Archive for January, 2009
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
If you’re a kid that’s residing in Australia, you won’t want to miss the chance of getting your very own Acer Aspire One for free, courtesy of the Rudd Government’s Education Tax Refund, which entitles children to either $375 AUD ($250) or $750 AUD ($500) depending on their age to be used for “educational purposes.” This is great, as long as the kids spend it the right way. So, get them while they’re hot, and remember to check out the latest netbook here to make sure you don’t purchase a lemon with the free money that you’ll be getting.
Sydney Morning Herald via Portable Monkey
Posted in Internet | No Comments »
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
New Opera Mini browser for Android-based smart phones makes numerous improvements based on user feedback. After years of experience playing the underdog to Microsoft and Mozilla, and producing some of the lightest and fastest browsers around, Opera is seeing great success in the mobile market. Opera markets two browsers in the mobile realm: Opera Mobile (a more traditional, full featured browser) and Opera Mini, a lightweight browser which uses java to deliver precompressed content with requests and compression being handled by Opera’s servers.
When it comes to Opera Mini, one hot market is for the T-Mobile’s G1 – which runs Google’s Android OS — and other upcoming Android phones. After thorough beta testing, Opera has released Opera Mini 4.2, specially crafted to work well with Android phones. The new edition of the browser includes many features suggested by users during the beta process and implemented late in the development cycle.
The browser can now upload and download content including web pages and images to the phone’s SD memory card interface via added support for the JSR-75 (File API) standard. Video is now also supported by a handoff to the OS’s dedicated video player. Inline URL entry and full double tap zoom/unzoom are also now available.
The trackball and fonts were also tweaked and passwords made easier to enter. The team also patched up a number of bugs and glitches in the betas. Opera’s Thomas Ford states, “We focused on the top issues that Android users reported. The experience should be much better and we invite them to try it.” (more…)
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
According to statistics collected by Jon Peddie Research (JPR), GPU shipment numbers for Q4 2008 were just 72.35 million units. That represents a significant drop off from one year prior when GPU makers shipped 100.5 million units, and an even bigger drop from Q3 2008, which shipped 111.26 million GPUs.
All graphics vendors felt the pinch, but ATI appears to have been hit a little bit harder, giving up some market share to Nvidia. As of Q4 2008, Nvidia held a 31 percent share compared to ATI’s 19 percent. Intel still bested them both with a leading 48 percent share of the market.
“The fourth quarter is usually a positive quarter for the computer industry,” Dr. Jon Peddie said in a statement. “There has obviously been some inventory problems in the quarter as sales failed to live up to the optimistic expectations of the third quarter, 2008. Vendors were bracing for a slower than usual quarter due to economic factors, but performance this quarter was surprisingly low. Put simply, the market stalled in the fourth quarter.” (more…)
Posted in Hardware | No Comments »
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
A security researcher is warning of a possible security hole in the latest beta version of Windows 7.Researcher Long Zheng has posted both a description and a proof of concept for an issue which could allow an attacker to skirt the User Account Control (UAC) component in the new version of Windows.UAC is designed to monitor a system and notify the user when a program attempts to alter the system. Originally designed to help prevent malware infections, the software was disabled by many users and widely mocked for the barrage of dialog boxes it created in some systems.
To improve the software in Windows 7, Microsoft has set new guidelines for UAC which allow changes to Windows settings but require authorization to otherwise alter the system.
The problem, explains Zheng, is that UAC itself is controlled through system settings. This, argues the researcher, can allow an attacker to completely disable the protections without user notification. (more…)
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Faster And Cheaper
A manufacturing process shrink is a lot to get excited about for both vendors and their customers, as the change normally leads to increased performance and efficiency, while reducing production cost by increasing the number of units produced per wafer. But the eventual benefit to design firms often comes at a huge up-front cost, since significant alterations normally result in bugs that need to be fixed before a full production run can begin. Each test run costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it pays to get things right the first or second time. Production delays are an even costlier problem when new architecture is involved, which is why Nvidia normally updates its current products before introducing any new ones.
Today’s updated product, the GeForce GTX 285, makes the typical promises of improved performance and efficiency compared to the GeForce GTX 280 on which it is based. Let’s take a quick look at how it compares to other high-end solutions. (more…)
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