LAS VEGAS - April 15, 2007 - Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft Corp. unveiled Microsoft Silverlight , a new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Early supporters of the new platform include Akamai Technologies Inc., Brightcove Inc., Eyeblaster Inc., Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix Inc.

Microsoft Silverlight, previously called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), integrates with existing Web technologies and assets to provide higher-quality experiences with lower costs for media delivery. Delivered to end users through a seamless, fast installation, Silverlight offers consistent experiences to both Macintosh and Windows users on a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer , Firefox and Safari.

Intel Corporation today announced the availability of new versions of its Intel Thread Checker, Intel Thread Profiler, Intel VTune Performance Analyzer and Intel Threading Building Blocks. These software development products enable developers to create more reliable, scalable applications, and have now been enhanced for the latest multi-core processors - Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 and Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - and newest operating systems - Microsoft Vista*, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise*, Red Hat Enterprise Linux* and Fedora Core*.

"Our Intel Core 2 processors have essential new profiling capabilities we're taking advantage of for the first time in our VTune Analyzer 9.0. Since nearly all systems shipping with Windows Vista will be multi-core systems, developers targeting Vista have been asking us for these parallelism tools," said James Reinders, director of marketing for Intel's Developer Products Division. "Developers on all operating systems want their move to parallelism well supported by development tools and we're committed to keeping up with our aggressive pace of supporting developers in as many ways as possible."

File sharing could become a lot faster in the near future as a team of researchers has developed a new technology which could see speed increases of up to 500%. Current technologies such as BitTorrent are limited by the number of people sharing a certain file, however the new research will allow software to spot chunks of data from a different download that contain identical or very similar data, therefore allowing more download locations. For example, if a song were being shared from a number of locations, it may have different information in the ID tags for various reasons and therefore conventional sharing methods would not recognise it as being the same data. But Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET) would spot these other songs and allow the user to download from these locations as well. The system basically assigns a rank based on how similar files are, and will then allow chunks of the file to be shared based on this.techPowerUp! does not support the use of file sharing software for illegal purposes. The above is just an example.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the launch of Windows Live Messenger on Xbox 360, connecting friends across Xbox 360 consoles, Microsoft Windows-based PCs and Windows Mobile-powered devices. With this update to Xbox 360, friends and families can easily connect and chat directly from their television using Windows Live Messenger, a network of more than 20 billion relationships and more than 260 million active accounts.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is a great game, but the developers missed bugs in the initial version and had to rush out a patch. This patch did some good, and some bad, because one could not use the old saved games to carry on the adventures of "The Marked One". For all those people who feared to start all over again there is a solution, in form of a tool, on the horizon that will convert older saved games to make them playable with patched game versions. Though such a converter sounds very promising it remains to be seen if this converter applies for the initial version's saved games, or to already patched ones as details of this tool are really sparse.

Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) March 29, 2007 -- The OpenOffice.org Community announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.2, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. With upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database software, the free software package provides a real alternative to Microsoft's recently-released Office 2007 product - and an easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users. OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users' PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals.

Microsoft has released firmware 1.3 for its Zune media player. The new firmware improves device and software reliability, such as device detection and synchronization. The new firmware also corrects a skipping problem with content downloaded from the Zune Marketplace as well as the FM tuner which no longer drains the battery when running in sleep mode. Zune users can update their devices from within the Zune software package.

If you are one of those guys who either want to keep the data on your harddrives secured from foreigners or you are just keen on the latest software technology you should check out TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt lets you encrypt files later to be mounted as a virtual drive. Imagine you want to share an important pile of data with your friends, with TrueCrypt done right you don't need to worry about its security anymore.
But there's more, you can of course encrypt an entire partition on your internal and external hard drive or USB flash drive. The encryption however is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent too.
The new version 4.3 is now completely digitally signed by Microsoft and therefore compatible to Windows Vista and it's User Account Control System (UAC). So there is no hassle anymore if you want to fiddle around with it using Bill's latest creation.

Largest Software Release in Adobe's 25-year History Revolutionizes Creative Workflows

SAN JOSE, Calif. - March 27, 2007 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe Creative Suite 3 product line, a revolutionary offering of tightly integrated, industry-leading design and development tools for virtually every creative workflow. Adobe's new Creative Suite 3 line-up unites the best of Adobe and Macromedia product innovation to provide designers and developers with a broad spectrum of creative options for all facets of print, web, mobile, interactive, film, and video production. There are six all-new configurations of Adobe Creative Suite 3. These include, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium and Design Standard editions; Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and Web Standard editions; and Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium (see separate releases). Rounding out the product line is Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection which combines 12 of Adobe's new design and development applications in a single box-the most comprehensive creative environment ever delivered.

A recent interview with ATI/AMD at ExtremeTech shows some insight to future versions of Catalyst Control Center (CCC) software. AMD/ATI knows that previous versions have been lagging, complicated, and somewhat bloated. AMD made a good effort to fix this by a complete rewrite of CCC, but it still feels a bit lacking to some people. Instead of working on making the current CCC faster and more streamlined (like the old control panel), AMD/ATI is focusing on making one centralized application to manage all AMD/ATI products.

Says AMD representative Phil Rogers: "Longer term our goal is continue to improve the user experience and to move towards a single or central user interface where AMD customers can configure the majority of AMD product settings... It is our goal and vision to eventually have a single UI for all AMD products (graphics, CPU, chipset), but this is of course a major project, and it will be quite some time before we're able to release such a product"

This means that AMD hopes to make their control center much more featured, but this may prove to backfire upon release. With great power comes great responsibility, as Spiderman's Uncle Ben once said. And if AMD can't quite handle the responsibility, we may be looking at one complex, bloated driver interface.

At CeBIT, Sparkle showed several unique self-designed cards, apart from the well known Calibre P880+ GeForce 8800 GTX cooled by TEC active cooler system from MACS Technology. VR-Zone has pictures of a very interesting graphics card, the self-designed Sparkle GeForce 8800 GTS without any additional power connectors? VR-Zone informs us that Sparkle will have their own self-designed G84 and G86 cards with better cooling solutions which will increase overclockability of the cards by 10-15%. There is also another interesting technology created by Sparkle where a small PCB is inserted into the graphics card with POST LEDs and a reset button. It allows voltages adjustment and temperature management through software. This concept will be available for upcoming Sparkle DX10 cards.

Google is rumored to have put into effect a timeline for giving more storage space to Gmail accounts. Gmail account sizes have slowly been increasing over time, and this is the most recent timeline to that increase.

• 2800MB: Already reached
• 2835MB: In 18.22 days
• 2980MB: In 384 days
• 3125MB: In 749 days
• 3270MB: In 1114 days
• 3415MB: In 1479 days
• 3560MB: In 1845 days

Please remember to take this timetable with a grain of salt, as my source does not site their, well, source.

Even though not all game developers have adopted shader model (SM) 3.0 introduced three years ago, and some claiming that transiting to DirectX 10's shader model 4.0 right now hardly makes sense, NVIDIA's new software development kit (SDK) already features profiles for shader model 5.0, which is believed to be an improved version of the SM4.0.

NVIDIA new SDK 10, which was released just last week, apparently contains macro invocations that define the supported CG profiles, including such profiles as Fragment50, Vertex50, Geometry50, meaning that current SDK supports architecture micro-code profiles for pixel shaders 5.0, vertex shaders 5.0 and geometry shaders 5.0.

While hardly anybody knows what shader model 5.0 actually is and how much is it different from the shader model 4.0, the inclusion of the architecture micro-code inside a compiler indicates that NVIDIA foresees the arrival of shader model 5.0-capable hardware soon enough to enable game developers to compile their titles for it.

SAN JOSE, Calif. and LAS VEGAS, Nevada - March 8, 2007 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show that it will expand its digital imaging product line, offering two editions of Adobe Photoshop CS3. In addition to the highly anticipated Photoshop CS3 software for designers and professional photographers, Adobe will also deliver Photoshop CS3 Extended, a completely new edition of Photoshop which allows cross-media creative professionals to stretch the limits of digital imaging. Photoshop CS3 Extended includes everything in Photoshop CS3 plus a new set of capabilities for integration of 3-D and motion graphics, image measurement and analysis. Photoshop CS3 Extended also simplifies the workflow for professionals in architecture, engineering, medical and science.

Ebay has decided for an improvement in its rating system for sellers and buyers. In addition to the standard positive, neutral and negative ratings, Feedback 2.0, as the service is called, will also provide four additional categories which buyers can individually rate sellers on called Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs).The five new categories are: Item as described, Communication, Shipping time and Shipping and handling charges. Buyers will be able to rate sellers on a 5-star rating scale on each category.

eBay plans to roll out Feedback 2.0 in Australia, Belgium, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom within the next few days. Feedback 2.0 will be launched in the United States this spring.

Futuremark Corporation, developers of 3DMark, the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking went live today with the beta version of YouGamers, the World's First Intelligent Gamer Website. YouGamers (www.YouGamers.com) is a new destination site for PC gamers offering original game content, previews, gaming industry news, exclusive interviews, and full game reviews. YouGamers initially launches with an English website, with localized language options in the future. In Version 1.0, YouGamers will provide a full gamer community with forums and blogs, offering users' homepages, personal profiles, game lists, and game hardware details. The game database contains approximately 100 top PC titles at launch, with ESRB ratings and publishers' system requirements. The website also offers an easy to use, integrated comparison shopping service with direct shopping links for all games and recommended hardware. Users will also be able to categorize the site's information by tagging, a Web 2.0 feature.

The Inquirer noted that Slysoft promised it's customers that their software would be able to remove Blu-ray Digital Rights Management (DRM) software by the end of this quarter. It seems that the people at Slysoft have not only done this, but accomplished their goal an entire month ahead of schedule. AnyDVDHD version 6.1.3.0 adds more than just true Blu-ray support. It also promises to run on Windows Vista and XP x64 (along with all the other operating systems it supports). The free upgrade also removes region encoding. Now it seems that the only problem people will have with upgrading their PC's to support high-definition optical drives is affording the drive and Slysoft AnyDVD HD. You can get AnyDVD HD here, and if you already have it, you can patch yourself for Blu-ray support here.

Microsoft has launched a new website designed to encourage more people to learn basic programming. The site offers free tutorials aimed to help people with no programming experience learn how to build websites and Windows applications in Visual Studio 2005 (the Express Editions are also free to download from Microsoft). Altogether there are 45 lessons which take between 20 and 40 minutes, along with 31 short videos accompanying the service. Users can chose between two main options: Windows Development and Web Development. By progressing through the tiers, users will start off learning the basics, before moving onto move advanced programming, including .Net development techniques. You can get started by visiting the Beginner Developer Learning Center.

Apple has recently been doing quite well for themselves recently. In the browser department, Safari is gaining users while Firefox is losing them. However, every rose has it's thorns. Safari has been often criticized with having a memory leak problem. A system can lose up to 76% of system performance just by having Safari open in the background. There have even been articles published detailing how you should shut down Safari when running anything else. Fortunately, Apple began working on a fix to this problem as soon as they heard about it. Anyone who runs Safari should grab the update.

CNET News had a good talk to Bruce Chizen, the CEO at Adobe, who revealed they are starting to host some of their leading applications to the internet. Photoshop being the first in line will be an ad-supported version with less options then it's offline counterpart.
This is the answer to Google's ever growing online portfolio and with Adobe one of the big companies showed the pressure they are now under.

Anyone who connects to the PS3 network this morning will promptly discover that they need to update their PS3 firmware. Too bad it doesn't really do too much to games. The main changes are...

• An added ability to resize the video chat window.
• The ability to attach a USB camera to the PS3, for video chat

We will probably see a substantial PS3 firmware upgrade come March 23rd, when we will see the console released in PAL territories.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Feb. 21, 2007 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) is pioneering a new way to deliver its industry leading creative software technologies online, with the launch of its web-based video remix and editing technology. Today, Adobe and Photobucket announced a partnership to integrate Adobe web-based video remix and editing technology directly into the Photobucket user experience, giving 35 million Photobucket users direct, free access to world-class digital video editing tools. The agreement marks a new stage in Adobe's delivery of its renowned video software technologies that today underpin flagship products such as Adobe Premiere Elements and Adobe Premiere Pro.

NVIDIA has announced the release of beta versions of the SDK and C compiler for their Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) technology. The C compiler includes a set of C language extensions that will enable developers to write C code that targets NVIDIA's GPUs directly. These extensions are supported by software libraries and a special CUDA driver that exposes the GPU to the OS and applications as a math coprocessor.

This approach differs to that taken by AMD/ATI and their "Close to Metal" (CTM) initiative. With CTM, AMD/ATI has opened up the low-level ISA so that their graphics products can be programmed directly in assembly language. CTM relies on developers creating libraries and higher-level tools for in-game use.

NVIDIA CUDA technology is a fundamentally new computing architecture that enables the GPU to solve complex computational problems in consumer, business, and technical applications. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology gives computationally intensive applications access to the tremendous processing power of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) through a revolutionary new programming interface. Providing orders of magnitude more performance and simplifying software development by using the standard C language, CUDA technology enables developers to create innovative solutions for data-intensive problems. For advanced research and language development, CUDA includes a low level assembly language layer and driver interface.

For those who run multiple operating systems, Microsoft has released its latest version of Virtual PC, which allows users to quickly switch from one OS to another by simply clicking the mouse. Although Microsoft once charged for this software, it is now free to everyone, although it doesn't work on home versions of Windows (ie. not XP Home or Vista Home Basic/Premium). It is capable of running a number of different operating systems, although some Linux distributions can be complicated to setup. It works with both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems and can be downloaded here.

Apple has joined this list of companies that have popular tech not ready for Windows Vista. Earlier this week, they announced that iTunes was not ready for Windows Vista. Apparently, all of Apple's software cannot be run on Windows Vista. This is quite a setback, considering how many Quicktime files there are on the internet, and how many people who own iPods.