release
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack Released
By installing the Compatibility Pack in addition to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you will be able open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. The Compatibility Pack can also be used in conjunction with the Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 to view files saved in these new formats.
It’s about time! It’s hard to tell how well the compatibility works, but at least the files can be opened and edited at all.
Source: Bink.nu