IT News HeadLines (HardOCP) 01/09/2010

Intel Almost Halves Core i7-950 Prices
DigiTimes, citing anonymous industry sources, claims that Intel is cutting Core i7-950 prices almost in half. Intel recently dropped the price of its quad-core Core i7-950 processors to US$294 from US$562 to defend from AMD's recent price cuts for its quad-core Athlon II X4 640 CPU from US$122 to US$99, according to sources from motherboard makers. Comments
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Updated Xbox 360 D-Pad Controller
Major Nelson posted a new video that shows off a pretty neat dual-design D-pad on Microsoft's updated wireless controllers. What do you think? Do you like the dual-design? Comments
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Desktop PC Platform: Saved By Overclocking
Benchmark Reviews has posted another overclocking editorial, the latest in a series of overclocking articles, this one explaining how the desktop PC platform has been saved by overclocking. For the past few articles of this series, I've concentrated on playing devil's advocate for the demise of desktop PCs. Some say it will live on past the imminent threat of notebook computers, mobile smartphones, and gaming consoles; others think the market has already passed its glory days. Each of my articles posed a narrative perspective describing real-world scenarios that continue to impact this industry. Each topic offered a form of speculative research, which I like to call job security, on the relative health of our hobby. That's right, I called it a hobby. Comments
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Email Overload? Try Priority Inbox
Google is rolling out a new priority inbox feature that is supposed to help you keep your mail more organized. With as much mail as I get around here, I'll give it a try and tell you what I think. Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the "spam" folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or "bacn." So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules. Comments
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Mark Hurd to Exit News Corp.'s Board
More bad news for Mark Hurd today, HP's former CEO failed to be nominated for re-election to the board of directors at News Corp.. I guess hell just have to relax and spend the tens of millions he got from HP. Hurd failed to be nominated for re-election to the board of directors of News Corp. and will exit that position after the company's annual meeting on October 15, according to a proxy statement filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Comments
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Facebook + Jury Duty = Bad Idea
If you ever get stuck on jury duty (trust me, at some point you will) try to refrain from posting about the case on Facebook while the trial is still in progress. Jons, 20, was a juror in a case of resisting arrest. On Aug. 11, a day off from the trial and before the prosecution finished its case, she wrote on Facebook that it was "gonna be fun to tell the defendant they're guilty." Comments
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HP to Pay $55M in Kickbacks Case
The moral of this story is that if you get caught buying your way into trouble, you can simply buy your way out. I hope you all learned a valuable lesson here today. Hewlett-Packard has agreed to pay 55 million dollars to settle claims the US computer giant defrauded the US government, the Justice Department announced Monday. The settlement resolves allegations that HP paid kickbacks to systems integrator companies in return for recommendations that US agencies buy HP products, the department said in a statement. Comments
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Facebook Feeds Narcissism
This hard hitting investigative report at CNN found that Facebook is used by narcissists to boost their egos. The follow up to this award winning report? People that like music use iTunes. For the average narcissist, Facebook "offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication." More importantly for this study, social networking in general allows the user a great deal of control over how he or she is presented to and perceived by peers and other users. Comments
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GIGABYTE Unveils Market's Only Passive Radeon HD 5770
GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co., Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to launch the latest in-house designed GIGABYTE GV-R577SL-1GD, featuring GIGABYTE's own Ultra Durable VGA Technology and silent-cellTM cooling design. GIGABYTE's GV-R577SL-1GD is built on the highly anticipated ATI RadeonTM HD 5770 Series GPU which utilizes the latest 826 million transistors on 40nm fabrication process and GDDR5 memory. GIGABYTE GV-R577SL-1GD is equipped with Microsoft DirectX® 11, ATI Eyefinity Technology, ATI Stream technology, ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support, UVD 2 and PowerPlay™, setting a new standard for HD gaming performance. Comments
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Toshiba Launches 24nm Process NAND Flash Memory
Toshiba Corporation, reinforcing its leadership in the development and fabrication of cutting-edge, high density NAND flash memories, has announced that it today started mass production of NAND flash memories fabricated with 24nm process technology. This latest technology advance has already been applied to 2bit-per-cell 64-gigabit (Gb) chips that are the world's smallest and offer the highest density on a single chip (8 gigabytes (GB)), and which are available from today. Toshiba will also add 32Gb and 3bit per cell products fabricated with the 24nm process technology to its product line-up. Comments
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Low Cost DisplayPort to DVI Dongles Are Finally Here
Remember those inexpensive Eyefinity dongles we've been telling you about for the last year (here)? Well, it looks like today is the day, you can finally grab a certified DisplayPort to DVI-D Single-Link active adapter for around $30 - $35. Word is that a variety of these low cost dongles will be available by next month and some will even be bundled with video cards in the near future. You can grab an Accell branded adapter from Amazon right now for $34.99 with free shipping.
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Lucid Introduces UNITY Graphics Board Architecture
Today LucidLogix Technologies (Lucid) announced its arming video card manufacturers with the new Unity™ graphics board architecture for the HydraLogix engine (previously known as HYDRA). Now graphics board vendors for the first time can combine a single HydraLogix 200 real time distributed processor with any single NVIDIA or ATI GPU, creating an affordable, flexible multi-GPU-ready graphics card that can make any motherboard a high performance gaming system. Gamers and high performance PC enthusiasts will have even more options to configure multi-GPU systems, which until recently were limited to vendor-exclusive architectures or HydraLogix equipped motherboards. And mainstream graphics users can now buy even a $99 graphics card and upgrade their system in the future with the brand graphics card of their choice. Comments
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ASUS EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition Video Card Review
ASUS is back making another play for your hard-earned upgrade money. This time, ASUS have brought out the EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition, a Radeon HD 5870 with an improved cooling device. Does a bundled game and improved cooling device make up for its $100 price premium?
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