Latest News - Page 3233

In what one could describe as to be expected, Intel has declared the Gulftown is slated to become the Core i9 series of processors when launched.

The news from INPAI.com.cn follows earlier decisions by Intel to rebrand the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips as Core i3 and add confusion to consumers who were actually starting to understand the rebranding when Intel originally shifted to the Core 2 branding years ago. Now while the average enthusiast is going to know what is going on and not be fooled by what is going on here, the average consumer is going to get screwed into thinking Core i3 is something new, much like NVIDIA has done with the the 8800GT.

Hmmm this is interesting; despite hearing about how little AMD is interested in the netbook market we find news that there will be a new AMD based netbook available soon.

The company responsible for this is called Medion the name of the book will be the Akoya Mini E1312.

What makes it even more interesting is that although the product is classified as a netbook it is using a low powered Sempron 2100U and an ATi Radeon TM Xpress 1250 Graphics Chip. The rest of the E1312 is pretty common with an 11.6 Inch display, 160GB HDD, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 1.3 MP web camera, WiFi (b/g/n) you know the drill by now.

Although not really computer related news I thought this was interesting. The new LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) has sent back some of its first images.

The images were shot right on the edge of the terminator (the line between the dark and light sides of the moon) they were intended to map out suitable areas for future manned landing sites.

Now the interesting part is that although none of these images are near any of the landing sites, many "no-moon-landing" skeptics are already using this to "prove" that man never went to the moon.

Information about Intel's next generation 32nm CPU has found its way onto the internet. The new chunk of silicon is being called SandyBridge and represents a new architecture all together.

Intel has always followed a tick-tock schedule. In this way each CPU design gets to run on two separate Processes while each Process will see a new architectural design. SandyBridge is the new design for 32nm.

The new CPU will feature more integration including an integrated graphics chip. So far SandyBridge has only been taped out, but they still expect it to reach production grade by 2011. SandyBridge should maintain the 1156 Socket used by the upcoming i5 CPU.

AOL could be facing some legal troubles. It seems that in an effort to gain a little more money they have been upgrading former employees free AOL accounts to paid accounts without notification or indeed without any kind of billing.

Now this would have gone unnoticed but one of the former employees now works for the Wall Street Journal. The former Employee (Jason Zweig) wrote his experience up on the popular online publication for the world to see.

Apparently AOL is threatening to send this not to collections without any signed agreement, bill, or any other type of documentation. The upgrade was "automatic" according to one support representative Zweig spoke with, yet they could not provide any supporting documentation other than to say the agreement was on "page C" (or was that D?).

Thermaltake has unveiled the ProWater PW880i LCS, providing a complete water cooling solution for the PC while mounting externally.

The external design of the PW880i makes installation and maintenance of the system much easier than convential water cooling systems and doesn't affect internal airflow within the case. The entire system mounts to a bracket which attaches to the rear fan mount of the case.

Several months ago, stories of unlocking the fourth core in the Phenom II X3 chips through a simple BIOS option were making huge news on the web, and now it looks like there is even more to the story.

After playing with the BIOS a little more, aOverClocked inside has figured out how to not only unclock the extra core in the chip, but turn the Phenom II X3 into an Engineering Sample as well. Any overclocker knows that this is good news, as ES chips have unlocked multipliers.

Just weeks after launching the iPhone 3G S, Apple is receiving numerous complaints about the battery life of the new phone.

Users of the new iPhone are having a lot of problems even making it through an entire day without the phone dying, forcing them to stop for a charge somewhere in the middle. Strangely enough, Apple touted the phone as having bettery battery life than that of its predecessors.

And all is well in the iPhone world again. At about 2:00AM GeoHot, the man with all the plans released purplera1n a jailbreak for all of the 3G S owners out there.

This means that all three of the mighty Apples have fallen to the Jailbreak community.

The new Jailbreak is not without its issues, as of right now it only works with Windows XP and Windows Vista. Windows 7 and OSX users have to wait a little longer.

While doing a little bit of digging in the latest leaked version of Windows 7, Kristan Kenney discovered that Microsoft may still be considering multiple installs of the OS.

Considering that Microsoft has announce in the past that they were considering multi-PC licensing and Apples upcoming Snow Leopard is said to be coming in a five-user pack for families, it wouldn't seem too far fetched. The Software License Terms for Windows 7 makes mention of a Family Pack and details that it can be installed on no more than three computers.

It would appear that one's package can indeed make a difference, and sometimes not a good one, with several systems makers in a jam because of a limited exclusion order prohibiting the import of chips from six companies found to be infringing packaging patents.

The two packaging patents in question belong to Tessera Technologies and the issues resulting from the infringement are having repercussions for firms including AMD, Freescale Semiconductor, Motorola, Spansion, ST Microelectronics and Qualcomm.

An engineer from Nordson who rely on Freescale chips complained "We were told we can't get the Freescale MCF5282 after July 17 for at least a year due to patent infringement," adding "This is causing quite a ruckus in engineering." And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

In the food chain of portable computers there is a new entry, dubbed the CULV or thin and light. These are the stop gap between the traditional laptop and the low powered netbook.

The problem is that these are having some issues in reaching the consumer in one piece.

According to reports manufacturers of thin and lights are finding that the plastic used to make the casings are cracking under the stress of holding the parts in and under normal wear and tear.

There is a win for consumer rights as Dell is being held accountable for an error in advertising on their Taiwan website.

The site depicted a 19-inch LCD monitor for the low price of NT$500 which is about $15 US dollars. In the eight hours that the ad existed roughly 26,000 orders were placed for the monitor. Dell did not want to send the monitors out but have been ordered to honor the price for one monitor and all single purchases and to offer diminishing discounts for people that bought more than one.

If Dell does not comply they will be facing legal action for violating the Taiwanese Fair Trade Laws.

Psystar, everyone's favorite Mac Cloner has risen from the ashes of Chapter 11 fires to announce yet another product.

What is this new product? Well if you were not able to guess for yourself I will tell you. It is another Hackintosh. This one dubbed the Open(7) will feature Intel Nehalem CPUs adding quite an extra kick to their performance.

Despite being hammered in court by the white clad Apple attorneys Psystar is still fighting the heavy thumb of Apple. They do not seem concerned at all with the ongoing demands of Apple to find out who is backing them or even the disruption of chapter 11. In a newsletter they say simply;

Although this is more Apple news it seems that there is a flaw (everyone stop to gasp) in the new iPhone OS 3.0 Software. This flaw revolves around how the iPhone handles SMS messaging.

According to very limited details it seems that the undisclosed flaw could allow malicious code to be inserted giving an evildoer root access to the thermally challenged device.

Charlie Miller, the person who discovered the flaw went on to say that despite the SMS flaw that the iPhone OS is still very secure. He praised Apple's decision to remove Flash and Java (despite advertising a full and "real" internet experience) stating that they are potential vectors for attack.

This is an issue in the world of security. It seems that many companies do not want people to know about gaps in their security or planning.

For the second year running a talk at Defcon/Black Hat covering a security hole in an automated service has been canceled. Last year it was after the Boston Transit Authority filed an injunction on three MIT students for exposing a flaw in their smart card payment system. This year it is a talk exposing a flaw in something that everyone uses, the Automated Teller.

It seems that there is a serious flaw in the software used in some ATMs that can allow a malicious person to access the internal network and to steal pin and account numbers. Barnaby Jack was going to discuss this at length and was also going to demonstrate both remote and local attacks on an unmodified ATM.

We told you yesterday that some 3G S iPhones are overheating and discoloring their white plastic back covers. While these reports have been going around the net Apple remained mysteriously quite.

Now thanks to sharp eyed people we find a new warning up on the Apple support site. The new warning (dated June 25 2009) says the operating temperature range for the iPhone 3G and 3G S.

To put it simply, unless you live in a idyllic part of the world that gets neither very hot nor very cold you should not use the iPhone 3G or 3G S. The operating range is quite simply ridiculous.

Rumors have been flying around like crazy lately concerning the PS3 and it looks like Foxconn has confirmed at least one of them, maybe more.

Foxconn and Pegatron have landed a contract with Sony, each getting 50% of the orders on a new PS3. This would be the newer, slimmer redesign that many have been eagerly awaiting. Pictures of the slim PS3 were spotted and Sony swiftly sent a cease and desist notice to have them removed, adding some credibility to the spotting.

Those looking forward to playing StarCraft II at LAN parties will be unhappy to hear that Blizzard will not be including LAN capabilities in the game.

Blizzard stated that there were two reasons backing their decision to exclude LAN play from Starcraft II. First up is that Blizzard wants to ensure that players receive the highest quality experience possible and the only way they can do that is to direct people to the upgraded Battle.net service.

IBM has teamed up with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) to build a super efficient water cooled supercomputer which could lower the system's carbon footprint by a whopping 85 per cent.

The Aquasar system, which boasts two IBM BladeCenter servers in one rack and peak performance of 10 Teraflops, will use chip-level water-cooling as well as reusing any excess heat to warm the university's buildings.