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Former Inquirer writer Charlie Demerjian is reporting (for his new project called SemiAccurate, mind you) that recent negotiations between Apple and Nvidia over next-gen hardware have come to a bitter halt. At issue is supposedly a much publicized problem with previous-generation GeForce GPUs that affected many of Apple’s MacBook laptops, forcing them to offer a costly warranty extension and repair refund policy.

While the newer 9400M chipsets which are now the basis of nearly all of Apple’s machines don't appear to be affected, there is some speculation that the 9600M GPUs used in 15" and 17" MacBook Pros may also suffer similar failures. But it is Nvidia’s questionable handling of the whole situation and arrogant stance that has Apple angered and looking for new suppliers.

However, the alleged ditching of Nvidia hardware (if true) is likely due to the fact that Core i7 chips for laptops are scheduled to be released in the second half of the year and Nvidia doesn’t have a chipset product for that space. The graphics firm is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Intel over whether or not it is licensed to make chipsets compatible with Intel processors that include an integrated memory controller – such as Nehalem CPUs.

Regarding its relationship with Apple, Nvidia claims nothing has changed in the last few weeks and that the Cupertino-based company is still buying their notebook GPUs and chipsets.

Packard Bell (subsidiary of Acer) has revamped its “imedia” desktop series – and their logo too, for what it’s worth. While notebooks and mobile technology as a whole has exploded, desktops still offer the best bang for your buck. Keeping this close to heart, the top-end imedia has been outfitted with components which balance cost and performance.


At its best, the imedia provides the choice between an Intel Core 2 Quad and an AMD Phenom II X4, up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GT230 with a whopping 1.5GB of VRAM. It has plenty of storage capacity with up to a 1TB HDD and is media-friendly with HDMI-out and a Blu-ray combo drive. It houses 6 USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, a multi-card reader and an optional Firewire port. Other optional specifications include a DVBT TV tuner with a remote control and a Wi-Fi adapter.

Cutting edge? Nah – but it’s a great package that offers quite the spectrum of customization. Its starting price isn’t half bad either at £299 ($489), which kicks things off with a Celeron.

Microsoft may be introducing a Family Pack for Windows 7 Home Premium, according to a pair of reports citing details in the end-user licensing agreement (EULA) of a recently-leaked build. The still-unconfirmed plan would enable users to install a single copy the operating system on up to three computers in a household, and falls in line with similar licensing Microsoft already has for the Home and Student Edition of Microsoft Office 2007.

There's no word on Family Pack pricing yet. Some suggest it would be somewhere around $189 to undercut Apple’s comparable plan which gives you five OS X licenses for $199, but when you look at the pricing for a standalone one-user copy of Home Premium, it's $120 for an upgrade and $200 for a full version. How the company ends up structuring its Family Pack pricing is anybody's guess, but it seems clear Microsoft still has some surprises up its sleeve to give XP and Vista users a bigger incentive to upgrade their systems.

The company announced a somewhat similar deal with the launch of Windows Vista back in 2007, though it was a limited-time offer for customers who bought retail copies of Vista Ultimate, the most-expensive SKU in the line.

When Mozilla made the transition from the Firefox 2.x series to the current 3.x series, they broke a record by netting over 8 million downloads in the first day it was available. Much of this was due to a very successful PR campaign. Firefox 3.5 was released without all that fanfare, but still managed to hold its own. Enough people were interested in the update to net Mozilla over 5 million downloads in the first 24 hours of availability.

What's more, this time they did it without any server mishaps, no doubt planning for a surge in server load in advance. Whether or not 3.5 is an exciting release is left up to you, but we can all agree that Mozilla has definitely helped changed the face of the Internet in the past several years. Hopefully they will continue to do such as Firefox becomes a more serious competitor than ever against IE.

For the past few days, users of the new iPhone 3GS have been complaining through various blogs and forums about heat related issues with the device. It’s not clear how severe or widespread the problem really is as Apple has not issued an official comment on the reports. While not admitting to any flaws, however, they have posted advice on keeping the iPhone 3G and 3GS within acceptable operating temperatures. This includes not leaving the phone in the car or exposing it to direct sunlight for extended periods.

Of course, this applies to just about any electronic device, but they also suggest avoid using certain applications for too long. Furthermore, according to reports around the web, the iPhone’s internal and ambient temperatures can spike when performing multiple functions simultaneously. Some examples of this include using the iPhone while it’s charging, using Wi-Fi during phone calls, and accessing data services during phone calls. In the case of the white model, the heat has been enough to cause discoloration.

If you happen to own Apple’s latest and greatest smartphone, let us know your thoughts in the comments. Is the 3GS really that prone to overheating or is this issue getting blown out of proportion?

Although Microsoft already supports the use of solid state drives in Windows Vista and XP, Windows 7 will be their first operating system actually optimized and designed with SSD performance in mind. Will its forthcoming release boost adoption of such drives, however? According to Digitimes, their cost is simply too prohibitive to make that a reality, with most drives still on the order of ten times more costly per gigabyte than traditional disks. As a result of that, sources at notebook vendors estimate that by the end of the year, SSDs will compose a mere 1% of the market.

While Windows 7 may not serve much to further their adoption on the basis of cost alone, it might be a tad shortsighted to gauge the state of SSDs based on market share alone. Manufacturing costs and storage densities are improving very rapidly. If you recall, some of the first available drives were selling for over $50 per gigabyte a few years back. Putting things into perspective with today’s prices, that means a drop rate significantly faster than mechanical disks are currently achieving.

One must also consider Windows 7 sales even farther down the road, where PC retailers might have the choice between a 1TB HDD or a 512GB SSD – the price premium might be easily overlooked a year from now.

The average PC user has a dozen or so applications which they completely swear by – and rightfully so. What gets the job done is what matters the most. There is, however, a treasure-trove of pint-sized utilities and fully blown applications just waiting to be discovered. We’ve scoured the Web to provide a list of 11 useful programs which you’ve probably never heard of.

All of the programs in this article are either absolutely free of charge or have a free alternative, so don’t hesitate to give them a shot and see what you’ve been missing out on. We hope that by the end of this list, you’ll have discovered at least one application that fills a void you didn't even know existed.


Read the complete article.
Also read: Top applications to install after a fresh OS installation.

Steam has kicked off another one of its popular weekend sales today, with Bethesda's acclaimed post-apocalyptic title Fallout 3 getting a nice 50% discount. This means the game will be available for just $25 on Valve’s digital distribution platform. Unfortunately, that does not include any of the $10 downloadable expansions, so those looking for the absolute best deal might want to hold on until October when the game and its five DLC packs will be sold together in a $50 Game of the Year bundle.


Additionally the company announced an update to its Steam client and, for fans of the old Street Fighter franchise, it is offering a 10% discount on pre-orders of Street Fighter IV PC which hits next Tuesday.

Apple Admits iPhone Overheating Issues -- Sort of @ PC World
Universal to bring Asteroids to theaters @ Ars Technica
Gamer steals from virtual world to pay real debts @ Reuters
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Just when it seemed like it was all over for Psystar, the infamous Mac-clone maker is reportedly set to emerge from bankruptcy and “again battle Goliath.” In an email newsletter sent to subscribers today, the company said Chapter 11 protection was critical to their daily operations, and suggested it plans to continue churning out products despite its legal and financial troubles.

In fact, the company just unveiled their new Open(7) system, which pairs an Intel Xeon CPU with up to 24GB of RAM for a fast OS X experience starting at $1,500. Psystar also announced a new bootloader, called the Darwin Universal Boot Loader (DUBL), and mentioned plans of an open source release. More details regarding the future of its business are expected soon, as the Chapter 11 process nears completion.

The lawsuit will likely continue in the meantime, which makes me wonder if Psystar folks are unusually valiant for releasing a new Mac-clone, have the financial backing of Apple’s competitors as it has been previously speculated, or are just poorly advised.

Without providing any actual figures Sprint says the Palm Pre smartphone, which launched early June, broke its own records for first day and weekend sales. Palm, on the other hand, only claims “sales have been strong and growing.” Indeed the device appears to be off to a good start, but with both companies mum on hard numbers, we have only the estimates of analysts with which to gauge its success.

The latest estimates come from Edward Snyder at Charter Equity Research, who says his sources in the manufacturing and retail channels indicate that Palm had sold 300,000 phones last month, and that the company has yet to catch up with demand. Palm is said to be producing 15,000 Pre units each day and plans to ship more than 1 million total units throughout its first quarter since launch.

That may not seem like much next to Apple’s million-in-a-weekend sales, but it’s still pretty impressive considering Palm shipped just 351,000 phones in the entire quarter prior to the Pre’s debut.

Following the delivery of final specifications and first host controller samples, it appears that the SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus standard, better known as USB 3.0, is about ready for a commercial rollout. According to a Nikkei report, Taiwanese PC vendors will be among the first to release computers equipped with the next-gen interface, which promises up to 5Gbps transfer speeds, or roughly ten times the speed of USB 2.0.

Citing rapid development in integrated circuits and the shipment of compliant controllers to PC manufacturers, the website claims the first USB 3.0-compatible PCs could appear by the end of the year, with 2010 seeing the start of a mass rollout. External storage is the likely first application of this technology. Unfortunately, USB 3.0 devices are not expected to reach its full potential at launch, with speeds probably reaching only 1.2Gbps initially. This is expected to improve as the standard matures though, as it was the case with its predecessor, paving the way for stuff like HD video streaming or backing up gigabytes of data in mere seconds.

Sony Walkman Turns 30: Memories of an Iconic Gadget @ PC World
Cash for Pirate Bay file-sharers @ BBC News
Super Geek Resume (pic) @ HardOCP
Wolfenstein PC Minimum Specs Announced @ Wolfenstein.com
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Microsoft’s latest foray into search, Bing, went live early June amid mixed reviews. So the obvious question many are asking is how has it fared against almighty Google in its first month? Not bad, according to research firm StatCounter, which claims Microsoft's share of the search market increased from 7.81 percent to 8.23 percent since the launch of its search portal.


That number is significantly lower than what was reported two weeks into Bing’s launch, however, showing many just took it for a spin and then moved back to their original search provider. Yahoo’s market share on the other hand stayed practically stationary last month, going from 10.99 to 11.04 percent, while Google’s share dropped slightly from 78.72 percent in May to a still dominant 78.48 percent of the market in June.

Microsoft’s gain may be small but is nevertheless important to the company, which is investing heavily in its online services business, refusing to cede the market to Google. One month is not enough to claim a strong comeback, though, we’ll have to wait and see if they can keep up the growth pace.

With Windows 7’s release looming on the horizon, Microsoft is busier than ever paving the way for it to arrive. Part of that is cleaning up loose ends with beta testers, hoping to get them spring for a license or at the very least upgrade to an RC release. For those who haven't bothered to update from the beta, Microsoft will be “encouraging” them through forced expiration of their copies.

Starting today, anyone still making use of Windows 7 Beta will find their operating system shutting down every two hours. Having such a “kill switch” built into the OS likely will cause privacy advocate and others to voice concerns, but for a beta release of Windows it is certainly an understandable move.

Windows already has a tough rep to beat in terms of security, with a lack of prompt updates being one of the most common causes of a compromised Windows machine. Microsoft clearly doesn't want old copies of a pre-release Windows 7 on the Internet. If you still happen to be using the beta, there's no better time than now to upgrade to the RC, which will remain active for another year.