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 do I.

The Israeli government claims they’ve struck a decisive blow against Hamas, but as far as I can see, they’re trying to pretend there’s reason for the pointless bloodshed, especially after mounting international pressure to cease the attacks, amidst the increasing civilian death toll, and disruptions to their livelihood.

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 Dual-GPU GTX 295.

Anandtech – GTX 295 Review

HotHardware – GTX 295 Review

Hexus – GTX 295 Review

FiringSquad – GTX 295 Review

Guru3D – GTX 295 Review

TomsHardware – GTX 295 Review (Preview)

TomsHardware – GTX295 Quad-SLI Review

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 closely. Now it’s time to share an early look at how we’ve used your feedback. Windows 7 is faster, more reliable, and makes it easier to do what you want. Both the everyday things and the killer “is that really possible?” things. Dig into this site to see what’s coming.

You can grab the Windows 7 Beta right here @ http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

(Don’t worry, I guarantee it’s stable and won’t corrupt MP3s)*

*Not actually a guarantee or true…

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 believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Official Google Blog Entry

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? Better start queuing now.

More at PCAuthority

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 for browsers.
 

FOXNews Firefox 3 Review

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. Which means that The Inquirer’s benchmarks were garbage, and I apologise for the misinformation on their behalf.

It’s retailing for US$649, which is rather steep considering the GX2 is around US$150 cheaper and offers virtually the same performance, albeit with improved CUDA.

The GTX 260 on the other hand is almost half the price of it’s bigger brother, and is only about 18% slower, which basically knocks the 9800 GTX out of contention at that price point (the GTX 260 is about 10-15% faster than the 9800 GTX). It’s currently about $50 more, but we might see the price difference between the two cards drop soon, depending on how nVidia decides to run things.

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 WiiPlay.

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 makes Crysis quite playable at @ 1600×1200, Very High; shame gameplay doesn’t scale with graphics performance.

Amazon has a GTX280 card listed for US$650, or about A$700. Ouch.

The nVidia GTX280 is due for release tomorrow on June 17th – no, I certainly won’t be trading in my 8800GT for one.

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 this with little notice isn’t a good move.

 

“We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers…I commend the companies that have stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry.” 

– Andrew Cuomo