The distribution that I currently use, as mentioned i Starting off with Linux,n the previous paragraph, is Ubuntu 7.10. It is currently the newest version, but as all new things, there might be a few flaws. First thing to note, if you have used Windows most of your computing life, the first time you run Linux you will probably not like it. Mainly because of the differences between them. Although Ubuntu has a similar desktop system using Gnome, it is still a tad different. Below are 2 pictures, the first being Windows XP Taskbarthe Windows XP task bar, and the second my current task bar using Ubuntu.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

As you can see, there is not much of a difference, but it can still be a little intimidating to the new user. Some other things you will notice is that installing is just a tad different than you would on windows. A lot of times you will be using something called a “terminal” window. Think of it like a DOS for Windows, but a lot easier to use.

Another fun little thing in Linux as well as Mac is the ability for multiple desktop screens. On the above image of my task bar setup in the lower right, you see two boxes. Each one of those is a different “desktop” to place things in. It basically allows you to put open windows in different windows and switch freely back and forth between the 2 separate desktops. It is very good if you have a lot of applications open and will save a lot of space and time.

The main extension for downloading is .tar.bz or .tar.bz2 which are kind of like a windows .zip or .rar file. When you run an application in Ubuntu, it will ask you if you want to run it in a terminal window or just run it in a background window. The only difference is that when you choose to run it in a terminal, you can see the window in the background. This might be useful for debugging and other uses.

Another fun thing is that Linux does not have even a fraction of the amount of viruses than Windows. This is not because Windows is just filled with holes, but because it has been the dominant OS for years on end, so most of the virus creators made all of the viruses on Windows, because they knew that it could spread a lot easier. This is almost the same concept for why Macs don’t have as many viruses yet.

Some drawbacks to Linux are, as mentioned before, since not as many people use Linux as say, Windows, there might not be thousands of people to call to get help on it. But there are some very helpful forums and sites out there for that exact reason. Linux.org is useful for basic questions if you are considering switching to any Distro of Linux. Ubuntuforums.org is a great community that can answer any questions about Ubuntu. If you need any other sites, google will list the sites for any Distro you choose to use.

I hope this review of Linux answered any peoples lingering questions about the OS. I know when I switched from Windows, I was extremely skeptical. But, in the end it worked out great. Feel free to leave a comment and add your input to the site, thanks for reading!

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) this week laid out its lineup of new products, which take dead aim at some of the latest hot buttons in computing.

One is the Dunnington CPU (central processing unit), with six cores, which will be introduced in the second half of this year, and will support FlexMigration, a technology that allows live virtual machine migration across server platforms.

Then there is the Nehalem chip, which Intel says is dynamically scalable from two to eight cores, offering multi-threading and delivering four times the memory bandwidth of today’s highest-performance Intel Xeon processor-based system.

Intel also announced a focus on visual computing, with a strong focus on high-definition graphics, and the Larrabee architecture for visual computing.

Other products announced were Tukwila, Intel’s next-generation Itanium processor, the world’s first 2-billion transistor microprocessor, and the Tylersburg motherboard chipset

The Dunnington

Socket-compatible with Intel’s Caneland platform, the Dunnington’s server migration capability provides investment protection and lets users choose the optimal server platform for performance, cost, power and reliability.

It is the last CPU of the Penryn generation, and Intel’s first multi-core die. Intended for blades and other stacked computer systems, the Dunnington will have a maximum power consumption of less than 130 watts.

The Dunnington is the Aliceton reborn; the original Dunnington was based on the now-canceled Whitefield.

With 16 MB of level three (L3) cache and almost 2 billion transistors, the Dunnington “will probably be a pretty good product because it will be a drop-in replacement for the Tigerton chip which is on the Caneland platform,” analyst Patrick Wang at Wedbush Morgan Securities told TechNewsWorld. “So you’ll go from a quad-core multichip packet to a monolithic six-core chip by the end of this year.”

The Other Products

With an architecture featuring an integrated DDR3 (double data rate three) memory controller, the Nehalem will run QuickPath Interconnect, and have up to 8 MB of L3 cache. It will scale from notebooks to desktops to servers; in the desktop versions, it will run on Tylersburg, which will have a three-channel memory interface using a point to point link similar to HyperTransport.

Tylersburg can be configured for both one-socket high-end desktop (HEDT) and two-socket (high-performance computing and dual processing server) operations.

Tukwila, Intel’s next-generation Itanium processor, has four cores, 30 MB of total cache, QuickPath Interconnect, a dual Integrated Memory Controller and mainframe-class RAS (remote access service) features. It will deliver more than twice the performance of the current-generation Itanium processor.

Intel vs. AMD

Observers have noted that the Nehalem’s L3 integrated memory cache is similar to AMD’s (NYSE: AMD) Barcelona chip design.

That, Wang said, is a good thing. “Nehalem puts Intel on the same ground as AMD.”

Over past five years or so, “Intel has had a faster core whereas AMD has had a significantly better architecture, which is why the AMD Opteron gained so much market share in 2006 — they had the integrated memory controller and HyperTransport,” Wang explained. “Those were the two things Intel was weaker at.”

HyperTransport is an industry standard interconnect technology designed to reduce the number of buses within the system that provides a high-performance, high-speed, high-bandwidth, point-to-point link with that provides the lowest possible latency for chip-to-chip and board-to-board links.

AMD calls its implementation of HyperTransport “Coherent Hypertransport” and Intel calls its feature “Quickpath Interconnect.”

“With Nehalem, Intel’s going to an integrated memory controller, which bumps up the performance another notch,” Gartner (NYSE: IT) Fellow Martin Reynolds told TechNewsWorld. “That was one of the things that let AMD get the advantage over Intel in 2006.”

The integrated DDR3 controller and the implementation of Quickpath “put Intel on the same ground as AMD in terms of architectural design,” Wang said. “It’s not a step back, it’s correcting a flawed architectural decision made many years ago.”

AMD’s Take

“I would say that Nehalem looks a lot like Opteron 1.0,” John Fruehe, AMD’s manager of worldwide business development in server workstations, told TechNewsWorld. “Where we started design in ’99 and brought out our products in the 2003 time frame, you saw the integrated memory controller, no more legacy frontside bus, and they’re really coming around.”

Intel’s rethink is being “driven by a lot of things happening in the market — customers are interested in scalability and efficiency, not only efficiency of processing but also power efficient systems, and that’s one area where AMD always has had the lead by not having a separate memory controller and a separate frontside bus,” Fruehe said.

However, he said duplicating the Opteron chip’s technology is not as easy as it looks.

“It’s not something you do very quickly — Intel tried twice to do integrated memory controllers and both times they backed away,” he added. “There’s a lot of complexity in integrating the controller and frontside bus.”

Compatibility is another area in which AMD has the advantage, according to Fruehe. “Historically, with each generation Intel have to go out and do completely new chips and new boards and there’s a lot of incompatibility. With Opteron, we tried to minimize that so we have a lifecycle on our platform that’s about three to four years, whereas with Intel it’s typically about 12 to 18 months.”

That saves a lot of time and money in data centers where “if you have 1,000 servers they all have the same drivers and BIOS” so an upgrade just means dropping in the new processor onto the board, Fruehe said.

Visual Computing and Larrabee

Intel will develop a complete path for visual computing, including a multi-core CPU, chipset and graphics as well as software and associated developer tools. The Larrabee architecture on which Intel will base visual computing will include a high-performance, wide SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data Streams) vector processing unit and a new set of vector instructions, vector memory operations and conditional instructions as well as a new hardware-coherent cache design.

Intel is looking at two separate parts of the graphics market, Reynolds said.

“They probably own 60 percent of the low-end to mid-range graphics market today with low-cost devices and think that, by advancing graphics technology through going to faster transistors, they can take up to 80 percent of the market,” he added. That extra 20 percent will be taken from AMD.

Larrabee, however, is about the high end, being a “new processor with some number of parallel cores running at high speed,” Reynolds said. It’s a “completely new architecture” and Reynolds believes Intel is gunning for the ray tracing market with Larrabee.

AMD is “very strong in high-performance compute clusters running visualization for use in the oil and gas industry, genome coding and other areas, Fruehe said.

And he warned that the Larrabee platform may have hidden costs: “Intel tends to downplay the word ‘software’ but it has all the impact in Larrabee — they’re really talking about changing the software programming model. Hardware is relatively cheap; software isn’t.”

From Youtube.com

You may have noticed that we’re now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We’re making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you’ll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality. This feature applies to all eligible videos uploaded from the YouTube community, and is not restricted to partner content, so everyone can enjoy this upgrade.

How do you watch higher quality videos? On your Account page you’re now able to choose “always show me higher quality when available” or “never show me higher quality.” We suggest you select “always show me…” only if you have a fast internet connection, otherwise you might find that videos don’t play as quickly or smoothly as you’re used to. Higher quality videos also have a link right below the video player which will allow you to select between the normal or higher quality settings.

We want to help everyone understand that YouTube will continue to evolve with the videos you’re creating. We’re especially excited about offering this upgrade in video quality to our community of filmmakers and animators, who have been requesting this feature for some time. As more of you guys produce great-looking videos, we want to make sure they can be seen in all their glory. So we’ll continue to increase quality behind the scenes and make tweaks to support your uploads. (Remember, we can now support uploads up to 1GB in size.)

You may also wonder how video quality is chosen. Our general philosophy is to make sure that as many people as possible can access YouTube and that videos start quickly and play smoothly. That’s one reason why you don’t see us racing to call this “Super Duper YouTube HD,” because most people don’t want to wait a long time for videos to play.

Right now the Help Center information is pretty basic, but ongoing we’ll be making more specific details available for those content creators who really want to tune their videos for YouTube.

Keep creating and watching..

The YouTube Team

From Playlist.com:

About Project Playlist

Projectplaylist.com is an information location tool similar to Google® and Yahoo!® but devoted entirely to the world of music. Our purpose is to help you find and enjoy music legally throughout the web in the same way that other search engines help you find webpages, images, and other media, but we also add a social /community twist. We make it easy for you to create playlists, share your playlists with friends, and browse playlists of others. We connect you with the coolest music on the web, and we connect people who are passionate about music. Music is burgeoning on the web. Increasingly, artists, record companies, music bloggers, music websites and music critics are uploading music files to websites that they control for promotional or other legal purposes. Our mission at Project Playlist, Inc. is to organize this rapidly growing abundance of legal music on the web for the benefit of the worldwide music community – artists, songwriters, music distributors, and listeners alike. Our view is that the more people share their individual passion for music by sharing playlists, the more music will be created, and the more the entire music industry will grow.

Projectplaylist.com allows you to discover all of this free music legally because we respect the rights of copyright holders and we insist that you do as well. We pay royalties to songwriters and music publishers, and we respect the performing artist’s choice. Some performing artists make their music freely available on the web, others allow you to listen to only a few freely available songs through a promotional site, and a few would prefer that none of their music be heard on the web at all. If an artist tells us that our search engine is linking to an illegally posted song, we will immediately take down the link to that music file.

We are in the process of building an index of links to music files posted on webpages that meet reasonable criteria as having the legal right to host music files for streaming to end users. Although we cannot control the music files posted on webpages by others, we can and do prohibit uploading or downloading of songs to or from our site. In other words we do not host music files, nor do we make them available. We only enable users to find these files and listen to them. We also require as a condition of the Terms of Use of our site that you not add to our index any links to webpages that you know to host illegally posted music files.

Once you find music tracks that you like through our music search engine (or on another user’s playlist), you can add them to your personal playlist and then share your playlist with others. You can post your playlist on your social networking webpage or any other website, subject to the terms of use of those sites, or you can email your playlist to friends! We are constantly adding features to help you find, play and share the music you love. If you discover a legally posted music file not in our index, you can add the link to that file to our index and to your playlist. We ask that you add links only to songs that you reasonably believe are legally posted on a legitimate promotional site such as an artist website or a music blog.

Basically, you search for music on the site, add it to yourown playlist, and listen! Its extremely simple and allows you to embed your playlist onmost social networking sites, along with your own webpage. Defenately worth checking out!

http://www.playlist.com

Quite a few people really hate this game. Why? Bad reputation for one part. Another part might be the boring beginning of the game. I played runescape for the better part of 2 years, my experiences were both good and bad. For one part, about 85% of the population of people playing runescape are:

1: Extremely immature and rude
2: Wanting to scam you for all you have
3: On the game about 12 hours a day
4: Going to kill you as soon as you follow them into PvP zones
5: Under level 70

I know it seems like a bad start for a review, but I really was not happy about the time I put into the game and what I got out of it. The server system is nice to an extent, with over 100 different world you can go to. Unlike some games, you arent restricted to a single server. Each server can hold 2000 people at a time, and you can move to different ones at will. Some of the things you will notice in the game is that you start in a place called Tutorial Island. You cannot leave Tutorial Island until you complete it, which takes about 30 minutes.

After you leave tutorial island you are thrown into a town with no direction on where to go next. People will most likely be running around and killing different animals. Some may look cool, some not. Skip about 30 levels and you are trying to get your skills up. Another interesting feature is all the skills you have. There are combat skills including Magic, Archery, Attack, Strength, and Defense. Along with a wide array of other skills that you really dont NEED in the game. There are probably over 150 quests now, some take 20 minutes, some can span the course of 8 to 10 hours. One major part of the game is called the “Wilderness”. This is the PvP zone. basically there are levels in the wilderness from 1 up. The levels basically mean the margain of levels up and down from yours that can attack you. So if you are level 60 and in 20 wilderness, levels 40-80 can attack you. If you attack someone that hasnt attacked you or anyone else, you get “skulled”. A skull and Crossbones appear above your head, and anyone can attack you without them getting one. People spend days in the wilderness, so it’s not advised to go in unless you know what you are doing.

Overall, the game wasn’t as bad as some people will tell you, I give it a 6/10 for scoring, as most of the game requires you to pay, and its extremely boring most of the time.

Final Score: 6/10

If you have any suggestions for game reviews, please email me at chazenn@hotmail.com. Thanks