Gr8Apes writes "AMD is upping the performance numbers for Barcelona by stating that "Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance 'over the competition's highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency'". AMD also claims that the new 3.0 GHz Opterons beat comparable Intel Xeon 5100 series processors in three server-specific benchmarks (SPECint_rate_2006, SPECint_rate2006, SPECompM2001) by up to 24%."

RockoTDF writes "A court in texas has ruled that an open WAP is not a sufficient defense against child pornography charges, a ruling which could carry over to p2p users. In addition, it appears that an open WAP could be seen as probable cause by law enforcement."

Oddscurity writes "According to The Inquirer someone managed to write a wrapper allowing DirectX 10 applications to run on platforms other than Vista. The Alky Project claims to have reverse-engineered Geometry Shader code, allowing Windows games to run on Windows XP, MacOSX and Linux. The Inquirer is understandably cautious about these claims, urging readers to investigate the releases themselves to ascertain whether or not it's a hoax."

techie writes "OSWeekly.com has published a review of Beryl, a very cool looking UI for Linux. Matt Hartley writes, "This release, in my opinion, was the most over-hyped and bug-filled to date. You will have to really hit Technorati to see more of what I'm talking about, but Feisty is as buggy as the beta I tested a short time ago. After completely tossing into the wilds of the ubber-buggy "network-manager," anything running with Edgy supported RT2500 driver shows up, but it will not connect without a special script. Those of you who are on Feisty and need help with your RT2500 cards are welcome to e-mail me for the bash script."

An anonymous reader writes "When a US legislator describes the Internet as a 'series of tubes' you just know that you're going to end up with some wacky laws on the books. Law professor Eric Goldman takes a look at the best and worst Internet laws in the U.S. Goldman offers an analysis of the biggies such as the DMCA, but also shines light on lesser-known laws like the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002. And he actually finds four Internet laws that aren't all bad."

UnreasonableMan writes to let us know that Robert Bussard, the fusion researcher whose talk at Google was discussed here a few months back, has won continued funding from the Navy. The word on this spread from Kent Brewster at the Speculations blog, who reportedly had the word from Bussard himself. (The link is to another blog that reproduces Brewster's post, because Speculations has no permalink.)

crazyeyes writes "This is easily the best article I've seen comparing data compression software. The author tests 11 compressors: 7-zip, ARJ32, bzip2, gzip, SBC Archiver, Squeez, StuffIt, WinAce, WinRAR, WinRK, and WinZip. All are tested using 8 filesets: audio (WAV and MP3), documents, e-books, movies (DivX and MPEG), and pictures (PSD and JPEG). He tests them at different settings and includes the aggregated results. Spoilers: WinRK gives the best compression but operates slowest; AJR32 is fastest but compresses least."

An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily has an interesting write-up on AMD's big Q1 loss and how the company plans to get back into the black. AMD admitted that Q1 was a meltdown and not just a miss. Looks like cost cutting, including layoffs, may be on the way. But the company says it won't change its overal direction. The CEO Hector Ruiz is quoted as saying, 'We are not going to change our strategy because of one lousy quarter.'"