| WIKI | FAQ | Tech FAQ | |
 http://csua.com/feed/ | |
| ||||||
| 11/23 |
| 2001/7/14 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21797 Activity:nil |
7/13 Slashdot's starting to get pretty lame, is there anything else
like it?
\_ There are many things like it. This is, of course, the problem.
\_ I like http://arstechnica.com. Far fewer articles, but more interesting.
And the people who run the site are generally more intelligent and
make more informed comments, unlike CmdrTaco.
\_ More hardware oriented: http://www.anandtech.com
\_ http://www.theregister.co.uk
\_ The Register can be as witty as The Onion but it's all true.
\_ http://www.newsforge.com --Galen |
| 11/23 |
|
| www.anandtech.com Take a look at how Lian Li has changed the standard layout of the ATX chassis in this exclusive look at the upcoming PC-V1000. Will the availability of this less expensive Athlon 64 processor offer builders who are on a budget a better buy? Does the shipping nF3-250 measure up to the great expectations of our chipset review? Take a look at our analysis of this titanium-shelled chassis from this market newcomer. Today is our tenth Buyer's Guide in as many weeks, for mid-range systems this time around. The gold anodized aluminum cooler installed on the All-In-Wonder 9600 XT, uses a similar offset fan with a finned-heatsink that's designed to pull air in through the fan and route the warm air away from the GPU. The cooler is slightly larger than the model installed on ATi's "standard" Radeon 9600 XT, and for good reason. The All-In-Wonder 9600 XT is actually clocked a bit higher than the Radeon 9600 XT. Taking the meaning of the term literally, we have that it is a processor that works in a server. Anyway, this chip often determines the consumer qualities of a server computer. First of all, the server, however overwhelmed with work it is, must quickly respond to users' requests. It must be fast at performing the tasks the owner of the server has set for it. Thus, the processor performance and of course reliability become the most important factors for choosing the appropriate server platforms. Cost is a secondary matter, although an important factor too (money is always important). Senate on Thursday voted to renew a four-year ban on taxes on Internet connections such as DSL and cable modems instead of a competing plan that would have made a moratorium permanent. By a 93-3 vote, the Senate adopted a compromise proposal favored by state governments, which argued that a perpetual ban would deprive municipalities of vital tax revenue and amount to an unfair subsidy for telecommunications companies. Google did not provide a planned stock symbol or a target date for its public listing. Along with marking Google's official intent to go public, the filing also provides financial and strategic insight into the company that will be closely analyzed by its competitors such as Yahoo Inc. As a private company, Google has not had to report sensitive financial data or risks to its business since co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched it in 1998. The Newcastle core is a modified version of the Clawhammer design which was featured in first generation Athlon64 processors - the difference being the amount of processor cache which is active in the core. Athlon64 processors based on the Clawhammer core have 1MB of L2 cache, while those based on the Newcastle core have only 512K. Typically, cutting the CPU's cache in half cuts down performance to the tune of 5-10% - but AMD's architecture is surprisingly resilient without a large amount of cache. Most have found that Athlon64 processors with 512k of cache perform within just a few percentage points of those with full 1MB of cache. Thus, AMD is starting to move their entire Athlon64 processor line down to 512K cache models, while at the same time boosting clock rates as their manufacturing process gets better to compensate for the speed loss from having less cache. The system has worked fairly well for AMD thus far, and if these processor cores are indeed "true" Newcastle cores, designed for only 512K of cache, they would be cheaper for AMD to produce, and due to the smaller core sizes, AMD would be able to produce more processor cores per wafer. Here's a blurb on PCI Express: Transition of graphics cards to PCI Express x16 lanes from conventional AGP is likely to be extremely painless for the industry. Both leading developers of graphics controllers - ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp. Other developers of processors that handle graphics, dubbed S3 Graphics, 3Dlabs, XGI Technology and Matrox Graphics, are also likely to introduce their new solutions for the new interconnection that will be available in computers powered by chipsets from companies like Intel, VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems, NVIDIA, ATI and ALi/ULi. CNET reports that Apple is looking into the matter: Apple Computer said Thursday that it is investigating reports that some iPod owners have had trouble updating their devices to take advantage of the company's latest version of its iTunes jukebox software. The Mac maker on Wednesday released an iPod software update in conjunction with its enhancement of iTunes. However, a number of iPod owners say that when they run the software that is supposed to upgrade their devices, the software cannot detect their iPod. Apple encouraged those who encounter a problem to contact AppleCare. They have announced lower than expected earnings and job layoffs: Gateway on Thursday reported a larger-than-expected first-quarter loss due to restructuring charges, and it announced plans to lay off 1,500 more employees by the end of the year, reducing its number of people to about 2,000. The news of the layoffs came as the PC maker, which acquired manufacturer eMachines in March in an effort to boost PC shipments, reported a preliminary loss of $166 million, 49 cents per share, on revenue of $868 million for the first quarter, which ended March 31. The loss included a charge of $104 million, or 31 cents per share, related to the closing of its chain of 188 retail outlets, which resulted in 2,500 layoffs. Without the charge and a $13 million tax benefit, Gateway would have posted a $75 million loss--22 cents per share--for the quarter, the company said. With eyes now on the second quarter, the company sees overall growth remaining flat, according to the company president JC Liao. However, Liao stated that strong demand for switches and rising broadband product shipments would help to stay a decline as monthly revenues for wireless products are seeing a slight drop. In addition, the company plans to launch more than 20 new products before the second half, Liao added. This particular incarnation of V-Link offers 533MB/sec of bandwidth between the chipset's north and south bridge components, which should be enough for most users. Although the VT8237 natively supports up to four Serial ATA devices, an external PHY chip is required to access two of the south bridge's four SATA ports. Mobo manufacturers have traditionally shied away from using external PHYs to tap the VT8237's extra two SATA ports, so I wouldn't hold out for a KT880 board with four SATA ports hanging off the south bridge. Even when only two of its Serial ATA ports are tapped, the KT880 still has a leg up on NVIDIA's current nForce2 chipsets, whose MCP south bridge chips lack any Serial ATA functionality. However, NVIDIA has pledged to bring Serial ATA support, among other features, to the nForce2 chipset with a new MCP, so VIA's Serial ATA advantage may not last. It accepts many different types of media: Compact Flash I/II, Multimedia Cards, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, MicroDrive, & SmartMedia memory cards. It also has a 3 port USB hub, & it's all wrapped up in one very sleek package. And I have a good relationship with him, to the point that either he or I can just pick up the phone and talk to each other. There's no secretary that screens you out and calls you back. He's got a commitment for $5 billion of product from a company Intel Corp. But you know, Dell prides themselves on not being a leader in things of technology, they pride themselves on being a strong follower. But I never dreamed that they would be dead last following, I mean, they're running at the very end. They're going to be at the caboose of the Opteron train. And it's just kind of surprising to me that they'd wait that long. We still have hope and confidence that they'll see the light. The key features include quick setup, TV viewing with full personal video recorder (PVR) capabilities, and video capture for editing. The product also features a fully-searchable interactive electronic program guide (EPG) that displays the schedule for TV shows for immediate or future viewing. Windows XP Service Pack 2 is largely intended to bolster the security of Windo... |
| www.theregister.co.uk Telco price war erupts 30 Apr 2004 11:43 64 Broadband 65 Bush and Kerry scrap over wireless broadband Key election issue 30 Apr 2004 11:30 66 eGovernment 67 Open source 'too costly' for Irish e-gov Open standards the preferred route 30 Apr 2004 11:25 68 Science 69 Cassini images delight star gazers Saturn in all its glory 30 Apr 2004 11:23 70 Business 71 Capgemini embraces new consulting paradigm 'Collaborative experience' 30 Apr 2004 10:25 72 Operators 73 New allegations in Iraq mobile network saga Darrel Issa named, again 30 Apr 2004 10:03 74 WLAN 75 Intel to commit to Soho WLAN upgrades Refreshing Wi-Fi zone 30 Apr 2004 06:58 76 WLAN 77 Central London Wi-Fi zone gets green light Council workers' access only 30 Apr 2004 06:41 78 Data Networking 79 IBM and Cisco feel the networking love Big Blue blades switched on 30 Apr 2004 06:12 80 Applications 81 MS Office vastly overpriced, says UK consumer outfit Votes for StarOffice 30 Apr 2004 06:09 82 Servers 83 IBM to assault users with virtualization technology Hit over head by abstraction 30 Apr 2004 06:04 84 Mobile Apps 85 Visto expands sync suit New patent, will file 30 Apr 2004 05:59 86 Devices 87 Savaged Nokia crops prices Bargain phones to stem market share drop 30 Apr 2004 05:56 88 Financial News 89 Google files Coca Cola jingle with SEC Wants to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony 29 Apr 2004 21:53 90 Financial News 91 Time Warner sprints ahead, AOL crawls Ups and downs 29 Apr 2004 21:39 92 Financial News 93 Marimba makes its way to BMC for $239m Acquiring a future 29 Apr 2004 17:32 94 Bootnotes 95 Brits welcome Luvania to EU Proud new member of family of nations 29 Apr 2004 15:53 96 Letters 97 Give us back our trigger numbers! Bedfellows 29 Apr 2004 14:59 100 Bootnotes 101 Captain Cyborg is back: official So says The Guardian 29 Apr 2004 14:59 102 BOFH 103 BOFH: The enemy at the gate Episode 13 Semper vigilo 27 Apr 2004 11:04 104 All yesterday's articles 105 RSS Feeds Soup du jour All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; Get the Reg Screensaver * 108 Join the Reg SETI group * 109 Join Reg Cancerbusters Copyright 2004 * 110 Privacy Policy * 111 Site Map * 112 Contact Us * 113 About Us References 1. |
| www.newsforge.com If you're a logged-in user, we'd like your comments on the proposed changes, and if you don't have a NewsForge login it only takes a few seconds to 44 create one so that you, too, can take a look at our latest experiment. On the surface, I like the Dutch Auction (as opposed to a syndicate allocation) for the IPO. It seems like the company is doing well, but I'm sure the valuation will be lunacy. That's no surprise, considering all the hype it's gotten. Things that don't deserve to go up don't usually stay up over the long term. But sometimes, the long term takes a frustratingly long time to play out. Thomas This week, advisories were released for eterm, mc, the Linux kernel, ssmtp, LCDproc, xine, samba, and sysklogd. The distributors include Debian, Guardian Digital's EnGarde Linux, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, Red Hat, and Slackware. The leading J2EE app server vendors, 64 BEA Systems and 65 IBM, have jointly proposed extensions to 66 BPEL (Business Processing Execution Language) to make it more easily implementable within Java/J2EE environments. In this article we'll introduce you to many of the new features and provide code samples, so you can hit the ground running when the final release becomes available. Linux kernel stability and reliability testing is quite sophisticated, thanks mainly to efforts such as the 86 Linux Test Project, but measuring application performance on Linux is more difficult. The Open Source Development Labs is calling for application vendors to put their products to the test for scalability, security and clustering. In keeping with the open source approach, the lab is also calling on vendors to share their testing and results. The files are often too large, poorly named, and many images need to be rotated. Luckily, a number of open source tools are well-suited to solving these problems quickly. I've spent some time on this and other OSDN sites reviewing gadgets -- in particular mp3 players. All of them have suffered from some form of what maybe should be called iPod envy. I wanted to write up my experiences with it, but more importantly shine a spotlight on the way the company approaches software development and uses free software to advance its bottom-line goals of producing what many consider to be the reference implementation for an outboard mp3 player. In this article, I'll explain what netgroups are, and how they can help you get finer-grained control over your local system security. If he did, he might have read this NewsForge article about CBTracker. There are stars that become household names -- names to conjure with. This episode was recorded at the Linux User & Develop Expo in London. |
| arstechnica.com They have been watching the goings-on at E3 this week, especially the long-awaited (and much-doubted) appearance of the Phantom Console. Calvin (among others) had serious misgivings as to whether Infinium could deliver the goods. Sure, I was skeptical about the company delivering a product. Now that they (seem) to have done that, I'm skeptical about them coming up with US$30 worth of content for me every month. On the flip side, the plan seems to be financially sound, as long as people subscribe. Too often a company comes out promising the world for the low, low price of $X dollars a month, only to go out of business because they really needed $5X a month to stay afloat. Once it is released this fall, we'll find out if it's a yawner or not. In addition to the coverage of the not-quite-a-PC, not-quite-a-console, Calvin and WyldKard ponder the Star Wars gaming universe, bleeding-edge gaming card angst, and a good old Internet time-waster. The gist of it is pretty simple: the RIAA has their own tracking system based on units shipped, while Nielsen Ratings bases their Soundscan tracking system on actual barcode-scanned purchases. The problem is that Soundscan shows a 10% increase in music sales when comparing the first quarter of 2004 to 1Q 2003. Avalon suggests that sales aren't down, only shipments are. Simple: in the past, the RIAA always shipped considerably more units than were sold. Retails stores simply want less inventory, so they order less, even though they are selling more. Roger Goff, an Entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles confirms that, indeed, retail has reacted this way in the Post-Napster era. " In other words, retail has adapted to more of an "on demand" model (similar to the Internet) as opposed to the, accepting-tons-of-product-shoved-down-the-pipeline model record companies imposed on them in the past. In other words, the supposedly woeful state of CD sales isn't all that woeful after all. Retail outlets have been working hard to keep up with online competition, and part of that has meant following the rule of Dell: don't have inventory if you can avoid it. The problem is, if this report is correct, then something seriously wrong is afoot. If more units are being sold and fewer units are being shipped, then that means the total cost-per-CD is actually in the RIAA's favor. That is, with all things being equal, more sales and fewer shipments ads up to more profit than before, because there's less overrun and less returns from retailers who can't move product. The Library is believed to be the greatest library of the ancient world, rivaled only by the Library at Pergamon, which was built many years later by Attalid kings hoping to recreate the glory of Greece. As fate would have it, Marc Antony would make a gift of several thousand scrolls from the Pergamene library to the library at Alexandria (for his dear Cleopatra, no less), only for history to see most (if not all) of those holdings destroyed in a tragic fire. No one knows for sure, but the library housed in the area of 500,000 scrolls (some would say 700,000, some would say less). It was a travesty for civilization in the West, and as a result we often have to rely on poor medieval witnesses to ancient literature, although we are also blessed with many Arabic copies of the works of Aristotle, Plato, and the like. Much, much more was lost, however, and we must always remember that the voices that speak to us from the age of Pericles are only a tiny few of those that were once read aloud in the Library's halls. The Library did not house "works by Socrates," despite what the BBC said. Socrates did not produce literary works, and even the ancients knew of Plato's hand in the dialogues. The library was designed as a mausoleum for Alexander the Great, but his body never made it there. Built by Ptolemy II Soter, the library was part of an overall house built for the honor of the Muses. Many libraries in the west are also designed in a similar fashion, with a central "tomb" area in the middle. Widener Library at Harvard University is designed as such, and the central tomb area lays vacant, as the library was built with funds donated by a relative of a man who died on the Titanic. The announcement breaks quite a bit of silence as to when Longhorn Server is expected to ship and what features it may contain. Targeted for 2007, roughly a year after the Longhorn desktop release, the server release will support Indigo, Microsoft's new Web services architecture, and sundry other things such as dynamic partition management. In a rather curious development, the company is also saying that it has planned the future service pack release dates for Longhorn server. As it turns out, the company is transitioning to a system whereby major server releases are scheduled for every four years, with "updates" to major releases every two years. So, the Longhorn roadmap currently looks like this: 2006 Longhorn desktop release 2007 Longhorn Server 2008 Longhorn Server Service Pack 2009 Update to Longhorn Server 2010 Service Pack for Update to Longhorn Server 2011 The Next Major Server Release The company hopes that a stringent release pattern will help corporate IT types plan their future rollouts with more foresight. Now most IT shops know what they will be running in 2015 if they're running Windows. Beta testing for Longhorn Server is scheduled to begin in the middle of next year. Turning to the more tangible present, the company said that a server update for Windows Server 2003 is planned for later this year. The update will come under the rubric of a service pack, but new features, including support for 64-bit applications, will be bundled in. A fuller update, code-named R2 (probably Release 2), is scheduled for next year and will include support for the company's document rights management service as well as Trustbridge, a company-wide identity management system. " One form, the so-called "up-skirt shot," involves using small photographic devices to sneak a peak up the dresses of women in public. Such practices are hardly new, but the advent of camera phones and other digital imaging devices is making the issue more pressing, argue lawmakers. The bill, which passed the Senate last September, would prohibit taking covert pictures in locker rooms, bedrooms and other places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Violators would face fines and up to a year in prison under the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, which passed the committee by voice vote. Whoever, in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, having the intent to capture an improper image of an individual, knowingly does so and that individual's naked or undergarment clad genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or female breast is depicted in the improper image under circumstances in which that individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding such body part or parts, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both. Although the image sizes are of course different, you can see the same concept at work. Those of us working with advertisers have seen this coming. Targeting is key, the medium and format is largely assumed to be irrelevant. What will be fun to watch, however, is how targeted image ads fare against the text ads. Assuming that the same algorithm is used, it will be a test of presentation format coupled with the tradeoff of one advertising message (the image) versus multiple messages (the text ads) in the same space. Dell's Inspiron XPS is aimed squarely at the Alienware crowd). Now Alienware is looking to up the ante with some of their own technology designs, and wouldn't you know their opening salvo has gaming performance written all over it. Video Array is an accelerated graphics processing subsystem that will allow users to add multiple, off-the-shelf video cards to their Alienware computer systems and have both cards process graphic commands in parallel. Understanding the wide-ranging wants and needs of its customers, Alienware designed its solution so that it is not tied to any one specific video card. This design will allow users to take full... |