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NervousNerd writes "Nvidia's first DirectX 11 offerings ran hot and offered a negligible performance difference compared to ATI's Radeon HD 5800 series for the cost. Also missing was the $200 mid-range part. But that stopped when Nvidia released the GTX 460 based on a modified version of their infamous Fermi architecture. The GTX 460 offers incredible performance for the price and soundly beats ATI's $200 offering, the HD 5830."

tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware just posted an interesting review of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It includes an expanded set of OS benchmarks that they also performed on the previous LTS release (8.04), to see just how much the mainstream Linux distro has progressed in two years."

markass530 writes with this from the EE Times: "Arm Holdings chief executive officer Warren East told EE Times Wednesday that servers based on ARM multicore processors should arrive within the next twelve months. The news confirms previous speculation stemming from Google's acquisition of Agnilux and a recent job advertisement posted by Microsoft. East said that the current architecture, designed for client-side computing, can also be used in server applications."

tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware is continuing its coverage of easy-to-install Linux applications for new users coming from Windows with the latest installment, Office Apps. This segment covers office suites, word processors, spreadsheet apps, presentation software, simple database titles, desktop publishing, project management, financial software, and more. All of these applications are available in the Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE repos or as .deb or .rpm packages. All of the links to download these applications are provided — even Windows .exe and Mac OS X .dmg files when available."

Crazzaper writes "I have been using Firefox for many years, and the war of the browsers has been around for longer than that. It just so happens that now we have a lot of options out there: IE, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and others. People are always talking about how one browser is going to take down another, but maybe that's not the issue at all. It seems very possible that one browser, like Firefox, can be taken down by multiple browsers at once, whether or not there was any intention to compete specifically with Firefox. I hadn't seen it this way, but I do now."

crazipper writes "After months of talking architecture and functionality, Nvidia is finally going public with the performance of its $500 GeForce GTX 480 and $350 GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards, both derived from the company's first DirectX 11-capable GPU, GF100. Tom's Hardware just posted a comprehensive look at the new cards, including their power requirements and performance attributes. Two GTX 480s in SLI seem to scale impressively well — providing you have $1,000 for graphics, a beefy power supply, and a case with lots of airflow."

crazipper writes "After months of talking architecture and functionality, Nvidia is finally going public with the performance of its $500 GeForce GTX 480 and $350 GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards, both derived from the company's first DirectX 11-capable GPU, GF100. Tom's Hardware just posted a comprehensive look at the new cards, including their power requirements and performance attributes. Two GTX 480s in SLI seem to scale impressively well — providing you have $1,000 for graphics, a beefy power supply, and a case with lots of airflow."

Crazzaper writes "When the iPad was announced, a lot of people who didn't care about tablets came out to bash Apple's new device. These same people said 'I would have bought it if it had a full OS,' but in reality full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started. This article gives an interesting perspective on why this happened, and argues that there's five big reasons why more powerful tablets exists but no one cares."

An anonymous reader writes "After seeing Opera's claim to 'Fastest Browser on Earth' after their most recent release, Tom's Hardware put Apple Safari 4.04, Google Chrome 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, and Opera 10.50 through a gauntlet of speed tests and time trials to find out which Web browser is truly the fastest. How does your favorite land in the rankings?"

A couple of weeks ago you posed some questions for Matt Asay, who recently moved into the COO role at Canonical. Click below to read his answers.
Adoption stories and influences
by eldavojohn (898314)"Every so often I see an adoption story about so-and-so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think 'Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time.' And then I wait. And wait. Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people. Do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?"
Matt: No, we have no plans to turn Wormtongue. We do, however, have aspirations to play Frodo. :-)

Ultimately, governments (good ones, anyway) are established to reflect the voice of their citizens. At Canonical, we believe that real, lasting change happens from the bottom up, as citizens within government and IT and those served by it clamor for change. We try to help this along by working with government organizations, including open source-friendly lobbying groups, to promote free markets and expanded choice through free and open-source software, but I personally believe that individuals will make the difference.

Change can be expensive, whether in terms of cost or bother, and so as individuals or organizations we generally try to avoid it. But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source. It's just that most of it doesn't get reported.

Don't lose heart and, in particular, don't lose "voice." We're being heard. The worst thing we could do is to slacken our pace now.

Revenue
by Enderandrew (866215)"Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a profitable venture to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?"
Matt: First off, it's critical to understand that Canonical doesn't make decisions at the cost of usability. Ever. Usability is our cardinal virtue.

The Yahoo! deal is not at the cost of usability. Yahoo! is an excellent and wildly popular search engine with many many millions of users. We are very pleased to have reached an agreement that will pump additional revenue into the community compared to the existing default. For those worried about Microsoft's involvement with Yahoo!, it is trivially easy to switch to Google or other alternatives.

We will make more commercial for-pay services available to our users, but we will never make then a requirement to have a full experience of the Ubuntu desktop. If you don't like them don't buy them and nothing will make you need to.

We have very healthy revenue coming from our various businesses, the most visible of which is providing support for our OEM partners like Dell as they roll Ubuntu-based devices globally. Less visible, but also fast growing, include our enterprise business (providing support and other services for Ubuntu in cloud and traditional server deployments) and our Ubuntu One services for Ubuntu client users.

I like to think of our guiding principle as "make money because of the Ubuntu community, not from it." At the scale where we operate, all sorts of financial opportunities become possible, opportunities that don't require us to hold back Ubuntu bits to goad people into purchasing. As we roll new services out, I hope you'll let us know how we're doing, and ensure we never sacrifice usability for financial gain.

Freedom, second?
by TheModelEskimo (968202) "Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing 'vague concepts' like software freedom and 'no vendor lock-in.' Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on 'high quality software at a compelling price' rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?"
Matt: I've never considered myself at odds with the goals of freedom-first software advocates, though I sometimes disagree with the means and the timing. Some, for example, have criticized Canonical in the past for including non-free bits (codecs and such).

I'm not among that number, because I believe that if we ever want to see mainstream adoption of Linux, we need to provide solutions, preferably short-term, that map to users' requirements. How likely is it that the mainstream could adopt a Linux desktop, for example, that doesn't offer support for Flash so that people can watch YouTube videos, as just one example?

It's easy to demand that everyone be like us, right now. But that, to me, is the antithesis of freedom. I'm not interesting in forcing people to make a choice. That's no choice at all. I believe the best way is to consistently offer a better experience, and invite prospective users to try it.

Here's a personal example. In my new role, I have switched from using Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux. I've been using a Mac since 2002 when I switched off Windows. This switch would have been painful but for the fact that Firefox runs so well on Linux, and gives me access to a range of online services (like Google Calendar) that I was using before on the Mac. It would have been doubly so if I couldn't keep using Tweetdeck and other software to which I'd grown accustomed on my Mac.

Over time, I'm sure I'll migrate to open-source alternatives, for the same reason I used Adium, not iChat, on my Mac: the open-source alternatives are often the best available.

But to force-feed "freedom" on me or anyone else is a foolish, losing proposition. Especially in the short term.

I believe that Canonical and the Ubuntu community are creating software that people will want to use, not that they have to use. In the three weeks I've been with Canonical, I've used my Mac exactly once (still moving music out of old, DRM-encrusted iTunes songs). I haven't missed it.

Your version of their vision
by eldavojohn (898314) "Late last year, you heralded some moves by Shuttleworth and you said:

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment 'doesn't mark a change of direction,' perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like 'I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks' but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?"
Matt: I don't want to offend you with a "soft-ball" answer, but it would be inappropriate for me to provide the level of detail you request, in part because much of this information is confidential to Canonical and our partners, but also because a big part of our strategy is to undergird and rely upon the community to take Ubuntu into devices that we as a company cannot or choose not to cover.

That said, two things have impressed me in my three weeks with the company. First, there are, as you point out, a lot of things going on with the very real potential for inefficiency and lack of focus.

But two, the company is remarkably consistent in what it does choose to go after. In particular, we are relentlessly focused on improving the Linux user experience. Canonical, in conjunction with the Ubuntu community, builds the industry's best Linux distribution, one that even a (former) Mac user like myself can easily digest.

We intend to take this emphasis and expertise in user design into a wide array of devices, but importantly will continue to focus on those that require a general purpose operating system. The good news is that even despite the increasing diversity of devices, the world is actually converging on fewer platforms, not more.

For areas that require expertise or focus beyond ours, we encourage our community to take Ubuntu into such opportunities, and they have. You might be surprised to learn just how many of the devices out there are powered by Ubuntu, often without Canonical involved. I see this as very healthy. It's the only way to compete with much bigger competitors like Microsoft: beat them with a bigger community like Ubuntu.

This isn't to say that we couldn't focus more. But that was already underway through Mark's and Jane's guidance. My job is to accentuate it and ensure that we stay on track.

Gaming and drivers
by HungryHobo (1314109) "I like Linux, I like programming on a Linux machine, I like learning on a Linux machine but I can't really game on a Linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market. What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to Linux? What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for Linux?"
Matt: You're asking the wrong man! My favorite game is Rogue, originally developed for Unix and still going strong in the guise of Qt NetHack and other variants. I'm easy to please, I guess.

As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical. Games developers will make their decisions based on their market dynamics and those dynamics are pointing more and more towards dedicated consoles rather than the general PC market.

We work very hard with the Linux Foundation and others in the Linux community to encourage component manufacturers to either open source their drivers or make them available for Linux and with considerable success. This is not to enable gaming per so but to make Linux a peer experience on all machines.

Proprietary products
Enderandrew (866215) "You often praise proprietary, closed-source products on your blog (especially products from Apple and IBM). What is your stance on mixing proprietary and open products?"
Matt: Ubuntu is about choice. While we believe that an operating system is best developed with the source code openly available, that does not mean that the applications running on it need to be restricted to only those using the same development method. Our own users tell us, in large numbers, that they would like to see apps become available from the likes of Adobe and the games developers. On server the case is even more apparent where there are excellent proprietary applications that we would love to make available to Ubuntu users and we work to do that.

We can't boil the ocean. We want people to adopt Ubuntu Linux, and part of that requires us to support the applications that the mass market requires. Our focus is to continue to provide the industry's best Linux experience, and to make that Linux experience superior to any other platform. This process is well underway, and will encourage more and more application developers to port their software to Ubuntu.

Along the way, we hope that others will follow our lead and open source their software, but we intend to lead by example, not force-feed the industry. Google, for example, is arguably putting more pressure on Microsoft's closed-source approach than any amount of lobbying ever has or will. You can argue that Google is only doing this out of self-interest, to which I reply, "Exactly." Once the industry recognizes its self-interest in open sourcing software, we'll have even more from which to choose.

I love great software, whatever its license. But I joined Canonical because I believe the open-source development model can create better software than closed alternatives, and I'm determined to prove that.

Enterprise versus desktop emphasis
by eldavojohn (898314) "You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room?"
Matt: Actually, the majority of Canonical's revenue does not derive from providing support to enterprises, though I of course hope and expect us to continue to grow that area of our business. Our revenue will be a mix of making Ubuntu available to everyone on a wide range of hardware, from selling services direct to users (e.g., Ubuntu One), enabling hardware manufacturers to deliver a solid, supported Ubuntu experience on a wide range of devices, and from selling support and other services to enterprise IT.

Our market opportunity derives from Ubuntu's global user community, but it's a matter of making money with or around that community, not from it. All sorts of business opportunities are possible once a platform becomes ubiquitous, which business opportunities don't depend on charging users for the right to use that platform. That's a 20th-century model that we eschew.

So, yes, you'll see Canonical putting a great deal of effort into making the Linux experience even more user friendly: the more users, the better our revenue opportunities from ancillary services. It's in our interest to have millions upon millions of people happily running Ubuntu, and our unwavering focus is on improving the usability and design of Ubuntu to ensure that they do just that.

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME
by Enderandrew (866215) "I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrudge people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?"
Matt: I'm new to the Ubuntu party, but I believe we already do this with Kubuntu. No?

Ubuntu and KDE and GNOME (cont.)
by Anonymous Coward "More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE. We need to know exactly when Matt will be pushing for GNOME to be deprecated in favor of KDE (or even XFCE). He really doesn't have a choice; GNOME needs to go, and it needs to go very soon. We're seeing the GNOME community fragmenting, and quite badly. Some people still advocate using C, others are saying that Mono is the way to go. And yet others are pushing for Vala. Frankly, the internal strife will tear the GNOME project apart, much like happened to XFree86. I, for one, sure hope that Ubuntu has moved away from GNOME far before then."
by Enderandrew (866215) "I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name. When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work independently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues. Even worse, they [Ubuntu] put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu. Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitriol from users who blame KDE devs... They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems. I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate they're getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash. That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlash is Ubuntu-created. ... But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out."
Matt: I remember my first taste of the KDE/Gnome divide when I was involved in the Linux Business Office at Novell. It was fractious then and, judging from your "question," it remains so. I don't want to add to this rancorous debate, but do hope you'll continue to talk actively and openly with Canonical and the Ubuntu community to ensure your views are heard and the Ubuntu distribution remains one that you will enjoy using.

Quality control
by davidm2005 (1453017) "I have been using Ubuntu as a software developer for the past several years. I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy and seems like a step backwards. The conclusion of this review also expresses a lot of my thoughts about Ubuntu 9.10. I had so many problems in using 9.10, that did NOT exist in 9.04, that I switched one of the two computers I use at work to Windows 7, for stability (yes, these are crazy days). Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the every-six-month release schedule?"
Matt: We are not complacent about bugs or quality. Far from it. In fact, I've been surprised by the level of attention it gets within the company.

You can criticize Canonical and Ubuntu for many things, but the work of the engineers and community in making an incredible operating system for servers and desktops on a huge array of hardware available for free to all is not one of them.

Every release of Ubuntu gets more users and is used on a wider choice of hardware. This creates complexity. Making an operating system entirely independent of the hardware that it is run on is hard and it's harder again when you are trying to push the performance of that product with each release.

As for Ubuntu 9.10, I've heard people call it a buggy release but that has not been my personal experience, and it's an accusation that the data do not support. Yes, we're constantly trying to improve, as Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman calls out. But I look at this as a very good problem to have.

Why?

Because it's a symptom of a very positive thing: growth. There are more users using Ubuntu on more hardware than any previous release. Millions upon millions of users. Importantly, with our hardware partners we are providing certified, pre-installed, and supported Ubuntu on an ever-widening array of hardware. Dell's XPS 13 is just one awesome example.

For those who prefer to go off the beaten track and install Ubuntu on alternative hardware, as I did recently with a ThinkPad X200s, there may be some manual labor involved, just as there would be if you were running Windows or Mac OS X on unsupported hardware. In my personal experience, however, everything "just works." I've yet to have a single problem. Coming from a former Mac user (motto: two buttons are too hard - just give me one button on my mouse! :-), that's high praise.

Quality control (cont.)
by bcrowell (177657) I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.
Matt: I'm sorry to hear that (no pun intended). But see my response above.

Is there a time to fork?
by nine-times (778537) "I've been thinking about the relative lack of success of Linux on the desktop lately. By 'relative lack of success' I don't mean to bash the quality of Linux, but only that it doesn't seem to be very widely used in spite of being pretty good for a lot of purposes. So first, to what do you attribute the relative lack of success, and what plans do you have, if any, to do something about it. It seems to me that a fair amount of the problem isn't the OS itself, but the associate applications. For example, lots of people have complained about GIMP for reasons ranging from lack of specific functionality to an unconventional UI, and even to the awkward connotations of the name 'GIMP.' Even having personally gotten some graphic designers to try the GIMP, I have yet to know any professional designers who find it adequate. I'd like to use Linux, but don't find I can come close replicating an equivalent workflow to what I have available using tools like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and Sound Forge. (those are the applications I'm personally stuck with, though I'm sure other people have other applications on their personal lists.)"
Matt: As to the relative lack of market share, it comes down to inertia. I didn't give the Linux desktop much attention until I joined Canonical. I had used it off and on over the years, but there was never a compelling reason to change.

Now that I've switched, I'm surprised by how much my ignorance of desktop Linux was coloring my opinion of it. I've been using it as my dedicated OS for three weeks, and have had only one (minor) reason to revisit my old Mac machine. I simply haven't missed it, and I thought that I would struggle.

Until someone has a compelling reason to shift, however, they're unlikely to discover this. For those picking up new machines, for example, a low-cost netbook, they won't have to overcome this inertia. Email, Internet, IM, etc. all work just as well on Linux as they do on Windows or the Mac. These are the applications we spend 99.9999% of our days in (most of us, anyway). As a result, I think we'll start to see barriers come down.

The irony in this is that these application incompatibility concerns are the exact same ones I had when I started using a Mac in 2002. Years later, application support on the Mac is much better, though still not at the same level as Windows. And yet 99 percent of the time it doesn't matter, just as it doesn't on Linux. As more applications move to the Web and as application developers improve their support for Linux (a trend I've noticed happening), it will matter even less.

In the interim, if you are happy to pay for and need these specific Windows-only applications then Windows is probably the right OS for you. Microsoft Office, however, is not a compelling reason to keep paying the Windows tax for many people. It's one of those applications that we think we use more than we actually do, and which OpenOffice (or Google Docs, if you wish) more than adequately handles.

We would love Creative Suite to be available for Linux but the open source or web-based alternatives are satisfactory for many users.

Mobile platform plans
by abhikhurana (325468) "What are Canonical's plans for mobile platforms? With Maemo, another Debian based distro, now available for smartphones, would Canonical also get involved with either that or maybe develop a completely new Distro? With the desktop Linux market being extremely small and server markets being dominated by Red Hat and Novell, mobiles probably are the sweet spot for Canonical, with its strong focus on usability. Additionally, the lack of standardization means that users are more willing to experiment with interfaces. So what is the relative priority of Mobile, Netbook, Desktop and Server platform in Canonical's roadmap?"
Matt: Mobile is a top priority for Canonical, especially as it looks less and less like the traditional embedded market and more and more like a general-purpose OS market. That's our sweet spot, and given our concern for and expertise in user interface design, we will be leaders in this market.

We will do a lot of work on ARM and Intel platforms this year that will see Ubuntu popping up all over the the computing landscape. Ubuntu is a platform: it is not a desktop product or a server product or a mobile product. So where there is a requirement for an OS you will find Ubuntu. You'd be surprised by the kinds of devices you already own that run Ubuntu today.

GhostX9 writes "Alan Dang from Tom's Hardware has just written a speculative op-ed on the future of AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA in the next decade. They talk about the strengths of AMD's combined GPU and CPU teams, Intel's experience with VLIW architectures, and NVIDIA's software lead in the GPU computing world." What do you think it will take to stay on top over the next ten years? Or, will we have a newcomer that usurps the throne and puts everyone else out of business?

Tom's Hardware got a rare opportunity to explore the Western Digital campus and show us what goes on under the hood of one of the favorites in storage tech. "When you buy a car, you look under the hood. Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives, we thought you might want a peek under that hood, too. Now that Western Digital is in the business of breaking new capacity records (the latest Caviar Green was the first drive to hit 2TB, for example), we jumped at the chance to take a first-ever, unrestricted tour of its California R&D facilities. This is the place where magnetic technology of the 1950s meets the nano- and quantum-level technologies of the current decade."

kaychoro writes "There may be hope for Duke Nukem Forever (again). 'Jon St. John, better known as the voice of Duke Nukem, said some interesting words during a panel discussion at the Music and Games Festival (MAGFest) that took place January 1 – 4 in Alexandria, Virginia, according to Pixel Enemy. Answering a question from the crowd regarding DNF, St. John said: "... let me go ahead and tell you right now that I'm not allowed to talk about Duke Nukem Forever. No, no, don't be disappointed, read between the lines — why am I not allowed to talk about it?"'"

As Windows 7's market share passes 3.6%, up from 1.9% the day before launch, llManDrakell notes an experiment they did over at Sophos. They installed Windows 7 on a clean machine — with no anti-virus protection — with User Access Control in its default configuration. They threw at it the next 10 virus/worm samples that came in the door. Seven of them ran; UAC stopped only one baddie that had run in the absense of UAC. "Lesson learned? You still need to run anti-virus on Windows 7."

crazipper writes "Back when Intel launched its Core i5/i7 'Lynnfield' CPUs, Tom's Hardware ran some tests in Windows 7 versus Vista to gauge the benefits of the core parking and ideal core optimizations, said to cut power consumption in the new OS. It turned out that Win7 shifted the Nehalem-based CPUs in and out of Turbo Boost mode faster, resulting in higher power draw under load, while idle power was a slight bit lower. The mobile version of the architecture was claimed (at the time) to show a greater improvement in moving to Win7. Today there's a follow-up with the flagship Clarksfield processor that shows the same aggressive P-state promotion policies giving Win7 a significant performance advantage with Core i7 Mobile. However, power consumption is higher as well."

crazipper writes "Back when Intel launched its Core i5/i7 'Lynnfield' CPUs, Tom's Hardware ran some tests in Windows 7 versus Vista to gauge the benefits of the core parking and ideal core optimizations, said to cut power consumption in the new OS. It turned out that Win7 shifted the Nehalem-based CPUs in and out of Turbo Boost mode faster, resulting in higher power draw under load, while idle power was a slight bit lower. The mobile version of the architecture was claimed (at the time) to show a greater improvement in moving to Win7. Today there's a follow-up with the flagship Clarksfield processor that shows the same aggressive P-state promotion policies giving Win7 a significant performance advantage with Core i7 Mobile. However, power consumption is higher as well."

Impy the Impiuos Imp writes "Sony is apparently merging out of existence half its Star Wars: Galaxies servers. In spite of a number of innovative features (three health bars, choreograph-able dancing, music you can coordinate between several players, 'your own R2 unit and 3PO,' programmable droids, and so on), a complete overhaul of the combat system, designed to simplify it and make it more action-oriented, actually drove away more people than it attracted. It soon thereafter retired to that great, Sony one-fee-for-all stable of aging and also-rans in the sky. Still on life support, it was preceded in death by Sony foster brother The Matrix Online."

Vigile writes "Not many people have debated that Intel's Nehalem architecture is the fastest available for consumer desktop computers since it was released last year, but quite a few have complained about the cost of the platform. Intel just released new Lynnfield-based processors under both the Core i7 and Core i5 names and tests are showing the new CPUs beating Nehalem in both performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar tests to a startling degree. And while raw performance probably still goes to the Nehalem-based Core i7 CPUs, the lower prices of motherboards and memory for Lynnfield processors will likely more than make up for it." Update: 09/08 14:03 GMT by T : There are more eye-wateringly exhaustive examinations of the new chips all over the Web; here's HotHardware's version, and Tom's Hardware's.

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware just interviewed Charlie Miller, the man behind the iPhone remote exploit hack and winner of Pwn2Own 2009. He explains the (now patched) bug in the iPhone which allowed him to remotely exploit the iPhone in detail, explaining how the string concatenation code was flawed. The most surprising thing was that the bug could be traced back to several previous generations of the iPhone OS (he stopped testing at version 2.2). He also talks about the failures of other devices, such as crashing HTC's Touch by sending a SMS with '%n' in the text."

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware has a long interview with security expert Joanna Rutkowska (which is unfortunately split over 9 pages). Many think that kernel rootkits are the most dangerous attacks, but Joanna and her team have been studying exploits beyond Ring 0 for some years. Joanna is most well known for the BluePill virtualization attack (Ring -1) and in this interview she chats a little bit about Ring -2 and Ring -3 attacks that go beyond kernel rootkits. What's surprising is how robust the classic BluePill proof-of-concept is: 'Many people tried to prove that BluePill is "detectable" by writing various virtualization detectors (but not BluePill detectors). They simply assumed that if we detect a virtualization being used, this means that we are "under" BluePill. This assumption was made because there were no products using hardware virtualization a few years ago. Needless to say, if we followed this way of reasoning, we might similarly say that if an executable makes network connections, then it must surely be a botnet.'" Rutkowska says that for her own security, "I don't use any A/V product on any of my machines (including all the virtual machines). I don't see how an A/V program could offer any increased security over the quite-reasonable-setup I already deployed with the help of virtualization." She runs three separate virtual machines, designated Red, Yellow, and Green, each running a separate browser and used for increasingly sensitive tasks.

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware has a long interview with security expert Joanna Rutkowska (which is unfortunately split over 9 pages). Many think that kernel rootkits are the most dangerous attacks, but Joanna and her team have been studying exploits beyond Ring 0 for some years. Joanna is most well known for the BluePill virtualization attack (Ring -1) and in this interview she chats a little bit about Ring -2 and Ring -3 attacks that go beyond kernel rootkits. What's surprising is how robust the classic BluePill proof-of-concept is: 'Many people tried to prove that BluePill is "detectable" by writing various virtualization detectors (but not BluePill detectors). They simply assumed that if we detect a virtualization being used, this means that we are "under" BluePill. This assumption was made because there were no products using hardware virtualization a few years ago. Needless to say, if we followed this way of reasoning, we might similarly say that if an executable makes network connections, then it must surely be a botnet.'" Rutkowska says that for her own security, "I don't use any A/V product on any of my machines (including all the virtual machines). I don't see how an A/V program could offer any increased security over the quite-reasonable-setup I already deployed with the help of virtualization." She runs three separate virtual machines, designated Red, Yellow, and Green, each running a separate browser and used for increasingly sensitive tasks.

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware has a long interview with security expert Joanna Rutkowska (which is unfortunately split over 9 pages). Many think that kernel rootkits are the most dangerous attacks, but Joanna and her team have been studying exploits beyond Ring 0 for some years. Joanna is most well known for the BluePill virtualization attack (Ring -1) and in this interview she chats a little bit about Ring -2 and Ring -3 attacks that go beyond kernel rootkits. What's surprising is how robust the classic BluePill proof-of-concept is: 'Many people tried to prove that BluePill is "detectable" by writing various virtualization detectors (but not BluePill detectors). They simply assumed that if we detect a virtualization being used, this means that we are "under" BluePill. This assumption was made because there were no products using hardware virtualization a few years ago. Needless to say, if we followed this way of reasoning, we might similarly say that if an executable makes network connections, then it must surely be a botnet.'" Rutkowska says that for her own security, "I don't use any A/V product on any of my machines (including all the virtual machines). I don't see how an A/V program could offer any increased security over the quite-reasonable-setup I already deployed with the help of virtualization." She runs three separate virtual machines, designated Red, Yellow, and Green, each running a separate browser and used for increasingly sensitive tasks.

Another installment of Tom's Hardware's how-to articles has a look at what it might take to build your own render farm. The article looks at everything from top-to-bottom roll-your-owns to buying things pre-built and the pricing insanity that goes along with it. "If you are working as a freelance artist in the above-mentioned media, toying with the idea, or doing so as a hobbyist, then building even a small farm will greatly increase your productivity compared to working on a single workstation. Studios can even use this piece as a reference for building new render farms, as we're going to address scaling, power, and cooling issues. If you're looking at buying a new machine and are thinking of spending big bucks to get a bleeding-edge system, you might want to step back and consider whether it would be more effective to buy the latest and greatest workstation or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes."

As storage hardware costs continue to plummet, the folks over at Tom's Hardware have decided to throw together their version of the "Über RAID Array." While the array still doesn't stack up against SSDs for access time, a large array is capable of higher throughput via striping. Unfortunately, the amount of work required to assemble a setup like this seems to make it too much trouble for anything but a fun experiment. "Most people probably don't want to install more than a few hard drives into their PC, as it requires a massive case with sufficient ventilation as well as a solid power supply. We don't consider this project to be something enthusiasts should necessarily reproduce. Instead, we set out to analyze what level of storage performance you'd get if you were to spend the same money as on an enthusiast processor, such as a $1,000 Core i7-975 Extreme. For the same cost, you could assemble 12 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drives. Of course, you still need a suitable multi-port controller, which is why we selected Areca's ARC-1680iX-20."

crazipper writes "Know a Windows power user who is (honestly) good with technology, but hasn't yet warmed to Linux? Tom's Hardware just posted a guide to installing and using Ubuntu 9.04, written specifically for the MS crowd (in other words, it talks about file systems, mount points, app installation, etc). Hopefully, by the end, your 'friend' will realize just how easy Ubuntu can be to use and start down a long path of exploration with a new operating system."

crazipper writes "Know a Windows power user who is (honestly) good with technology, but hasn't yet warmed to Linux? Tom's Hardware just posted a guide to installing and using Ubuntu 9.04, written specifically for the MS crowd (in other words, it talks about file systems, mount points, app installation, etc). Hopefully, by the end, your 'friend' will realize just how easy Ubuntu can be to use and start down a long path of exploration with a new operating system."

crazipper writes "Much fuss has been made about Nvidia's CUDA technology and its general-purpose computing potential. Now, in 2009, a steady stream of launches from third-party software developers sees CUDA gaining traction at the mainstream. Tom's Hardware takes five of the most interesting desktop apps with CUDA support and compares the speed-up yielded by a pair of mainstream GPUs versus a CPU-only. Not surprisingly, depending on the workload you throw at your GPU, you'll see results ranging from average to downright impressive."

PLSQL Guy writes "Duke Nukem Forever developer 3D Realms is shutting down, according to Shacknews. They cite 'a reliable source close to the company,' who said the developer is finished and employees have already been let go. It looks like all of the Duke Nukem Forever jokes are turning into reality; DNF might turn out to be the ultimate vaporware after all." 3D Realms' webmaster, Joe Siegler, confirmed the closing, saying that he didn't know about it even a day beforehand. Apogee and Deep Silver, who are working on a different set of Duke Nukem games (referred to as the Duke Nukem Trilogy) say they are not affected by the problems at 3D Realms.

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware's continuing series on computing security has an interview with Adam Barth and Collin Jackson, members of Stanford University's Web Security Group and members of the team that developed Chromium, the open-source core behind Google Chrome. The interview goes into detail regarding the sandboxing approach unique to Chromium, comparisons between the browser and its competition, and web security in general."

Crazzaper writes "There's a lot of controversy over ISP capping with Time Warner leading the charge. Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about how capping is the new form of DRM at the ISP level. The author draws some comparison to business practices by large cable operators and their efforts to protect cable TV programming. While this is understandable from the cable operator's perspective, the article points out how capping will affect popular services such as Steam for game content publishing and distribution, cloud-computing and online media services. Apparently this is also an effective way of going after casual piracy."

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware recently interviewed Dino A. Dai Zovi, a former member of Sandia National Labs' IDART (the guys who test the security of national agencies). Although most of the interview is focused on personal computer security, they asked him about L0pht's claim in 1998 if the Internet could still be taken down in 30 minutes given the advances on both the security and threat sides. He said that the risk was still true."

crazipper writes "Tom's Hardware interviewed Charlie Miller, winner of this year's Pwn2Own contest and formerly with the NSA. He discusses the effort it took before the contest to be able to take down a MacBook within seconds, sandboxing, and the effectiveness of the NX bit and ASLR. His outlook on end-users protecting themselves against attacks? 'Users are at the mercy of the products they buy.'"

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo's all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech's flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie's state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5" drives. LaCie's drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the $600 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

justechn writes "Tom's Hardware has an article about custom PC maker Puget Systems, who had just finished a custom $16,000 PC for one of their clients. So what exactly goes into a $16,000 system? How about: Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, and Cooler Master Stacker 810 case. In addition to all that hardware, it also runs very quiet and very cool. The temperature of the CPUs is 36 C at idle, 45 C at load."

Crazy Taco writes "Tom's Hardware reports on newly discovered screenshots that reveal Microsoft is planning to release their newest version of Windows in multiple confusing versions ... again. The information comes from the latest version of the Windows 7 beta, build 7025 (the public beta is build 7000), and shows a screen during installation that asks the user which version of the OS he or she would like to install. Who's up for guessing what the difference is between Windows 7 'Starter' and Windows 7 'Home Basic?'"

director_mr writes "Tom's Hardware is running a story with an interesting description of a 28-qubit quantum computer that was developed by D-Wave Systems. They intend to open up use of their quantum computer to the public. It is particularly good at pattern recognition, it operates at 10 milliKelvin, and it is shielded to limit electromagnetic interference to one nanotesla in three dimensions across the whole chip. Could this be the first successful commercial quantum computer?"

The Raindog sends us a particularly timely showdown article comparing seven 2.5" mobile hard drives, four of them HDs and three SSDs, across a wide range of application, file-copy, power-consumption, and noise-level tests. Tom's Hardware was recently forced to issue a correction to a claim, which we discussed here, that SSDs aren't actually much more power-thrifty than HDs. The Tech Report's in-depth comparison provides some data points on the question of whether solid-state storage is ready to supplant traditional mechanical hard drives, but notes that the price disparity is still substantial.

Bakasama writes "Tom's Hardware compared the power performance of several available SSD cards with a Rotating HDD that was chosen specifically for its poor power efficiency. The results seem to fly in the face of current wisdom. 'Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren't there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD.'"

stress_life writes "Following controversial allegations that Nvidia is cheating in 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament 3 benchmarks, executives from Futuremark and Epic moved forward to clean any confusion. However, the game was not over — enthusiasts from Israel ported PhysX middleware to run on ATI Radeon cards, achieving remarkable performance. Owners of ATI Radeon cards will be able to play PhysX games as well, such as Ghost Recon 2 and already mentioned Unreal Tournament 3."

Tom's Hardware has a quick look at the changes being seen in the datacenter as more and more companies embrace a Web 2.0-style approach to hardware. So far, with Google leading the way, most companies have opted for a commodity server setup. HP and IBM however are betting that an even better setup exists and are striking out to find it. "IBM's Web 2.0 approach involves turning servers sideways and water cooling the rack so you can do away with air conditioning entirely. HP offers petabytes of storage at a fraction of the usual cost. Both say that when you have applications that expect hardware to fail, it's worth choosing systems that make it easier and cheaper to deal with those failures."

Starturtle writes "Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer had admitted that Microsoft had been working on support for Blu-ray under Windows during this year's Mix08 conference. Rumors began to swirl and many began to expect Microsoft to announce a Blu-ray peripheral for the Xbox 360. However, Microsoft came out and denied all rumors, stating that they were not exploring any kind of Blu-ray add-on or in talks with Sony about integrating Blu-ray into the Xbox experience. After months of rumors and denials, the Xbox 360 with a Blu-ray disc drive is due to be manufactured soon and shipped in Q3 of 2008. Pegatron Technology, an OEM subsidiary of Asustek Computer, is reported to have received the winning order from Microsoft for a Blu-ray equipped Xbox 360."

Nvidia has stated that their translation of Ageia's physics engine to CUDA is almost complete. To showcase the capabilities of the new tech Nvidia ran a particle demonstration similar to Intel's Nehalem demo, at ten times the speed. "While Intel's Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. In the very likely event that Nvidia's next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can't ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics."

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at the HTC Shift, the newest contender in the ultralight portable arena, with a strong compare and contrast to the other two heavyweights, the ThinkPad X300 and the Macbook Air. "As some of you know, I actually like the Macbook Air but found the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 to be a vastly more useful product in the class. I'm one of the few folks that have been using an early version of the HTC Shift , a smaller screened ultra light tablet with a keyboard and a touch screen which is superior to both offerings in some ways and just released on Amazon.com for $1500 (someone screwed up, this wasn't supposed to happen until next week). This got me thinking: The perfect next generation ultra-sexy notebook should be a blend of all three products."

Tributaries has just announced a solution to all or your oversized power adapter woes. The new T12 power strip features 12 different outlets and eight of them are located on the edge and can be rotated by as much as 90 degrees. The adapter also provides surge protection for RJ-11, RJ-45, and Coax if you so desire.

Tom's Hardware is reporting that the Optimus keyboard that everyone was so anxious for (although maybe less so when they saw the price tag) started shipping this week. "According to an announcement made on the Optimus project blog, keyboards are now shipping to customers who pre-ordered the $1564 keyboard nine months ago. Keyboards with passive keys are delayed and will be shipping in about a month, the manufacturer said. [...] Earlier this month, one of the first Optimus Maximus keyboards was sold for $2750 on Ebay." Engadget even got the chance to test one of these expensive toys out.

Tom's Hardware has a detailed benchmark and analysis of Intel's new Skulltrail offering, taking a look at 8 vs 4 cores. The comparison uses games, A/V applications, office applications, and 3D rendering tools to help demonstrate benchmarks. "We were disappointed by the Skulltrail platform. Although we have tested and reviewed numerous Intel products, we have never had such a half-baked system such as this in our labs. If this sounds harsh, bear in mind that all we have to base this conclusion on is the Skulltrail system itself in its current state, which Intel provided as an official review platform. We do not know whether Intel plans to revise and improve the platform before the final versions ship to retail."

Tom's Hardware has a nice roundup of some of the new shiny hardware for February '08. Everything from a screaming fast 2 GHz DDR3 to liquid cooled cases and back again. "Unlike previous Zalman cases that used a heat pipe assembly, the LQ1000 has a traditional water pump and flexible hose for connecting the case's sinks to CPU and graphics coolers. A passively-cooled finned side panel and fan-assisted rear radiator remove heat, while a lighted flow indicator shows the bottom-mounted pump in action."

The Last Gunslinger writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has published detailed results of their laboratory analysis of AMD's recently released Spider platform, including the Phenom 9500 and 9600 running on 790FX chipsets. Amongst other interesting details, the 2.4GHz Phenom 9700 has been pushed back to Q1 2008. The 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 benchmarks on average 13.5% lower than Intel's Q6600 quad-core CPU...and the MSRP for the Phenom is about 13.6% less as well. Much is made of the AMD OverDrive utility, by which the THG labs were able to OC the Spider platform by 25% (3.0GHz) using air cooling alone."

amcdiarmid writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Windows Server 2008 RC0 up on their site. It has a few good points, and at 19 pages is certainly 'in-depth'. From the article's conclusion: 'Microsoft has used the time since the release of Windows Server 2003 very well. The new Server Manager simplifies system administration immensely. Unlike Windows Vista, whose new dialogues still confuse even experienced users, Windows Server 2008 makes the admin feel right at home and in control ... However, it's not all sunshine, either. Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly ... Microsoft also gets low marks for failing to include SSH support in the operating system. On Linux servers, working without SSH is simply unthinkable. At least the Redmond company includes its encrypted remote shell WinRS. However, secure FTP is still a missing feature. The FTP client is being treated like an unloved stepchild, to the point where it is not even included in the Server Manager.'"

not5150 writes "The inventor of the electric 'KillaCycle" motorcycle was taken to the hospital for x-rays after demonstrating the vehicle to reporters. Bill Dube, a government scientist during the day and bike builder at night, attempted a burnout in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center during the Wired NextFest fair. Fueled by the "most powerful" lithium-ion batteries in the world, the bike accelerated uncontrollably into another car. There's a video interview (thankfully before the crash) and footage of Dube crashing."