CEBIT IS THE PLACE where Thermaltake tends to drop its bombs, and this year it had the launch of a new venture for the company, gaming. There were also some interesting coolers and cases, but the Esports line was getting all the attention.
CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.
ONE PART that Thermaltake has been getting a lot of press for is the new Fermi GTX480 certified case, a variant of its mainstream Element V case. Other than the day-glo green trim, how does it differ from the normal ElementV? Let's take a look.
WHAT DO YOU get when you cross Apple, Siemens and Sisvel with the German police at CeBIT? Raids of course, with lots of police, lawyers, and people stripping booths clean of everything electronic.
WHAT DO YOU do when there is a major international trade show, and you can't even supply all your partners with upcoming parts? You threaten them, which is exactly what Nvidia did for its upcoming GTX480 at CeBIT.
THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.
THERE ARE A lot of curious things coming out of TSMC lately, and they all seem to center around dodging real questions. The problem is yields on their 40nm process, but TSMC will not address half of the reported problems publicly.
IT IS THAT TIME of year again, Nvidia's quarterly conference call for the financial set. Since the company gets pouty every time we try to ask it questions, we decided to publish an open list of questions for you, the people they have far less disdain for than SemiAccurate, to ask directly.
WITH ANOTHER LAUNCH of the Nvidia GT300 Fermi GF100 GTX480 upon us, it is time for an update on the status of that wayward part. Production parts have been coming back from TSMC for several weeks now, and the outlook for them is grim.
IF INTEL'S NEXT generation chip does indeed slip into 2011 as some rumors suggest, there is a very good reason for it. Intel works in strange and mysterious ways, and uses more Feng Shui than anyone would expect.
IN PART 2, we look at the overall findings of the scanner, and a close look at each one. Also included is a look back at the 2007 results in light of the new data.
The Symbian platform, which has been developed over more than 10 years and has shipped in more than 330 million devices around the world, is now completely open and the source code is available for free. According to the Symbian Foundation, an industry group; the transition from proprietary code to open source has been the largest such project in software history.
THIS PAPER FOCUSES on the accuracy and time needed to run, review and supplement the results of the web application scanners (Accunetix, Appscan by IBM, BurpSuitePro, Hailstorm by Cenzic, WebInspect by HP, NTOSpider by NT OBJECTives) as well as the Qualys managed scanning service.
DESPITE THE EXCITEMENT ahead of the launch of the iPad, it seems like Apple has failed to impress not only the media, but even a large share of its otherwise loyal community. It’s not just the name that has been ridiculed, but the device itself just isn’t what most hoped it would be and this could possibly be Apple’s first failure in many years.
NVIDIA'S GF100 ARCHITECTURE is falling into the same trap that G200 did, shooting for the moon at the cost of the parts that pay the bills. Let's take a look at the architecture and how it stacks up in the market once again.
EVERY COUPLE OF years the death of the desktop PC is announced and we’re told that notebooks are set to replace the humble desktop as not only are they getting faster but they look so much better, use less power and of course they’re much more desirable than a desktop PC. However, the New York Times Bits blog talked to a few technology companies at CES about the desktop PC and according to them, it’ll still be around, for now.
IT LOOKS LIKE Nvidia's mighty mobile business is hitting the skids, and it is going back to competing on price again, begging for deals and renaming the G92 again. The problem is seen with the release of the renamed 3xxM mobile GPUs, and how these are messaged.
NVIDIA IS TRYING to make Ion2, its next generation 'chipset' seem like something it is not, but the specs say otherwise. It is just a warmed over G218 integrated graphics chip with a few ports added on.
REMEMBER THE TRIUMPHANT WIN for Fermi at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that Nvidia heavily touted at its GDC conference keynote? The supercomputer project was just killed for power reasons. Fermi power reasons. Whoops.
ANOTHER SHOE HAS DROPPED on the heads of Intel's legal team. This time it is an FTC lawsuit saying that the company is anticompetitive. Time for the fun to begin again.
SEVERAL CANADIAN ARTISTS have formed a group to sue the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) and the four major music labels EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner for copyright infringment.
Expensive niche standard on an expensive niche standard
ATI IS GETTING on board the Blu-ray Stereoscopic 3D train before it even exists. Lets hear it for an expensive and mostly useless standard that adds on to a expensive and mostly useless standard known for customer abuse.
WITH SEVERAL REALLY useful new standards on the horizon, wouldn't it be nice if there was a board or two that did both, USB3.0 and SATA3, and did them well? If you have been waiting for such a beast, the '333 Series' Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and X58 Extreme 2 are the boards for you.
THE BIG CONTENT MAFIAA just lost another round in the war on consumer rights, and they lost badly. The Pirate Bay won again, ironically by doing exactly what the MAFIAA wanted.
OFFICIAL WORD FROM NVIDIA is that gaming is now a footnote for the formerly leading graphics company, its latest and greatest Fermi chip won't see the light of day until at least Q1 of 2010, and Fermi's clock speeds so far are massively off what the firm had hoped for. Yup, it is a mess, just like we told you.
HP ANNOUNCED that it will buy 3Com for $2.7 billion the other day, and with one swipe of pen on checkbook validated Cisco's strategy. HP also showed that it won't be able to compete in the converged network arena for years to come.
NVIDIA IS KILLING the GTX260, GTX275, and GTX285 with the GTX295 almost assured to follow as it abandons the high and mid range graphics card market. Due to a massive series of engineering failures, nearly all of the company's product line is financially under water, and mismanagement seems to be killing the company.
WHAT DO YOU DO when you have nothing, and are facing quarters of buying markeshare and have no competitive products on the horizon? If you are Nvidia, you spin, and use the F, fear, U, uncertainty, and D, doubt, in FUD to pretend there are shortages.
INTEL'S LAST KEYNOTE of IDF focused on TVs and how PCs could integrate with them. All it managed to do is convince me that the future is darker than I had feared, the wrong forces are in control, and Intel doesn't understand this market.
ONE OF THE FEATURES of the upcoming ATI Evergreen family, also known as the 5-series, is a tessellator. While this might be old news to graphics card enthusiasts, this time it really is different, mainly because Microsoft is finally backing the technology.
WHAT DO YOU do when a large company you are doing business with flatly refuses to obey the law? T-Mobile did that to us the other day, and now they have taken customer service to a low that is hard to put into words. Yes Virginia, it can get worse.
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE you hear of poor corporate behavior, but T-Mobile just told me that it simply would not follow the law. No, really, one of its droids was read the law, offered a chance to look it up, and still said no way.
WHAT HAPPENS IF you do something really stupid at Defcon, or even in greater Las Vegas? You get arrested, which is precisely why Jim Rennie gave a talk titled, "So You Got Arrested at Defcon....".
WHEN YOU DO something wrong, the best thing you can do is come clean and not cover it up. Covering things up only makes things worse, especially if you do it in a panicked way.
ONE OF THE few things worse than being woken up by an alarm clock at 7am after getting to a hotel well past midnight is being woken up before 7am by a phone call from a very angry Wolfgang Gruener. That was the first time the dirty underside of plagiarism in the IT journalism world directly made my life interesting, but far from the last.
INTEL DROPPED A bombshell on the market today with a little bullet point and a few carefully chosen words. Opening up Atom to third parties to interface with willy-nilly went from impossible to product in the space of one slide.
GOOGLE IS FINALLY launching an operating system called Chrome OS. The big loser in all of this is Microsoft, but there are two others that will also take a huge hit, Intel and AMD.
Part 1: Because of Windows, Google doesn't have to try
HANDS UP ANYONE who didn't see the Google Chrome OS coming, no points if you are an MS CxO? MS has only itself to blame for the nuclear missile that may very well have ended the company, they simply produced crap for way too long.
IN ORDER TO GAIN access to the Chinese market, US companies have co-operated in one way or another with government requests to restrict freedom of access to the Internet. Why are those companies pushing back now because of China's new Green Dam web filter?
AFTER HAVING ATTENDED the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's (SIFMA) annual technology conference in Manhattan for several years, this years event came as quite a shock. Attendance was down noticeably, and several big names were not in attendance.
The TJX retail chain has agreed to pay $9.75 million to the states after a huge data breach that exposed the personal information of millions of cardholders to identity thieves. They have also agreed to implement and maintain a “comprehensive information security program”, supposedly designed to safeguard consumer data at TJX. Since they already attested that they were complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards, why should consumers believe them now?
THE CASE OF JAMIE THOMAS-RASSET came to a close today as the jury returned a verdict that she had willingly and knowingly downloaded 24 different songs from KaZaA, violating the copyright of the companies represented by the RIAA.
THE MORNING WAS SLOW at RIAA vs Thomas, and both jurors and spectators were assaulted multiple times by Richard Marx ballads before the plaintiffs finally rested. Three days and innumerable legal opinions later, the RIAA’s final arguments were made by a succession of copyright lawyers listening to Sarah MacGlachlan and sagely nodding their heads at dusty pieces of paper from the US copyright office.
INTEL JUST TRANSITIONED their product naming schemes from annoying to downright stupid. The new branding schemes make no sense and will only add confusion to a line that is already almost impenetrable.
IT'S A RARE TREAT for a member of the public to be able to walk into a regular, everyday federal courtroom and watch veteran attorneys make mistakes that would have Johnnie Cochran rolling over in his grave.
IN THE CAPITOL RECORDS vs Thomas-Rasset media sharing trial, one thing became clear, the RIAA lawyers are down at least 100 IQ points on the defense. It shows too.
WHEN YOU KNOW what is going on, it makes sorting rumors from truth a lot easier. One of the biggest tricks has leaked almost entirely out, so lets give you the rundown on the latest ATI code names.
THE THERMALTAKE LEVEL 10 is the most striking and beautiful case to come out in the last few years. After a sneak peek at CeBIT, it finally got an official unveiling today.
CEBIT IS THE PLACE where Thermaltake tends to drop its bombs, and this year it had the launch of a new venture for the company, gaming. There were also some interesting coolers and cases, but the Esports line was getting all the attention.
CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.
WHAT DO YOU get when you cross Apple, Siemens and Sisvel with the German police at CeBIT? Raids of course, with lots of police, lawyers, and people stripping booths clean of everything electronic.
WHAT DO YOU do when there is a major international trade show, and you can't even supply all your partners with upcoming parts? You threaten them, which is exactly what Nvidia did for its upcoming GTX480 at CeBIT.
THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.
THERE ARE A lot of curious things coming out of TSMC lately, and they all seem to center around dodging real questions. The problem is yields on their 40nm process, but TSMC will not address half of the reported problems publicly.
IN PART 2, we look at the overall findings of the scanner, and a close look at each one. Also included is a look back at the 2007 results in light of the new data.
DESPITE THE EXCITEMENT ahead of the launch of the iPad, it seems like Apple has failed to impress not only the media, but even a large share of its otherwise loyal community. It’s not just the name that has been ridiculed, but the device itself just isn’t what most hoped it would be and this could possibly be Apple’s first failure in many years.
SEVERAL CANADIAN ARTISTS have formed a group to sue the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) and the four major music labels EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner for copyright infringment.
ATI IS GETTING on board the Blu-ray Stereoscopic 3D train before it even exists. Lets hear it for an expensive and mostly useless standard that adds on to a expensive and mostly useless standard known for customer abuse.
WITH SEVERAL REALLY useful new standards on the horizon, wouldn't it be nice if there was a board or two that did both, USB3.0 and SATA3, and did them well? If you have been waiting for such a beast, the '333 Series' Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and X58 Extreme 2 are the boards for you.
THE BIG CONTENT MAFIAA just lost another round in the war on consumer rights, and they lost badly. The Pirate Bay won again, ironically by doing exactly what the MAFIAA wanted.
HP ANNOUNCED that it will buy 3Com for $2.7 billion the other day, and with one swipe of pen on checkbook validated Cisco's strategy. HP also showed that it won't be able to compete in the converged network arena for years to come.
ONE OF THE FEATURES of the upcoming ATI Evergreen family, also known as the 5-series, is a tessellator. While this might be old news to graphics card enthusiasts, this time it really is different, mainly because Microsoft is finally backing the technology.
WHAT DO YOU do when a large company you are doing business with flatly refuses to obey the law? T-Mobile did that to us the other day, and now they have taken customer service to a low that is hard to put into words. Yes Virginia, it can get worse.
WHAT HAPPENS IF you do something really stupid at Defcon, or even in greater Las Vegas? You get arrested, which is precisely why Jim Rennie gave a talk titled, "So You Got Arrested at Defcon....".
WHEN YOU DO something wrong, the best thing you can do is come clean and not cover it up. Covering things up only makes things worse, especially if you do it in a panicked way.
GOOGLE IS FINALLY launching an operating system called Chrome OS. The big loser in all of this is Microsoft, but there are two others that will also take a huge hit, Intel and AMD.
The TJX retail chain has agreed to pay $9.75 million to the states after a huge data breach that exposed the personal information of millions of cardholders to identity thieves. They have also agreed to implement and maintain a “comprehensive information security program”, supposedly designed to safeguard consumer data at TJX. Since they already attested that they were complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards, why should consumers believe them now?
INTEL JUST TRANSITIONED their product naming schemes from annoying to downright stupid. The new branding schemes make no sense and will only add confusion to a line that is already almost impenetrable.
WHEN YOU KNOW what is going on, it makes sorting rumors from truth a lot easier. One of the biggest tricks has leaked almost entirely out, so lets give you the rundown on the latest ATI code names.
THE THERMALTAKE LEVEL 10 is the most striking and beautiful case to come out in the last few years. After a sneak peek at CeBIT, it finally got an official unveiling today.