ThinSkin writes "ATI and Nvidia are well known for hailing their products as leaders in 3D apps and games, but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well. ExtremeTech is featuring an article that tests cards from ATI and Nvidia to determine who takes the cake in video quality and performance. Using CPU utilization scores and visual quality comparisons during video and DVD clips, the author concludes that ATI's latest generation of GPUs have an edge over Nvidia, particularly in DVD playback and with video acceleration."

Next Generation is running a short piece detailing some highlights of an interview with John Carmack, set to run in the February issue of PC Gamer UK. From the article: "For the last year I've been working on new rendering technologies. It comes in fits and starts. Our internal project that'll incorporate it hasn't been publicly announced. We're doing simultaneous development on Xbox 360 and PC, and we intend to release on PlayStation 3 simultaneously as well, but it's not a mature enough platform right now for us to be doing much work on."

Ant writes "This Revolution Advanced article takes a look at the evolution of controllers from the days of Atari 2600 to Nintendo Revolution." Tragically the Intellivision controller is missing. But oh the nostalgia.

YesSir writes "The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft CTO Craig J. Mundie and Bill Gates are talking about the idea of a specially designed cellphone that could be converted into a full-fledged computer through a connection to a TV and keyboard. They hope to use this product to bring computing to the masses in developing nations and be a Windows powerd alternative to Nicholas Negroponte's $100 free open-source powerd laptop."

Chabil Ha' writes "CNET has gathered together some good old nostalgia from the photo vault. What high-tech product advances the fastest? It's probably the hard drive. The capacity doubles easily every two years and sometimes every year, faster even than the chip progress described by Moore's Law. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."

AmigaAvenger writes "It was recently announced by Yahoo news that the Arizona based company Extend America will be testing high altitude balloon service over North Dakota to handle the duties of cell phone towers. Three balloons will be able to take the place of 1,100 cell phone towers, and will remain aloft for 24 hours. Plans call for the service to be sold wholesale to existing wireless carriers, and will include both voice and data service."

Dave Robertson asks: "Fibre channel storage has been filtering down from the rarefied heights of big business and is now beginning to be a sensible option for smaller enterprises and institutions. An illuminating example of this is Apple's Xserve Raid which has set a new low price point for this type of storage - with some compromises, naturally. Fibre channel switches and host bus adapters have also fallen in price but generally, storage arrays such as those from Infortrend or EMC are still aimed at the medium to high-end enterprise market and are priced accordingly. These units are expensive in part because they aim to have very high availability and are therefore well-engineered and provide dual redundant everything." This brings us to the question: Is it possible to build your own Fibre Channnel storage array?

twitter asks: "There's power management and there's standby, do you know the difference? The BBC is running story on how much electricity is wasted by TV standby mode. Thanks to the very useful EnergyStar program, I'd be the one in seven who thought they were saving electricity, with the standby button. I've been very happy with APM and hibernation on laptops, and want to do something similar with the desktops I use. What's the state of APM / ACPI Wake-on-LAN for Linux these days?" Slashdot touched on this issue, earlier in the week, but that article was more on TVs, not on computer power saving technologies.

Critical_ writes "Tom's Hardware recently discovered a bug in Microsoft's ACPI driver implementation under Windows XP SP2 that causes a loss of more than one hour of battery time when connecting any USB 2.0 device to an Intel Core Duo based system. Apparently Microsoft, Intel and ODMs have known of this problem under a confidentiality agreement since July 12, 2005 via (a still private) Knowledge Base article KB899179. The bug lies in the asynchronous scheduler component inadvertently being left running causing Windows' internal task scheduler (ITS) to treat it as a running process involving the attached device. This in turn prevents the ITS from powering down the processor into one of the ACPI sleep states causing the system to use more battery power. At this time there seems to be no fix. Strangely, single-core systems and AMD systems are not affected. This leads one to wonder if it is truely a software problem or if there a much larger hardware problem that may affect Core Duo equipped Apple systems."

asc4 asks: "The company I work for is a webhosting and colocation company. As our power utilization grows, we have begun searching for ways to make our datacenter more efficient. The biggest hit from the utility company comes in the peak usage charge, which penalizes (rather severely) for the highest sustained burst of usage during a billing period. Due to the nature of the colocation business, we can't control how much or when client devices use power, so I'm wondering: is there's something we can do at the datacenter level to help smooth out our power consumption, over the course of a given period of time?"

The Guardian Gamesblog has a longish piece talking with Volatile Games, developers of the title Possession for the PS3, about what it's like to make a game for Sony's next-gen console. From the article: "At the end of the day it's just a multi-processor architecture. If you can get something running on eight threads of a PC CPU, you can get it running on eight processors on a PS3 - it's not massively different. There is a small 'gotcha' in there though. The main processor can access all the machine's video memory, but each of the seven SPE chips has access only to its own 256k of onboard memory - so if you have, say, a big mesh to process, it'll be necessary to stream it through a small amount of memory - you'd have to DMA it up to your cell chip and then process a little chunk, then DMA the next chunk, so you won't be able to jump around the memory as easily, which I guess you will be able to do on the Xbox 360."

prostoalex writes "A high tech civic group led by Intel is soliciting a bid from ISPs to create a WiFi cloud around Silicon Valley. From the Reuters article: 'The Smart Valley group will solicit financial contributions to develop the plan to cover another 20 Silicon Valley cities. In all, the plan would stretch across four counties - Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz.'"

DarkClown writes "Wired is running a piece discussing the recovery from the burst Bubble in Silicon Valley. This time, though, it's no Bubble: it's a Boom. They suggest that this latest boom, fueled by Google's ascent, is under steadier footing than last time. Technology and the market seems to be catching up to the hype." From the article: "A boom perhaps, but not (phew!) a bubble. There's a difference. Bubbles are inflated with hot air and speculation. They end with a wet pop, leaving behind messy splatters. Booms, on the other hand, tend to have strong foundations and gentle conclusions. Bubbles can be good: They spark a huge amount of investment that can make things easier for the next generation, even as they bankrupt the current one. But booms - with their more rational allocation of capital - are better. The problem is that exuberance can make it hard to tell one from the other."

Artem Tashkinov wrote to mention a SecurityFocus article which discusses a disturbing new threat to computer security: Rootkits that target a computer's BIOS. From the article: "One rootkit expert at the conference predicted that the technology will become a fundamental part of rootkits in the near future. 'It is going to be about one month before malware comes out to take advantage of this,' said Greg Hoglund, a rootkit expert and CEO of reverse engineering firm HBGary. 'This is so easy to do. You have widely available tools, free compilers for the ACPI language, and high-level languages to write the code in.'" Update: 01/27 14:28 GMT by Z : John Heasman wrote with a link to the slide presentation on this topic given at the Black Hat Conference (pdf).

YesSir writes "Support for the high-end processor that has had difficulties catching on is coming in from its co-developers Intel and HP. 'The 10 billion investment is a statement that we want to accelerate as a unified body' said Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group."

madgunde writes "Looks like MacWorld magazine was a little premature in reporting that the new Apple iMac Core Duo doesn't live up to Apple's speed claims. The folks over at MacSpeedZone have done some performance testing of their own that debunks MacWorld's results and shows that the new iMac Core Duo DOES live up to the hype. Not only did the new iMac wipe the floor with the old model in their tests, but using MacWorld's own test methodology would allow MacSpeedZone to conclude that the new Intel iMac is almost as fast as a PowerMac Quad G5. " I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.

Ironsides writes "The Washington Post is reporting the the Bush Administration is planning to re-enrich spent nuclear fuel so that it can once again be used in nuclear reactors. Included in the plan is a proposal to take spent fuel from other countries and re-enrich it for use as well as domestic spent fuel. This would be a break with a policy set forth by President Carter in an attempt to discourage nuclear proliferation. Currently $250 Million as been proposed for FY 2007 to start developing the technology."

Tomo-chan writes "It seems Sony's cost-cutting has made it a more pragmatic company. The new boss has weilded his mighty chopper and put an end to both Aibo and Qrio, as well as some other marginal product lines. Aibo -- we'll miss you..."

boxturtleme writes "Despite the sometimes lackluster reviews of the new Intel iMac over the past several weeks, what with speed tests and hardware bugs, the New York Times sure seemed to like it. And beyond the blazing review, the Times seems fully confident that someone will soon have Windows and OS X dual booting."

rchapman writes "Generally, file systems are not considered "sexy." When a young programmer wants to do something really cool, his or her first thought is generally not "Dude, two words... File System." However, I am what is politely termed "different." I find file systems very interesting and they have seldom been more so than they are right now. Hans Reiser is working on getting Reiser4 integrated into the Linux kernel, the BSD's are working on getting a journaled file system together, and Sun Microsystems just recently released a beta of ZFS into OpenSolaris. "