Intel is transitioning all of its 45 nm Xeon DP processors from the C-O to the E-0 stepping. There are no changes in the feature set of the Harpertown quad-core CPUs and Wolfdale dual-core processors, with the exception of the flagship model, which is the sister model of the company’s Skulltrail processor Core 2 Extreme QX9775. The thermal design power (TDP) rating of the Xeon X5482 drops by 20%.

According to a product change notification sent to Intel customers yesterday, all 18 current 45 nm Xeon processors are transitioned to the new stepping with first samples expected to become available on July 3. The updated processors are scheduled to begin shipping on October 6 and Intel asks its customers to be prepared to receive these CPUs by October 20 of this year.

View Full Article: TG Daily

Ina Fried: With Microsoft's announcement of yet another patent cross-licensing deal this week, it would seem nearly everyone has a deal with Redmond.

The company has inked a lot of deals since it began its patent deal push a few years back, signing folks from Sun Microsystems to Novell to Samsung. So it's getting a lot less interesting to write up each one of these things. As the latest one crossed my desk earlier this week, I had an idea. Rather than write up a story on how another name got added to the list (Pentax), I'd focus on something far more interesting--who's not on the list.

View Full Article: CNET News

Yahoo’s chairman, Roy Bostock, rejected late Thursday accusations from the billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn that the company’s board had acted irrationally in turning down a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft and repeated that Yahoo remained open to a deal at the right price.

Mr. Icahn announced earlier in the day that he intended to initiate a proxy fight to replace Yahoo’s board with 10 new directors that would try to negotiate a merger with Microsoft. Mr. Icahn said he hoped Yahoo would resume merger negotiations with Microsoft and make the proxy fight unnecessary.

View Full Article: The New York Times

We are seeing the SSD market mature quickly from the performance, pricing, and capacity viewpoints. Just over a year ago, the first generation SSD drives had average capacities in the 16GB range with read/write performance around 45/25 MB/s. Pricing for these drives was around the $100 per-GB range and most suppliers explicitly stated the drives were meant for industrial, military, medical, or commercial use.

Last fall, second generation controller technology became available and performance jumped to 60/40 MB/s read/write speeds for the mainstream market along with specialized manufacturers like Mtron and Memoright offering drives in the 100/80 MB/s read/write range. The new capacity standard became 32GB with 64GB performance oriented drives available. Pricing for the mainstream also dropped with costs averaging around $48 per-GB for the performance-oriented drives and around $33 per-GB for the mainstream drives.

View Full Article: AnandTech

The beta version of Yahoo's SearchScan security feature has come under fire for false positives and other mistakes.

SearchScan is the result of a partnership between McAfee and Yahoo to improve the security of Web searches. The feature, powered by McAfee's SiteAdvisor, alerts users when sites contain spam, spyware, adware or other malicious software that could damage a PC.

However, since the beta was unveiled May 6, there have been some cases of false positives. A URL mix-up by Yahoo seemed to label Google.com as a malicious site. In another case, AnyCoupons, a Web site operated by 77Blue, was classified as a spammer. Though both issues have been resolved, the latter left a bad taste in the mouth of 77Blue CEO David Lewis, who complained that Yahoo and McAfee were slow to fix the problem.

View Full Article: eWeek

Scientists have launched a new game site designed to make computers smarter by harnessing the cognition of the humans playing the games. Gwap.com, short for games with a purpose, takes a Tom Sawyer approach to solving age-old computer problems by repackaging normally mundane tasks as online fun.

The games are the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon University professor whose research led to the CAPTCHA, which is used by websites to prevent computer scripts from signing up for accounts. The puzzles with blurred images and squiggly lines take advantage of computers' inherent difficulty recognizing patterns.

View Full Article: The Register

Mtron Co., Ltd, a manufacturer of Solid State Drive (SSD) products in South Korea, announced today that they have completed the development of new PRO 7500 series for industrial purpose, and will be launching the new series in June.

Mtron’s new PRO 7500 series supports SATA II interface and provide the maximum read speed of 130MB/s and write speed of 120MB/s, becoming the fastest SSD in the market. With the development of their new PRO 7500 series, Mtron created another innovation to the SSD technology and proved once again that they are the leading manufacturer of SSD products in the highly competitive market.

View Full Article: BusinessWire (via Engadget)

One week after hiding Internet Explorer attack code on his Web site, security researcher Aviv Raff has posted details on how to launch the attack.

The bug lies in the "Print Table of Links" feature, which lets IE users print out a Web page along with a list of all the links on the page tacked onto the end. Raff discovered that if an attacker added special scripting code to a Web page, he could then run unauthorized software on the PCs of IE users who printed using this feature.

The flaw affects IE 7 and IE 8, Raff said. Security vendor Secunia said that the bug also affects IE 6.

View Full Article: Yahoo News - PC World

It doesn't get much closer than this: Microsoft's Xbox 360 beat out the PlayStation 3 in U.S. console sales for April, but only by a whisker -- 188,000 units to 187,100 units, according to NPD Group data released this afternoon. As reported here earlier today, Nintendo's Wii dominated the market again, with 714,200 units sold.

The month included the April 29 launch of "Grand Theft Auto IV," and the Xbox 360 version of the game was the top-selling title for the month, with 1.85 million units of the game sold for the Microsoft console. The PlayStation 3 version of GTA IV sold an even 1 million units.

View Full Article: Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog

After years of conflict, Microsoft and the computing and education project One Laptop Per Child, have reached an agreement that will put Windows on the organization’s computers.

Microsoft long resisted joining the ambitious project because its laptops used the Linux operating system, a freely distributed alternative to Windows.

The group’s small, sturdy laptops have been hailed for their innovative design. But they are sold mainly to governments and education ministries in developing nations, and initial sales have been slow partly because countries were reluctant to purchase machines that did not run Windows, the dominant operating system.

View Full Article: The New York Times

The folks at Valve have updated their hardware survey again posting the most popular CPU, GPU, operating system, amount of RAM and more. Interesting stuff. Of the 1,724,108 systems in the survey, some of the most popular hardware was:

Network speed: 2,048.0 Kbps / System RAM: 2GB and above / Processor Vendor: Intel / CPU Speed: 2.3GHz - 2,69GHz / Video Card: GeForce 8800 / VRAM: 256MB / OS: Windows XP

News Source: HardOCP

Microsoft has quietly removed a key backup feature from an upcoming update for Windows Home Server, much to the frustration of channel partners who've been touting this particular feature of the product to customers.

In January at CES, Microsoft announced Home Server Power Pack 1 and said it would not only fix a number of minor issues in the software, but also give users the ability to perform full Home Server data backups on external storage devices, including the backup database. PP1 is due for release in the second half of the year.

View Full Article: ChannelWeb