Nightly Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 04:09 AM CET - Jan,28 2003
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- Kasparov Defeats Deep Junior in Game 1 - World chess champion
Garry Kasparov defeated computerized challenger Deep Junior on Sunday in
the first of six games pitting human wit against computer logic. Kasparov
forced the Israeli-programmed Deep Junior into a position from which it could
not win, compelling the human moving its pieces to resign four hours into the
game.
- Can your cell phone impair your vision? - New research from
the University of Utah has revealed
a
potentially lethal "tunnel vision" that drivers get while talking on a
cell phone. Researchers found that drivers using cell phones, even
hands-free devices, aren't processing peripheral vision well. The scientists
studied twenty volunteers who used a driving simulator to experience all sorts
of distractions, from cars suddenly swerving to a stoplight changing. In one
test, a driver on a phone and one focused solely on the road were shown the
same series of billboards. The driver not yakking remembered seeing 50 percent
more billboards than the driver on the phone, the study found. Associate
professor David Strayer said this is "inattention blindness," an impairment
that slows reaction time by 20 percent and made some drive-and-dial
practitioners miss half the red lights they were suddenly presented with in
some simulations.
- Windows NT 4.0 Server gets another year's life - Windows NT 4.0
Server, still the weapon of choice for quantities of the more truculent IT
manager, has been given another 12 months to live. Microsoft today intends to
announce that paid incident and security hotfix support for the product,
previously scheduled to cease at the end of this year,
will now run up until 31st December 2004.
- Blanket hack muffles RIAA site again - Hackers have
once again disabled the Web site of the Recording Industry Association of
America, a group of record labels that is leading the charge in the
crackdown on online music piracy. The attack, which began Friday, has caused
the site to be unavailable for three days, an RIAA representative confirmed
Monday. It follows several other malicious attacks on the site last summer.
"How pathetic that those who want free music don't believe in free speech,"
RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said in a statement. "We will continue to fight
theft on the Internet and work hard to make sure that songwriters, artists and
other copyright holders continue to get paid for their work."
- nForce Soundstorm technology review - One of the most
overlooked features is
the SoundStorm audio technology. Also found in the Xbox, Soundstorm offers
the unique ability to output an AC3 or Dolby Digital 5.1 digital signal which
can then be decoded using an appropriate receiver. This feature has been
available on both the nForce 1 and 2 platforms.
- Philips announces 4x DVD+R/+RW drive, DVDRW424 -
The DVDRW424 allows consumers to record their home videos, photo albums
and PC data on a 4.7 Gbyte DVD in less than 15 minutes. The drive features a
4x write/rewrite speed on DVD+R and DVD+RW discs, a 8x DVD read speed, 24x CD
recording and 10x for CD rewriting, making it one of the most versatile drives
on the market.
- Mitsumi Europe announces CR-487ETE -
Mitsumi will launch the highly efficient CD-ReWriter CR-487ETE (WORD
.doc), which is capable of reading CDs at 52X the speed and writing on CD-Rs
just as fast, onto the European Market at the end of January. Thanks to the
support of the new Ultra Speed standard it is capable of reaching 24X the
speed with CD-RWs and it is of course downwards compatible.
- EasyHardDisk 20GB USB 2.0 Review - In the dozens of USB Flash
drives, Flash memory storage products, and portable drives we've reviewed to
date, not one offered the best of all the features we sought - affordability,
portability, and performance. However, a new and exciting product we're
looking at today offers all three. Enter EasyDisk's first foray
into hard
disk based storage - the EasyHardDisk. Packing a performance punch that
wrecked our other two portable drives in our labs, this 20GB model does not
disappoint.
- Ultimate DDR RAM Guide - Overclockers NZ have posted
their original ram guide, which has a total of 15 modules, ranging from
DDR-266 to DDR-400 varieties.
- January Budget Gamer PC Guide - We'll be getting $1000 of cold,
hard, cash to build the best gaming rig we can. Those of you who complain
that's too expensive, go buy a console. PC gaming is not for you.
$1000 is pretty much the absolute minimum for a budget gaming rig, because
any lower than that and you'll be upgrading very soon. And then it just adds
back up to $1000 or more. So let's get cracking!
- ATI RenderMonkey 0.9 Beta Toolsuite -
RenderMonkey is a suite of open, extensible shader development tools for
both current and future hardware that allows programmers and artists to
collaborate on creating realtime shader effects. ATI showed these tools
publicly for the first time at Siggraph 2002 in San Antonio, on the ATI booth
and in a number of partner sessions. A Beta version of the RenderMonkey IDE is
currently available for free download to anyone interested in working with
programmable graphics shaders.
- Matrix: Reloaded Trailer -
The Matrix:
Reloaded is coming to theatres in May and The Matrix: Revolutions in
November.
- KDE 3.1 Final - Here is finally
a stable
version of KDE 3.1
- CuteFTP XP 5.0.1 -
CuteFTP is
absolutely the easiest way to transfer files across the Internet. Its built-in
Connection Wizard will walk you through connecting to an FTP site in seconds
and its user-friendly interface will have you transferring files in no time,
even if you are a beginner. If you want to try something similar and free,
here is an open source alternative to this software - try
SmartFTP 1.0.971.
(thanks SavageNews).
- Updated Koepi's XviD Codec build (win32) -
XviD is a video codec
(download
XviD-26012003-1) just like DivX. Needless to say that most new movies and
videos are being encoded with XviD.
- PowerDVD XP *Fix* - Many of PowerDVD users have noticed that the
latest PowerDVD patch is not all it is cracked up to, reducing deluxe users
into, standard users demanding that they repurchase the audio packs so they
can enable the 8 speaker option, DTS etc. However, once again bbq has
found the solution,
several files were not correctly included in the update, however bbq found
them in the Japanese version .
- DVD Region-Free 1.32 - You don't need to flash any firmware which
is dangerous or unavailable.
DVD Region-Free
also disables region check for popular software-based DVD players such as
PowerDVD, WinDVD and CinePlayer. Other features include Region-Free for RCE
DVDs, Macrovision-Free, Operation-Free and run self at DVD players startup
automatically.
- WipeOut 1.0.3.1 -
Wipes free space on the selected drive, clears cookies, temporary internet
files, file access history from the registry and recent folder. Some of the
power user features are select additional directories you want to wipe,
registry keys you want to clear, cookies you want to keep, number of patterns
to write to free space and registry entries before clearing and the thread
priority of the free disk space wipe.
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Updated:12:40 AM CEST Jun,21
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