[H]ard|OCP

Augmented Reality Overkill

Augmented reality is cool and all but could you imagine if it was like this?

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Nintendo Pirate to Pay $1.5M

The 24 year old guy that pirated Super Mario Bros for the Wii has reached a $1.5M settlement with Nintendo. Topping things off, the guy will also have to pay Nintendo’s $100k legal bills too.

Nintendo said the loss was caused when Burt made New Super Mario Bros for the Wii gaming console available for illegal download a week ahead of its official Australian release in November last year.

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Stimulus Funds For Broadband in a Mess

I know it may seem hard to believe that the government is having a hard time delivering on its promises but that is exactly why the broadband stimulus is in the shape its in. Apparently the government isn’t able to keep pace with the demand for broadband stimulus money, then there is the squabbling over funds and so on. What a mess.

The combination has swamped the agencies in charge and created a bottleneck that might threaten disbursement. After nearly a year, about 7% of the funds has been assigned to specific projects. As a result, "There's significant doubt as to whether the monies can be awarded before the end of September," when the funding authorization expires, says Dan Hays, who directs the communications practice at consulting firm PRTM.

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Gaming [H]eadlines

EA Announces Crysis 2, New Dragon Age @ Shacknews

More Free Mass Effect 2 DLC Today @ Softpedia

Next Assassin's Creed Setting and Multiplayer Details @ Blue’s News

Save 66% on Total War™ Games, DLC @ Steampowered

Sex, Not Violence, Is Beautiful and Natural @ Kotaku

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5570 Review Round-Up

Reviews of the AMD ATi Radeon HD 5570 are popping up around the web so we ran around and gathered up a few reviews and posted them here in one convenient location. We’ll add more to the list as they come in throughout the day.

[H]ard|OCP

HotHardware

Legit Reviews

Overclockers Club

Rage3D

Tweaknews

AMD today introduced the ATI Radeon™ HD 5570 graphics card, perfect for end-users seeking an energy efficient, low-profile DirectX® 11 card for small form factor PCs. The ATI Radeon HD 5570 graphics card joins the award-winning line of AMD graphics that fully support DirectX 11, as well as ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology1 and ATI Stream capabilities.2 This latest offering completes a full DirectX 11 refresh of AMD discrete graphics products, bringing customers a choice of cutting-edge graphics cards to match every budget and form factor.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5570 Video Card Review

Today’s video card evaluation examines the performance and placement of the AMD ATI Radeon HD 5570. If you are looking to buy of a half-height video card, you will definitely want read this article before plopping down your hard earned cash.

Today, AMD is launching the Radeon HD 5570. At $75-85 MSRP, the Radeon HD 5570 sits in-between the Radeon HD 5450 and Radeon HD 5670. The question on the table is, what is its value when the Radeon HD 5670 sits close in price? We’ll bring this question to bare, and show you our gameplay experiences, and provide our opinions on the value of this video card.

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HD Video Tour of the ISS

The cool video of the day has to be this HD tour of the International Space Station. Definitely worth watching if you have seven minutes to spare. Thank to NASA*Jim for the linkage.

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MySpace Music Experiments with Audio Ads

MySpace is expanding that audio ad experiment it started last year. What do you think? A thirty second ad every one hundred songs on a play list? That doesn’t seem bad.

The ads are impossible to avoid, unlike the visual, banner ads that can be put out of sight in background windows as users listen along while doing other Web surfing or computer work. But the audio ads are timed so that a user can listen to up to 100 songs on a playlist or to a full album with just a single interruption after the first song.

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[H]ardware Round-Up

Cases & Modding

Corsair Obsidian Series 800D Case @ ThinkComputers

Thermaltake Element V Full Tower @ Pro-Clockers

Video

NVIDIA Optimus Mobile Technology Preview @ HotHardware

NVIDIA Optimus Mobile Technology Preview @ Legit Reviews

NVIDIA Optimus Mobile Technology Preview @ PC Perspective

Cisco Predicts Wireless Data Explosion

Cisco has announced the results from its 2009 – 2014 Global Mobile Data Forecast and they predict an explosion! What is with all the "explosions" lately? If there isn’t an "explosion" does that mean your prediction blew up in your face? But wait...that would be an explosion...making your prediction true!

By 2014, researchers predict, mobile data traffic throughout the world will reach 3.6 exabytes per month, or an annual run rate of 40 exabytes. This is a 39-fold increase from 2009 to 2014, or a compound annual growth rate of 108 percent.

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AMD Talks-Up "Llano" x86 Innovation at ISSCC

Samuel Naffziger, Senior Fellow at AMD, kicks off the company’s first blog dedicated solely to AMD’s Fusion family of processors. Mr. Naffziger wrote:

At AMD, we live by the mantra that the Future is Fusion and our global engineering teams are working aggressively to deliver the industry’s first accelerated processing unit (APU) in support of it. That said, the consumer trends that led AMD to embark toward developing APUs began years ago; the idea wasn’t born in either a CPU or a GPU, but was born in how consumers began using their PCs. Things like: streaming video, immersive gaming, 3D user interfaces, enhanced multimedia and other compute intensive tasks became the norm rather than the exception. As an engineer, my job is to help figure out how the nuts and bolts can best fit together to help improve the user’s experience; our team is presenting today at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco some of the results of those efforts.

I wanted to share Kyle’s response to the aforementioned blog post (comments are moderated and the response has not been posted yet) and give you guys the opportunity to weigh in on the subject as well:

I appreciate the fact that you are sharing some cool power stuff, but this obviously is not going to keep Intel from kicking your butt in the 32nm market with its Westmere CPUs already selling. Where’s Bulldozer that we were promised in 2009?

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Windows 7 Battery Notification Messages

Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows division, made a blog post today explaining all the talk about Windows 7 so-called battery problems.

Several press articles this past week have drawn attention to blog and forum postings by users claiming Windows 7 is warning them to "consider replacing your battery" in systems which appeared to be operating satisfactorily before upgrading to Windows 7. These articles described posts in the support forums indicating that Windows 7 is not just warning users of failing batteries – as we designed Windows 7 to do this – but also implying Windows 7 is falsely reporting this situation or even worse, causing these batteries to fail. To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state. In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement.

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Google Threatens Chinese Knock-Off Site

Want a surefire way to piss off Google? Copy the company’s logo and then laugh as you refuse to remove it. No, really. It works for the Chinese.

A Google spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the company has officially asked Goojje to stop copying Google's logo, which is protected by trademark. China has a notoriously poor record at protecting intellectual property rights. Pirated software, music, movies and clothing, among a host of other goods, are widely available throughout the country despite repeated government crackdowns.

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Man Arrested For Extorting Student Filer Sharers

You guys are not going to believe this one. A man was arrested for, get this, doing EXACTLY what the RIAA does to people thousands of times a year. Too bad there isn't any way to get the RIAA in hand cuffs.

Dehelean, who worked for UGA's Enterprise Information Technology Services, called the student Jan. 25 to let her know that she'd been caught downloading copyrighted material - a violation of university policy - and "offered to make the situation go away in exchange for money," UGA police Chief Jimmy Williamson said.

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Seagate Announces The Savvio 10K.4 Hard Drive

Seagate Ships World’s Highest-Capacity, Most Reliable Small Form Factor Enterprise Drive: The Savvio® 10K.4 Hard Drive Enterprise storage systems can now move to 600GB capacity, 2 million hour MTBF solution Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) today announced worldwide shipments of its Savvio® 10K.4 hard disk drive (HDD), the world's highest-capacity and most reliable 2.5-inch enterprise-class drive. Built for the demands of enterprise servers and to enable new levels of data density in external storage arrays, Savvio 10K.4 doubles the capacity of its nearest competitor to 600GB. It is also the first HDD to achieve an unprecedented 2 million hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) reliability rating.

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Intel Itanium 9300 Processor Raises Bar

Intel Corporation today introduced the Itanium® processor 9300 series, previously codenamed "Tukwila," which delivers more than double the performance of its predecessor, boosts scalability and adds reliability features to the Itanium platform that is already running mission-critical applications for 80 percent of the Global 100 corporations.

With the Gartner Group predicting a 650 percent growth in IT data over the next 5 years, businesses need increasingly powerful and scalable enterprise servers. The two-billion transistor Itanium processor 9300 series meets this need head on with twice as many cores as its predecessor (four versus two), eight threads per processor (through enhanced Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology), more cache, up to 800 percent the interconnect bandwidth, up to 500 percent the memory bandwidth, and up to 700 percent the memory capacity using-industry standard DDR3 components.

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Former Intel Exec Pleads Guilty in Galleon Insider Case

The tenth person to plead guilty in that Galleon insider trading case was a former treasury department executive at Intel. According to the New York Times, the man has agreed to cooperate with authorities but still faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

Throughout 2007, the executive, Rajiv Goel, provided Mr. Rajaratnam with details of Intel’s quarterly earnings before they were publicly released. He also tipped Galleon’s founder about a pending joint venture between the Clearwire Corporation and Sprint Nextel, a deal that Intel planned to invest $1 billion in.

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Teen's Facebook Party Trashes $1.5M Home

Thinking about leaving your 16 year old kid home alone in your $1.5 million home while you are away for the weekend? Better hope he doesn’t have a Facebook account. Didn’t this just happen a while back?

A 16-year-old schoolboy saw his parents' £1million home trashed by gatecrashers after he advertised a party on Facebook when he was left alone for the weekend.

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Ten Years Ago In Tech

What was the big news ten years ago today? AMD launched the 1.1GHz Athlon with on-die L2 cache, a Voodoo 3 3500 was $169.99 and T&L was "the future."

AMD has "demonstrated" a 1.1GHz Athlon. We ain't in Kansas anymore girls. I would have to say that is some serious stuff.

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DirectX End-User Runtimes

[H] forum reader polonyc2 posted a link in the forums to the DirectX end-user redistributable. The package weighs in at just under 105MB and supports Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 & 2008, Windows XP 64-bit and Windows XP Service Pack 3.

This download provides the DirectX end-user multi-languaged redistributable that developers can include with their product. The redistributable license agreement covers the terms under which developers may use the Redistributable. For full details please review the DirectX SDK EULA.txt and DirectX Redist.txt files located in the license directory.

[H]ardware Round-Up II

Cooling

Spire TherMax Pro CPU Cooler @ Tech-Reviews

ETC.

How To Reverse Engineer A Motherboard BIOS @ Phoronix

NZXT’s Avatar Gaming Mouse v2 @ TechREACTION

QNAP NMP-1000 Network Media Player @ techPowerUP!

Video

EVGA Geforce GTX275 CO-OP @ BmR

Security Chip That Does Encryption in PCs Hacked

You know you are a bad mofo when you hack a Trusted Platform Module chip with a needle, some acid and rust remover. Thanks to Henrico D. for the linkage.

Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.

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The iPad Tweet That Enraged Steve Jobs?

Why on earth would Steve Jobs get so mad over a tweet about the iPad? Hell, I don’t know, why does that guy do anything he does? I’ll bet that Wall Street Journal guy (that made the tweet) will think twice next time.

There was inevitably some cultural friction when Apple's secretive CEO took his new iPad around to New York's professionally indiscreet media. Exhibit A is a single tweet from a Wall Street Journal editor, which purportedly made Steve Jobs go ballistic.

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$70k For Broadband Installation

I found the broadband bargain of the day! Only $70,000 for a basic install! What a bargain!

A couple who want a broadband connection for their home and guesthouse business have been told by BT it will cost £45,000 to have it installed. Ray and Frei Walker have managed with an old 'dial-up' service for the last nine years at their detached Victorian home in Dufton, Cumbria

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LIAN LI T1 Spider on Video

I’ve watched this video twice now and I have no idea what to say....I am at a complete loss for words.

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Gaming [H]eadlines

Best PC Mods of 2009 @ Kotaku

Mass Effect 2 Remains Atop UK Charts @ Joystiq

New Fable 3 Info Will 'Really Upset People' @ Shacknews

Retail Ninja Blade (PC) Gold @ Blue’s News

Locus OS Interface

This location-based operating system called the Locus OS is pretty damn slick. The operating system was designed by a guy named Barton Smith and supposedly the multiple widget desktops are designed around locations (home, work, car) and automatically switches between desktops thanks to GPS and wi-fi mapping.

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Online Video Explodes

Reports indicate that online video has exploded. No word on the extent of the damages, injuries, casualties or what caused the explosion but many expect a group called "nerds & geeks" to be behind this.

The online video market continued to grow in December, as nearly 178 million U.S. Internet users watched 33.2 billion videos in the month a lone, said comScore last week. When broken down, the numbers mean that 86.5 percent of total U.S. Internet users watched online videos and averaged 187 videos per user. The average length video watched was 4.1 minutes, up from 3.5 minutes in a report from last March.

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[H]ardware Round-Up

Cases & Modding

Antec Nine Hundred Two Ultimate Gaming Case @ Legit Reviews

Dynatron Azenx P-Secure Secure HDD Enclosure @ Pro-Clockers

Cooling

Noctua NF-P14 FLX Case Fan @ Verdis Reviews

Motherboards

Foxconn Inferno Katana P55 Motherboard @ Ninjalane

Power Supply

Ultra X4 1050 Watt Power Supply @ TechwareLabs

Survey Finds People Frustrated With Slow Websites

I know this may be hard to believe but, a new survey claims that people do not like slow web sites. On top of that, the study also claims that consumers will go somewhere else if your website takes too long to load. Ya think? Thanks to Edward C. for this one.

Conducted by Equation Research, the study polled 1,500 people who use the Web at peak times such as holiday shopping, booking summer travel or executing trades during financial market shifts. It concluded that poor Web performance is rife in the retail, finance and travel industries, and that this has a dramatic and lasting impact on where consumers spend money online.

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