eldavojohn writes “In the ongoing BP debacle, the Obama administration imposed a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling and a halt to 33 exploratory wells going into the Gulf of Mexico. Now a federal judge (in New Orleans, no less) is unsatisfied with the reasons for this and stated, ‘An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.’ The state’s governor agrees on the grounds that blocking drilling will cost the state thousands of lucrative jobs.” The government quickly vowed to appeal, pointing out that a moratorium on 33 wells is unlikely to have a devastating impact in a region hosting 3,600 active wells. And reader thomst adds this insight on the judge involved in the case: “Yahoo’s Newsroom is reporting that the judge who overturned the drilling moratorium holds stock in drilling companies. You can view his financial disclosure forms listing his stock holdings online at Judicial Watch (PDF).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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An anonymous reader writes “The Australian Government Standing Committee on Communications has released the results of a year long enquiry into cybercrime in a report titled Hackers, Fraudsters and Botnets: Tackling the Problem of Cyber Crime. This report includes a recommendation that Internet Service Provider customers should be forced to install anti-virus and firewall software on their computers as part of their contractual obligations. The Australian Communications and Media Authority receive further powers and responsibilities under the recommendations with respect to shutting down websites hosting malicious content and ensuring that infected consumer devices are disconnected from the Internet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AP – Though Apple stores will be carrying the iPhone 4 this Thursday, you’ll have to wait until next week if you want to buy it from its official U.S. wireless carrier, AT&T Inc.
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Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday announced new blade and rack servers designed to deliver more performance while combining hardware and software capabilities to improve server reliability and lower energy costs.
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Aha. There was indeed an explanation for shipboard oxygen consumption exceeding projections by a fraction of a percent: It seems a parasite has stowed away upon my Royal luxury vessel!
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Recently, HP’s performance ZR series of LCD displays have attracted quite a bit of attention. We’ve heard your comments and pleas for reviews of the 22” and 24” ZR series of HP displays, and those are still very much forthcoming. But for today, we’re breaking some news with a review and launch announcement of HP’s 30” high performance display refresh – the S-IPS ZR30w. It's HP's latest and greatest flagship, and we've thoroughly reviewed it.
Meet HP's new 30" flagship, the ZR30w
Does this 1+ billion color behemoth capture the 30" crown? Read on and find out!
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Today Apple announced the gold master release of iOS 4 to the general public. While the rollout has gone relatively smoothly thus far, with both Anand and I moving from the latest release candidate to the gold master build without issue, we noticed something unnerving while doing performance and battery life testing involving one of iOS 4’s most touted features: background audio playback multitasking.
The combination of Pandora Radio background playback while surfing the web in Safari results in audio skipping after about an hour. Read on for more info.
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Five years ago we dissected the original Xbox 360. Today we're back with the new, slim Xbox 360 and have put together a similar guide to disassembling the console. In addition we've gone in and looked at the power savings and noise reduction made possible by further integrating the CPU and GPU onto a single package.
Moore's Law delivers as the new Xbox 360 uses roughly 80% of the power of the previous generation (and less than 50% of the original Xbox 360). Noise characteristics are also improved. We measured a 4 – 5 decibel reduction in noise when using the system.
Read on for the full guide!
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Earlier this year Apple updated its entire MacBook Pro lineup. The update wasn't cosmetic, the 2nd generation unibody design carried over from 2009. Instead the 15-inch and 17-inch notebooks got Core i5/i7 CPUs paired with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M GPUs. The 13-inch model was left with a Core 2 Duo and only saw a big improvement in GPU spec with the integrated GeForce 320M.
Clearly valuing a consistent GPU experience over a faster CPU, Apple decided to keep the Core i-family of CPUs out of its most popular MacBook Pro. As a result the new MacBook Pro offers roughly twice the 3D gaming performance of its predecessor, but only a small improvement in CPU performance. The standard memory size is now doubled to a respectable 4GB.
Battery life has also improved pretty significantly. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro now offers the best battery life in Apple's entire lineup. In our light web browsing test we measured a full 9.75 hours of battery life on a single charge. Our worst case scenario? 3.56 hours.
Check out our full review for everything from battery life to display quality and thermals.
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PEBBLE BEACH, CA—Overcome by problems in his personal life, an inability to get his golf game in order, and his foundering public image, Tiger Woods broke out into uncontrollable sobs on the fifth tee of the U.S.
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Officials say a positive E. coli test prompted the recall, affecting the Wharton family’s stores of ground beef, beef chuck, and rump roast.
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Reuters – Youthful Neda Agha-Soltan became a symbol of the violence of the 2009 Iran protests when shocking footage of her dying moments reached millions on the Internet after the contested presidential election last year.
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Dear The Onion,
How do you know if you’ve been emasculated? My mom says I am but I’m not sure.
Skip Hannigan, Gainesville, FL
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AP – A hacker took over more than 100 computers and used them to extort sexually explicit videos from women and teenage girls by threatening to release their personal data, federal prosecutors charged Tuesday.
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PC World – Salesforce.com officially launches Chatter today at Cloudforce 2010–the largest cloud computing event of the year. Chatter brings social networking to the enterprise in much the same way salesforce.com brought Web 2.0 to the enterprise–enabling the benefits of social networking to be utilized for new strategic advantages.
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eldavojohn writes “For those under eighteen who play video games in China, life just got a little harder. Not only is gold farming illegal, but starting August 1, virtual currency platform makers are expected to put in safeties that prohibit underage players from using virtual currencies — because doing such a thing might promote ‘unwholesome’ behavior. The new regulations explicitly ‘forbid content advocating pornography, cults, superstitions, gambling, and violence in all online games.’ The business papers are picking it up as a number of stocks from companies like Tencent Holdings — which is heavily based in virtual currency in China — fell about 5%, though the company said that the ban on minors will not affect it.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Just two days before the official iPhone 4 release Apple delivered its promised iOS 4 update to all iPhone 3G and 3GS owners. The new OS release enables Apple's own variant of multitasking, organizational folders and lays the foundation for much of what we should expect to see from Apple over the coming years.
The smartphone OS space is maturing very quickly and iOS 4 is an example of that. Read on as we dive in to the new OS.
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vossman77 writes that BitTorrent is no longer the MPAA’s enemy number one. They are now more concerned about illicit, for-profit movie download sites. This reader adds, “Just a thought, but maybe if the studios offered a low-cost, for-profit, legitimate download site without DRM, they could receive the profits at the expense of the cyberlockers.” “Movie fans downloading free pirated films are no longer Hollywood’s worst nightmare, but that’s only because of a newer menace: cheap, and equally illegal, subscription services. Foreign, often mob-run, businesses aggregate illegally obtained movies into ‘cyberlockers.’ Cyberlocker-based businesses operate from Russia, Ukraine, Colombia, Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere. … Hollywood movies are made available via illegal for-profit sites within days of theatrical release, while the advent of global releasing now allows the proliferation of individual titles into an array of language dubs within the first month of a theatrical debut. … When movies are released on DVD and Blu-ray disc, the sites upgrade the quality of video offered from camcorded images to pristine digital copies. ‘Sometimes these sites look better than the legitimate sites,’ Huntsberry said. ‘That’s the irony.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Who makes the fastest mobile GPUs right now? That question can be a bit tricky to answer, since getting identical laptops other than the GPU is difficult at best. Thankfully, AVADirect was good enough to send us a couple Clevo W860CU notebooks that are indeed identical, outside of the GPU. One sports AMD's top-of-the-line Mobility Radeon HD 5870 while the other is graced with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285M. Which one is the better option? That's what we aim to determine with this head-to-head duel.
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Finding a reasonable gaming laptop without spending a ton of money can be difficult; finding one with DX11 support and high quality components for $1100? That's just being greedy, isn't it? And yet that's exactly what MSI's GX640 brings to the table. Sporting AMD's Mobility Radeon HD 5850, it's a slight step down in performance from the HD 5870, but it's also several hundred dollars cheaper. The GX640 isn't without a few blemishes, but overall this is a very feature rich laptop for a great price.
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Two years ago the best SSD you could buy was made by Intel and it cost $7.44 per GB of MLC NAND. Today Intel is actually the value leader. The 80GB X25-M G2 will set you back $205 at Newegg, or $2.56 per GB. The performance crown now belongs to companies like Micron and SandForce. Although Intel hopes to have performance leadership once more with its 25nm SSDs due out in Q4, the priorities have shifted. Intel’s focus is on bringing SSDs to the mainstream; it wants a bigger slice of the HDD pie. At the end of the day, that’s where the money is.
At just over $200 that’s affordable enough for high end notebooks and desktops but what about more mainstream price points? For many the $99 mark is key. Luckily as SSDs have gotten faster, a new breed of small, affordable SSDs have emerged right around the $100 mark. Today we’re going to take a look at three of those devices.
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Treasury officials say the gold has just been in the bottom of some vaults at the US Bullion Depository anyway, and the government needs the money NOW.
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AP – Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev visits Silicon Valley for the first time on Wednesday, eager to reinvent his country’s outmoded, oil-dependent economy — and lure talent and money from the high-tech capital.
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Today, we take a look at an X58 motherboard from ASRock, the Extreme3. The Extreme3 is the next iteration up from the ASRock X58 Extreme, with the notable additions being USB3 and SATA 6Gb/s functionality. The good news is that ASRock have managed to provide the extra features whilst retaining a sub $200 price point, making it a difficult board to ignore…
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Our previous comparison between AMD and Intel laptops is now a year old, and plenty has changed since then. With a couple of the more recent releases on hand, it's a good time for another head-to-head comparison. Unfortunately, getting the latest AMD-based laptops can be tricky, so we don't have their recently announced "Vision 2" platform (aka Danube/Nile) available for testing (yet). However, there are still many "old" AMD Vision laptops on the market, as well as a ton of Intel i3/i5 units, so we feel it's still useful to see how the two platforms compare. Does AMD have more going for it than the value proposition? Can anyone provide an IGP that's fit for gaming? That's what we aim to find out.
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sciencehabit writes “Scientists observing the x-ray sky first noticed noise in their signals that was eventually ascribed to x-rays produced when the solar wind interacts with the tails of comets. Once alerted to this phenomenon, researchers then noticed that similar x-rays are generated when solar wind particles strike neutral atoms just above Earth’s magnetosphere, the bubble produced by Earth’s magnetic field that surrounds the planet and protects it from harmful solar radiation. The emissions, which are easy to detect with x-ray telescopes, could produce a display of the entire magnetosheath, the part of the magnetosphere that is bombarded by incoming solar particles. And that display could enable scientists to generate, in real-time, global, space-weather images, just as high-flying meteorological satellites provide real-time images of weather on Earth. This would be useful because, when sudden bursts of intense radiation from the sun pierce the magnetosphere’s protective bubble, they set off events that can fry the delicate electronic equipment aboard orbiting satellites, interfere with or kill telecommunications signals, and even overload electric power grids on the ground.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Another year, another Computex. Every time it comes around, vendors attempt to tease and tantalise both journalists and Joe Public alike with concept models, previews, machines running really fast, and the ubiquitous booth attendants holding motherboards upside down. As part of our motherboard coverage here at AnandTech, rather than post separate news articles for each motherboard, we've had a look through what Computex 2010 had to offer, including current and to-be-released products, and got facts straight from the manufacturers where possible.
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Actress Amanda Bynes, star of such films as She’s The Man, announced on her Twitter feed that she would retire from acting.
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Business intelligence projects fared well at the 2010 Computerworld Honors program, which recognizes IT projects that benefit society.
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The past couple of years have shown us a lot can be done with very modest CPU power thanks to Moore's Law. Everything from netbooks to smartphones rely on a new category of "fast enough" silicon that is more power than performance optimized. A number of companies are working on a similar approach to server hardware.
SeaMicro is one such company and today it is announcing its first product: the SM10000. A single 10U SM10000 houses 1TB of memory and 512 Intel Atom processors. The idea is to deliver similar total performance to dozens of power hungry Xeon/Opteron servers, but at a fraction of the total cost of ownership thanks to very low power requirements.
We recently had the opportunity to spend some time talking to SeaMicro's CEO about the technology and honestly, it's pretty interesting. Read on…
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A few months back, Anandtech carried the review of the Patriot Box Office media streamer. Pursuant to a very good reception from readers, we have decided to start a dedicated home theater section where we will be covering products in this space. Of primary interest will be media streaming boxes, but we will also cover other DLNA enabled products, media extenders, PVRs and DVRs.
We will formally inaugurate this section with a roundup of the various platforms in the media streamer space. Towards the end, our methodology to evaluate the various media streamers will also be presented. Readers are welcome to give feedback and let us know areas they would like reviews to concentrate more on. Read on to find more about the history of media streamers, the current state of the market and where we think it is headed.
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NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN—"We really appreciate all you’ve done for us, but now you need to let us die," intoned a 170-ton blue whale through a series of deep and mournful vocalizations. "I swallowed two plastic coolers, a tire, and about a hundred gallons of oil this morning. Is that any way to live?"
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theodp writes “Google faces an imminent California Supreme Court decision on whether an age discrimination suit against it can go forward. But that hasn’t kept the company from patting itself on the back for how it supports ‘Greyglers’ — that’s any Googler over 40. At a company of about 20,000 full-time employees, there were at last count fewer than 200 formally enrolled Greyglers working to ‘make Google culture … welcome to people of all ages.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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eldavojohn writes “Media darling Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, has been told by his lawyers to avoid the United States on the grounds that the US military would like to ask him a few questions about his source of the Collateral Murder video. Assange claims to be holding yet more video (of a US attack on a village that allegedly killed 140 civilians in May of 2009), as well as a quarter million sensitive cables relating to the current foreign war operations from the US State Department. Assange surfaced for the cameras in Brussels while speaking about the need for the freedom of information. Can he build a high enough profile to protect himself from danger?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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We've been playing around with two OMAP 3430 based phones for a while now – the Nokia N900 and Motorola Droid. Though they aren't the newest smartphones to come across our bench, both are important baselines and still very relevant devices, each for totally different reasons: The Motorola Droid is the phone that launched Android into maturity with 2.0. The N900 is Nokia's latest internet tablet turned smartphone running Maemo – which will evolve into MeeGo through joint Intel-Nokia collaboration and run atop Intel's Moorestown platform.
These are two phones that were both all the rage before their release, and we're visiting them now, a little over midway through their life cycles, to see how they're doing and how they compare against everything else we've reviewed.
Read on for our comprehensive comparison and review!
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