Creative recently introduced its newest headset, designed for use with Apple's iPhone and iPod. The EP-630i uses a pair of in-ear buds, which come with three different silicone covers to ensure users find an ideal fit. Each earbud is powered by a 9mm Neodymium magnet to deliver above average sound quality.

The headset, available in black only, includes an integrated microphone with a built-in button that allows users to answer or end calls in between listening to music on the iPhone. The gold-plated 3.5mm 4-pole plug makes this possible, and the Y-configuration cord is nearly 4 feet long, with an oxygen-free copper cable to maximize sound quality.

The headset will be available in Singapore starting in September of 2008, priced at the equivalent of $59. A US release date is expected soon.

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After eVGA and XFX announced, BFG now will also offer a limited number of GeForce GTX 260 and 280 owners a cash rebate. The offer is again only available to US and Canada customers who have bought and registered their BFG GeForce GTX 200 series cards between June 16 and July 16 with the sum 'rewarded' being of up to $120.

What's also nice is that in addition to the rebate BFG offers qualified customers $50 off their next graphics card, if it's the same GT200-powered model they already have (so if they go SLI that's another 50 bucks in yuor pocket).

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AMD has seen its share of ups and downs over the years, but the company has had it especially hard ever since its acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006. Since then, the company has experienced numerous quarters of losses, announced job cuts, and has watched as top executives abandoned the chip giant.

Most recently, AMD announced that it would take another $880 million USD charge due to the poor performance of ATI's Consumer electronics division.

Today, AMD CEO Hector Ruiz stepped down from his position with the company. Ruiz joined the company in January 2000 and became CEO in April 2002. Ruiz will be replaced by the current Number 2 in charge, Dirk Meyer. Ruiz will stay on as the executive chairman of AMD's Board of Directors.

The future looks uncertain as the man who has become the face of AMD moves on to greener pastures. Meyer will have to find a way to get AMD back on a track to profitability and get its first 45nm processors out the door to combat Intel.

Ruiz's departure comes at a time when AMD is trying to fight off a surging Intel. Intel just recently announced a 25 percent increase in quarterly profits at the same time AMD was reporting losses. Intel also this week launched its Centrino 2 platform which aims to take much of the air out of AMD's Puma platform.

AMD, however, has obtained better success on the graphics front with its new Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 graphics cards which are the current "bang for the buck" kings. AMD garnered so much praise from reviewers and consumers alike that NVIDIA responded with price cuts to its recently introduced GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics cards.

AMD may also have a little bit of help on its side in the form of an official FTC investigation into Intel's business behavior. But the fact remains, whatever the outcome of the FTC investigation, AMD still has to deliver a competitive product to stay alive in this cutthroat industry.

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Administrators still cannot access San Francisco's main IT system, thanks to a now jailed employee who changed all the passwords and won't give them to authorities.

An IT employee who is charged with gumming up the works at the City and County of San Francisco's main data center by changing access passwords for administrators could have been stopped short of crippling access to the system if IT management had had the right security software in place.

Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, Calif., pleaded not guity in court July 17 at his arraignment on four felony counts of computer tampering. Childs remains in custody in lieu of $5 million bail. Childs, who makes $127,000 per year and has worked for the city for five years, has a bail hearing set for July 23.

Childs, a computer network administrator for the Department of Technology, is charged with tampering with the system's FiberWAN [Fibre Channel-connected wide area network], which contains San Francisco's sensitive Human Resources, payroll and other personal data. He created an administrative password that provided him superior access to the network.

Childs, who was arrested July 13, refuses to divulge to authorities the new secret password he concocted

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Well, according to a VM Ware exec. Applications, appliances, servers, etc will run on their own customized "thin-layered" OS's doing away with bulky commercial OS's like Windows...


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GPU-Z is a lightweight utility designed to give you all information about your video card and GPU.

Here is the list of changes :
 
 - Added full support for HD 4870 X2
 - Added support for reading clocks on newer ATI drivers (R700)
 - Fix for realtime clock sensor showing double memory speed on RV770 GDDR5
 - Added detection for GeForce 9800 GT, GeForce 9300 GE
 - Added support to start GPU-Z minimized (use -minimized)
 - Added tray icon when GPU-Z is minimized
 - Fixed crash when uploading large BIOS files
 - Fixed rare crash that could happen on some NVIDIA cards
 - Added detection for Intel Q43. G45 and some variants of G35, G965, GM965

Download

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Inno3D GeForce 9800 GTX Overclock Edition review

A reference based GeForce 9800 GTX, yet pre-tested and qualified to run at higher clock-speeds. That and a better bundle as Inno3D is now bundling a DX10 title with the OC edition, namely Company of Heroes, Opposing fronts from THQ. Interested already ?

Well read on then as with the recent GeForce 9800 GTX card price-drops .. pricing became really interesting !

You can find the review here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/inno3d-geforce-9800-gtx-overclock-edition-review/

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A new type of flash memory is being developed, according to today's reports, which not only takes up less space and uses less electricity than the current flash memory technology, but also lasts much longer as well. The ferroelectric chips under development by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology as well as the University of Tokyo will outlive current flash memory by a factor of about 10,000. Today's flash memory chips have a life of about 10 years, and can be re-written only an average of 10,000 times.

The practical size of current flash memory chips maxes out at about 20 nanometers, for durability and service life reasons, among others, with the next generation coming in at 30nm. The prototype ferroelectric NAND flash memory the scientists are developing can be scaled down to 10nm, and that's just at the beginning stages of its development.

Part of the reason the ferroelectric chips last so much longer is their rewriting voltage of less than six volts, as opposed to the higher, near 20 volt rewriting of conventional flash chips. Either technology uses a wear-levelling process where all cells are used equally, and those that wear out are retired, which means flash memory capacity eventually decreases down to nothing, rendering the storage device it's used in useless.

Flash memory, unlike hard drive storage, can be smaller and is more resistant to abuse, as it has no moving parts. For the same reason, flash memory is also faster. It's used in a wide range of devices, from cell phones and portable digital media players, to laptops computers and video game systems.

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Wow, that could easily be marketed for a "The Hulk" game. I already check with Point of View yesterday, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be available starting next week at a retail price of 169 EUR here in Europe. EVGA also announed the product under SKU 512-P3-N873-AR. The cards are all clocked at default nd features a 738 MHz GPU, 1836 MHz-clocked shaders and 512MB of GDDR3 memory set to 2200 MHz.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ has a price tag of just $200. Mind you that right now I'm working on a GeForce GTX+ SLI review as well. Now then, if you can't take the color green very well .. close your eyes:

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Here's the E3 trailer for Call of Duty: World at War, an upcoming first-person shooter under development by Treyarch and published by Activision for the PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii.  The newest installment in the Call of Duty series goes back to its roots, for better and for worse.

Treyarch will be handling the development this time around and they're taking the series back to World War II. On the bright side, Treyarch is basing its game on the Pacific Theatre, a part of WW2 that hasn't been explored by any Call of Duty game before it.

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Activision has released the first trailer for Singularity, Raven Software's upcoming first person shooter in development for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

The trailer runs for about a minute and contains in-game footage. I really like the style - some kind of industrial spooky atmosphere and the electric effects are looking great. Let's hope they aim higher than mediocrity with this one. Anyway, definitely check out the trailer, it's worth to check it out. 

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Fremont, California, USA, July 15, 2008 - Patriot Memory, a global provider of premium quality memory module and flash memory solutions, today released their "Warp" Solid State Drives (SSD). Available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities, Patriot's Warp SSD's offer many benefits that are superior to traditional hard disk drives.

Built with NAND flash rather than traditional magnetic platters as the storage medium, Patriot's Warp SSD's offer faster read/write speeds, uses less power and are more rugged and reliable versus traditional HDD drives. In addition Warp's SSD offers Error Checking and Correction (ECC) as well as proprietary wear-leveling algorithms which ensure both data integrity and prolonged life of the SSD's.

"Solid state drives are the future of data storage," said Jay Meng, Flash Product Manager for Patriot Memory. "With so many advantages over traditional HDD's, Patriot's Warp SSD's will undoubtedly become the mobile professionals and enthusiasts first choice for data storage."

For more information about Patriot's Warp Solid State Drives and other memory module and flash memory solutions, please contact your Patriot Sales Representative or visit http://www.patriotmemory.com.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=14439

Watcher

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Thank to Jurgen from POV for actually noticing this one. You know, whenever a big company like Sony announces a new product they make pictures available to press and partners for them to use. Every now and then they goof up. So in the internet tradition of "Fail!" threads (we actually have one here at Guru3D.com) I just had to post this product photo of the new Sony Vaio FW series.

But what happens when we zoom in ? Okay, so maybe you have to be a bit geeky to actually understand the fun of this, but for a manufacturer to distribute photo's of a new Laptop  ... not booting up ? Too much fun. Ah subtleties.

Oh and can I just say, I love high-res photo's ;)

 

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NVIDIA on Wednesday denied rumors that the majority of its GeForce 8M mobile graphics chips are flawed. The video hardware maker contradicts the earlier reports that all G84 and G86 video chipsets are more likely to fail and tells Ars Technica that only a subset of its graphics processing units (GPUs) are at increased risk, with just a "very small percentage" of that group likely to die early. When that happens depends entirely on the specific notebook and is more likely to happen with systems running intensive tasks or in warm climates, the company says.

The chip designer has already taken the steps of developing a software driver that downclocks affected chips to prevent them from overheating, and has made sure that none of its in-production chips suffer the same flaw. Desktop parts have never been affected, the copmany says.

NVIDIA's assertions haven't been corroborated elsewhere but potentially assuage worries that all of the affected chipsets would die early. The G84 and G86 platforms are used throughout much of the company's GeForce 8M series and are used in many mid- to upper-range notebooks, including those from Apple, Dell, HP, and other major PC builders.

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Microsoft is preparing the completely new Arc Mouse and is updating the existing Sidewinder X5.

The Arc Mouse is distinguished by futuristic appearance, comfort of usage typical for a large mouse, and compact dimensions. All these features are combined thanks to an original folding design. The mouse is expected to be announced in red and black variants this summer for about 60 USD (wireless receiver included).

As for Sidewinder, it became lighter and simpler comparing to the previous modification. In particular, the newer model has no changeable weights and LCD display. At the same time, it offers resolution switch and wired PC connection, in addition to 9 programmable buttons. Simpler design affected the price positively, making it 60 USD.

 

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Playing catch-up with competitors Hitachi and Samsung -- both of which have begun shipping 500GB laptop drives -- Toshiba has finally announced a new 400GB high-capacity drive along with a new line-up of high-performance 7,200rpm 2.5-inch HDDs. The new 400GB drive boosts areal density to 477Mbit/s (308Gbpsi) to achieve a capacity of 400GB on just two platters and is touted as its "low-noise flagship model." The new 400GB notebook drive (MK4058GSX) is expected to hit mass production in September and will target both notebook PC and consumer electronic applications; however, the company expects to ramp up production of its higher performance 7,200rpm models of its current drives next month, including the 320GB (MK3254GSY) model and the smaller 80GB, 120GB, 160GB and 250GB capacities.

Toshiba says its MK4058GSX uses an improved read-write head and enhanced magnetic layer to boost areal density and achieve a capacity of 400GB on only two platters, the highest data density of any of Toshiba

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When NVIDIA decided to lower prices last week in their high-end serieses merely a couple of weeks after it's launch, it certainly did piss off a lot of people who had just bought the hardware.

To ease that pain a little, XFX and eVGA have launched reimbursement programs which will see early GTX 200 buyers get either cash back or EVGA bucks.

XFX's offer is available in the US and Canada and will enable those who have purchased a GTX 260 or 280 between June 16 and July 11 (2008) to get up to $120 in cash. EVGA's promotion covers the June 16th to July 7th period and will provide GTX 260 and GTX 280 owners with either $75 or $60 and $150 or $125 EVGA bucks which can be used to purchase other EVGA products.

Terms & Conditions:

• Must be a new purchase from an authorized EVGA reseller. Step-ups do not qualify.
• You have 14 days to register and upload a qualified invoice to claim your EVGA Bucks.
• Only customers who purhased the EVGA GTX 280 or GTX 260 at the full Manufactured Suggested Reatil Price (MSRP) will qualify for the Reimbursement Program.
• If between June 16th and July 7th you purchased an:
  • EVGA GTX 260 you will receive $75.00 in EVGA Bucks* or $60.00 Cash Back**
  • EVGA GTX 280 you will receive $150.00 in EVGA Bucks* or $125.00 Cash Back**

I have to say. Hats off to both of them for doing this it really is a nice gesture, but the Northern America / Canada limitation  .. that is seriously silly.

Does the world end at these regions ? Why doesn't the rest of your end-users deserve the same courtesy ? We hope more AIBs will join this example and that the cashback will not be a limited one to the US & Canada only.

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In Red Alert 3, the desperate leadership of a doomed Soviet Union travels back in time to change history and restore the glory of Mother Russia. The time travel mission goes awry, creating an alternate timeline where technology has followed an entirely different evolution, a new superpower has been thrust on to the world stage, and World War III is raging.

The Empire of the Rising Sun has risen in the East, making World War III a three-way struggle between the Soviets, the Allies, and the Empire with armies fielding wacky and wonderful weapons and technologies like Tesla coils, heavily armed War Blimps, teleportation, armored bears, intelligent dolphins, floating island fortresses, and transforming tanks.


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Lian-Li today launches the PC-7F & PC-60F; the newest advanced Midi Tower chassis

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BT today announced plans to roll out fibre-based, super-fast broadband to as many as 10 million homes by 2012. The
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