• 3.79GHz Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition.

• An Intel X58 chipset.

•12GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM.

•2 x 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2

•1TB 7,200RPM Hitachi hard drive.

•80GB Intel X-25M solid-state drive.

All this comes at a pretty hefty $8,028 price tag, including the Ferrari red paint job, which is a $500 option. Unfortunately, the automotive-class red paint job reportedly helps you get at least three extra frames per second in Crysis. Fortunately, there’s a potential DIY fix to save those $500: Apply a few adhesive flames to the chassis.

REVIEW: http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/fal…5.html?subj=re

Once you have downloaded and burned a copy of the Live CD ISO, you will have the ability to launch a fully functional copy of the Ubuntu to test out driver compatibility and to sample the user interface, all without installing a single file to your PC. This guide will walk you through testing your hardware and installing a dual boot setup all without formatting or repartitioning your hard drive.

What you’ll Need:

1. Use Your ISO Burning Software To Create A Live CD

 

To begin we must mount our newly acquired ISO file to a bootable CD. You can use either your existing CD burning software, or since we are in an open source frame of mind, a free alternative such as InfraRecorder. Once this is completed the CD should be moved to the bootable optical drive on your PC. We are now ready to restart our machine and begin the trial.

2. Try Ubuntu Without Any Change to Your Computer

 

As mentioned before, one of Ubuntu’s finest features is the ability to run the OS off the CD before you commit any additional time to an installation. Running the software “live” is made possible without permanent installation by placing all the necessary files into RAM instead of your hard disk. Incompatibilities are rare, but not even Microsoft has the ability to predict every system configuration. The odds are pretty good that if you have problems booting with the “Try Ubuntu” option, you will have problems with a full blown installation as well.

3. Test Your System For Compatibility 

 

If all went well with the Live CD initialization, after a short boot sequence you should find yourself greeted by a fully functional desktop with which to experiment and test your hardware. To get a quick overview of native driver support you can click system, preferences, hardware information. This will give you a list of hardware detected on your PC similar to the Device Manager in Windows. 

For a quick and easy way to verify basic compatibility, try using the built in utility located under system, administration, hardware testing. This will walk you step by step through compatibility checks on your video, audio, and input devices. If you manage to pass each stage of the test with without issue, you should have no trouble getting your hardware up and running after a permanent installation. So if you’re now ready to give Ubuntu a home in your system, and have 4GB of disk space to spare on your hard drive, go ahead and restart the computer and boot back into Windows to begin the installation.

4. Install Ubuntu Without Formatting or Repartitioning Your Drives

 

Your Live CD contains a new feature that can be accessed from the autorun menu in Windows called Wubi (Windows Ubuntu Installer). This interface will allow you to install Linux to any drive on your PC and the option of booting from any OS each time you start your machine. A key advantage here is that since we are installing Ubuntu from within Windows, it can be uninstalled at any time using the Add/Remove Programs utility. 

Despite what many people believe, however, this install is not a virtual machine. It works more like a disk image creating a block of data on the drive. This carries a little bit of a performance penalty, but nowhere near what you encounter when you run an OS within an OS. At this point you can simply follow the installer.

Setup Options:

1.) Installation Drive – Which hard disk you wish to install to. If you choose the “C” drive, for example, the image will be located under c:\ubuntu
2.) Installation Size – It is important you pick the size that you think will suit you needs. If you only intend to dabble in the OS, 4 to 8GB should be enough.
3.) Username / Password – Make sure you write this down. Once the OS is installed you will need this to log in.
4.) Click “install”. The amount of time required to complete this step depends very much on the speed of your internet connection, since many of the install files are downloaded on the fly. Upon completion, you will be asked to reboot, after which you’ll be greeted with a new boot loader on startup that’ll give you the option to pick Windows or Ubuntu.

5. Update the OS

 

Just like a clean install of Windows, one of the first things you will want to do with your fresh copy of Linux is check for updates. This can be accomplished by clicking on System, Administration, Update Manager. Available updates should quickly populate your list. After you have reviewed your options, click Install Updates. If you fail to receive any updates, try launching Firefox by click on the icon along the top to verify a working internet connection. You will want to make sure you are connected to the internet through a wired Ethernet connection since wireless networking may require you to hunt down and download additional wifi hardware drivers first.

6. Driver Configuration 

 

If you only plan to use your copy of Linux for basic applications such as email, web browsing, or Open Office, you may not need to worry about additional drivers. Ubuntu comes bundled with many open source-equivalent drivers. But if you plan on running anything that requires 3D acceleration, rock out to an aftermarket sound card, or even enable most wifi devices, a bit of extra configuration might be required. 

If Ubuntu didn’t automatically activate your hardware, it doesn’t necessarily imply that the appropriate drivers don’t exist, rather it might just mean it might not open source. The primary vision of the Linux project is an operating system without restrictions. Some companies such as ATI and Nvidia, however, don’t want to open its drivers because doing so could reveal proprietary information to their competitors. To enable accelerated graphics using proprietary drivers you need to access the menu system and click System, Administration, Hardware Drivers to view a list of your options and activate them manually. You can download the latest versions of these drivers using the links listed below, but until you become more familiar with how to work under the Unix terminal it might be best to stick with the built-in generic drivers.

ATI Linux Display Drivers and FAQ

Nvidia Linux Display Drivers and FAQ

Creative Labs Linux Display Drivers and FAQ

All Other Drivers

7. Alternative Software Options 

Web Browsing

Word Processing

Image Editing

8. Enjoy Linux!

Austin GDC 2008 Steaming away

By Charlie Demerjian: Wednesday, 17 September 2008, 9:59 AM

WELL PLACED SOURCES tell us that Google is going to be buying Valve any second now. If you have to stop and think about why, you probably are not aware of Steam, Valve’s amazing content distribution platform.

Google Portal may be a nice idea, but that is irrelevant. Google Content Distribution (Beta) however should make just about every other competitor lose several years of sleep, most of their remaining hair, and large gobs of stock price.

Valve has the best content distribution platform out there, bar none. Steam may have had rough patches here and there, but they are almost all ironed out now, and just about everyone that matters has signed up to use it.

When Google picks them up, it will be a clean kill, no one else will matter. It is a good buy for them, a good thing for Valve, and in general, good for everyone except MS. Then again, they are irrelevant now, so who cares?

For you non-programmers, there’s an Easter egg, too: type “about:internets” into the Omnibox. I’m not going to be a spoilsport by revealing what happens, but here’s a hint: Ted Stevens.

Among the “about” features:
• about:memory shows how much memory the browser–and any other Web browser–is using. Conveniently for Web developers, it also shows how much each Web site in a browser tab is using.
• about:stats shows a wide range of internal measurements such as the time taken to initialize Chrome, load Gears, or perform various operations while running JavaScript programs with Chrome’s V8 engine. The page also carries the amusing note, “Shhh! This page is secret!”

Typing about:histograms into Chrome’s address bar shows many performance details. 
• about:network tracks the detailed network activity of using a Web site.
• about:version shows details of what version of Chrome is running, along with the user-agent text that the browser reports when identifying itself to Web sites. Why “Mozilla” is in this string is a mystery to me, though perhaps it has to do with the way Chrome can use Firefox plug-ins; why “Mozilla” is apparently in the iPhone’s user-agent text is even more a mystery.
• about:histograms graphs various performance measurements such as the time taken to autocomplete text users type into the browser.
• about:crash crashes the active browser tab.

A PlayStation 4 and potential ‘Xbox 720′ could arrive as early as 2011, estimates Crytek president and CEO Cevat Yerli. Industry analyst Colin Sebastian agrees, suggesting that “the general consensus amongst industry professionals is that a new generation of home consoles will arrive on the market in 2011 or 2012.” 

Terabyte storage for the Xbox 720? 

We’ve already speculated about what Microsoft might be planning for its third Xbox – 16 or 32 processing cores (including onboard graphics), 8GB of DDR memory, broadband connectivity and a hard disk that delivers terabytes rather than gigabytes of storage space. 

More storage is a given – Microsoft has recently launched the 60GB Xbox 360 Pro, while Sony has rolled out a 160GB PlayStation 3. Both consoles are trying to sell themselves as digital hubs and any future Xbox is going to need a huge amount of space to store downloadable movies and TV shows, demos and Live Arcade games. A 60GB hard drive is nowhere near big enough. 

“One of the problems with the 360,” Rockstar Games founder Sam Houser told 1UP, “is the fact that they don’t have a significantly larger storage medium than the previous systems. It’s a slightly bigger DVD disc… If we’re filling up the disc right now, where are we going? It’s not like our games are going to get any smaller.” 

The solution isn’t just to add a Blu-ray drive to the next Xbox. The developers of Bioshock recently told videogamer.com that: “in terms of specific things, [Blu-ray] hasn’t made much difference. The original game fits on a 360 disk so it wasn’t like we were in need of room.” The ability to run games from a massive hard drive renders the optical drive virtually redundant. 

Xbox 720 to feature Intel processor? 

Assuming that Microsoft isn’t going to dumb-down the next Xbox in favour of a Wii-style family console, the next-generation of processors could give the Xbox 720 the muscle of a turn of the millennium supercomputer. A return to Intel technology might also be on the cards. 

Because by 2012, Intel plans to have launched the 22nm die shrink of the Sandy Bridge architecture – that’s the next architecture after Core i7 (aka Nehalem). According to TechRadar’s resident chip-geek Jeremy Laird, this should see CPUs with at least 16 cores, each with two threads for 32 logical processors. We might even see chips with as many as 24 or 32 cores. 

Graphics-wise, the current trend on the PC side is towards outsourcing more of the physics and AI work to the GPU. So a contender for Xbox 720 inclusion might be Intel’s Larrabee processor. 

With its multi-core x86 approach to graphics rendering, Larrabee is blurring the lines between traditional CPUs and GPUs. “It’s not inconceivable that you might have a next gen Xbox with a relatively simple CPU,” says Laird, “just a couple of biggish out-of-order cores, and then some Larrabee-like monster handling graphics, physics, AI and so on.” 

Why Sony’s Cell might have got it right 

Larrabee isn’t just a graphics processor. It’s a clever side bet by Intel on a possible future processing paradigm – highly parallel, massive floating point performance. Revolutionary? Not quite. 

“The Cell processor was quite prescient,” suggests Laird, “as it’s philosophically similar to Larrabee. The problem is that the only workload on a console that is currently parallelised is graphics and that’s the one thing the Cell doesn’t do. Real-time physics and complex AI will become more important on consoles, as will more programmable graphics (ray-tracing is one example). So highly parallel and programmable Larrabee or Cell chips look like the way forward.” 

Considering that the next generation of processors could pack in several billion transistors, the next generation of consoles should be capable of some truly stunning high-definition games. Any new machine in 2012 will take full advantage of broadband for multiplayer and massively multiplayer gaming, social networking and media sharing. 

But what if there is no next-gen console? 

Acclaim boss Dave Perry recently suggested that Sony has “pretty much no chance of making money on the PS3″ and will have to extend the console’s lifespan. While Alex St. John, the CEO of games company WildTangent, predicts that: “we’re looking at the last generation of consoles. There’s not going to be an Xbox 720 or a PS4, I’ll make that bet, not going to happen.” 

Sure, Microsoft can build a better, faster, more powerful Xbox. As Microsoft’s Robbie Bach told 1UP: “people ask me how many people I have working on the next generation. On the one hand, it’s everybody. On the other, it’s nobody. People are continuously working on new technology.” 

The next question isn’t necessarily ‘what will the next Xbox look like?’ but ‘will there even be one?’

Saw this on one of the forums,so thought i will post it here.

The Pencil extension for Firefox adds a full-featured sketching and prototyping tool that lets you design web pages and make diagrams right inside Firefox. Once you install Pencil, from the Tools menu choose “Pencil Sketching” to launch the Pencil editor. There you can literally design software, web pages, or just sketch out diagrams using the menu of prefab shapes and widgets Pencil provides. Drag and drop annotation tools, shapes, lines, text boxes, labels, buttons and more onto the Pencil canvas and save your work as a Pencil document in its tabbed editor.

Tagmarks (Install)

Firefox 3 comes with the blue star icon at the end of the address bar for quick, one-click bookmarking. The Tagmarks extension takes this concept further with more one-click icons that bookmark and assign frequently-used tags to the current URL. Here’s more on how Tagmarks works.

HandyTag (Install)

Just can’t think of the right tag to describe a new bookmark? Want to get into the habit of tagging your bookmarks but feel kind of lazy about the whole thing? HandyTag suggests applicable tags for a given bookmark, pulled from various sources. With HandyTag installed, when you bookmark a URL, HandyTag adds buttons below the Tags field that present checkboxes for tags that apply—from your current list of tags (“Perso”), the web page’s author (“Webmaster”), KGen, and Delicious. Click on any button to see that source’s suggested tags for the page, and check off the ones you want to add to your bookmarks.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5039968/

Now download any theme you want from the net.Here are some sites from where you can download themes for xp

www.wincustomize.com

www.xptheme.info

www.themexp.org

www.deviantart.com

In the past, Crytek was responsible for the first-person shooters Far Cry (2004) which ran on its CryEngine 1, and Crysis (2007), which rand on its CryEngine 2. Crysis Warhead, another first-person shooter with ties to Crysis and also built with CryEngine 2, is being readied for release this September.

Yerli gave no word on what other titles the company might produce between now and 2012, when he believes the studio’s next engine will be ready and a new generation of consoles will be available.”

Certainly money well spend.