Nvidia unveils GeForce GTX 690: Dual GK104 flagship launching May 3rd As we mentioned back on Monday, Nvidia was going to be making some kind of GeForce announcement this evening at the Nvida Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, China. Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has just finished his speech, announcing Nvidia's next ultra-premium video card, the GeForce GTX 690. Launching later this week, the GeForce GTX 690 will be Nvidia's new dual-GPU flagship... AnandTech
Why is Ivy Bridge so hot and bothered? If you read our Ivy Bridge coverage carefully, you'll know that we observed some rather high temperatures when overclocking the Core i7-3770K. With a single-fan air tower, our chip ran at a reasonable 50-60°C when clocked to 4.4-4.5GHz at its default voltage. However, when we pushed to 4.9GHz on 1.35V, the temperature soared past 100°C. Other reviews have observed similarly scorching temperatures, so it's not just our sample. Tech Report
Get rich U. Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it's as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. The New Yorker
Texas, Amazon agree on sales taxes, says statement from Combs' office Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Susan Combs and Amazon.com, Inc. today announced an agreement that will lead to the creation of thousands of new jobs in Texas by the online retailer. According to the agreement between the Comptroller of Public Accounts and Amazon, the Company plans over the next four years to create at least 2,500 jobs and make at least $200 million in capital investments in the state... Chron.com
Brilliant: Players waging actual war on EVE's economy I'm not an EVE player. I know it sucks in some people like a massively multiplayer black hole, but the actual act of playing it has never exerted much of a gravitational pull on my attention. I'm probably dumb. Regardless, though, I can't help but admire the sheer insanity this place constantly generates. Years-in-the-making corporate conspiracies, thousands-strong space battles, the very existence of Dust 514 – it is, at times, nearly unbelievable. RPS
Steve Wozniak: Why I love my Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Our Dan Patterson, Todd Moore and Gina Smith caught up with Gina's coauthor and friend Steve Wozniak, who invented Apple technology and co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs. It's noisy in there – but this podcast is a fun conversation with Wozniak over why he thinks the Windows Phone 7 UI is just the bee's knees. He shows us that he carried two iPhones, a Droid Razr and, to our surprise at the time, a Nokia Lumia. aNewDomain
A history of Mozilla browsers design Writing the piece on FOSS design, it made me think about past experiences in various communities and brought back memories to the point when I decided to put down some thoughts on Mozilla browsers (won't cover other apps today) design history as I saw it, both as an user and from my involvement with its community. Even if the screenshots below are taken mostly from Wikipedia (try to run 10-15 years old binaries on a current Linux desktop)... Nicu Buculei
FCC: TV stations must post rates for campaign ads The FCC voted Friday to require broadcast TV stations to post online the advertising rates they charge political candidates and advocacy groups. The vote came despite strong opposition from many broadcasters, who have argued that making sensitive advertising rate information so publically available will undermine stations' competitiveness and give advertisers unfair leverage over how much they are willing to pay. Phys.org
At 92, a bandit to Hollywood but a hero to soldiers One of the world's most prolific bootleggers of Hollywood DVDs loves his morning farina. He has spent eight years churning out hundreds of thousands of copies of "The Hangover," "Gran Torino" and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas. "Big Hy" – his handle among many loyal customers – would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. The NY Times
Get him to the geek The underground double bus on Boston's silver line is filled to capacity with an unusually homogeneous crowd this morning. Mostly male, mostly twenty-something, mostly white, mostly dressed in slouchy windbreakers, cargo pants, and baggy jeans. Their T-shirts mostly depict pixelated cartoons and mushrooms, and esoteric catchphrases. It's the uniform of a certain social subset, the kind of attire that suggests acne where there is none. GQ
How Apple sidesteps billions in taxes Apple, the world's most profitable technology company, doesn't design iPhones here. It doesn't run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn't manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby. Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states. The NY TImes
Is GPL licensing in decline? A debate has raged for months about open source licensing trends. It all started with assertions that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is rapidly falling from favor as an open source license, replaced largely by the Apache License. Free software advocates couldn't disagree more. What's really going on? To understand the answer, you need to know a little background. InfoWorld