Posted 03/11/10 at 04:54:33 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The filthy rich have a new poster boy. According to the latest Forbes World's Billionaires list, Mexican telecom magnet Carlos Slim Helu is the richest man alive, with his $53.5 billion fortune proving just about enough to win him the top spot ahead of Bill Gates. Gates may have spent a substantial part of his life atop the list but this year he missed the top spot by a whisker with an estimated worth of $53 billion. He lost nip and tuck despite adding $13 billion to his fortune over the past year. This is the first time in the last 16 years that a non-American has topped the list. Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer, Paul Allen and Michael Dell are some of the other tech honchos on the list.

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Posted 03/11/10 at 04:43:20 PM by Bart Salisbury

Microsoft might well be right--the Internet does go “bing”! comScore’s reporting that Microsoft’s Bing search engine saw a jump in use in February. More a lower-case “b” jump than a capital “B” jump, but a jump nonetheless.

comScore’s Core Search Report for February shows Goggle by far in the lead of search providers with 65.5 percent of all search queries, edging up slightly from its January total of 65.4 percent. Yahoo! was in second place with 16.8 percent of all search queries, down from 17.0 percent. Number three Bing was still number three with 11.5 percent of all searches, which was 0.2 points higher than in January.

The big deal here, if there is one, is Bing’s progress since its introduction last summer. It has constantly increased its share of the search query pie. The pace has been slow, but it has also been steady. And, at this rate of growth, it will only take 99 more months before Bing brings search giant Google to its knees.

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Posted 03/11/10 at 04:04:51 PM by Bart Salisbury

Connecting people to what they want (or alternately helping people more easily spend their money), just got a bit easier with Google’s new “in stock” notifications.

The process is simple. If you do a search for a product that is sold by participating retailers, and one of those retailers is nearby, and has that item in stock, the search results will be displayed with a blue dot. With “My Location” enabled, you’ll even know how far you have to drive to acquire your coveted item. Google’s partners in this venture include Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, and Pottery Barn.

According to Google’s Mobile Blog: “If you have an iPhone, Palm WebOS phone, or any Android-powered device, and you're in the US, just go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on the "more" link, and then select "Shopping." Or look for the "Shopping results" section in Universal Search results when you search on Google.com.”

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Posted 03/11/10 at 03:34:15 PM by Bart Salisbury

Pink Floyd has scored itself a favorable ruling from a British court that may allow the band to remove its individual tracks from digital music services, such as iTunes, Lala, and Amazon.

The underlying issue is a relatively simple one: Pink Floyd’s contract with its record company, EMI, gives the band the right to say yeah or nay to the sale of individual tracks from its albums. Pink Floyd’s intent is to preserve what it says is the artistic integrity of its work. While the contract was signed pre-digital, the band believes it applies to the digital world as well.

Pink Floyd isn’t looking to prevent its music from being available digitally. Instead it wants to control the way that music is made available. For Pink Floyd this would be the whole album or nothing at all. And for such works as The Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall, this seems to make sense. Other artists, such as Garth Brooks and AC/DC hold a similar view.

Record companies, on the other hand, find selling individual tracks easier, and hence more profitable, than selling whole albums. A position borne out by the fact that a lot of albums are little more than a fistful of songs crammed together under a title--with little or no thought to musical integrity. Consumers, for some strange reason, object to having to buy nine crappy songs just to get one good one, so tend to disfavor the idea of album integrity.

For artists there is a money issue as well. Whole albums produce more royalties for artists than do single tracks. Being able to control presentation would give artists additional leverage with record companies, giving this ruling greater significance.

The ruling doesn’t put an end to Pink Floyd in digital form. As far as EMI sees things, the court didn’t prohibit it from single track sales, so it’s single track business as usual, even for Pink Floyd, until EMI is told otherwise.

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Posted 03/11/10 at 02:30:40 PM by Bart Salisbury

See what you can accomplish if you whine about something enough? Even the mighty Apple, which lords it above consumers with it’s ‘my way or the highway’ software approach, will capitulate and give the customer what he wants: the iPhone is getting multitasking.

Not right away, mind you. And, if the sources AppleInsider uses are not as reliable as they claim, maybe not at all. But, should it come to fruition, it will be in version 4.0 of the iPhone OS, for which there is no projected release date.

Between now and then Apple has some issues to contend with, as adding multitasking to the iPhone (and by extension the iPad), will be both a simple and a complex task. Simple because version 3.x of the iPhone OS has fully preemptive multitasking. Apple, for security and technical reasons, blocks all but a select few applications from running in the background. None of these select few are among the thousands of third party apps that populate the iPhone App Store (and which help bolster the iPhone's popularity).

Complex because Apple has to tweak the user interface to make access to multiple applications intuitive and easy. As most applications are shut down when a user goes to the home screen, such interface needs didn’t have to be address. Since Apple is obsessive about such things, this could take a while. And, of course, there’s all those funky technical issues over resource allocation that have to be resolved, so running apps play nice with the OS and with each other.

Once multitasking is implemented, then iPhone users can start whining about slow performance and battery life, like the rest of smartphone users.

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Posted 03/11/10 at 12:09:43 PM by David Murphy

Oh, Cisco. What a tease you are!  The company's been pumping up the general Internet crowd for a game-changing announcement, one that would--and I quote--"forever change the Internet."  I was honestly hoping that said unveiled device would be like, a super-crazy consumer router that would... well. I'm not really sure what it would do. Gigabit speeds are more than sufficient for anyone's home networking needs right now (when I'm looking for this column on a terabit connection in five years, I'll have a hearty laugh.)  And it's not like we have a new wireless draft on the way any time soon.

It would have been nice and revolutionary for Cisco to embrace--you guessed it--a more open-source platform for its hardware devices. One, it's what I write about and, two, we're kind of in a hardware lull, don't you think?  When it comes to consumer routing and switching devices, there's only so much one can do. Aside from adding on new antennas, shifting antennas around in new ways, or adding more ports to the back of a device, what's really propelling router technology forward nowadays?

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Posted 03/11/10 at 10:47:39 AM by Paul Lilly

We're not the least bit surprised that OCZ has come out with yet another solid state drive (SSD), but here's something you probably weren't expecting: It costs less than $100.

OCZ's new Onyx SATA II 2.5-inch SSD series looks to tackle the mainstream market by putting more focus on price than it does with raw performance or high capacity. Available initially only in 32GB form, the Onxy drive offers up to 125MB/s read and up to 70MB/s write speeds, so it's not going to knock out the competition. But it will make a solid argument for a netbook or boot drive.

"As new technologies become available, OCZ continues to expand both our enterprise and consumer SSD lines, and one of our goals is to make SSDs more affordable to end-users. Our new Onyx series SSD does exactly that and is a perfect solution for netbooks, laptops, or home desktop PCs," commented Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "Designed to offer the best of both worlds, the new OCZ Onyx SSD delivers the speed and reliability of solid state storage to mainstream consumers at an aggressive price point that makes the technology more accessible to customers who want to take advantage of all the benefits of the SSDs without incurring the high cost normally associated with the solution."

Few other details are available, such as which controller the Onyx uses, though we do know it comes with 64MB of cache and serves up TRIM support.

No word yet on when this one will make it to market.

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Posted 03/11/10 at 10:32:58 AM by Paul Lilly

During CeBIT, Mushkin was spotted showing off a new line of memory modules. Dubbed "Ridgeback," the upcoming memory kits will sport a redesigned heastpreader with ridges along the back (imagine that).

News and rumor site Fudzilla says the Ridgeback heatsink will be available in gaming and enthusiast grade memory kits in both DDR3 and DDR2 trim. These will include:

• 4GB DDR3-1600, 6-8-6-24, 1.65V
• 6GB DDR3-1600, 6-8-6-24, 1.65V
• 6GB DDR3-1600, 8-8-8-24, 1.65V
• 4GB DDR2-1066, 5-5-5-15, 2.1V

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Posted 03/11/10 at 09:33:55 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

Meet the world’s fastest CPU. OK, so we just gave away the big reveal to our report before you even flipped one page, and without so much as the common courtesy of a spoiler alert. For that, we do not apologize, because it’s not like you couldn’t have guessed how this one would end up. After all, Intel’s new 3.33GHz Core i7-980X builds on all the goodness of the ass-kicking quad-core 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition, but is smaller, cooler, and has an additional two cores under its heat spreader. With Hyper-Threading enabled, that’s a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?

In fact, Intel’s Core i7-980X seems to be one of the most flawless launches we’ve seen from the company in some time. By flawless, we mean there are no contortionist acts, such as explaining to consumers that a new socket (LGA1156) will have the same CPU branding as an incompatible existing socket. Nor is there the head-scratcher of a very novel, yet very limp, integrated graphics chip in a CPU (Clarkdale), which, by the way, won’t work in boards that lack graphics output ports.

With Core i7-980X, you update your BIOS, drop the chip in, and—voilà—you spend hours rocking a six-core high. Put simply, Core i7-980X is 24-ounces of prime-rib red meat for performance enthusiasts who really haven’t had much to gnaw on since the original 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition came out two years ago.

So we’re done, right? You don’t need to read on? Sorry, there’s still more to learn. If you want to know if your motherboard works with the new chip, what applications can really exploit the six cores, and how this bad boy performs, you’ll have to keep reading.

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Posted 03/11/10 at 09:18:33 AM by Paul Lilly

It's here, ladies and gentlemen - the Khronos Group today announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification at GDC 2010 in San Francisco.

In short, the latest iteration "brings the very latest in cross-platform graphics acceleration and functionality" to PCs and workstations, but if you're looking for a bullet list of geeky details, we have you covered. Some of the benefits include:

• two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU;
• per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility;
• drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention;
• shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility;
• separation of texture state and texture data through the addition of a new object type called sampler objects;
• 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality;
• performance improvements, including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query.

"The release of OpenGL 4.0 is a major step forward in bringing state-of-the-art functionality to cross-platform graphics acceleration, and strengthens OpenGL’s leadership position as the epicenter of 3D graphics on the web, on mobile devices as well as on the desktop," said Barthold Lichtenbelt, OpenGL ARB working group chair and senior manager Core OpenGL at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is pleased to announce that its upcoming Fermi-based graphics accelerators will fully support OpenGL 4.0 at launch."

So what does this all mean for Joe Gamer? That remains to be seen, and ultimately decided by developers. OpenGL 4.0 has DirectX 11 in its sights, and Khronos has no qualms about saying so. "OpenGL 4.0 exposes the same level of capability of GPUs as DirectX 11," the company said during a presentation at GDC.

Game on.

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