Archive
- Internet Explorer 9 to feature GPU acceleration
In recent months, Apple, Google, and Mozilla have really managed to squeeze impressive amounts of performance out of their respective web browsers, making page rendering and web applications noticeably snappier with each release. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 lags behind a bit in current benchmarks, but the IE team has a...
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Last by bdwilcox at 9:53 PM on 11/20/09 - Office 2010 beta is now available
If spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations get you all hot and bothered, then you might be happy to know that Microsoft has released a public beta of its upcoming Office 2010 productivity suite. You can grab the beta right now from the official download page; just click "Get It Now"...
73 comments —
Last by 5150 at 10:26 AM on 11/20/09 - GPU-accelerated Flash 10.1 beta hits the web
A little over a month ago, Adobe announced plans to release a beta of its GPU-accelerated Flash 10.1 player "later this year." Well, we're now later in this year, and as planned, the beta has become available for download from the Adobe Labs site. Adobe offers versions of the...
53 comments —
Last by insulin_junkie72 at 5:14 PM on 11/18/09 - Microsoft warns of Windows 7 zero-day flaw
Is this the first zero-day security vulnerability in Microsoft's new operating system? According to ComputerWorld, Microsoft has confirmed the presence of a flaw through which attackers could crash Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines. Reportedly, exploiting the flaw can bog down those operating systems "so thoroughly that the...
25 comments —
Last by TO11MTM at 7:58 PM on 11/17/09 - Microsoft to get some Wolfram in its Bing
Wolfram Research's Wolfram|Alpha "computational knowledge engine" isn't meant to be a Google-killer, but it might just help turn Microsoft's Bing into one. Microsoft has announced on the Bing search blog that it has partnered up with Wolfram Research to integrate some Wolfram|Alpha features inside its search engine.
30 comments —
Last by Pettytheft at 8:37 AM on 11/12/09 - Amazon releases Kindle app for Windows
No need to shell out 260 bucks for a Kindle reading device—so long as you don't mind reading books off of your PC monitor or laptop display, that is. Amazon has released a Windows application that lets...
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Last by bender at 3:36 PM on 11/11/09 - European Commission holds up Sun, Oracle deal
Remember how Oracle and Sun shook hands on a $7.4-billion merger this spring? The U.S. Department of Justice okayed the deal in August, but now, the European Commission has thrown a wrench into the works. As the Associated Press reports, the Commission has issued a "statement of objections"...
28 comments —
Last by RagingDragon at 8:44 PM on 11/11/09 - CyberLink speeds up photo, video apps with GPUs
A year on from the release of Elemental's Badaboom, GPU-compute acceleration for consumer video apps seems to have creeped into the mainstream. Earlier today, CyberLink and Nvidia announced "unique new features and significantly improved performance" now available in CyberLink's suite of photo- and video-editing applications. The acceleration features span...
25 comments —
Last by stmok at 11:43 AM on 11/10/09 - Epic lets devs make standalone Unreal Engine 3 titles for free
id Software often gets credit for opening the source code of old game engines a few years after their release. Epic Games has now pulled a comparable feat, except with two major differences: the new Unreal Development Kit doesn't include game-engine source code, but it does give developers all of...
28 comments —
Last by OneArmedScissor at 1:01 PM on 11/06/09 - New Chrome beta is faster, has bookmark sync
Mozilla Firefox may be getting all the market share points, but Google is still hard at work improving its own web browser. The search giant has released a new Chrome beta that features both improved performance and the ability to synchronize bookmarks across different PCs. The bookmark sync feature...
51 comments —
Last by Trymor at 5:59 AM on 11/07/09 - Firefox beats Internet Explorer 6 in popularity
Web developers rejoice: more people are now browsing the web using Firefox than Internet Explorer 6, according to Net Applications figures quoted by Ars Technica. The data show Firefox commanded 24.1% of the market last month, compared to 23.3% for IE6. (In September, the same two browsers had 23.8%...
77 comments —
Last by Palek at 12:53 AM on 11/06/09 - Quadro, Tesla users get free ray-tracing engine
Ever since Intel started talking about Larrabee, the concept of accelerating ray-tracing on graphics hardware has generated an increasing amount of buzz. Today, after six months of beta testing, Nvidia has introduced a free ray-tracing engine for workstation and servers with Quadro and Tesla GPUs. The engine is called...
29 comments —
Last by Shining Arcanine at 5:40 PM on 11/05/09 - Firefox 3.6 beta has tab-level Aero Peek support
Well, the first Firefox 3.6 beta didn't make it out quite as early as we thought, but it's available now. Just head over to the official beta page on Mozilla's Firefox site to get it—provided you care enough to install and use an unfinished web browser, of course. This...
15 comments —
Last by blubje at 2:34 PM on 11/03/09 - DirectX 11 benchmark goes up for download
With both DirectX 11 graphics cards and Windows 7 now out in stores, Shacknews reports that middleware developer Unigine has released what may be the very first public DX11 benchmark. Dubbed "Heaven," the 127MB application is available at FileShack. In the benchmark,...
93 comments —
Last by UberGerbil at 11:43 AM on 10/26/09 - New AMD Stream SDK beta is fully OpenCL compliant
OpenCL developers, rejoice. AMD has released a new beta of its ATI Stream SDK v2.0 developer toolkit, this time bringing complete support for the new GPU-computing application programming interface. The Khronos Group has blessed the release as "fully compliant" with the OpenCL 1.0 specification. Best of all, this toolkit is...
22 comments —
Last by fellix at 3:55 PM on 10/14/09 - Firefox 3.6 includes page orientation code
Next time you tilt your laptop, the web page on your screen might just move accordingly. Well, maybe not, but Mozilla developers will definitely let web developers access laptop orientation information in the upcoming Firefox 3.6 release. According to a blog post by Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard, the simple orientation...
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Last by poulpy at 5:52 AM on 10/14/09 - AMD, CyberLink team up on DirectCompute acceleration
As much press as OpenCL has gotten, it's not the only player in town for vendor-agnostic GPU-computing applications. With Windows 7 now less than two weeks away from launch, eyes are starting to turn to the DirectCompute programming interface Microsoft has included in its DirectX 11 toolkit. In their latest joint...
21 comments —
Last by Scrotos at 6:25 PM on 10/12/09 - Office 2010 Starter to supplant Microsoft Works
Say goodbye to Microsoft Works and hello to ad-supported software and license-only retail cards. That's the gist of a recent post on the Office 2010 Engineering blog, where Office Corporate VP Takeshi Numoto announced Office 2010 Starter alongside other, new ways in which Microsoft will distribute Office 2010. Office Starter...
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Last by PetMiceRnice at 12:01 PM on 10/12/09
- Upcoming microATX MSI H57 motherboard pictured[22]
- Internet Explorer 9 to feature GPU acceleration[18]
- Deal of the week: A $550 ultraportable and a $225 home server[17]
- Name Your PC Day Shortbread[24]
- Chrome OS VMware image pops up on BitTorrent[19]
- Power Pack 3 for Windows Home Server arrives next week[14]
