On the OpenMandriva.org Website today, Anurag Bhandari posted that Mandriva’s and Mandrake’s old wikis, forums, mailing lists, and such have been saved. The records seem to go back to Mandrake Linux 9.1 and Corporate Server 4.0. The note said more was to come, but that may have been in reference to languages. Right now OpenMandriva have relocated English and French. I’d hoped to see it go all the way back to the beginning which I think was somewhere around 5.1 or so (echoing Red Hat’s version at the time because Mandrake was based closely on them back then). So, we’ll be sure to check back from time to time to see the progress. The data is being kept at archive.openmandriva.org.

One of my earliest Linux screenshots, Mandrake Linux 7.2, from 2000.

As with previous beta releases, Apple continues to ask developers to focus on Wi-Fi, Graphics Drivers, and Safari.

The update is available through the software update tool in the Mac App Store and Apple’s Developer Page.

Previously, the site gave users the ability to stream trailers in 480p or 720p, along with providing download options for 480p, 720p, and 1080p. Trailers uploaded to the site after an approximate date of May 22 no longer have any download options and can only be streamed in-browser at 480p or 720p.

Trailer options before 5/22
Trailer options after 5/22
While trailers uploaded before May 22 can still be downloaded, Apple appears to be removing the option from movies with multiple trailers that have a trailer uploaded after that date. For example, Disney Pixar’s Monsters University has trailers that were uploaded on the following dates: 6/20/12, 3/08/13, 5/20/13, and 5/22/13. None of these trailers have download options.

Disney’s Planes, on the other hand, has trailers that were uploaded on the following dates: 3/15/13, 04/04/13, and 5/17/13. Each of these trailers can still be downloaded at all resolutions, including 1080p.

So, while older trailers can still be downloaded from the site, Apple appears to be removing downloads from older trailers as newer trailers are added, slowly phasing out the availability of trailer downloads altogether.

It is not clear at this point why Apple has begun phasing out movie trailer downloads, but we have contacted the company for more information.

(Thanks Eduardo and Theo!)

The system includes a plug-in adapter that is designed to read data from a car’s onboard diagnostics, turning nearly any car manufactured after 1996 into a connected car. The adapter utilizes an accompanying iPhone app to provide detailed information on driving habits and car health.

Unfortunately, Automatic has experienced some problems with the aforementioned iPhone app and as a result, it has decided to delay (via Engadget) the final release of the system until August to work out some of the kinks.

The good news is that the Link – that little device that plugs into your car – is ready and being manufactured! Unfortunately, we underestimated the time needed to complete the iPhone app and we’re sorry to say that it won’t be ready until the end of August.

As it is only the software that needs to be tweaked (the hardware is already in production), Automatic is offering its first preorder customers the opportunity to test a beta version of the system. Customers that opt-in to the beta will receive the dongle and the app in mid-June, but the company warns that the current version of the app lacks support for Crash Alert, multiple cars, and multiple users.

Customers who are eligible to participate in the early release of the Automatic Link should have already received an email from the company with details on how to proceed. Customers who ordered later or who order today can expect to receive the Link in August.

The Automatic Link retails for $69.95 and can be preordered from the Automatic website.

Team Green captures the single-GPU crown, again

Today Nvidia pulls the wraps off its $650 GK110-based 700 series flagship card, the GeForce GTX 780. This board slides directly into the yawning chasm that exists between the $500 GK104-based GTX 680 and the $1,000 GK110-based GTX Titan, though despite its price it’s actually much closer in specs and performance to the Titan than it is to the GTX 680.

Specifications

Like the Titan, the GTX 780 is a GK110 board, so it has all 7.1 billion transistors, a 384-bit memory bus care of six 64-bit memory controllers and two less SMX clusters with 12 for a total of 2,304 CUDA cores. Its 3GB of memory runs at the usual 6GHz clock speed, and its 863MHz core clock speed is just a smidge higher than the Titan’s 836MHz clock. Its 900MHz boost clock is also a bit faster than the Titan’s 876MHz. Overall, it would be fair to refer to the GTX 780 as the so-called Titan LE that has been rumored for a while now, as it’s a basically a slightly neutered version of the Titan, at least as far as gamers are concerned. Performance in games is extremely competitive with the Titan, more so than we thought it would be given its price. When it comes to compute performance, however, the GTX 780 is heavily neutered compared to the Titan, and for good reason. The 1.5 Teraflops of double precision performance that was so welcome in the Titan is nowhere to be seen in the GTX 780, as Nvidia is reserving that feature for the pricier Titan, and is also billing the GTX 780 as strictly a gaming card. The GTX 780 still offers respectable single precision performance though, clocking in at 4 Teraflops compared to the Titan’s 4.5 Teraflops. For comparison, the GK104-based GTX 680 can only push 1 Teraflop of single precision, and its double precision performance is just 1/24th of that by Nvidia’s design. It wants these “cheap” cards to be used for gaming, period, and its expensive Tesla cards to be used for Compute. This is why the Titan costs $1,000 and the GTX 780 costs $650.

GTX 780 Specs

Otherwise the card looks, feels, and runs almost exactly like a Titan. It has the same 10.5-inch length, the same six-pin and eight-pin PCIe connectors, and the same HDMI, DisplayPort , and DVI connectors. It supports up to three-way SLI. The minimum power supply required is 600w, and the card’s TDP is 250w, just like the Titan.

New Technology

Nvidia is releasing the GTX 780 with a fair bit of cool new technology that helps round out the package a bit, so let’s look at each of them one by one.

Adaptive Fan Control

Nvidia’s all-new Adaptive Fan Control smooths out the speed at which the fans spin up and down, resulting in less noticeable noise during operation.

Even though the GTX Titan was and is a “quiet” GPU by our standards, Nvidia tells us that it’s not necessarily fan noise that people notice as much as changes in fan speed, and we have to say there’s some truth to that. Once a fan is spinning at a certain RPM we tend to not notice it, especially as the Titan and the GTX 780′s fans never really spin very fast. It is certainly noticeable though when the fans spin up or down suddenly; we all hear that. So on the GTX 780 Nvidia has smoothed out the speed at which the fans spin up and down so you don’t hear the change in fan speed.

ShadowPlay

ShadowPlay is designed to improve the in-game video recording experience over FRAPS by consuming less system resources and compressing the videos. It will work with any Kepler GPU and will be released this summer.

Now this is a cool feature, albeit one we have not tested as it was not available just yet. This is software that only works with Kepler GPUs to record your gaming sessions by using the GPU’s built-in H.264 video encoder. The software will just record everything you do and keep only the portion that you just played, hence it’s name, as it records everything that you just did, like a shadow. You can tell the software to just keep the last five minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes, and it’ll intelligently delete what is not needed, helping keep file sizes down by both deleting unneeded video and also through video compression. Nvidia also claims the peformance hit from turning on Shadowplay is less than five percent, so it’s main advantages over FRAPS are that it only records what just happened instead of everything, and it requires less system resources to do so. This software will be rolling out this summer and will be available via Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software, and will be supported on any Kepler GPU. It should be noted that beginning with this launch driver, the GeForce Experience software will replace the Nvidia Update software in the driver package, and though users can opt out of installing it, by default it will be installed with all Nvidia drivers going forward.

Head on over to page 2 to read about the rest of the new features, see the benchmarks, and our final thoughts.

GPU Boost 2.0

The GTX 780 features GPU Boost 2.0 temperature target settings as well as the ability to overvolt the board.

This feature first appeared on the GTX Titan and it works beautifully. Its main goal is to prevent the GPU from throttling itself due to excessive heat, which results in reduced performance. To prevent this from happening, users can now set the peak temperature for a card, which by default is set to 81C but it can be pushed up to 95C if you like (the card can handle it). Nvidia tells us these cards can go all the way up to 105C before the hardware is damaged, but you’d be lucky to push either a Titan or a GTX 780 past 80C typically since their coolers are so effective. However, the GPU will overclock as high as it can until it reaches that pre-determined temperature, so you can nudge the temperature GPU Boost 2.0 also allows for overvolting a card, so you can overclock it as high as you can get away with by pushing the core clock power target, temperature target, memory, and voltage. Only the Titan and the GTX 780 offers these features at this time. If you try to use them on a GTX 680, for example, they are simply greyed out.

Performance

When we first heard of this card we figured it would land squarely in between the $500 GTX 680 and the $1,000 GTX Titan, both in performance and price. Then Nvidia informed us the card was priced at $650, and we looked at the benchmark charts and thought this was either a very competitively priced product, or the Titan is really overpriced, at least for gamers. Looking at the benchmark chart (below) you can see the GTX 780 is within five to 15 percent of the Titan in all benchmarks, which is seriously impressive given it costs $350 less. In general we run all games at 2560×1600 with 4XAA enabled, which is extremely taxing on even the most hardcore systems, and yet the GTX 780 was just on the cusp of playing all games extremely smoothly, with the exception of Metro: Last Light, which will remain a ball buster for the forseeable future it seems. Even though we’d prefer to have at least 40-50fps, that is just not possible with a single GPU at the resolution we run, and only the Titan can get close to achieving it. That said, the GTX 780 is damn close, and easily puts some distance on both the GTX 680 and the Radeon HD 7970, making it the fastest sub-$1,000 GPU available at this time. It should also be noted that the card ran cool and quiet throughout testing, and we were able to run it at 1,084MHz with no problems at all.

GTX 780 Benchmarks

Final thoughts

This is one wicked fast GPU, and if it was $750 or so like we thought it would be you would see us waffling a bit between this card and the Titan. However, at $650 it is very competitive, though we’ve yet to compare it to dual GTX 660 Ti cards or GTX 670 cards in SLI, but then you have to deal with dual GPUs. Also, add-in board partners will be releasing their own versions of the GTX 780 with custom cooling solutions, but we do not know at this time whether the boards will be overclocked or offer larger frame buffers.

In our opinion, the best news about the GTX 780 is at the resolution we use for testing there was no such thing as an affordable GPU that could handle it. The GTX 680 and the HD 7970 were all stuck around 20fps or so for newer games, though the Titan could handle them much better. With the GTX 780 we have a truly semi-affordable card that can run newer games at these resolutions and AA settings just fine. Nvidia says the GTX 780 is 34 percent faster than a GTX 680 and that seems about right to us, and 70 percent faster than a GTX 580, so people with older cards will see quite a jump in performance by upgrading. There also might be other 700-series cards in the pipeline, so anyone looking to upgrade might want to wait just a bit before pulling the trigger on a new card.

As far as how AMD will respond, that remains to be seen. The company reminded us that the HD 7970 GHz edition is still the fastest card at its price point of roughly $420, and that is certainly true. Whether or not it will respond with a GCN 2.0 board dubbed Radeon 8790 or similar is anyone’s guess, but given the ferocity of the GPU wars as of late we’d be shocked if AMD sat on the sidelines for very long.

PS: Here is a promotional video Nvidia sent us that walks you through the GTX 780′s hardware and software.

Cost projections for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program declined $4.5 billion last year.

The cost savings come from the Pentagon’s annual selected acquisitions report (SAR), which reviewed 78 DoD programs and found that to absolutely no one’s surprise the overall cost of Pentagon acquisition programs grew by nearly $40 billion (or 2.44 percent) on the whole last year. But it seems all the talk of federal belt-tightening might be having an impact on Pentagon culture. This was also the first time in a long time that no program in the SAR went 15 percent or more over its budget.

Pentagon officials credited the Better Buying Power initiative, an in-house effort to reform weapons procurement to better allocate resources and reduce redundant or wasteful spending, with helping to curb spending on several programs.

For a program with such a checkered past–it’s been considered for the budgetary chopping block more than once–the drop in overall cost is huge for the JSF program and an indicator that it may finally be moving toward initial operating capability. Often a program finds a way to spend the money it already has in its projections, so the downward revision in total price may amount to something the JSF program really needed: a public relations boost at a point when pricey government programs are not popular with anyone.

So not only is the JSF the most expensive weapon ever developed, but it might now hold the title–at $4.5 billion–for the most expensive PR moment ever purchased.

[Defense News]

“Okay, Glass. Who’s that?”

This is the One for stock Android lovers.

Handset makers and wireless carriers love to load up Google’s Android platform with custom overlays, user interface tweaks, and third-party programs that don’t ship natively with the open source operating system. That’s great for them, but most power users would prefer a clean version of Android to work with, which is why the third-party ROM community is popular. Well, following in the footsteps of Samsung and it’s custom S4 that was announced at Google I/O, HTC is reportedly kicking around the idea of offering a Google Edition of its One smartphone.

News of the custom HTC One comes from Russell Holly over at Geek.com. Citing un-named sources, Holly says the Google Edition device would be offered in the U.S. first, though it’s unclear if it would be carried in the Play Store like the Galaxy S4 will be.

Other details are equally light and vague, though Holly claims an official announcement could come within the next two weeks, with a release likely planned for sometime this summer.

Assuming prices are roughly the same, which would you rather own, a clean version of the HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S4?

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook

GTX 780 mega-podcast!

We were busy little bees this time and could only spare three people: host and Senior Editor Josh Norem, Associate Editor Tom McNamara, and legendary intern Chris Zele. Ironically, we spent most of our time jabbering on about Nvidia’s newest high-end video card, the GTX 780. We didn’t have the MSRP in time for the taping of episode of #203 of the Tecnobits No BS Podcast, but you can’t let missing things like “facts” stop you from having an opinion!

We also tackled reader questions, one of which was about the systems we used at home. So if anyone else was on the edge of their seat and waiting for this information, your day has finally arrived. Also, with Gordon unavailable, we had Chris do his rant at the end. We’ll let you judge the results.

Note: We’re having our video-editing monkey slave away at editing the video. Provided he doesn’t keel over, we’ll embed it as soon as we can!

If you want to catch future episodes, you can:

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Thanks for listening! We wouldn’t be here without all of your support!

-Tecnobits Staff

Scientists now believe that the blue and green gaseous material at the center of the ring is a large football-shaped region sheathed by a ring of cooler gas (the yellow and orange ring) at its fattest point near the center. So the ends of the hotter football-shaped gas cloud protrude from either end of the ring, and we’re looking directly at the end of the football, so we see the enveloping cooler gas as a ring encircling the hotter blue/green gas.

What does all that mean? If you’re an astronomer it means you have a better understanding of the Ring Nebula. That in turn provides insight into the way our own sun’s nebula will form in another six billion years or so when it runs out of fuel, sheds its outer gasses, and collapses in on itself (it won’t look like this because our sun isn’t as big, but nonetheless there will be similarities). For the rest of us, it means look at that amazing image of the Ring Nebula!

[NASA]