Psystar, the gutsy Mac Clone maker out of Miami, has recently exited chapter 11 after Apple successfully lifted the stay in proceedings that occurred as a result of Psystar’s bankruptcy.
Psystar’s request for bankruptcy threatened to delay its case against the official Mac maker because the proceedings in that case were put on hold while the bankruptcy court began hearing the clone maker’s case for Chapter 11 protection. However, Apple a little over one week ago successfully won its motion to have the temporary stay in the case lifted. That ruling overturned the automatic freeze on any court proceedings that followed when Psystar filed for Chapter 11 in May.
Now that Psystar cannot avoid further proceedings by staying in bankruptcy, the firm is out from chapter 11 and has even released a new clone. Balls of steel, friends.
Silicon Valley’s favorite journo Fuad Abazovic is upturning rocks in NVIDIA land to reveal details of the firm’s second-gen ION part.
Confirmed in a late February investor presentation, ION’s next generation has been shrouded in secrecy until recent whispers from insiders at big green. The rumors go that the upcoming platform, dubbed ION 2 for now, will undergo a die shrink and bump the shader count from 16 to 32+.
The modifications to the core design of the ION package should considerably boost the ION’s 3D rendering process… Or trigger a deluge of crummy CUDA apps.
That said, ION’s already robust performance will need a sharp kick in the pants if it hopes to contend with Intel’s Pine Trail platform which we prattled on about in June.
Microsoft’s revamped Bing search engine has harnessed the power of Twitter to enhance the relevancy of the engine’s results.
The Redmond outfit has confirmed that a select number of prolific Twitter users are currently being indexed in the experiment.
“We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets,” wrote Microsoft Search Technology Center GM Sean Suchter. “We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”
The initial roster of Tweeple is designed to appeal to a broad range of unique interest groups; provided examples include Danny Sullivan, Kara Swisher, Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest. We can infer that Microsoft hopes to interest the critical Digg regurgitator, chatty Cathy, washed up politician and squealing fangirl demographics with these selections.
The goal was to have a single video codec present in every major browser. This would allow web developers to include <video> elements without worrying about plugins or browser compatability. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that will happen, with browser makers split between H.264 and Ogg Theora.
The quick version: Apple won’t use Ogg Theora because of hardware comparability and patent exposure, Opera won’t use H.264 because of cost, and Mozilla won’t use H.264 because of licensing restrictions. Microsoft won’t use H.264 for the same reason as Mozilla, but also hasn’t commented on supporting <video> at all. Google will support both Theora and H.264 in Chrome, but Chromium won’t have the latter because of licensing. Also, Theora isn’t up to snuff for YouTube’s volume.
Ian Hickson, reasonably, says that forcing Theora into the HTML5 spec won’t convince Apple to get on board, and all the others will do it anyway. Therefore, no codec will be officially specified in HTML5. The hope is that over time, one of the two formats will become the de facto standard.
ATTENTION UPGRADEOPHOBES: Microsoft has issued a reminder that any remaining installations of the Windows 7 beta (build 7000) will begin bi-hourly shutdowns as of today. Users are encouraged to upgrade to the release candidate which is good until June 1, 2010.
Enthusiast memory manufacturer Mushkin has recently announced that it plans to launch NVIDIA and ATI GPUs after a relatively unsuccessful bid in January 2008.
The new stable of products will debut as NVIDIA parts billed under the ultimateFX branding. The following GPUs are on deck, while a roster of ATI cards will follow later in the year:
Kaspersky Lab has secured a legal victory against infamous adware firm Zango in a ruling that will do much to prevent the Internet’s pests from dumping bogus lawsuits on the doorstep of security firms.
Zango has been lambasted on numerous occasions for its spyware-like behavior, most notably on StopBadware which outlines several behaviors which any reasonable person will recognize as spyware:
Behaves as spyware (Transmits private info)
Bundled software cannot be closed (Interferes with computer use)
Automatically runs on startup (Interferes with computer use)
I got the chance to meet Wallace Santos at CES this past January, and his enthusiasm for high performance PC parts was contagious. Today I received word that he’s giving away two AMD TWKR cpus at his Maingear blog.
The TWKR line is optimally used with extreme cooling such as liquid nitrogen, but they’re not easy to come by; if you want in, get over to Maingear and take a shot at winning.
Windows 7 build 7264 has arrived 19 days after the last x86/x64 ISO leak. The x64 version is already making the rounds, while the x86 edition is on the way soon.
You know the drill: There’s no changelog and you’re on your own.
The Mozilla Foundation has announced today that the next major iteration of Firefox, version 3.5, has publicly launched.
Firefox 3.5 has grown from the humble 3.1 update, codenamed Shiretoko, into the vastly more ambitious project released today. Though Shiretoko was compelling for its time, the subsequent introduction of Google’s Chrome and development in other browsers prompted a deadline setback and heightened aspirations.
The new version of the increasingly popular browser carries a clearinghouse of features, some 5,000 in all according to Mozilla. Headlining for the raft of changes includes: HTML5 streaming video, vastly improved JavaScript speed, IP geolocation for location-sensitive websites (think restaurant searches), a knockoff of IE8’s InPrivate browsing mode, and a dupe of Chrome’s webpages-as-apps feature.
Users interested in getting their hands on Mozilla’s newest kits can grab a copy right now.
Infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay has been sold for $7.1 million USD to Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), a firm that is publicly traded on the Swedish stock exchange.
Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.
To decentralize even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.
The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde hopes that the developing changes will improve the stability of the torrent ecosystem which has become increasingly reliant on TPB’s services.
Saying the Icrontic Expo starts June 24 and ends June 28 is an innocent lie. Many Icrontic regulars arrive early, and the international travelers typically stay late. For me, Expo is a 3+ week endeavor that leaves behind the deliriously tired, sputtering nutcase that’s writing this post.
After 6 years, it feels like we almost know what we’re doing. Never ever has the setup gone so smoothly, the tournaments gone so well, and the balance of activities been so sublime.
Eric Ryder spent many weekends preparing Icrontic HQ, adding a huge amount of electrical and network infrastructure over last year’s already significant setup. Quinton Healy diagrammed and refined a new table layout to allow more people to fit in the same amount of space (and more comfortably). When the tent arrived, the tables and cables fell into place like clockwork thanks to their outstanding planning. Sixty computers, and zero circuits tripped in the tent. Wow.
Andrew Conrad and Bryan Miller ran the Left 4 Dead, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Team Fortress 2 tournaments, all of which were spectacular successes. They stayed cool under pressure, and resolved some bugs we ran into early on in TF2. People are still talking about how great that event turned out.
ASRock — the budget-conscious offshoot of Asus — has confirmed the oft-rumored Phenom II X4 965 by dropping it into the list of CPUs certified for their range of AM2+ and AM3 motherboards.
As can be seen in the following table, the 965 is a 3.4GHz Black Edition part which means unlocked multipliers abound.
Now that Microsoft has outed the pricing structure for Windows 7, Amazon has opened preorders for the October 22 launch of the new operating system.
As a special incentive to get your preorders in, the etailer is offering 50% off the upgrade editions of Home Premium and Professional; the deal drops the price to $49 and $99, respectively.
The XHTML 2 working group is being suspended by the W3C at year’s end to focus resources on HTML 5. A good move, since I think even many web devs don’t understand the difference.
Ready to 
Leave a Comment
Robert Hallock
Jul 3 in News
RSS