Readers of Lifehacker (lifehacker.com), the enormously popular web lifestyle blog owned by Gawker Media, voted Comodo Firewall Pro the best Windows Firewall available on the web. As part of Lifehacker's regular High Five Feature, which asks readers to select the best five products for a service and then vote on the best, Comodo received nearly 31% of the 3400 votes cast, nearly 400 votes more than the standard Windows Firewall, which came in second.
nVidia has finally come clean, confessing that there are failing mobile GPU chips in certain Hewlett-Packard notebook models.
So, looking forward, what can we expect from the GeForce 9400M chipset in Apple's new MacBooks? Fisher stated plainly, "You can rest assured that Apple has been aware of all of the science that we've developed around this issue and would not be launching the most important product in their history with a product they felt was at risk."
Best Buy has offered the first sub-$100 Blu-ay player when factoring in bundled coupons. The Insignia NS-BRDVD is about as basic as you can get, but nonetheless, it is the cheapest Blu-ray player on U.S. retail shelves.
The NS-BRDVD is offered for $199.99, but comes with a $100 coupon book for Blu-ray movies. And since you will have to buy Blu-ray movies for this new player anyway, some may actually consider it a useful promotion and accept Best Buy’s message, that this player, in effect, actually costs just $99.99.
The U.S. Department of Justice has dropped its two-year investigation of nVidia and ATI over suspicions the companies conspired to fix graphics chip prices. Both companies received letters from the DoJ saying the investigation had been dropped, but each still agreed to pay a $850,000 out of court fine.
Although little was known about specifics of the investigation, in December 2006, the companies confirmed receipt of subpoenas by the agency. The DoJ simply stated it was looking into: "The possibility of anticompetitive practices involving the graphics processing units and cards industry."
According to CanardPC.com, the release of Intel's Nehalem processor is coming earlier then expected. Sources are saying the date has jumped from November 17 to now November 3.
(Translation by Babel Fish:) We have just learned that official launch of the new processors Core i7 (ex-Nehalem) and from the X58 platform which accompanies it came to be advanced two weeks. Previously envisaged to expire on November 17, the NDA which accompanies launching by these new products from now on is shifted at November 3, that is to say in approximately fifteen days.
Despite Intel readying low-power x86 processors for mobile devices, Intel today confirmed x86 on the iPhone will not come to fruition any time soon. Instead, it appears Apple will instead tap the design resources of its recent P.A. Semi acquisition.
Intel's PC processors may own the desktop. But the semiconductor giant's x86, or Intel Architecture design, is far from the most ubiquitous. Booming demand for mobile phones has made variations on U.K.-based ARM Holdings' design far more ubiquitous. Intel hopes to challenge that by offering a scaled-down version of the processor powering your PC for smaller devices. Intel's pitch for why device makers should use its chips: Their machines will be able to take advantage of much of the software built for everything from notebooks to desktop workstations and servers.
Due to a bizarre new law passed in Taxes, computer repair technicians reportedly will soon be required to obtain private investigator licensing to continue their trade.
In order to obtain said license, technicians must receive a criminal justice degree or participate in a three-year apprenticeship. Those shops that refuse to participate will be forced to shut down. Violators of the new law can be hit with a $4,000 dollar fine and up to a year in jail, penalties that apply to customers who seek out their services.
The AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition represents the company's new flagship consumer processor, but it also represents a potentially serious problem: reliable frequency scaling. To be painfully exact, the new chip is only 100MHz faster than the previous 9850 model. It is becoming increasingly doubtful AMD will further ramp Phenom core operating frequencies until the 45-nanometer "Deneb" and "Shanghai" cores reach full production status later this year.
The nominal voltage on the Phenom X4 9950 is listed as 1.05-1.30 Volts, which is interesting as the Phenom X4 9850 was 1.2-1.3 Volts. Taking a look at CPU-Z 1.46 we can see the processor is running at a core voltage of 1.296 Volts, which is right where the nominal voltage should be. The chip has a Max TDP of 140W and has official support for a 2.0GHz memory controller and HT 3.0 frequency with Dual Dynamic Power Management technology. At 140W, a robust platform will be needed for this CPU as budget boards won't meet the power requirements and will fail over time. For this reason AMD has a recommended motherboard page that they urge consumers look at when building a system around one of these parts.
Advanced Micro Devices has declined a renewal of fabrication agreements with Semindia following a three-year manufacturing agreement. The India-based chip manufacturer claims other potential customers are inline for negotiations, but the current downtown in the semiconductor industry has forced many corporations into a "wait-and-watch" scenario for new chip production contracts.
Bob Kondamoori, MD of Sandalwood Partners, an investor in Semindia, told the Financial Chronical, many companies were "in a wait-and-watch mode because of the economic situation and downturn in semiconductor industry. Many of them are themselves looking to sell their fabs."
Intel today officially inaugurated the opening of Fab 28, a 45-nanometer semiconductor fabrication facility that is the latest in a series of important investments for the company's increasingly valued Israeli operations.
Fab 28 is Intel's seventh 300mm wafer factory and its third factory to produce 45nm chips. It is, however, the firm’s first 45nm fab outside the US. Spanning a whopping 283 dunams (283000 metres squared) in total and with 20,000 square metres of clean room space, fab 28 certainly puts Israel on the fab map in a big way. Fassberg acknowledged, “this is a huge project on the scale never before seen in this country. We have to prove that the trust invested in us by Intel worldwide was justified.”
Gainward has traditionally been an exclusive partner for nVidia graphics accelerator, but industry sources are suggesting the popular brand is now working with AMD to launch an ATI Radeon HD product line in the near future.
Gainward's decision to launch ATI Radeon HD products indicates that the market for AMD graphics chips is good and more traditionally Nvidia only vendors may follow suit, market watchers commented. Whether Nvidia decides to try and woo partners back with reduced pricing or other incentives bears further observation, the watchers noted.
Various industry insiders suggest Microsoft is prepping a Xbox 360 Pro price cut to $299 just in time for the E3 convention scheduled for later this month.
A $50 price cut would put the 20 GB Xbox 360 Pro at $299, only $20 more than the Xbox 360 Core Arcade bundle, which is priced at $279. Microsoft's Xbox 360 Elite console—with a 120 GB drive—currently carries a retail price of $449.
While Matrox left the enthusiast scene years ago, the Canadian manufacturer continues to churn out professional video cards for niche markets. With the company's graphics accelerator division somehow still staying afloat, it appears somebody, somewhere is still buying Matrox video cards for whatever reason - solid driver support seems to be the argument of the day. Regardless of the reason, Matrox appears to have the solution if you need a $599 video card with "QuadHead GPU" technology for driving up to four displays with a single-slot, low-profile card.
Let’s recap. Matrox is offering a low-profile graphics card will set you back about $600. Seeing that price tag, we had to remind ourselves that, for the same money, you can get two ATI Radeon 4870 512 MB graphics cards, and drive four 2560x1600 monitors. Or you can buy three 4850 512 MB, and drive six 2560x1600 monitors.
Solid state hard drives using flash memory modules are oftentimes touted as offering potential power saving benefits due to having no moving parts, but a recent product comparison review published by Tom's Hardware has debunked the popular assertion.
No, our results are definitely correct. We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs. In an effort to determine the actual impact on notebook systems, we took four SSDs that we had available in our test lab, and ran a series of Mobilemark benchmark runs on a Dell Latitude D630 notebook. We found runtime differences of up to one hour (!) when using a flash SSD compared to a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5” notebook hard drive.
eBay is on the hook for about $63 million to LVMH Malettier, the parent company of Louis Vuitton and other exclusive brands, as ordered by a French court. The popular online auction site was found liable for sellers offering counterfeit goods, which LVMH asserted was tantamount to copyright infringement. The court agreed, though eBay intends to appeal the decision.
"This decision is not based on combating counterfeit material. It is based on LVMH's desire to protect its commercial practices and exclude competition," said a spokeswoman for eBay in Paris. "This is being done at the expense of the consumers and sellers to whom eBay is always offering opportunities," she added.
Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to deploy content search crawlers capable of better indexing online content delivered via the Shockwave Flash file format.
Overall, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and its relevance. The snippets will give better information about the page on the search results. You can also expect search engine optimizers to figure out ways to improve rankings of Flash-based Web sites just like they do with HTML-based sites.
With Windows XP officially being canned yesterday for most OEM configurations, Dell is instead rolling out a Windows Vista Bonus promotion for channel partners. The bonus? A preinstalled copy of Windows XP operating under a valid Vista product license for select systems.
Dell's stance of not just offering Windows XP directly but actively telling its huge ecosystem of resellers how they, too, can game Microsoft's system and continue selling Windows XP demonstrates a significant shift in the OEM's relationship with Microsoft. With chief software architect Bill Gates' departure fresh in the air, it should be remembered how, under Gates' tenure last decade as chief executive, Microsoft exploited its position as supplier of a popular PC operating system to play hardball with PC OEMs on licensing Windows.
For those enjoying the bleeding edge of software development, the Opera Desktop Team today issued the third release candidate for the upcoming Opera 9.51 web browser. Updates include installer tweaks, numerous bug fixes, and resolving a printing issued under Linux.
And one more RC for the upcoming 9.51! Lots of nice fixes in this one - and we need your feedback....
Hoping to cope with the increasing popularity of file sharing, Japan's prominent NTT Communications intends to soon cap each broadband subscriber's uploads to 30GB per day. However, unlike cap proposals recently surfacing among Western broadband providers, download limits will remain uncapped for now.
By targeting large uploaders the limits will likely hit the small portion of OCN's 7 million customers who operate file-sharing servers from their connections, said Tei Gordon, an NTT spokesman in Tokyo. The limit corresponds to about 7 full-length movies per day.
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Deriding the United States for falling woefully behind in consumer broadband service, a new report issued by the Baller Herbst Law Group is calling for an aggressive response. The report suggests an "affordable" 100Mbps service roll out by 2012, with 1Gbps service becoming available by 2015.
"We believe that great nations find the means to do what will make them and keep them great," says the report. "The United States has done this time and again—building canals and railroads, developing electric, telephone and highway systems, conquering outer space. Now, the time has come to build a world-class communications network."
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