Comment ... and an Embedded DRM (Score 1) 116
Apparently plus an embedded DRM according to this article from The Inquirer. Previous generation is looking better and better.
Comment Is this the Tock? (Score 2, Informative) 116
The Sandy Bridge architecture, aside from the die shrink and subsequent increase in clock rate which that entails, in my opinion, is not that much of an improvement over the previous i7 Lynnfield architecture (i7 860, 870, 875k, 880). Here is an article that benchmarks a Sandy Bridge CPU vs an i875k where the frequency of both processors set to 3.4 GHZ... not that big of an improvement.
Funny thing is many of the articles today are praising the chip as a big improvement over Lynnfield not making it clear that this is most likely due to the clock rate increase.
Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 82
Good points! In this era of boring iPhones, iPads, and other gadgets that look alike it is nice to see folks still modding cases so these stand out from the rest.
Comment Sandy Bridge (Score 1) 230
I don't see Intel's Sandy Bridge on the list... won't be available 'til January.
Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed 1352
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!
Comment Re:Gawker? Scadenfreude Central Hoist on own Petar (Score 1) 236
I understand your pain. I didn't even realize I an email of mine was in the Gawker database until I got an email from them advising me that my email password might have been compromised. It turned out I did register for LifeHacker long time before it got bought out by Gawker. I couldn't even remember the password I used for that account so just to be safe changed all the passwords I had on various sites. Took me almost half a day to complete... what a pain in the rear.
Comment Re:EasyDNS (Score 4, Informative) 207
Not only that, Gawker seems to have an ongoing battle with Wikileaks, Assange, and anon via posts like this and this. They also appear to be taunting anon to hit them if they can... looks like they got what they wished for although as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity... especially for the Gawker media empire.
Comment Re:Guilty much? (Score 1) 685
Since the information is already out there, coercing and/or intimidating people (I suspect this is not just targeted at students but to all people who have hopes of working for the feds in the future) from joining the discussion about the leaked info just goes to show the hypocrisy of the gov.
Comment Folks have learned their lesson (Score 1) 351
Folks cannot trust Microsoft that it will stick with Windows Phone 7 in the long run. They have seen Pocket PC, Zune, and various embedded OSes and gadgets from Microsoft abandoned in the last couple of years.
Submission + - Ohio takes the lead in offshoring fight (computerworld.com)
cyclocommuter writes: From this Computerworld article: There are anti-outsourcing efforts in almost every state, but few are as loud and aggressive about it as Ohio. This is a state that has suffered major job losses in manufacturing, and the anger about those losses has put offshore outsourcing in the cross-hairs of state politics.
IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours" 360
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog Microsoft's Ted Johnson writes, 'With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system's native support makes it even harder. Windows' DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.' Some Mozillians hit back in the comments to the IE Blog post and others have written blog posts of their own. PC Mag's Michael Muchmore seems to conclude that IE9 and Firefox 4 are more or less the same (despite the title of his article) while Chrome currently lags behind."
Gartner Predicts Android Most Popular Mobile OS By 2014 180
mikesd81 writes "According to Gartner research firm, Google's Android smartphone operating system will in a single year have leapfrogged competitors like Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's Blackberry and Microsoft Windows phones in global popularity, and will challenge Nokia to become the world's most popular mobile OS by 2014. Gartner says that the explosive growth of Android will give it 17.7% of world wide sales by the end of 2010. ... Analysts also say there are number of things that could derail Android's growth, including Oracle's lawsuit over Java patents."
Submission + - Why Andy Grove is right (cnet.com)
cyclocommuter writes: From TFA: Former Intel CEO Andy Grove is dead on about the dire need to come up with policies to create more manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Look no further than the bustling economies in Asia if there is any doubt.
Submission + - Scientists: Size of Oil Spill Underestimated (nytimes.com)
cyclocommuter writes: From the NYT article: Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who is an expert in the analysis of oil slicks, said he had made his own rough calculations using satellite imagery. They suggested that the leak could “easily be four or five times” the government estimate, he said.
Sun Pushes Emergency Java Patch 90
Trailrunner7 writes "In a sudden about-face, Sun has rushed out a Java update to fix a drive-by download vulnerability that exposed Windows users to in-the-wild malware attacks. The patch comes less than a week after Sun told a Google researcher it did not consider the issue serious enough to warrant an out-of-cycle patch and less than a day after researchers spotted live exploits on a booby-trapped Web site. The flaw, which was also discovered independently by Ruben Santamarta, occurs because the Java-Plugin Browser is running 'javaws.exe' without validating command-line parameters. Despite the absence of documentation, a researcher was about to figure out that Sun removed the code to run javaws.exe from the Java plugin. The about-face by Sun is another sign that some big vendors still struggle to understand the importance of working closely with white hat researchers to understand the implications of certain vulnerabilities. In this case, Google's Tavis Ormandy was forced to use the full-disclosure weapon to force the vendor into a proper response."
