Computer Technology News for the masses

Just how valuable is the newly appointed CEO, Tim Cook to Apple?

2011-08-28T20:46:00.000+02:00

Just how valuable is the newly appointed CEO, Tim Cook to Apple? According to an SEC filing, his continued presence at the helm of Apple over the next decade is worth a cool one million--shares of Apple stock, that is. If you sold a million shares of Apple stock on Friday, it would be worth about $383 million.

The August 24 8-K Filling - which public companies are required to file after a major change that shareholders should be aware of--lists all the news that's been going around over the past few days in lovely legal speak: Jobs's resignation (though the form notes that "Mr. Jobs will continue to serve as an employee"), his election to chairman of the Apple board, and Tim Cook's promotion and board appointment.

Cook's million shares will arrive in two phases: The first 500,000 will vest in August 24, 2016, and the other half-million will vest on the same date in 2021. In other words, Cook will receive the stock grants once he's been CEO of the company for five and ten years, respectively. As incentives to stick around go, it's a little bit nicer than a new company parking spot.

Computer Tools for Stress Testing, Overclock Validation and Monitoring

2011-07-14T19:05:00.000+02:00

Hi guys!

I was wondering what to post today - So i thought i would share some good applications with you! Enjoy! All of these are tested on Windows 7 64-Bit.

MSI Kombustor – GPU Stress Test

This application is a really handy one for testing, if your graphics card are running to hot and might be giving artifacts and to check the temperature of the card at the same time.

It is often used by Overclockers to check if their new OC on their GPU is stable enough.

I am not much of a GPU Overclocker – But I have really been enjoying using this program to stress the GPU on computers that had artifacts and cooling issues.

Link: http://www.geeks3d.com/20110407/download-msi-kombustor-2-0-2/

Prime95 – CPU/Memory Stress Test

This nifty program is developed by George Woltman and was dedicated to find the Mersenne prime numbers.

But for the past years it has also been used to stress memory modules and the CPU, since it takes a lot of calculation power to discover these prime numbers.

There are different types of testing templates you can run in this program, some of them are more CPU intense, and some of them are a mix of both CPU and Memory stress test, and there is also one that will kick the thermal output up a notch to see if your CPU is overheating.

A good program for people who overclock their CPUs.

Link: http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=205

CPU-Z – CPU/Memory/Motherboard Monitoring

Not sure what model your motherboard or CPU is? And you might also want to know how many MHz your memory modules are running at? And you might also be too lazy to take off the side panel to check?

Then this is the application for you!

Here you can see in-depth information about some of the key components in your PC, CPU, Motherboard and Memory.

For the CPU, you can check Core Stepping, Voltage, Supported Instruction Sets, Cache, Core Speed, Bus Speed, Multiplier, Which nm technology it is based on and etc.

On the mainboard tab you can again find general information regarding your motherboard, chipset information, graphics interface, model/revision and also BIOS date/model.

The last tab is for Memory; here you can see which memory modules you have installed in which slots and also frequency, timings and serial numbers.

It is also used by Overclockers to “validate” their OC.

Link: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

GPU-Z – Graphics Card Monitoring

GPU-Z is really just like CPU-Z, just that it is for graphic cards obviously. Here you can find what GPU model it is, Release dates, amount of Transistors, Die Sizes, DirectX Support, Bus, Bandwidth, Memory Type and Size and so on.

It also displays overclock if available, else it just shows the default clock.

This program can also monitors the temperatures of the GPU Cores and shows the voltages and amperes.

On this you can also use it to “validate” your overclock

Link: http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

Have you used any of these Applications? What do you think about them? Is there a better alternative? Then please post a comment! :-)

Badly Stuffed Animals! :-D

2011-07-13T21:44:00.000+02:00

Hey guys!

Check out this page on Facebook.
I pissed my self laughing by all them pictures of "badly" stuffed animals!

Good stuff!

Enjoy!

http://www.facebook.com/badlystuffedanimals

Google+ Soon Over 10 Million Users

2011-07-13T21:28:00.002+02:00

After some calculations and estimations by Paul Allen, he have got to the number that around 9.5 Million users have joined Google+ and the 2.2 Million of them have joined Google+ in the last 32-34 hours!

Though, this is coming from a 3^rd party source so these data isn’t official!

Accordingly some other News sites have asked Google for a comment about these numbers, but haven’t received any so far.

Google+ Page on Facebook announced earlier that Google+ might hit 20 Million users by Sunday this week.

But I guess that if Google+ is growing so rapidly, I think they are going to be a good competitor against Facebook.

But 10-20 Million users! At such a short period of time, I am really amazed! Good job Google!

I have an account on Google+ myself and I really like!

Especially the chat functions where you can voice/video chat and also send/receive files!

I think Windows Live Messenger might not be as popular at some point when we can do all this online from a Social Networking site where it is obviously common to make contact in those ways.

400 Million Windows 7 Licenses sold.

2011-07-12T18:11:00.000+02:00

Microsoft announced this Monday that they have now sold 400 million Windows 7 licenses and also are encouraging users to switch from Windows XP to Windows 7.

CEO Steve Ballmer said that on the 1-Year Anniversary of Windows 7 last year, they had sold 240 million licenses. Microsoft also announced that customer will have 1,000 days until the company will stop support Windows XP.

Senior Director for Windows Commercial Product Marketing Team, Erwin Visser says:

"Windows XP served us well, but in the ten years since it launched, the world has changed."

"It's time to retire Windows XP and move to Windows 7 to take advantage of the last decade of

innovation in areas such as security, performance and more natural, intuitive interface."

But why is it that Microsoft wants to promote Windows 7 this much when Windows 8 is around the corner?

Tami Reller says:

"Windows 7 is the path to Windows 8. In the future, businesses will be running a combination of Windows 8 devices and apps alongside Windows 7 PCs and apps."

Fundamental breakthrough in heat transfer for microelectronics

2011-07-12T17:37:00.000+02:00

Sandia National Laboratories are a big company with a lot of visions and “missions” to do. They are also in charge of ensuring that U.S. nuclear arsenal is safe, secure and reliable.

They are also doing research on killing cancer cells with nanotechnology.

Anyway, they have also developed a new thing for Computer environments.

Sandia National Laboratories have now developed a new technology which has the potential to dramatically change the air-cooling for computers and microelectronics, and now lab officials are seeking for licenses in the electronics chip cooling area to license and commercialize the device.

This new “Sandia Cooler” is also known as the “Air Bearing Heat Exchanger” is developed by the Sandia researcher, Jeff Koplow, who was recently selected to take part in the NAE’s 17^th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium by the National Academy of Engineering.

This Sandia Cooler will significantly reduce the energy needed to cool down processor chips in large computing environments and data centers.

In a regular/normal CPU cooler, the heat transfer bottleneck is the boundary layer of air that clings to the cooling fins. Though with the new Sandia Cooler, the heat is efficiently transferred across a tiny narrow air gap from a stationary base to a rotating structure.

The normally boundary layer of air surrounding the cooling fins is subjected to a powerful centrifugal pumping effect, causing boundary layer thickness to be reduced up to ten times thinner than normal. This reduction enables a dramatic improvement in cooling performance.

Mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI now illegal

2011-07-11T18:53:00.000+02:00

The people who are responsible for the licensing of HDMI ( High-Definition Multimedia Interface ) are now making a demand for companies that are making DisplayPort-to-HDMI cables/converters, that they need to stop their productions of those and recall ALL products.

The President of HDMI Licensing, Steve Venuti, says the following:

"We are committed to protecting the over 1,000 HDMI adopters and the many consumers who use HDMI products by enforcing the HDMI trademark against counterfeiters."

"It is our goal to have only legitimate and authentic HDMI products on the market and CBP enforcement is one of many strategies we utilize as a part of our larger global strike against counterfeiters."

There have been 32 shipments containing fake HDMI products such as DVD Players, adapters, cables and other electronic projectors since January 2010, all of these have been seized or destroyed at the US ports.

I can understand that it’s not allowed to make copies of a licensed product, but making a converter illegal? I don’t get the point of that!

BREAKING NEWS: NVIDIA 28nm Kepler Delayed! 2012 Launch instead.

2011-07-09T11:41:00.000+02:00

It has been announced that Kepler is NOT going to be released Q4 2011, sorry folks.

The reason for this is bad production yields and lower performance than expected. Also TSMC expected to be at full scale production of the 28nm chips in 2011, but because of growing inconsistencies resulting in delays, this is not going to happen.

So it also seems that AMDs Southern Islands are going to be delayed since they are also relying on the 28nm chip production.

I really don’t want to be TSMC right now; I think they are under quite a pressure…!

HTC have bought VIA S3 Graphics technology

2011-07-08T17:56:00.000+02:00

The Taiwanese company HTC, have bought VIA Technology S3 Graphics technology for $300 million dollars, which will give HTC an advantage regarding graphics in their tablets and smartphones.

The CEO of S3 Graphics, Dr. Ken Weng said that their S3 Graphics technology has been implemented in over more than one billiom game consoles, mobile devices and computers worldwide.

Also it seems that the deal is going to be settled at late 2011

So it is going to be exciting to see when HTC will start implement this in their products.

NVIDIA: 28nm Kepler chips ready for Notebooks

2011-07-07T07:27:00.000+02:00

NVIDIA held a conference or partner roundup in Lisbon Portugal, where some of the people who attended that conference have confirmed that some of NVIDIAs 28nm notebook chips are almost ready for production, maybe even this week!

So we might see some good news later this week or next week, even some more details please! J

Anyway, it seems that NVIDIA might try to start launching these notebook chips along with Ivy Bridge 22nm.

Again it depends on how NVIDIA feels and what the right time is to do so.

As seen earlier when new graphics cards are launching for notebooks, often it is from the low-end to mid-end to high-performance chips.

So the first chips we are going to see are properly just some low- mid-end chips.

But we will have to wait a bit more time!

I will try to gather as much information as possible about Kepler 28nm since it seems to be quite a hot topic around.

But, my personal opinion about this… Umh, I have ATI… so… Hehe! Nah, I have an old ATI 4850x2, and it runs kind of okay still, but well! Not much of a gamer anyway!

Anyway, stay tuned guys!

Guide: Remove advertisements from Windows Live Messenger

2011-07-06T19:07:00.000+02:00

Here i will explain how you can remove those annoying advertisements from Windows Live Messenger.

First, you have to make sure that you have the latest version of Windows Live Messenger.
If you are not sure, get it here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-messenger?os=other
When you have installed the latest version of Windows Live Messenger you have to go to this website: http://apatch.org/downloads/
Here you download the latest A-Patch for Windows Live Messenger.
When you have downloaded the A-Patch, extract it to your Desktop.

IMPORTANT: Before you run A-Patch - Make SURE to close down Windows Live Messenger!

Now go to your Desktop and run the A-Patch .exe file that you have just extracted.
Here you choose that you want to "Patch Messenger" and then click next.
( It might ask you to make a backup of the "Standard" settings of Windows Live Messenger, just say OK and save that )
Then you come to a screen where all the goodies are located!
You can then tick off "Remove Advertisement" "Remove See More Offerings" and also things such as "Disable Nudge Delay", "Remove Featured Section", "Disable Photo/Video Sharing" and so on.
After that you hit "Apply"
Now you can open up your Windows Live Messenger again and all the changes you've made should be visible.

Here is a screenshot of how my Windows Live Messenger window looks without the advertisements.

Guide: Simple Tweak that will make Windows 7 shutdown faster

2011-07-06T18:39:00.000+02:00

Here i will describe how you can make your Windows 7 Operating System shutdown faster.

First, click on 'Start'/'Windows Orb'.
Then type regedit in 'Run' or type it in the search field and press 'Enter'.
Now that we can see the Registry Editor, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Control
Under 'Control' you will find "WaitToKillServiceTimeout" - It should have a value of 20000.
Right click it and 'Edit'.
Here you will see the value of 20000, change this to a lower value, such as 1500.
Though anything below 1000 is not recommened in my opinion.
When the value is set, just click "OK" and restart your PC.

Now your PC should shutdown faster.

3 Million units of the Samsung Galaxy S II sold in 55 days!

2011-07-05T16:53:00.000+02:00

The company Samsung Electronics announced that they have sold 3 million units of the Galaxy S II in 55 days!

I just sat and calculated this and i am not a math expert, honest! I suck at math, nothing worse! Anyway!

1 unit each 1,58 second! Hehe.

It took Samsung 85 days to sell 3 million units of their old model, Galaxy S.

So according to Samsung, this is their fastest selling phone of all times, congratulations Samsung! Good job!

But hey! I don’t blame them! It is for sure a really nice looking phone.

Global Spam is decreasing

2011-07-04T19:08:00.000+02:00

The Global Spam level is at its lowest in 3 years.

The latest report from Symantec Intelligence claims that since November 2008, where a lot of botnets and the Internet company McColo got shutdown, the spam has been decreasing for the past 3 years.

The Spam level is about 72,9% which is a drop for about 2,9% since May 2011.

Saudi-Arabia is the country in the world who receives most of the spam, followed by Russia and China.

Nearly about half of all spam e-mails are about medicinal products, also spammers are trying to use the Wiki name to trick people into a new product by the name WikiPharmacy.

Well, at least we are receiving 2,9% less “BUY VIAGRA AND RUSSIAN WIVES” e-mails ;-)

Microsoft Office 2010 SP1 released

2011-07-04T18:49:00.000+02:00

Hey guys!

This is kind of late news, but i thought i would share it with you anyway!

Last week the first Service pack for Microsoft Office 2010 were released so it was available for download through Windows Update.

As with Windows Service packs, this Service pack contains all of the updates until the Service pack, so all updates are put together in a “Service pack”.

Some of the improvements for Office 2010 in this Service pack are performance improvement for Access and OneNote.

And also Outlook 2010 now supports Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Cloud based Office software.

So make sure to check out Windows Update! Or you can download it through Microsoft here:

Office 2010 32-bit: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26622

Office 2010 64-bit: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26617

AMD Southern Islands codenames available

2011-07-04T18:37:00.000+02:00

It seems that the version of Catalyst 11.7 was containing some codenames for some of the new graphics cards that AMD/ATI is going to launch around Q3/Q4 this year.

These codenames are New Zealand, Tahiti, Thames and Lombok.

Here is a summary of the graphics cards:

Tahiti:

It seems that this is going to be the new high-end GPU that will come in 2 variants, Tahiti Pro and Tahiti XT.

New Zealand:

This one is most probably ending up as the Dual-GPU graphics card with two Tahiti’s

Thames:

Thames could either be a new performance chip or a new mobile chip.

Lombok:

Not sure! But it could be the successor of the Bart’s chip, but it is NOT confirmed yet, even though, it will end up with at least 3 different versions.

As seen before, I am pretty sure that AMD will be able to launch these 28nm parts before NVIDIA, and I am really excited to see what performance these babies can punch out!

Force Series GT SSD’s sets sail from Corsair

2011-07-02T15:26:00.000+02:00

Corsair is updating their Force Series lineup with a premium product that will sell under the Force Series GT name.

It’s featuring the Sandforce SF-2280 controller and is packed with a SATA 6Gbps interface.

This SSD is going to be available in either 60GB or 120GB capacities, although a 240GB model should come at a later point.

The read and write speeds of this series will do up to 555MB/s and 525MB/s. And according to Corsair its random 4k read performance should be able to peak at 85,000 IOPS.

As a side note, this SSD will come in a red 2.5” case and will also have a 3.5” adapter.

I got to admit that these high-performance SSD’s are getting some incredible read/write speeds! Still reminds me of the YouTube movie with the 24 Samsung SSD’s in a raid J Good stuff!

Samsung are preparing Galaxy Z

2011-07-02T15:03:00.000+02:00

It seems like that Samsung Galaxy S II isn’t going to be the only dual-core smartphone from Samsung this year.

This new Samsung Galaxy Z is going to have a 4.2” Super Clear LCD touchscreen with a resolution of 800x480 and its going packed with NVIDIA Tegra 2 which is a 1 GHz dual-core chip which includes both a CPU and a GPU.

This new smartphone is also going to be a bit heavier and thicker than the Galaxy S II with 135 grams of weight and a thickness of 9.45mm.

The other “standard” features are 802.11bgn WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, 8GB of internal Memory, MicroSD card slot, GPS, digital compass and it will be running with Gingerbread, Android 2.3.

Though it will only have 720p 5.0MP camera, where Galaxy S II had an 8MB Full HD camera.

At the moment it was made from an announcement in Sweden, and the pre-order price tag is set at about €435 and $630.

The design of this Galaxy Z is really nice, I really like the aluminum look on the back.

In general, before the smartphone days I was a Samsung man with their flip phones and all that! But lately I personally think that they are starting to get back on track with smartphones which is really nice to see!

Samsung announces high performance Class-10 MicroSD card

2011-06-30T21:26:00.000+02:00

The company Samsung has today announced that they are starting to manufacture a new high performance MicroSD card, which has twice the data transfer speed compared to its previous generation of MicroSD cards designed for smartphones.

This new MicroSD card can hold up to 32GB of data and has a read data transfer speed of up to 24MB/Sec and writes up to 12MB/Sec.

That’s more than the double of the maximum write speeds of the Class-4 32GB MicroSD card generation.

Samsung’s new MicroSD card is based on their 20nm NAND flash memory chips instead of the previously chips, which were made in a 30nm process. According to Samsung this transition has made the productivity of the chips over 30% better.

The reason that Samsung are starting to make these is because of the smartphone industry has a demand for new high performance MicroSD cards for the next generation of mobile application and for 4G models of smartphones.

Just a quick note about SD card classes.

There are Class 2, 4, 6 and 10.

Class 2, 4 and 6 are mainly used for normal speed units, for an example a normal Video Recorder, where a Class 10 is used for a High-Definition Video Recorder.

Just to put it a bit in perspective J

Google+ versus Facebook

2011-06-29T18:38:00.001+02:00

Now Facebook is going to get some competition from Google.

Google is making their own Social networking service by the name Google+ which is at the moment in a kind of closed beta where only a limited amount of users are able to test and use it, though the first impressions seems positive indeed.

Google’s user interface should be pretty straightforward and you can import all your information from the various of Google services, such as Picasa and G-Mail.

One of the unique things about Google+ is that it organizes your contacts/friends into circles.

The concept for this is rather interesting since it is designed to mimic real life relationships, for an example it allows you to organize your contacts/friends into different circles such as family, coworkers, friends, soul mates or whatever you like.

Another thing that Google+ is improving over Facebook is the privacy and security levels, so in that case it could be a bit ahead of Facebook.

I think that Google+ might become a success, but I doubt it can remove Mr. Zuckerberg & Co. from the social networking throne that it is sitting on at this moment.

NVIDIA 28nm chip getting taped-out

2011-06-29T18:23:00.002+02:00

UPDATE: NVIDIA: 28nm Kepler chips ready for Notebooks
Check out the frontpage of WishoffNews.com

According to multiple sources, it seems that the new NVIDIA 28nm chip with the codename of Kepler is being taped out.

Tape-out means that it is the final design cycle for integrated circuits.

So at the moment it does not seem that NVIDIA has any problems or issues with this chip so far, but it is still in the testing phase.

They are making a transition from their Fermi chips which were at 40nm to 28nm – I doubt that is easy! But this new chip will be able to pack a lot more transistors than its predecessor, Fermi.

If we are optimistic, we might be able to see NVIDIA push out some Kepler chips around Q4 2011, but that would be very optimistic because TSMC needs some more time to be able to make these chips properly.

Though as it seems there is a slight chance that we can see Kepler in Q4 and mass availability in 2012, but we are not 100%.

AMD/ATI is also working on their 28nm part, and I will try to gather information about this as well.

So stay tuned!

Today is Opera 11.50 Aka Swordfish day

2011-06-29T18:05:00.000+02:00

Today is the day where the internet browser Opera has launched its version 11.50 codename Swordfish, which packs some quite nice features and enhancements!

Opera now features a better type of Speed Dial extension which makes it possible to get all the information you need straight from your Speed Dial.

All this is made possible thanks to the smart Speed Dial extension which can be downloaded from their Add-ons portal.

Another really nifty feature in Opera 11.50 is that it allows you to synchronize passwords between different computers! Then you can easily access your favorite websites without needing to type in your password over and over again!

Another rendering engine is also present, the Presto 2.9.168 which features up to 20% faster rendering with CSS, SVG, Navigation, Session History and HTML5 tag.

And the Opera team wants to thank all the people who have helped them testing and giving them constructive feedback.

You can download Opera 11.50 here:

http://www.opera.com/browser/

Video - Xiao Xiao Stickfight! Enjoy!

2011-06-28T20:16:00.000+02:00

I have always been a fan of these Xiao Xiao stickfights! Really well done!

Enjoy!

Rootkit infects Windows MBR

2011-06-28T19:07:00.000+02:00

There are almost new kinds of virus, malware or spyware every day, both on computers but also on mobile phones where it’s increasing.

Now there is a Rootkit around by the name Win32/Popureb.E which goes deep down to the Master Boot Record ( MBR ) and hides there so it is impossible to get rid of it since all the security and cleaner applications we use does not go that deep.

An engineer by the name Chun Feng from Microsoft states as follows:

“If your system does get infected with Trojan:Win32/Popureb.E, we advise you to fix the MBR and then use a recovery CD to restore your system to a preinfected state”

The rootkits are mostly used to hide follow-on malware such as banking password-stealing Trojans.

Also, rootkits aren’t a new phenomenon on Windows.

Back in 2010 there were a rootkit by the name Alureon, which infected Windows XP machines and crippled the machines after the installation of a Microsoft Security Update.

Seagate unveils Momentus Thin Drives

2011-06-28T18:47:00.000+02:00

Seagate have announced that they have developed a new thin hard disk drive.

There are a tablet that will have these news drive are the Archos G9 8” and 10” tablets that will feature Seagate’s new thin Momentus hard drive with a profile of 7mm!

The Momentus thin drive comes in different variations including, 160GB, 250GB and 320GB with either 7200RPM or 5400RPM, including 16MB of cache.

As an option it can have the FIPS 140-2 U.S government-grade encryption to protect all of the hard disk drive data.

It is a great achievement for Seagate to be the first to launch this kind of product, but in my opinion I don’t think it is a reliable solution for tablets, since they get “moved” around a bit more than a regular laptop and are more fragile.

Either way, the future is Solid State, and I think that’s what hard drive companies should focus even more on, and I don’t think that many people who own a tablet could even use near 320GB of storage!

I even doubt that there are any have used all of the 64GB that some of the Apple iPad comes with.