Independent financial advisory outfit, Collins Stewart, has released its "Tech Food Chain Update" in which it claims the The restocking cycle in the PC food chain is behind us and that from this month onwards, production will have to match demand or sell through.

The firm took a look at the market for PCs, CPUs and Flash memory, painting a rather more upbeat picture to the one we've had repeatedly rammed down our throats the past few months of this recession.

Dell says it has hooked up with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stick little gold star's denoting energy efficiency on all its servers.

The EPA, which we erroneously believed consisted solely of Al Gore wearing a cape, must be very proud of Dell, seeing as the computer maker is apparently the first major vendor to certify entire platforms to meet its performance per watt requirements. Not only that, but Dell is also boasting its PowerEdge R610 and R710 server platforms have qualified for the new Energy Star specification too.

We know the i5 is on the way. The new 1156 socket CPU with dual channel support from Intel should be hitting the streets some time later this year.

But what about the mainboards to support it? We know there are a couple being prepared (Gigabyte and Asus have shown some off) but where is Intel's own offering.

Well have no fear; Intel is prepping no less than five boards for your i5 love. The boards are looking to be all variants on the same theme (powered by a P55 Chipset) and will be called the DP55KG, DP55SB, DP55WB and DP55WG.

I am always on the lookout for unusual news and this one fits right in there.

A Forbes' reporter took a Panasonic Toughbook CF-30 and decided he was going to find a way to destroy it. Not all at once as there are many things that will kill off even the hardiest of machines but to see exactly how much it could take before dying.

After exhausting the official Panasonic claims they fed it to a Tiger, allowed an Elephant to step on it and finally shot it with a .22.

I have said it before and I will say it again, an iPhone is good but a jailbroken iPhone is better and if this is the iPhone 3G S it is better still.

For those of you that have played around with a jailbroken iPhone you know that there are some pretty impressive games on Cydia, everything from the original Doom to a Pacman like game.

Well then the emulators started showing up and you would play even more games. With the more powerful graphics on the 3G S the third party emulator devs have dived in. One has even come up with an emulator for the Play Station 1 and GameBoy Advanced.

We told you that the New Zune HD will have an nVidia Tegra inside. We showed you confirmation of that (and actually have additional confirmation from Derek Perez).

But we did not know when we would see these potential serious competitors for the iPod. Well now we may have a date for you. According to an article over at Fudzilla we might see the new Zune HD in September.

The capacities will be limited to 16GB and 32GB. This is a shame as a 64 and 128GB model would probably have sold better especially given the "HD" quality video playback.

Mvix is gearing up to release their latest Media Player in the next few days and it looks to be quite a promising product.

The Mvix Ultio MX-800 is set to be their most comprehensive Media Player to date. Not only does it support just about any format of audio, video, or picture that you can throw at it including MP4, AVI, FLV, MKV, VOB, H.264, FLAC, OOG, AAC, TIFF, PNG, and much much more.

Sugar Labs, the open sourcerer which came up with the software for One Laptop per Child's (OLPC) little laptop has now announced it has bunged its OS onto a USB stick which can be used on any old computer. Literally.

Sugar on a stick, as it's being called rather sweetly, can be run directly from a 1GB USB drive, giving kids a veritable candy mountain of collaborative educational software to play with. The stick, unwrapped at the LinuxTag conference in Berlin, aims to sugar coat the market with free software, according to its Sugar Labs developers, who only recently broke off from OLPC.

The gang over at Engadget got to play around with the new HTC Hero and so far they are loving it.

The new Hero does feaure Android but it is not a Google branded product. This means you are not going to get loaded down with the Google logo, but it also means that you won't be getting over the air updates also.

There are going to be a host of new features but one of the ones they liked the best was the Teflon outer coating.

Buffalo has announced that they are refreshing their RUF2-PS line of tiny flash drives, bringing a 16GB model into the mix.

For those that are unfamiliar with the Buffalo RUF2-PS flash drives, they are super compact drives that are just marginally larger than the USB connector itself. The drives fit almost flush with the USB port they are connected to, measuring 18mm x 18mm x 8mm and weigh only 3 grams.

VIZIO has announced their fall lineup of HDTV options, bringing eight new models between 32" and 55".

The 42", 47", and 55" XVT series TVs operate at 240Hz, two of which VIZIO has incorporated their TruLED and Smart Dimming backlight technology. VIZIO's 32" and 37" displays will operate at 120Hz and are part of their Slim line. All of the new models do full 1080p and have a Mega Dynamic Contrast Ration of up to 2,000,000:1.

Yesterday we commented on OCZ extending their warranties on their Vertex and Summit solid state drives and provided some speculation towards their reasoning behind the extra year of warranty.

OCZ reached out to us to provide some additional clarification on the issue and wants everyone to know that the added year of warranty is strictly to offer a better product all around, including the post-sales support of their products. There are NO quality issues with the Vertex and Summit series drives, NO changes have been made to the drives, and those that have purchased the drives prior to OCZ offering the extended warranty are JUST AS ELIGIBLE for those that purchase these drives now that the waranty has been extened.

The bi-annual TOP500 supercomputing sites list was released today at the annual International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, with AMD finding itself top of the list once again.

AMD was boasting the largest processor share of the top 20 and top 25 highest performing supercomputers in the 33rd edition of the Top 500 supercomputer rankings, as well as the top 2 overall ("Roadrunner" and "Jaguar") and the top 2 academic research clusters - from the University of Tennessee (#6) and the University of Texas (#8). Overall four of the top 10 supercomputers used AMD Opteron processors. Even the recently launched Six-Core AMD Opteron processor has already appeared in two Cray XT5 supercomputers.

We have heard tell that MSI will likely (paper) launch its brand new MS-1241 tomorrow based on AMD's Yukon platform.

The little lappie is a lightweight, low-cost 690E which MSI hopes will be something of a challenger to HP's Dv2. Not that it's particularly hard to challenge the DV2 in this writer's opinion.

If you are disappointed by the looks of your new iPhone 3G S well then ColorWare has a solution for you.

They have announced a simple process where you can send in your iPhone 3G S and have the back cover dyed to a different color. But the fun does not stop there.

You can have them change the normally chrome bezel, the home button, your headphones, and the SIM-Card holder. You do have to send the phone to them (if you are in the US) to get these exciting new colors added.

In the not too distant past we have talked about TSMC's poor 40nm yields and how it affects nVidia, ATi and now GlobalFoundries. The issue is that the 40nm process from TSMC is simply as leaky as a Microsoft Beta test.

It is not doing well. This is not so much of a monetary issue for ATi, after all they only pay for complete and working chips. Sure the yields still hurt them but having limited supply but they are still only paying for the GPUs that work. nVidia, on the other had pays by the wafer so the poor yields affect them more directly. Not only do they have a supply issue but they also pay for GPUs that can't be sold.

This has opened the door for GlobalFoundries, they are moving to 32nm rapidly and will be able to grab some of TSMCs business despite TSMC leapfrogging everyone to 28nm.

There is good news and bad in the world of Adobe's Flash Player 10.

The good news is that there is a new Beta out that looks like it will work with just about all of the smartphones out. This includes Android, Win Mobile, Palm's WebOS and Symbian.

The Bad news? Well if you have not figured it out, Apple's iPhone OS is not included again. Despite being promised for a couple of years Flash Player for iPhone is just not looking like it will happen anytime soon.

In the world of cellular phones the leading manufacturer in the world is not Apple like many think; but Nokia. This Finnish cellular giant has been a player in the game for a very very long time. They have made many innovative moves that have brought better and more flexible phones.

Now they look like they might be making another move, this one is not phone based (yet) but is a dive into the Netbook/MID pool. To make this change Nokia has chosen Intel as their CPU of choice. This is an interesting departure as they have been working with ARM for so long that bringing Intel in is a big deal.

Of course this could be a preview of things to come as Intel works hard on their own SoC design. It could be that we see Intel based Smart Phones from Nokia in the future.

When thinking about pusing something to the limit, usually it concerns finding the upper limit. User hackerman1 from The Windows Club forums wanted to go the other way however and see just how slow of a system he could get to run Windows 7.

(Click the above image for the large version)

There is some rather concerning news for Facebook users. It seems that a new Blog called FBHive has revealed that they can unmask certain personal information in a Facebook profile even if the user has elected to keep it private.

This could be a bad thing as it can lead to Identity Theft and potentially expose minors to who otherwise might be protected from predators. FBHive has not released details of the hack nor has Facebook confirmed the exploit at the time of this writing.

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