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PC World – You could spend hundreds of dollars on image-editing software. But before you part with your hard-earned money, consider one of these free photo-editing programs. No matter what your level of expertise, one of these eight photo editors will fit your needs and personality–as well as your budget.
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Over the past couple of years, Corsair has been branching out from just producing system memory. They've moved into Solid State Disks, power supplies, enclosures, and even brought their first gaming headset to market just this year. Each entry has met with some success, but while the cases in their Obsidian series have proven excellent, they're still prohibitively expensive. The Graphite Series 600T is relatively new, and while the $159 MSRP is still on the steep side, it lines up to compete with the crowd favorite Antec P180 series. I had a chance to take the 600T for a spin, and it may just be worth every penny.
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PC World – Ubuntu may shift from updating every six months to updating every day, according to a report Tuesday in The Register.
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ORLANDO, FL—While attending a recent party following one of Major League Baseball’s winter meetings Monday, Commissioner Bug Selig mentioned Hall of Fame outfielder Willie Mays repeatedly throughout the night, recounting numerous anecdotes of meetin…
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Finding a mainstream notebook with a high resolution screen can be harder than pulling teeth. Outside of the new Dell XPS 15 and the odd business-class machine, a resolution higher than the dismal 1366×768 on a 15.6" screen can be extremely difficult to locate and may even force you to compromise and buy a bigger machine than you'd intended. Fortunately there are options and we've tracked one down in the form of the Clevo B5130M. Sporting NVIDIA's new GeForce GT 425M and a 1080p high-resolution screen, is this notebook enough to steal the crown from the Dell XPS 15?
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AP – Alicia Keys and Lady Gaga take charity work seriously, and they’re going offline to prove it.
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Generally speaking when we think of Antec, we usually think of quality cases (such as the silent gaming stalwart P182/P183 line) and solid power supplies. Personally I even think of good customer service (i.e. missing some drive rails? E-mail their customer service and they'll send you replacements for free.) What we don't think of is quality audio, and just like Corsair's recent branch into audio hardware with their HS1 gaming headset, Antec has opened a brand new line dubbed "Soundscience," which starts with their Rockus 3D 2.1 speaker system. The $249 MSRP could make them a tough sell; do you get your money's worth?
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justice4all writes “Google is working on a fix to a zero-day flaw discovered by British security expert Thomas Cannon that could lead to user data on a mobile phone or tablet device being exposed to attack. Cannon informed Google before posting information about the flaw on his blog. ‘While doing an application security assessment one evening I found a general vulnerability in Android which allows a malicious website to get the contents of any file stored on the SD card,’ Cannon wrote. ‘It would also be possible to retrieve a limited range of other data and files stored on the phone using this vulnerability.’” Sophos’s Chester Wisniewski adds commentary on how this situation is one of the downsides to Android’s increasing fragmentation in the mobile marketplace.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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philmarcracken writes “The Senate recently passed a bill through the Lower House for the separation of Telstra’s retail and wholesale arms and now that same bill has just scraped by in the Upper House; 30 to 28. The deal is worth $11 billion AUD for Telstra and is welcomed by them despite Coalition opposition. This paves the way for the governmental body NBNco to use Telstra’s existing assets and expedite laying fibre optic cables to the larger population densities.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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LANSDALE, PA—According to delighted reports, 25-year-old Brian Hatcher spent a most exquisite Saturday evening in the enchanting company of not only his parents, Mike, 54, and Diane, 53, but also their dear friends and longtime canasta partners Doug and Trudy Blanchard, both 53.
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dmbkiwi writes “The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what’s new, I’ve downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Last week I mentioned that I had recently spent some time with AMD down in Austin, TX, benchmarking its upcoming Brazos platform. The Brazos platform is composed of an AMD Zacate or Ontario APU and the Fusion Controller Hub (a South Bridge based on the SB800 series). Brazos systems will run the gamut of mainstream notebook, netbook and nettop segments ranging from $299 to around $500. While AMD let us reveal the fact that we tested Brazos, we weren't allowed to publish numbers last week. Today, we can.
Read on for our full Brazos performance preview.
Updated: Now with Core i3-330UM performance data!
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Beginning in the spring of 2011, the government of the United Kingdom will conduct regular surveys of the happiness and well-being of its citizens. Here are some of the variables that will be measured.
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Zmee writes “I am looking to build a 2D application for personal use and I will need to use a canvas to paint custom objects. I am trying to determine what foundation to use and have not located a good side-by-side comparison of the various flavors. For reference, I need the final application to work in Windows; Linux is preferred, but not required. I have looked at WPF, Qt, OpenGL, Tcl/Tk, Java’s AWT, and others. I have little preference as to the language itself, but each of the tutorials appear to require significant time investment. As such, I am looking to see what the community uses and what seems to work for people prior to making that investment.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Appolicious – It’s only been a couple of days since the release of iOS 4.2, an update with some major new features, but rumor has it that iOS 4.3 is only a few weeks away.
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ciaran_o_riordan writes “After last month’s unfortunate ruling by Canada’s Federal Court that Amazon’s 1-click shopping idea could be patented, the Commissioner of Patents and the Attorney General of Canada have filed notice (PDF) to Amazon.com, Inc. (respondent) that an ‘appeal will be heard by the [Federal Court of Appeal] at a time and place fixed by the Judicial Administrator,’ probably Ottawa. This case, called Canada’s Bilski, has been in the works since Amazon filed their patent application all the way back in 1998. Just like Bilski, the object of this case is what subject matter is and isn’t patentable — a question which will create crucial case law, making participation in this case important. Anyone looking for more background, particularly those interested in helping to prepare an amicus brief for this case, is welcome at ESP’s wiki page.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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We’d recommend buying these top-rated cameras anyway, but their Black Friday bargain prices sweeten the deal significantly.
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Over the summer we previewed OCZ's first affordable PCIe SSD: the RevoDrive. Made of a pair of SandForce SF-1200 controllers behind a PCI-X RAID controller and a PCI-X to PCIe bridge, the RevoDrive performed well and ended up being only slightly more expensive than a pair of SF-1200 SSDs.
The original RevoDrive had an expansion connector on it that was never used. That's where the RevoDrive x2 comes in. You get twice the number of controllers, making the x2 identical in performance to OCZ's recently announced IBIS drive. But without the HSDL interface. Read on for our quick look at OCZ's latest PCIe SSD.
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Back in March 2010, Intel announced an Atom based platform optimized for storage applications. Using either a D410 or the dual core D510, paired with an Intel 82801IR I/O controller, it was touted by Intel to have been picked up by various NAS vendors such as LaCie, LG, QNAP, Synology and Thecus. We have had the LaCie 5big storage server in our labs for the last few weeks. Aimed at the needs of small businesses, the server brings in a wealth of features thanks to the Windows Storage Server 2008 platform on which the NAS runs.
Read on for our review of the LaCie 5big storage server, and to identify whether it would be a good solution for the storage needs of your small business.
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Mashable – Making a gadget your own is much more fun than joining the anonymous ranks of consumers toting identical tech.
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Even though the WP7 official unveiling is quite a ways behind us, we’ve been spending quite a lot of time with the respective Windows Phone 7 launch devices. Anand has the LG Optimus 7 and the Samsung Focus, and I got the HTC Surround. There are a number of other devices bound for other carriers both international and domestic, and we’re getting to them in time.
If you haven’t already, definitely read our Windows Phone 7 launch piece which covers the platform as it exists purely from the software perspective. We promised then that we’d be taking an in-depth look at each of the devices with the usual rigor, and are starting out with the HTC Surround.
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Many readers have sent in an update to yesterday’s story about the Department of Homeland Security’s seizure of torrent-finder.com, a domain they believe to be involved in online piracy. As it turns out, this was just one of dozens of websites that were targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “In announcing that operation, John T. Morton, the assistant secretary of ICE, and representatives of the Motion Picture Association of America called it a long-term effort against online piracy, and said that suspected criminals would be pursued anywhere in the world. ‘American business is under assault from counterfeiters and pirates every day, seven days a week,’ Mr. Morton said. ‘Criminals are stealing American ideas and products and distributing them over the Internet.’” The TorrentFreak article we discussed yesterday has been updated with a list of the blocked sites.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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 Kansas City Star |
Space station crew lands safely
USA Today A capsule carrying two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut touched down on the grassy plains of central Asia as Thanksgiving Day neared an end in the United States. The 11:46 pm ET landing in wintry weather in Kazakhstan marked the end of a … Space Station Crew Returns Safely to Earth Space Station Crew Arrives Safely Back on Earth Soyuz spacecraft to deliver New Year gifts to ISS |
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When someone talks about budget gaming on a laptop, a lot of things might go through your head. Are they talking about ten year old games on netbooks? Maybe by "budget" they mean $1000? Or perhaps they're referring to a pathetically slow IGP that can barely run modern games at 768p (but does reasonably well with 3+ year old titles)? So many options, but today we're talking about a laptop that can legitimately play almost any modern title at medium to high detail and 768p, and it checks in at a pocketbook friendly price of under $700.
Given the specs and performance potential, it's no surprise that the laptop in question comes from Acer—with everything that implies. The Acer Aspire 5551G also happens to be the best example of AMD's midrange gaming laptops, packing a dual-core P520 processor with a Radeon HD 5650 graphics card. There are certainly some blemishes in the overall experience, but many people are able to overlook those when they see the bottom line—which might explain in part why you can no longer find this model in stock. Yeah. But if you're curious as to how an AMD Vision Premium 2010 notebook stacks up to the competition, read on….
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Barence writes “Control of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote, as does the world’s biggest creative software company, Adobe. And HTML itself is changing, too. This article examines the case for each of the contenders in the war of the web and, with the help of industry experts, assesses which – if any – is most likely to emerge as victor.”
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I hate to keep things from you all, but last week I was diligently working in a room at AMD’s new campus in Austin, Texas. You see, AMD wanted to give us more time with the Brazos/Zacate platform we tested at IDF ahead of its official launch. It’s too early for production worthy OEM systems and AMD wasn’t too keen on these reference platforms leaving its offices so it did the next best thing: fly us out to test the systems on AMD’s campus.
The rules were simple. We couldn’t run anything that would harm the system, but other than that we were free to bring whatever we wanted and test however we wanted. AMD dropped by our private room to check to see if we needed anything but other than that, it was all hands off.
The Brazos test platform
While I’d love to share performance data with you today, I can’t. You’ll have to wait another week or so for that. What AMD is allowing us to talk about are the specific configurations AMD’s first Fusion APUs will ship in and general impressions from the testing.
Read on!
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WASHINGTON—Having admittedly "reached the end of [his] rope," President Barack Obama sent a rambling 75,000-word e-mail to the entire nation Wednesday, revealing deep frustrations with America’s political culture, his presidency, U.S. citizens, and himself.
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MojoKid writes “Those satellites in space don’t just take spy pictures. On this Black Friday 2010, they actually took pictures of you, and your rush to Black Friday shopping deals. The research is being done to see what consumer demand this year means for retail stocks. The trend, so far, has been favorable. The companies involved in this are Remote Sensing Metrics and Digital Globe. Remote Sensing Metrics is a Chicago-based consulting firm that analyzes the satellite imagery. In turn, it purchases those images from Colorado-based company Digital Globe, which operates its own satellites.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Phoghat writes “The highly classified X-37B Space Plane is scheduled to land soon. It was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on April 22 atop an Atlas 5 rocket, and the Air Force is still being very secretive on all aspects of the flight. We do know that it’s set to touch down at Vandenberg Air Force Base’s 15,000-foot runway, originally built for the Space Shuttle program. In many ways, the craft resembles a Shuttle with stubby wings, landing gear and a powerful engine that allows the craft to alter its orbit (much to the dismay of many observers on the ground). Its success has apparently given new life to its predecessor, the X-34, which had been mothballed.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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LOS ANGELES—The group of professional adults responsible for making television commercials in which Dodge trucks drive through various wilderness environments or haul noticeably heavy objects is referred to by the auto manufacturer as "the crea…
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theodp writes “Looks like threatening to take their ball and leave paid off for US tech firms. The Irish government announced plans this week to tap the welfare state and working class for much of the $20B in savings they’ve pledged to find over the next four years, but the austerity measures will not touch large businesses like Microsoft, Intel, Google, HP, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pfizer, which created jobs and fueled exports in Ireland after being lured by low corporate tax rates. More than 100,000 Dubliners took to the streets to protest the bailout plan, calling for the Irish government to default on the country’s debts, and demanding an immediate election. ‘We should default,’ said a retired union worker, ‘the idea that the workers of this country should pay for the gambling of the billionaires is disgusting.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hollywood is still obsessed with sports, as these life stories of athletes now in production demonstrate.
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PC Magazine – Windows Home Server users decry decision to remove Drive Extender feature from the upcoming WHS latest release, code-named “Vail.”
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As we discussed a couple weeks back, Dell has relaunched their XPS brand for laptops, with a focus on quality and "mainstream performance". The latter means that unlike previous XPS laptops, you won't find the highest performing GPUs in the new models—Dell will continue to serve the needs of mobile gamers with the Alienware brand. The former is the more interesting aspect, as Dell's XPS laptops will have better build quality and improved LCD panels. Dell sent us their new L501x, the 15.6" chassis with NVIDIA's Optimus Technology and a new GeForce 420M GPU (our first look at the mainstream 400M parts!), and they included the upgraded 1080p B+GR LCD panel. Read on to find out just how good the new XPS is, and whether it's worth the price of admission.
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I haven’t had an official product briefing with VIA in years. The last time I met with a representative from the company was two years ago outside of IDF in San Francisco. Before then, it was probably around 4 years.
VIA was the first casualty of integration in the PC space. Today we’re all talking about moving graphics onto the processor die, but a few years ago we were having similar discussions about moving the memory controller and north bridge on die. As a manufacturer of chipsets (north and south bridges) for CPUs, VIA lost relevance in the x86 CPU market as the need for a third party chipset maker faded.
VIA’s recent visit to me in Raleigh, NC had two purposes according to the company. One, to remind me that VIA was still around and to give me some face to face time with a VIA representative (appreciated). And two, to showcase VIA’s dual-core Nano platform and brand new integrated graphics chipset (intriguing).
Read on for our preview of VIA's latest, and surprisingly competitive Nano platform.
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AFP – US authorities have shut down dozens of websites offering counterfeit goods and pirated music, five months after a crackdown on sites offering movie downloads.
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