Thursday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 06:37 PM CEST - Jun,26 2003
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- The new 'Angels': No man needed - It's hard to imagine
the
new breed of Charlie's Angels, who combine sexiness, cheekiness and enough
action-adventure to fill about 90 minutes of big-screen time, having any time
left for personal lives, let alone love lives. After all, how do you schedule
a pedicure, let alone a sizzling night with the man of the moment, in between
mastering disguises, martial arts classes and espionage?
- Record industry to sue downloaders - A recording-industry
trade group said Wednesday it
plans to sue hundreds of individuals who illegally distribute copyrighted
songs over the Internet, expanding its anti-piracy fight into millions of
homes.
- 'Hulk' Pirate Guilty of Felony Copyright Infringement - After
learning that a version of its film, "The Hulk," had become available for
illegal downloading on the Internet two weeks before its theatrical release,
Universal initiated an immediate investigation and then referred the matter to
the FBI. The Department of Justice took immediate action on the matter and
today, Kerry Gonzalez, the individual who posted "The Hulk" on the Internet,
pled guilty to felony copyright infringement;
he
faces a sentence of up to three years in federal prison.
- Microsoft Warns of Windows Media Flaws -
Vulnerabilities in two Windows Media products could allow an attacker to
take over a media server or view a user's media library, Microsoft warned
Wednesday.
- OpenOffice.org 1.0 Launched -
OpenOffice.org 1.0
for the Apple Macintosh has reached
final release status, joining Windows, Linux, and Solaris versions of the
office suite. It supports a wide range of file formats, so users can exchange
documents with users of other office-software suites, such as Microsoft
Office. The software takes advantage of the popularity of X11 in the
open-source world, and incorporates FreeType's font engine for anti-aliased
fonts. It runs natively on Linux, PPC Linux, Solaris, Windows, and many other
flavors of Unix.
- Scientists Announce First 3-D Assembly Of Magnetic And Semiconducting
Nanoparticles - Scientists from Columbia University, IBM and the
University of New Orleans today
announced a new, three-dimensional designer material assembled from two
different types of particles only billionths of a meter across. In the June 26
issue of the journal Nature, the team describes the precision chemistry
methods developed to tune the particles' sizes in increments of less than one
nanometer and to tailor the experimental conditions so the particles would
assemble themselves into repeating 3-D patterns.
- Via Changes Motherboard Plans - In a move that reshapes Via
Technologies' motherboard product strategy,
the company has stopped selling Pentium 4 motherboards, a company
executive confirmed. "It's true that we have stopped making P4 motherboards,"
said Richard Brown, Via's associate vice president of marketing, in an e-mail.
"This is because all our customers are now using our P4 chipsets, so we don't
feel that we can add any particular additional value by continuing to make
them ourselves."
- Pioneer Introduces World's First DVD Recorders With TiVo Service -
These new recorders offer consumers the control provided by the
easy-to-use TiVo service integrated with advanced DVD recording for the option
of short-term storage on a hard drive or long-term archival of broadcast
programming on DVD-R/RW discs. The Pioneer Elite DVR-57H includes a
120-gigabyte hard disc drive while the Pioneer DVR-810H boasts 80 gigabytes of
storage space.
- Intel launches 2.5, 2.6GHz Celerons - Intel rolled out
two new desktop Celeron processors yesterday, clocked at 2.5GHz and
2.6GHz. Derived from the original Pentium 4, the new chips operate on a 400MHz
frontside bus and use a Socket 478 interface. The Celerons are fabbed at 0.13
micron, however, and feature only 128KB of on-die L2 cache. In 1000-unit
quantities, the desktop Intel Celeron processor at 2.6GHz is priced at $103;
the 2.5GHz is priced at $89, both ahead of the 2.4GHz part following the
latter's price cut last April.
- AMD Athlon 64 Performance Rating Formula Revealed - A hardware
web-site x86-secret.com has
revealed a formula describing performance rating of AMD Athlon 64
processors. If you still do not understand how a 1.60GHz Athlon 64 processor
is brand-named as Athlon 64 2800+, then the formula will show you how such
things may happen. Apparently, performance rating of AMD 64-bit desktop
processors looks as follows: Performance Rating = (CPU Frequency x 3)/2 + 400
e.g. 2800+ = (1600MHz x 3)/2 + 400.
- Benchmarking: Games - Since February, more and more
allegations of cheating and improper conduct have come to light concerning
NVIDIA and the 3DMark 2003 benchmark suite.
THG decided it was time to take stock, review what has happened so far,
take a look at the goings-on behind the scenes and find out what roles ATI,
NVIDIA, Futuremark, and the OEMs play in this little piece of industry drama.
- Kiss Technology DP-500 Networkable DVD Player review -
The new firmware (2.6.6) adds 3.11 support and was worth the wait. I found
it quite good and allowed me to play a good few titles on my Home Theatre PC
that were in DivX 3.11 format. The addition of a network port as well as the
simple server PC-Link application really signifies that this is the excellent
choice for those who have a lot of DivX files. The PC-Link software could do
with some improvement, adding MPEG1 and MPEG2 support would be nice since the
DP-500 can play the files anyway. An addition of a DHCP server would also be
nice and would make things a lot simplier for those of us without broadband
routers and such. I also found the player to be compatible with several media
types including DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W, despite what the specifications say.
- 17 Inch Monitors with 16 and 20 ms: Part IV -
The 20-ms line has now been crossed. And with it, most of the afterglow
problem common to flat panels is solved. For our fourth set of comparative
tests of the best currently available17-inch monitors, we had two questions to
address: can you play games and edit images on them.
- VIA KT400A Roundup - Hexus.net has published a new
VIA
KT400A Roundup.
- GF FX 5900 Roundup - UKGamer has published
a
3-way Geforce FX 5900 roundup.
- VIA KT600 / EPoX 8KRA2 review -
The VIA
KT600 chipset is a step in the right direction. VIA needed to match NVIDIA
on pure specification before they took them on from a performance viewpoint.
The 'upgrade' of the Northbridge now sees full XP3200 support and precious
little else. The VT8237 Southbridge gets a couple of extra USB2.0 ports and,
most notably, provision for on-chip SATA. The SATA feature extends to the
ability of effectively adding a coupe of extra ports via an optional SATA
physical layer. The memory interface, though, has been left in VIA's preferred
single channel mode.
- BFG Tech 256MB Asylum GeForce FX 5600 Review - Suffice to say that
BFG has built the card well, has included a good feature package with the
inclusion of 256 MB of memory and VIVO functionality and has an excellent
lifetime warranty and free 24/7/365 toll free tech support standing behind the
product. That is a GF FX 5600 package that I have seen no match for as yet.
For the second part of this conclusion I do have to say that I am more than a
little disappointed in the package that NVIDIA has supplied to its
manufacturing partners in the 5600. I mean seriously, how in good conscience
could I recommend any 5600 when they are so thoroughly trounced by ATI's
Radeon 9500? In every single test I ran the 9500 was the hands down winner.
The 5600 is not able to even come close to ATI's midrange DX9 offering.
- Gigacube R9600Pro Lite 128MB VGA Review - The overall picture is
not pretty for Gigacube's R9600Pro Lite 128MB. Due to the reduced memory
frequency, 400MHz,
its performance is roughly on par (or below) with a Leadtek A310 FX5600.
At its current price, ~$330NZ, you will better off with a cheap R9500Pro.
- Albatron GeForce FX 5600 Review -
Albatron certainly did not dissapoint us with their GeForce FX 5600. In
the two synthetic benchmarks we ran, both the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra and
GeForce FX 5600 were neck and neck but when it came to real world games like
Serious Sam and Unreal Tournament 2003, the GeForce FX 5600 really showed an
increase in frame rate at the lower resolutions like 640x480 and 1024x768. At
the higher frame rates the difference between the two cards was a bit more
minimal.
- Prolink FX 5600 Ultimate Golden Limited Videocard Review - PCStats
has posted
a Prolink FX 5600 Ultimate Golden Limited Videocard review
- Gainward FX PowerPack Ultra/760 XP Golden Sample review -
The Gainward FX PowerPack Ultra/760 XP Golden Sample can give you: 1) a
higher speed in AA and/or anisotropy than its competitors (RADEON 9600 or
GF4Ti 4200); 2) potentially more technological solution with the DX9 support
(such games are right around the corner already); 3) VIVO support. Again,
remember that there are two types of the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra cards on the
market - with the frequency of 350MHz and 400 MHz. Be careful!
- Avant Browser 8.01 Build 112 -
Avant Browser (download)
is an upgrade to Internet Explorer. Avant Browser is a fast, stable,
user-friendly, versatile multi-window browser.
- Internet Download Manager 3.16 -
Internet
Download Manager (download)
is a tool to increase download speeds by up to 500 percent, resume and
schedule downloads.
- VideoLAN 0.6.0 -
VideoLAN plays lots of video formats, even without the proper codecs
installed. Good for previewing partially downloaded files.
- BSPlayer 0.86.499 -
BSplayer (download)
is a Windows player that plays back all kinds of media files ( avi / mpg / asf
/ wmv / wav / mp3...) and specialises in video and divx playback
- Windows Media Player 9 Update - Microsoft has released
a new build of Windows Media Player 9 - 9.0.0.3008. This was necessary to
fix a security issue. With Windows Media Player 9 Series, a flaw in an ActiveX
control might permit a Web page to gain access to your Media Library.
- Jet 4.0 Service Pack 7 - If you have installed Jet 4.0 SP7 for
Access 2000 or another application that uses the Jet 4.0 engine, you do not
have to reinstall Jet 4.0 SP7 for Access 2002 ~
download.
- Windows 2000 SP4 released - Microsoft has finaly released
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (130MB) for download. There are 669 Public
fixes, 6 partner only fixes and 675 fixes in total. (thanks
Neowin.net) German version can be found
here.
- Sound Blaster Audigy 1 Drivers - Creative Labs finally released
an updated driver set (EU
/
Asia mirror) for the original Audigy series. The package contains WHQL
Driver v5.12.1.383, Audio HQ v1.20.03, PlayCenter3 v3.02.67, Surround Mixer
v2.00.26. Features: Audio HQ now features a new "Decoder" tab under Device
Controls, for setting software Dolby Digital decoding options. Surround Mixer
and Diagnostics work flawlessly. The maximum number of supported hardware
channels has increased to 64.
- Foobar2000 v0.7 Beta 3 -
foobar2000 (download
~
changelog) is a nice small media player (consumes 1.9MB RAM only)
developed by Peter Pawlowski (ex-WinAmp member). It uses a plain and simple UI
- no skins, no fuss.
- Winamp 3 Build #499 -
Winamp (download)
supports MP3, CD, Audiosoft, Audio Explosion, MOD, WAV and other audio
formats, custom appearances called skins, plus audio visualization and audio
effect plug-ins.
- WinAmp 2.95 + - A new beta of WinAmp v2.95 is available ~
Mirror1 /
Mirror2 /
Mirro3. Remember, it's an unofficial release, so try only at your own
risk.
- Logitech iTouch Keyboard Patch -
This file is an updated version of the Players.ini. If you are having
problems with WinAmp 3.x or the latest version of Real One, this update will
modify the Players.ini file. The updated Players.ini file has all the
supported players and allows the Multimedia keys to function.
- SiS 740/65x VGA drivers v2.18 - SiS has released a new
740/65x integrated VGA drivers v2.18 (WinXP/2k
~
Win9x/ME)
- VIA USB 2.0 Drivers 2.56 - VIA officially released
a new v2.56
driver for USB 2.0 support.
- Cmedia 9738/9739 Audio Drivers - A new CMedia 9738/9739 AC97
OnBoard-Audio drivers
were released.
- Lite-On firmware - Lite-On IT has released some new firmware
versions for the
LTR-52327S
and
LSC-24081MX (external combo) drives.
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Updated:11:47 AM CEST Jun,09
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