The Phenom II X4 955 beats the i7 920 in 3 out of the 4 games they tried. The only one it lost was Cryis Warhead and it was a narrow loss (48 vs. 46 FPS).

These price difference of these two chips is about $35 on Newegg. I think for gamers, getting the X4 955 and putting that extra $35 towards the video card will net better results. This isn't counting the additional cost of DDR2 vs. DDR3 memory which has minimal effect on performance right now but still has a big price difference.

VT-x has been around since some of the later Pentium 4 chips released in November, 2005. The only Core 2 chips missing the feature are the low end ones - the ones branded Celeron and Pentium as well as the lowest end Core 2's. Still, it's pretty annoying, especially consdering all new AMD chips have AMD's version enabled.

I see this release finally includes drivers for RT2860 based wifi cards. This will definitely make my life easier as having to recompile the drivers manually every time a new kernel package came out was getting old. With that in place, this may finally be the first time I'll be able to install an Ubuntu system without having to hunt for any drivers.

Thankfully last time I did a frseh install, I remembered to put /home on a different partition, so I may just do another fresh install this time instead of upgrading.

Not quite... In 3G, the two frequencies are used together. One is for the uplink and one is for the download. 2100 in this case is the downlink. An iPhone wouldn't be able to establish the uplink via 3G making it unable to connect at 3G speeds at all.

ATT uses 850 for the uplink and 1900 for the downlink. Europe uses 1900 for the uplink and 2100 for the downlink. Hence the iPhone will work fine with ATT in the US and with carriers in Europe but not with T-Mobile (for 3G, that is).

T-Mobile and ATT use different frequencies for 3G. T-Mobile uses 1700/2100, ATT uses 850 and 1900. You can connectivity with EDGE but you won't be able to do 3G.

Anyway, just because it's contract free doesn't mean the phone is unlocked. It probably still has the ATT SIM card restriction in place.

When you buy a brand new keyboard for less than $5, then yes $69 is expensive.

The DSi has 802.11g connectivity, just not 3G like the iPhone. In that respect at least, it is competitive with the iPod Touch which also lacks 3G.

Don't confuse the regular DS with the DSi.

If you're married to Toyota, check out the Insight. The '10 Insight doesn't quite match up to the '10 Prius in MPG, but it has a $3K lower base price. The math works out much better for the Insight.

Serenity sounds like a module where lady astronauts would go to take care of various lady business. They need to give these things more masculine names like "Power Eagle Hammer 8000 Type R AMG".

You're right, there is absolutely nothing about this that makes it iPhone specific. Any camera phone with a web browser (or any other combination of camera and web browser...) can do the very same thing.

Of course, adding "iPhone" to the title of anything suddenly makes it 100x more newsworthy in the eyes of fanboys :)

I have a pair of cheap Airlink adapters from Frys that have been running well for several months now, despite them both being enclosed in areas with poor airflow. I use them to connect the Xbox (running XBMC) in my bedroom with my router in the living room.

The connection is fast enough to play back downloaded videos with zero issues. I tried some tests using computers at opposite ends of the house and was able to get around 3 or 4 MB/s transfer between them. My 802.11n wireless network usually peaks at around 6-8 MB/s, so while it is slower, it's not noticable for most tasks and still enough to max out my FIOS connection.

You could have a connector standard that was a standard micro-USB port next to a standardized audio or audio/video port - basically break out the iPod connector into two smaller connectors. You could plug in just a micro-USB cable to the micro-USB side, just a AV cable to the AV side, or use a standardized wider cable/connector that'd connect to both simultaneously.

You can get symmetrical speeds with FIOS. Their 20/20 plan is $65/month. Of course, the usual disclaimers about limited FIOS availability apply.

I use their 20/5 plan which is $10/month cheaper. 5 Mb/s is fast enough for all of the time critical upstream I need (VOIP and the occasional video call) and it's fast enough that I can get to a >1 share ratio on torrents in a reasonable amount of time. I'd rather put that $10 into savings instead.

Sure, it's true people frequently lose power when a storm is right on top of them, but there's a long period of time where you know the storm is coming your direction but isn't close enough to disrupt your power. During this, having the TV on and tuned to the news is the best way to know how long you have until it hits and how bad it could get when it does hit, so you can make the appropriate preparations proactively.