ThinSkin writes "As part of their 'Spring Refresh,' both AMD and Nvidia reveal new $250 graphics cards, the Radeon 4890 and GeForce GTX 275. ExtremeTech takes both cards and runs them through a gamut of gaming and synthetic benchmarks to decide which card triumphs over the other. Long story short, the GeForce takes the cake with impressive performance at its price, while the Radeon didn't show a high improvement over the cheaper Radeon 4870."

Amy Bennett writes "A recent poll of about 12,000 US business decision-makers by market researcher CoreBrand found that Microsoft's brand power has taken a dive over the past four years. According to the study, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful US company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries. The CEO of CoreBrand said: 'When you see something decline with increasing velocity, it's a concern.' To add some historical context, IBM suffered a much faster and more severe decline in brand power in the early 1990s and it took them 10 years to rebuild the brand's reputation."

holy_calamity writes "Nuclear powered space probes like Pioneer have 'nuclear batteries' that (very inefficiently) convert heat from decaying isotopes into electricity. US researchers think a new material that converts radiation directly into power instead could make nuclear batteries 20 times more efficient. (Unfortunately they will likely not be user-replaceable.) The material consists of gold, carbon nanotubes, and lithium hydride."

michuk writes "IBM's representative for KT182 (the committee empowered to vote on OOXML in Poland) accused the committee's chair of intentionally manipulating the process. A letter from the president of the body overseeing KT182, sent a month ago to the committee chair for distribution to all committee members, was never distributed. The letter recommended that, if consensus were not achieved on the OOXML vote, then Poland should abstain. This follows up my recent report on the OOXML process in Poland (also covered by Groklaw), it looks like things are going bad this time, at least as bad as in October." The EU is already investigating the Polish process based on complaints last fall. Is anyone tracking all of the allegations and investigations surrounding OOXML?

PaisteUser tips us to an Ars Technica report discussing how 28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers. The information comes out of the 158 pages of Microsoft emails that were handed over at the request of a judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit. NVIDIA has already faced a class-action lawsuit over the drivers. From Ars Technica: "NVIDIA had significant problems when it came time to transition its shiny, new G80 architecture from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The company's first G80-compatible Vista driver ended up being delayed from December to the end of January, and even then was available only as a beta download. In this case, full compatibility and stability did not come quickly, and the Internet is scattered with reports detailing graphics driver issues when using G80 processors for the entirely of 2007. There was always a question, however, of whether or not the problems were really that bad, or if reporting bias was painting a more negative picture of the current situation than what was actually occurring."

Matty the Monkey brings us a story from the BBC about silicon chips which can bend, flex, and even stretch. Researchers have developed a method to create circuits just 1.5 microns thick, which can then be bonded to a type of rubber to allow a great degree of flexibility. Scientists and companies see uses for these circuits in products ranging from "electronic paper" to form-fitting sensor devices to advanced brain implants. From BBC News: "To create the foldable chips, these circuit layers are deposited on a polymer substrate which is bonded in turn to a temporary silicon base. Following the deposition of the circuits, the silicon base is discarded to reveal delicate slivers of circuitry held in plastic. These are then bonded to a piece of pre-strained rubber. When the strain is removed, the rubber snaps back into shape, causing the circuits on the surface to wrinkle accordingly."