Windows 7 Beta 1 was leaked to the torrent net this weekend, with the usual suspects hosting the files.

Windows 7 has caused quite a stir and has received more positive press than just about any other OS in MS history at this stage. Personally I find it very funny as 7 is nothing more than a Vista Kernel with a new GUI and a few basic improvements. Which makes me wonder where all of the anti-DRM fanatics are? This crowd lambasted Vista for its DRM and HDCP inclusions which are still present (and even more locked down) in 7 yet they are silent or praising 7.

To me it sounds like some hypocrisy is going on.

Particle Physicist Brian Cox seems to think that Macs are the end all beat all for Physicists. In a long and gushing article on Apple's website he goes on to explain why he has chosen this and why he feels others in the Particle Physics world use the Fruity Toy too.

Cox declaims "because they're essentially UNIX" Physicists that have been using UNIX in the past love the ability to use a terminal shell and type in UNIX commands. He also declares that Macs can still natively compile FORTRAN and other legacy code without the same issues that Windows has.

What I find the most interesting is that he is willing to pay significantly more for his "UNIX" based Mac than he would getting a standard PC and running Linux. I wonder if Mr. Cox is aware that Linux is also UNIX based or that there are a large number of compilers for FORTRAN for Windows. If Physics like to keep things the same (as Mr. Cox suggests) that list should have them Windows happy as they are just upgraded versions of the compilers they have been using for 20 years.

Things are not looking good for Telstra. If rumors are to be believed the TelCom giant could be looking at losing some of its network arm to the national broadband project.

According to an article in International Herald Tribune Telstra could be left out of the building of this new broadband network due to demands it put on the government. Telstra wanted to be assured that it would not be broken up and the Australian Government responded by saying they could build the network without them. A Government Panel recommended against using Telstra on the 18th of December because Telstra wanted to keep all the goodies to itself.

The problem there is that technically the new network cannot be built without Telstra (or at least without some of their infrastructure). The other companies in consideration for the project do not have the resources to build a national network and would need to take some of Telstra's to get the job done. This means that Telstra would either need to willingly allow another company to use parts of its infrastructure or legislation would have to be used to force them.

ASRock has kindly allowed us an exclusive sneak peek at its upcoming M3A790GXH/128M motherboard which uses the new AM3 socket with Hyper-Transport 3.0 and carries DDR3 memory support!

Using the AMD 790GX + SB750 chipsets, the board is backward compatible with existing AM2+/AM2 processors and makes use of DDR3 1333/1066/800 memory across four DIMM slots with up to 16GB max capacity.

The now extremely unpopular government in Australia * is planning to launch a trial of its P2P filtering over the Christmas holidays.

To call the filtering idea bad is describe an axe murder as a mild social deviation. When first announced the filter was supposed block access to illegal content such as pornography involving minors. Now it has bloomed into what can only be described as a Film and TV industry driven fiasco.

Despite public disapproval, the warnings of security experts on the dangers of the filters used and the sheer pointlessness of filtering on this scale. The live pilot will go through.

Sometimes being first out with a product is not a good thing. ECS in a rush to get back in the limelight has just announced an AMD AM3 DDR3 mainboard.

This board that will feature the 790GX chipset and the SD750 will be in a class by itself for some time as there are not going to be any DDR3 capable Phenom IIs for a couple of months.

Still ECS can claim they had it first.

Engadget has caught a glimpse of HP's Voodoo-designed Firebird 803 tower PC and it's quite the interesting looking unit indeed. Unlike the monster-ish Blackbird 002, this system is a much more streamlined, compact arrangement whilst still being marketed as a "gaming tower".

The weird yet sleek design of the chassis flips the disc drive and other internal components sideways to keep its width to an absolute minimum. The power supply is also external to the main box to assist in further space saving (and deals with potential heat problems this way as well). The downside is its expansion possibilities are minimized by running this design and pretty much what you get out of the box is what you're limited to.

Some early benchmarking results of AMD's yet to be officially released Phenom II series processors have surfaced on the web which give a good indication of the expected performance characteristics.

A fellow by the name of coolice over at Malaysian tech site BreakTheLimit has somehow gotten hold of a Phenom II X4 940 processor and puts it through its paces at its stock speed of 3GHz in a wide array of tests, including Super Pi 1M and 32M, Cinebench R10, PiFast Multithreaded, WPrime 1.5, Aquamark and 3DMark06.

We've heard and seen a lot about NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce 295 dual-GPU graphics card recently, but little has been mentioned about the next flagship single-GPU offering; the GeForce GTX 285. We know that the card is based on NVIDIA's refined 55nm G200b core and apparently it runs identical specs to the existing GTX 280s, but will come in with higher reference clock speeds yet eats less power.

Now we get to see a bit more about how this relates in real world terms with ChipHell scoring two slides from NVIDIA which show a few of the GTX 285's specs and some benchmark results of the card up against an existing GTX 280 on a Core i7 platform across a series of gaming tests.

The gang over at Psystar are grabbing at straws lately. They have been in an ongoing legal battle with the Mighty Apple over their Apple Clones and now have come up with a very interesting legal argument.

Psystar's lawyers are claiming that Apple never properly copyrighted OSX.

Now there is an entry in the U.S. Copyright database but the date of filing is January 2008. If this is accurate it could be a big blow to Apple as (for the most part) you cannot copyright something after the fact and then sue someone using it.