Software programmers make the virtual world go round, but just how much do they get paid? This is what the guys over at adtmag.com set out to answer, and the results might just surprise you.
As you might expect coming up with a number to this question is somewhat complicated given how diverse the industry is, but it also varied wildly based on where you live. A Colorado based programmer for example will likely top out around $150,000 per year, but drop the same guy down in Silicon Valley and he could rake in as much as $198,000. This could be partially attributed to the vastly different cost of living between the two areas, but then again Silicon Valley has always had an endless hunger for programming talent.
Here are a few other samples from the report complete with fancy job titles.
We highly recommend checking out the full article for more.
- Programmer lead with 10-plus years of experience -- $99,666 - Technology expertise: Extranets -- $100,566 - Education: Doctorate degree -- $101,647 - State: Virginia -- $102,773 - Major metro area: San Jose -- $114,450 - Computer and mathematical occupations -- $77,230 - Computer programmers -- $74,900 - Software developers, applications -- $90,410 - Software developers, systems software -- $97,960
Apple might want us to believe the Netbook is dead, but if sales of AMD's all new Fusion series are any indication, the market is indeed alive and well. AMD claims it has shipped five million units of its Atom competitor since it launched back in January, and is struggling to meet demand.
Fusion is a part of AMD's new ultra low voltage processor lineup that seeks to combine respectable x86 performance, with a very capable DirectX 11 integrated graphics solution. Early reviews seem to agree that AMD is headed in the right direction, and it's about time they found a way to justify the $5.4 billion the company spent on the acquisition of ATI.
Skeptics would point out that 5 million units is a fairly small percentage of the overall processor market, but its still a very strong showing for a platform that didn't exist this time last year.
The future might be Fusion, but it's also sold out. No future for you!
In a bid to accelerate the Firefox development process, Mozilla introduced a new update channel called Aurora last month. Shorter release cycles mean that Mozilla has absolutely no time to bask in the glory of Firefox 4's success. In fact, Mozilla has begun two-timing (for lack of a better metaphor) Firefox 5 and Firefox 6. The latter is now available in the Aurora update channel, the browser vendor announced Friday.
The latest Firefox Aurora packs a number of new features, including Scratchpad, Data Manager Window, Panorama Groups on Demand, Web Console and Web Developer Menu.
The new Data Manager Window lets the user specify the extent to which they want their browsing data, including cookies, passwords and location information, to be accessible to specific websites.
For developers, Mozilla has added the Scratchpad to let them quickly build and test Java snippets within the browser. Further, this Aurora build boasts increased support for "HTML5, DOM level 3, server-sent events, networking technologies and other tools that make it easier for developers build advanced Web apps." More information about the new features is available here.
For those who yawn at the prospect of running a beta build but quail at the very sight of a nightly, the Aurora channel offers the best of both worlds, tempering adventure with a bit of stability.
Google is confident that its cloud-based Chrome OS will change the computer security landscape beyond recognition. That the many layers of security built in to the operating system will be enough to render third-party anti-virus solutions useless.That you will no longer have to "spend hours fighting your computer to set it up and keep it up to date." But not everyone - least of all computer security companies - is convinced.
One of the skeptics, Rik Ferguson, director of security research at Trend Micro, has dismissed Google's security promises as "media friendly" hogwash while comparing them to similar claims from Apple: "While I applaud the impressive advances in security that are apparent in Chrome OS, to a certain extent we are seeing marketing history repeat itself. How often did the mantra that MacOS was immune to malware need to be repeated until the vast majority of users believed it and continue to do so, even after Apple went as far as incorporating rudimentary AV software into MacOS?"
In a recent blog post, Ferguson tersely touched upon Chrome's key security features, including sandboxing, automatic updates, complete absence of desktop apps, cloud-based data storage, and the ability to seamlessly revert back to the last known good state when an anomaly is detected.
He then proceeded to focus on some of the possible workarounds that malware vendors are likely to employ. Ferguson feels that as hackers are likely to find new ways of circumnavigating the sandbox itself, it would be "short-sighted" to completely rely on sandboxing technology even when it is as effective as Chrome's.
He further wrote, "As regards the notion of the operating system always reverting to a known good state at reboot and the security afforded by encrypted data being stored in Google's cloud, well surely that's just moving the goalposts for the bad guys."
"If I can infect you for one session and steal your keys, well then I'll get what I can while I'm in there and then continue accessing your stuff in the cloud, after all I've got your keys now, I don't need your PC anymore."
Even though it's not too surprising to see Trend Micro having a problem with Google's assertion, it does have a point in that no operating system is impregnable and that Chrome OS will, over time, have its fair share of security issues - just a case of how they manifest themselves.
All said, the cloud-based operating system is likely to make things a bit more complicated for malware authors. It's also just as important to acknowledge the great job that Google has done in making Chrome one of the safest web browsers out there. It now needs to keep up the good work.
It's Friday! Fridays are great. Someone should make a song about Fridays.
Anyway. Time for another Forum Feature. It's a short one this week since I'm on a mini-vacation in sweaty Baltimore, but here are a few threads from our official forums that could use your kind attention:
Adv0cate has recently come into some in-store credit and wants to know which tablet he should buy: the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Blackberry PlayBook, or Asus Eee Pad Transformer.
Also, our Break Room subforum, best known as a terrible place, has been closed for renovations. Which probably means we'll burn it down, take the insurance money, and go somewhere with beaches.
With the first e-G8 meeting this week, we suspected that Internet issues would come up at the real G8 conference attended by world leaders. French president Nicolas Sarkozy is known for his desire to "tame" the web, which he sees as a threat to content owners. Imagine our surprise when a memo leaked to the Financial Times indicated wide support of the principals of freedom that made the Internet the force for good it has thus far been.
The document affirms the important role the web will play in the future of democracy in both developed and developing nations. Other statements call for faster deployment of fiber optic cables to expand access. Happily, the document roundly dismissed any kind of Internet censorship. In fact, it says every nation should work to keep the web "open". There is even an admission that some of the archaic provisions of copyright law may need to change with the times.
Mark Zuckerberg was on hand to argue against any shift to strong privacy rules that would hamper the efforts of social networking sites like Facebook. When CUNY's Jeff Jarvis called on Sarkozy to pledge to "Do no harm" during the e-G8, we really didn't think he was listening. Perhaps he got the same message from other world leaders. This leaked memo is far from an official statement, but it makes us feel just a little hopeful.
We didn't expect Google to rest on its laurels after finally ramming through the acquisition of flight software company ITA a few weeks back. Sure enough, flight information is now integrated into Google search results. This is a preliminary version of the feature which is not using ITA technology yet, but Google assures us that changes are coming.
When you search for a destination along with some trigger words that Google determines as travel oriented, the results will have flight information right at the top. You'll see a list of the flight numbers and times, along with links to the airlines that run them. The search engine also understands three-letter airport codes if your city has more than one.
You'll be able to search specific trips by using two city names, or just search for 'flights out of x' to get a list of all non-stop flights leaving an location. These features are nice, but the ITA software is likely to make them considerably more useful. As it stands, the feature feels rather barebones. The change should be available to all users. Let us know if you care for it.
We'll keep this week's Photo Awesome short for the holidays. Earlier in the week, our Editorial Director Jon Phillips posted a video first look of the Samsung Galaxy tablet 10.1. In it, he showed off the video-taking capibilities of the device, by walking up to Gordon, and asking him to rant right there on the spot.
And, as it often does with Gordon, hilarity ensued. Check out the footage below, and have yourselves an awesome holiday weekend. See you Tuesday!
It's true, we've been giving Apple a lot of grief recently over the whole Mac Defender thing. While it's fun to watch Mac fanatics squirm so much over a fairly straightforward malware infection, if we're being honest, the only reason us Windows users are so cynical and jaded in the first place is because we've all dealt with a nasty infection or two ourselves. But just how prevalent is malware on Microsoft systems? A post on Microsoft's Threat Research & Response Blog earlier in the week gives us a glimpse at some of the numbers.
In the post, Scott Wu and Joe Faulhaber cite some statistics from the company's newly updated Microsoft Security Scanner. The tool was downloaded almost 420,000 times in the seven days after the update, and it detected 20,097 infected computers in its scans. That's roughly 1 in 20 computers. While a 5 percent infection rate isn't good, it certainly doesn't support the conception that some people have of Windows machines being overrun with viruses and OMG h@x0rs left and right.
In case you were wondering, each infected machine had an average of 3.5 threats found, with Java exploits being far and away the most common cause. Five of the top six most common infections were Java exploits.
Zhao Chun-Yu obviously never heard that crime doesn't pay, or if she did, she wasn't the type to let a boring old cliché boss her around. She definitely didn't hear it from her mother. Chun-Yu and her family ran a massive Hong Kong-based counterfeit networking business called Han Tong Technology. Chun-Yu and her morally lenient relatives used false names and documents to help import the pirated hardware into the US, then created fake packaging materials to make them look like authentic Cisco products. They raked in millions of dollars worth of sales.
Then the Justice Department slammed the brakes on the joyride.
Earlier this week, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia convicted Chun-Yu on 16 different counts of all types of lengthy jail term-inducing crimes, including conspiracy, money laundering, importation fraud, trafficking in counterfeit goods and bald-faced lying to law enforcement. They also ordered her to fork over "two Porsches, one Mercedes, seven bank accounts containing more than $1.6 million, and four homes and three condominiums with a total value of more than $2.6 million," according to the Justice Department's press release.
Chun-Yu is due to be sentenced in August, and if she gets the proverbial book tossed at her, she faces millions of dollars in fines and over a hundred years in prison. One of her accomplices, Donald Cone of Maryland, was also convicted.
Songs from the cloud? No, its not the name of a LSD-induced Beatles guitar-fest. It's the future of music, from the sounds of it, and it has all of the major players rattling their sabers and baring their teeth at one another. In an obvious grab at some of Apple's musical market share, Google and Amazon have both recently rolled out cloud-based services that let users upload music to company servers, then stream the songs to Internet-connected devices. Apple's response? "Pfah! Who needs uploading?" A Bloomberg report published late last night cites three anonymous sources who claim that, unlike Google and Amazon's offerings, Apple plans on skipping the tedious uploading part entirely by scanning iTunes users' music collections and creating a copy of it on Apple servers.
So how did Apple pull off what Google and Amazon couldn't? Better paperwork. The other two companies couldn't get the big four music publishers to sign licensing agreements. Without a license, the companies can't offer the songs from their servers. Google really, really tried: Bloomberg reports they offered the music companies a cool $100 mil up front, but the publishers balked because they feel that Google searches and YouTube send users to pirated content. Apple's taken the time (and, presumably, shelled out serious cash) to get the publishers in their corner.
Here at Maximum PC, we adhere to the cable news statistics rule that two data points is all you need to create a trend. So being presented with the second white system we've seen in the last three months, we can now declare that white is the new black (which was the new beige).
And, (Kent Brockman voice-over) it's a trend we like. Far from gaudy, Polywell's Ignition X5800 manages to look powerful, stately, and professional. It's an appropriate aesthetic coming from a company with a long history of making computers for work. For 24 years, Polywell has cranked out workstations, servers, and even Alpha-based rigs.
White is really the new black.
Those workstation roots seem to influence the rig's interior as well, with Polywell opting for Intel's 3.46GHz Core i7-990X six-core processor conservatively overclocked to 4GHz. The 990X is coupled with Asus's Sabertooth X58, 6GB of DDR3/1600, a 128GB Crucial C300 SSD, and a 2TB Hitachi, er, Western Digital hard drive. The big surprise is its GPU. Given that AMD was the first graphics company out with a new dual-GPU card, we expected to find the Radeon HD 6990 in Polywell's rig. When we cracked open the case, we instead were treated to Nvidia's top new dual-GPU offering, the GeForce GTX 590. Why no Radeon HD 6990 card? Perhaps it's the result of vendor/supplier relationships, or just a matter of preference, but we do wonder if something isn't up with the Radeon HD 6990. After all, if you glance through the magazine this month, you'll find a review of Asus's GTX 590, but nothing for AMD's hot new card. That's because no cards were available for review.
We'll leave the issue to the armchair analysts. Instead we'll concentrate on how the Polywell X5800 performs.
Against our current zero-point rig, a Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.5GHz, there's not much of a contest. The Polywell X5800 roasts the quad-core 920 in everything by double-digit numbers. The closest the zero-point came was in our Adobe Lightroom benchmark, where the Polywell aces it by just 11 percent. Lightroom isn't very multithreaded and is mostly clock-speed dependent. The Polywell is clocked about 13 percent higher, so the 11 percent advantage is about right. In gaming, the GTX 590 easily surpasses the old dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 card by huge margins. STALKER: CoP saw it 76 percent faster and Far Cry 2 (which is more dependent on CPU performance these days) also saw a nice 51 percent boost. But what about more current rigs? Perhaps the best comparison is the Sandy Bridge–based Digital Storm Black Ops Enix we reviewed in April. Clocked 700MHz higher, with its Turbo Boost 2 taking it to 5.2GHz, the Enix manages to get ahead of the X5800 in all six benchmarks. However, in three of the benchmarks—Vegas Pro 9, MainConcept Reference, and Far Cry 2—it's surprisingly close considering the clock differences.
While it's certainly not a price breakthrough, Polywell's X5800 should be given credit for offering both a 990X and what's essentially the performance of GTX 580 cards in SLI in a $3,500 box. It's still a tough sell against the onslaught of über-clocked Sandy Bridge–based systems that are now back on the market, but it's at least respectable.
Riddle me this: When is a portable PC not a laptop? When it's so heavy you're afraid if you put it on your lap you'll never be able to get up again. Though we wish Eurocom's Panther 2.0 had shipped with a weightlifter's belt, our testing left little doubt that the chiropractor bills will be worth it. This outlandishly large machine has the power and flexibility of a true no-compromise mobile workstation.
To be fair, in 1983 the original Compaq Portable weighed in at around 28 pounds—this behemoth weighs just 15 pounds, including the power supply. However, instead of a 9-inch monochrome monitor, you get a 17.3-inch, 1920x1080 pixel, LED-backlit display. That's full HD resolution—combined with the Blu-ray player, five speakers, and a subwoofer, you've got yourself a portable movie theater, as well.
If performance trumps portability, this mobile workstation is the fastest, most flexible system you'll find anywhere.
It's not the 17-inch monitor, though, that sets this machine apart. The size and weight are necessary to support the power and features of a desktop PC. The rig is engineered to run desktop and workstation-class CPUs; our test system sported a Core i7-980X Extreme running at 3.33GHz with six cores, but the platform supports Xeon processors as well. Two AMD Radeon HD 6970M XT graphics cards, each with 2GB of GDDR5, work together with CrossFire technology.
Our test system included 12GB of RAM and two drives, one 256GB solid-state drive and one 500GB 7,200rpm hybrid drive. If that's not enough, there's room to expand with two more, and the system supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 configurations. Even the CPU and graphics cards can be upgraded; this is one of the most expandable and upgradeable mobile systems we've ever tested.
As you'd expect from those specs, the system blew through our tests. Whether in CPU, graphics, or I/O-intensive tasks, it will run with all but the top overclocked, gaming desktop machines. Upping the resolution on our Call of Duty 4 test to 1920x1080 didn't even phase this system; it still delivered 191fps. The only test where it fell down was the battery drain test; we only made it through 30 minutes of a DVD before the battery gave up.
At 16.76x11.44x2.43 inches, the Panther's as bulky as it is heavy. All of that surface area, though, is put to good use. The keyboard is large, with a separate numeric keypad. There are two USB 3.0 ports, three USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, FireWire, DVI, HDMI-out, and HDMI-in so you can play your Xbox on the big screen.
When we tested the Malibal Nine X7200 built on the same platform (Holiday 2010), we gave it a Kick Ass award. The Panther 2.0 has even more impressive specs, easily earning the award. Its size, weight, and limited battery life make it appropriate for only a small subset of users, but its performance and flexibility define a new class of mobile gaming systems. $5,373 www.eurocom.com
OK, quick show of hands: Who hasn't hunted down a favorite music video on YouTube or some other streaming video service over the past few months? Right. Now, who of you out there hasn't discovered new music by stumbling across a band's video online for the first time? So, we can agree that music videos posted to the web are an inherent good then, right? Right. With that out of the way, let's get down to business. No matter whether you're looking to find an old favorite, or have a hankering to discover something new, music video streaming wunderkind HelloDay has something for you.
What makes HelloDay a slick enough viewing experience to warrant it's being declared our Cool Site of the Week? One word: Choice. HelloDay is a music video depository with a free repertoire of tunes that spans hundreds of artists and a wide variety of genres. From classic pop to trip hop, Abba to Jay-Z, HelloDay's got it all. Eschewing the use of any search functionality other than breaking the site's music up into genres, HelloDay forces visitors to discover new music as they search for something familiar.
While this might sound like an exercise in frustration, in reality it makes for a refreshing viewing experience that'll leave site visitors with a few more musical flavors lingering on their palate than they started off with. And if what you're looking for isn't already available on the site, HelloDay's got you covered there as well, as users are encouraged to submit the URLs of new music videos for inclusion in the site's collection.
Be sure to check back next Friday for another edition of Cool Site of the Week.
Those yellow and orange 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards from Monopoly don't actually exist in real life, but for more than 450 inmates at a California prison with "a high risk of violence," they didn't need one. A computer error allowed them to walk free on "non-revocable parole," meaning they're not required to check in with parole officers and will only be put back behind bars if they're caught committing a crime.
Word of the snafu comes two days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California's prisons are too overcrowded and upheld an earlier order that state officials would have to figure out a way to reduce the population of inmates from 143,335 to around 33,000, the L.A. Times reports.
Here's how it works, and where things went wrong. The law that created non-revocable parole excludes inmates that are gang members, have committed sex crimes or violent felonies, or have been determined to pose a high risk to commit another crime based on their records behind bars. You know, the types you wouldn't want to run into on a lighted street, nevermind a back alley. However, the computer program prison officials used to make that assessment has no way of accessing an inmate's disciplinary history. It instead relies on a state Department of Justice system that records arrests but not conviction information for about half of the state's 16.4 million arrest records.
In a review of 200 case files out of 10,134 former inmates given non-revocable parole in July of last year, it was found that 31 were not eligible, and nine were determined likely to commit violent crimes. That's a 15 percent error rate for that sample, which translates to more than 450 violent inmates being released during the first seven months of the program.
Think of all the things you could do with a 100-core processor, or even a 1,000-core processor. Climb the ranks of Maximum PC's Folding@Home team! Encode videos like a boss! Run Crysis! Ah, if only it was as easy as piling on more cores for exponential performance gains. There's more to it than that, and a couple of researchers from North Carolina University say they've developed a pair of techniques that will help maximize the performance of multi-core processors by allowing them to retrieve data more efficiently.
As the researchers explain it, the new techniques allow multi-core chips to do a better job allocating bandwidth and "prefetching" data, according to a press release issued by NCSU.
"The first technique relies on criteria we developed to determine how much bandwidth should be allotted to each core on a chip," says Dr. Yan Solihin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. "By better distributing the bandwidth to the appropriate cores, the criteria are able to maximize system performance.
"The second technique relies on a set of criteria we developed for determining when prefetching will boost performance and should be utilized, as well as when prefetching would slow things down and should be avoided."
By using both techniques, the researchers claim they were able to boost multi-core chip performance by 40 percent compared to multi-core processors that don't prefetch data, and 10 percent compared to multi-core chips that always prefetch data.
For all the geeky details, you can read the 12-page paper here.
Having a Maximum PC mindset might not always mesh with what's left in your bank account at the end of the month, and so sacrifices have to be made. Do you raid the kids' piggy banks to fund that swank solid state drive upgrade, or try and get by with a mechanical hard drive that offers a fraction of the performance but tons more space per dollar? Thanks to Gigabyte, the latter option looks a little more attractive when paired with its new Z68XP-UD3-iSSD motherboard than it otherwise would be.
Just as the model name implies, Gigabyte's Z68XP-UD3-iSSD is based on Intel's Z68 Express chipset and comes bundled the chip maker's 20GB Solid State Drive 311 Series. Before you "pshaw" and "as if!" the idea of a paltry 20GB, understand this isn't meant to replace your primary storage option, but supplement it.
Gigabyte's bundling Intel's mSATA-based single level cell (SLC) SSD to allow users to take advantage of Intel's Smart Response Technology right out of the box. The tiny module is cleverly located between the CPU socket and top PCI-E port and doesn't appear to interfere with anything.
Intel's Smart Response Technology is supposed to accelerate overall system performance by putting frequently used blocks of disk data on an SSD. It's like having a super large cache for your hard drive, and according to Intel, you can expect "overall system responsiveness similar to what an SSD-only system provides."
In Greek mythology, Chronos was known as the Titan god of time and the ages. He swallowed each of his children as they were born in fear that one of them would rise up and take his throne, just as his father (who Chronos killed, by the way) prophesied, but his wife managed to hide one of them (Zeus), who would later fulfill that prophesy. None of that has much to do with PCs, except that boutique system builder named its small form factor (SFF) gaming line after the Greek god.
We presume Origin's Chronos doesn't have the same murderous tendencies as its namesake. But despite its small size, it can be configured with the right parts to help you kill your friends on a virtual battlefield at the next LAN party. There are four different SFF cases the choose from, the least expensive being the NZXT Vulcan, which comes as the default option at the starting price of $966.
Other components include:
Intel Core i3 2100 processor
Asus P8H61-I motherboard
Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti
4GB DDR3-1333 memory
320GB hard drive
24X DVD burner
500W power supply
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Hardly worthy of a Greek god, but that's what you get for a pedestrian price tag. However, there are plenty of upgrade options to choose from, including dual GTX 590 (or AMD Radeon HD 6990) videocards, faster processors, up to 8GB of RAM, up to four HDDs or SSDs, and more.
The World Weide Web Consortium (W3C) is calling for a broad review of HTML5, the next version of the Hypertext Markup Language used to describe webpages, as well as five related specifications that constitute the W3C Open Web Platform. Officially, this is known as entering the Last Call draft stage in which the HTML Working Group encourages people to comment on what's been made of HTML5 so far and whether or not they believe that technical requirements have been met.
This is a big step for HTML5, though not the last one. More changes could, and probably will come before it's final, particularly with the broad scope of HTML5.
"We now invite new voices to let us know whether these specifications address a broad set of needs," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "This process for resolving dependencies with other groups is a central part of our mission of ensuring the web is well-designed, including being available to all. W3C staff will provide the HTML Working Group the support it needs to move forward, and to ensure that the specification meets W3C's commitments in areas such as accessibility, internationalization, security, and privacy."
If there are no substantive changes that need to be made, HTML5 will move up in the W3C Standards Process to Candidate Recommendation, and then onto W3C Recommendation at which point it will officially become a standard. W3C expects this to happen in 2014.
Last year Mark Zuckerberg challenged himself to learn Chinese. The year before that het set out to wear a tie every day. This year's annual "person challenge" that the billionaire founder of Facebook has set for himself is to eat meat only from animals that he himself has killed. His new goal first came to light in a status update on his private Facebook page in which he told his 847 online friends, "I just killed a pig and a goat."
Zuckerberg later confirmed his challenge to Fortune, so there's little chance he'll try backpedaling on this one and claim his comments were taken out of context, as he did with the whole COPPA thing. No, this is about Zuckerberg coming up with an annual goal to "learn about the world, expand my interests, and teach myself greater discipline," and to force himself to spend at least a little time away from Facebook.
"The only meat I'm eating is from animals I've killed myself," Zuckerberg told Fortune. "I'm eating a lot healthier foods. And I've learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals. It's easy to take the food we eat for granted when we can eat good things every day."
Zuckerberg's friend and neighbor, Jesse Cool, is a Silicon Valley chef and owns a local restaurant called Fleat Street Cafe. She's been helping Zuckerberg with his challenge, introducing him to local farms and advising him on his first kills.
"He cut the throat of a goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it," says Cool.
After killing his food, Zuckerberg takes the carcases to a butcher in Santa Cruz to be cut up into manageable parts, and he isn't afraid to the eat the parts some would consider, well, gross. For example, he and his girlfriend recently ate the heart and liver of a chicken, and used the feet to make stock.
Wondering about his first kill? This is a billionaire we're talking about, so naturally it was lobster (or MySpace, depending on your perspective).
Software programmers make the virtual world go round, but just how much do they get paid? This is what the guys over at 
Apple might want us to believe the Netbook is dead, but if sales of AMD's all new Fusion series are any indication, the market is indeed alive and well. AMD claims it has shipped five million units of its Atom competitor since it launched back in January, 
In a bid to accelerate the Firefox development process, Mozilla introduced a new update channel called Aurora last month. Shorter release cycles mean that Mozilla has absolutely no time to bask in the glory of Firefox 4's success. In fact, Mozilla has begun two-timing (for lack of a better metaphor) Firefox 5 and Firefox 6. The latter is now available in the Aurora update channel, the browser vendor announced Friday.
Google is confident that its cloud-based 
It's Friday! Fridays are great. Someone should make a song about Fridays. 
With the first e-G8 meeting this week, we suspected that Internet issues would come up at the real G8 conference attended by world leaders. French president Nicolas Sarkozy is known for his desire to "tame" the web, which he sees as a threat to content owners. Imagine our surprise when a 
It's true, we've been giving Apple a lot of grief recently over the whole Mac Defender thing. While it's fun to watch Mac fanatics squirm so much over a fairly straightforward malware infection, if we're being honest, the only reason us Windows users are so cynical and jaded in the first place is because we've all dealt with a nasty infection or two ourselves. But just how prevalent is malware on Microsoft systems? A post on Microsoft's Threat Research & Response Blog earlier in the week gives us a glimpse at some of the numbers.
Zhao Chun-Yu obviously never heard that crime doesn't pay, or if she did, she wasn't the type to let a boring old cliché boss her around. She definitely didn't hear it from her mother. Chun-Yu and her family ran a massive Hong Kong-based counterfeit networking business called Han Tong Technology. Chun-Yu and her morally lenient relatives used false names and documents to help import the pirated hardware into the US, then created fake packaging materials to make them look like authentic Cisco products. They raked in millions of dollars worth of sales.
Songs from the cloud? No, its not the name of a LSD-induced Beatles guitar-fest. It's the future of music, from the sounds of it, and it has all of the major players rattling their sabers and baring their teeth at one another. In an obvious grab at some of Apple's musical market share, Google and Amazon have both recently rolled out cloud-based services that let users upload music to company servers, then stream the songs to Internet-connected devices. Apple's response? "Pfah! Who needs uploading?"
OK, quick show of hands: Who hasn't hunted down a favorite music video on YouTube or some other streaming video service over the past few months? Right. Now, who of you out there hasn't discovered new music by stumbling across a band's video online for the first time? So, we can agree that music videos posted to the web are an inherent good then, right? Right. With that out of the way, let's get down to business. No matter whether you're looking to find an old favorite, or have a hankering to discover something new, music video streaming wunderkind 
Those yellow and orange 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards from Monopoly don't actually exist in real life, but for more than 450 inmates at a California prison with "a high risk of violence," they didn't need one. A computer error allowed them to walk free on "non-revocable parole," meaning they're not required to check in with parole officers and will only be put back behind bars if they're caught committing a crime.
Think of all the things you could do with a 100-core processor, or even a 1,000-core processor. Climb the ranks of Maximum PC's Folding@Home team! Encode videos like a boss! Run Crysis! Ah, if only it was as easy as piling on more cores for exponential performance gains. There's more to it than that, and a couple of researchers from North Carolina University say they've developed a pair of techniques that will help maximize the performance of multi-core processors by allowing them to retrieve data more efficiently.
Having a Maximum PC mindset might not always mesh with what's left in your bank account at the end of the month, and so sacrifices have to be made. Do you raid the kids' piggy banks to fund that swank solid state drive upgrade, or try and get by with a mechanical hard drive that offers a fraction of the performance but tons more space per dollar? Thanks to Gigabyte, the latter option looks a little more attractive when paired with its new 
In Greek mythology, Chronos was known as the Titan god of time and the ages. He swallowed each of his children as they were born in fear that one of them would rise up and take his throne, just as his father (who Chronos killed, by the way) prophesied, but his wife managed to hide one of them (Zeus), who would later fulfill that prophesy. None of that has much to do with PCs, except that boutique system builder named its small form factor (SFF) gaming line after the Greek god.
The World Weide Web Consortium (W3C) is calling for a broad review of HTML5, the next version of the Hypertext Markup Language used to describe webpages, as well as five related specifications that constitute the W3C Open Web Platform. Officially, this is known as entering the 
Last year Mark Zuckerberg challenged himself to learn Chinese. The year before that het set out to wear a tie every day. This year's annual "person challenge" that the billionaire founder of Facebook has set for himself is to eat meat only from animals that he himself has killed. His new goal first came to light in a status update on his private Facebook page in which he told his 847 online friends, "I just killed a pig and a goat."
