MS To Offer Free Windows 7 Upgrade To Vista Users

From Slashdot:
Link to Tech ARP Article – The Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Program Rev. 2.1

EDIT: [...a consumer who buys a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, Business, or Home Premium on or after July 1, 2009, through Jan. 31, 2010, could obtain a free upgrade to Windows 7.] – Popular Science

Who the hell worships a bundle of flying spaghetti with meatballs?

With a decrease in the number of pirates we have seen an increase in global warming over the same time period.
Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates.

Israel Ceasefire + Withdrawl

The West Article – Tenuous night of peace falls over Gaza
A tenuous ceasefire held in Gaza on Monday as Israeli troops began withdrawing from the battered enclave after the Jewish state’s deadliest offensive on the Palestinian territory…

So, what’s left…?
The Palestinians don’t expect this cease-fire to last long, and quite frankly, neither [...]

Internet Censorship in Australia – F**K Off, Basically.

http://nocleanfeed.com/

nVidia GTX 285/295 Reviews – And they look delicious.

nVidia GTX 285 – The US$399 die-shrunk (55nm) card. Sits right between it’s older cousin, the GTX 280, and the slightly faster DAAMiT HD4870 X2

Anandtech – GTX 285 Review
HotHardware – GTX 285 Review
Hexus – GTX 285 Review
FiringSquad – GTX 285 Review (Overclocked (?))
Guru3D – GTX 285 Review (Tri-SLI)
  
nVidia GTX295 -The new US$499 performance king, the [...]

Windows 7 Beta and How Great and Stable and Pretty it is.

Windows 7 – Looks great, runs great. Minimal compatibility problems, and far improved support facilities, including a user-friendly program-compatibility interface. And a plethora of desktop friendly things too, including smarter grouping, a greatly improved notifications bar, and movable gadgets.

Windows 7
Over the past few years, you’ve asked us to make some changes to Windows. We listened [...]

Google Chrome Beta Release – 2nd September

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we [...]

nVidia’s Geforce 9800GTX+, nVidia PhysX, ATi’s HD 4850 Benchmarks, and Fruit.

Geforce 9800GTX+ and nVidia PhysX

nVidia Geforce 9800GTX+ (55nm G92b Core)
Picture Courtesy of Tom’s Hardware

ATi HD4850 Benchmark.

ATi HD4850, Picture courtesy of HotHardware
Enable PhysX on any G92/G92b/GT200 core nVidia card!
Instructions
Supported Cards:
All Geforce 9 series cards.
Geforce 8800GT 256MB/512MB
Geforce 8800GTS (512MB ONLY)
Oh yeah, and Phantasy Star Portable. You can look as goofy as these guys.
Good Luck.
[...]

3G iPhone Down Under

I just bought an LG U990 Viewty about 3 months ago as well. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice phone, it just doesn’t have much substance. And I’m sure I won’t be able to resist the temptation of the rather similar looking iPhone. Hmm…

Jobs announces July 11th worldwide 3G iPhone rollout. And it’s… cheaper? [...]

Mozilla Firefox 3 Released!

 
Get it here (Or up there)
Speedy performance, thrifty memory usage, and, in particular, the address bar that now predicts where you want to go when you start typing (what Mozilla insiders refer to as the Awesome Bar) firmly plant Firefox at the top of the Web browser hill, flying the flag of our Editors’ Choice [...]

nVidia Geforce GTX 260/280 Released+Benchmarks

The nVidia Geforce GTX 260/280 series graphics cards were officially launched today.
And with this launch, AMD gain a very real chance to fight back with their upcoming HD4780.
Tom’s Hardware’s GTX 260/280 Review
Anandtech’s GTX 260/280 Review
Guru3D’s GTX 280 Review 

 
So what’s the say?
The GTX 280 is about on-par with the 9800GX2 in performance, or perhaps 2-3% under. [...]

Spore Release – September 5/7 – World Watching Wright

I probably haven’t been looking forward to Spore as much as it might deserve. I feel it’s more of a 4,5,6 or 20 in 1 game, rather than a new direction for PC gaming.
Of course that depends on how well each level is integrated. Hopefully it won’t end up as some sort of glorified all-in-one [...]

Complete GTX280 benchmark scores… From The Inquirer.

3DMark Vantage (Performance) – 10338
3DMark06 (default) – 15846
Crysis DX10 @ 1600×1200 – 44.00fps avg.
Let’s see what else nVidia’s new GTX280 card has -
GTX280 Benchmark Scores

 
I’ve never entirely trusted “The Inquirer”, but these scores seem pretty plausible. If these scores are accurate, the GTX280 improves upon the Geforce 9800 GTX’s overall performance by about 18% 35%?
This [...]

Verizon Communications terminates Usenet access for customers.

CNet News Link
Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups–out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.
Well, this is rather ham-fisted. I don’t personally use Usenet, but I still disagree with a blockout-approach of this scale; their customers likely pay for full access to the internet, and cutting off a major service like [...]