PC maker, Alienware Corporate, have released 2 Aurora PCs with Star Wars themes on it, named Light Side and Dark Side.

Both Aurora Light Side and Dark Side models are built on AMD64 Technology, combine innovation, simplicity, and the foresight to deliver next-generation computing performance today. For hardcore gamers, here is a great news, it can be configured to have NVIDIA SLI Technology too. :) NVIDIA SLI takes advantage of the increased bandwidth of the PCI Express bus architecture, and leverages hardware and software features inherent to NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units) and NVIDIA nForce4 MCPs (media and communications processors).

Need security? Both Aurora PCs have NVIDIA® ActiveArmor™ as well. NVIDIA® ActiveArmor™ is a hardware-accelerated firewall that works seamlessly at all times to ensure your network connection is fully protected at all times – even during wicked-fast multiplayer gaming sessions and large file downloads or network transfers.

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According to survey released on 2nd May 2005 by SANS regarding the Top20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities during the first quarter of 2005, researches believe that online criminals has turned their attention to antivirus software and media players like Apple Computer Inc.’s.

As more Windows users agreed to receive security upgrades automatically, hackers looked to take advantage of other software programs that might not be patched as frequently, the head of the cybersecurity training and research organization said.

“Operating systems have gotten better at finding and fixing things and auto-updating, so it’s less fertile territory for the hackers,” said SANS Chief Executive Alan Paller.

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Now, hackers have found ways to take control of a user’s computer by tunneling through Microsoft’s Web browser, media player and instant-messaging software. So, again, I’m here to promote a more secure browser : Firefox. :)

Click the following link to download Firefox.

According to networking guru, George Ou from ZDNet, Sony Play Station Portable (PSP) is bad enough to ruin wireless Local Area Network (LAN) in the home, due to its lack of support to WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security.

Currently, Sony PSP supports only Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption security for wireless LAN, but too bad this encryption technology was found to be completely broken five years ago.

The Wi-Fi Alliance in 2003 mandated that all Wi-Fi products comply with the new WPA standard and use the new TKIP encryption algorithm yet Sony somehow feels exempt from this responsibility.

So, for PSP user, they will have to lower their wireless LAN security to only support WEP instead of a more secure WPA, in order to connect using PSP. The following is one of the suggestions from George :

Sony needs to rectify the situation as soon as possible by retrofitting all new PSPs off the factory floor with WPA capability and offer a free upgrade to the PSPs that are already out in the wild.

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We have seen the introduction dual core processors, first Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron, then come Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840.

Intel’s vision of a future chip design which are moves that are necessary to improve overall system performance as the chipmaker packs more cores onto a single chip.

The new head of Intel’s Corporate Technology Group, Justin Rattner, described Intel’s evolving vision of what its chips might look like around 2015 in an interview at Intel headquarters Thursday. Intel, like much of the chip industry, has decided that multicore designs are the way to go to improve performance in the future.

Some the early fruits of Intel’s project are evident in Intel’s I/O Acceleration Technology, announced earlier this year at the Spring Intel Developer Forum, Rattner said. This technology essentially improves the I/O performance of Intel chips by dedicating excess processing resources to I/O functions. It will be available next year with Intel’s first dual-core Xeon server chip, code-named Dempsey.

However, Intel is urged to move away from its frontside bus design by analysts and customers due to the advent of multicore processors. This is because in Intel’s current chips, the interaction between the processor and a system’s memory bank is handled by a memory controller on the chip set that feeds data to the processor at various speeds ranging from 400 MHz to 1066 MHz, depending on the chip. This design has served the company well for many years, but as chips start to take advantage of multiple processing units, they require increased amounts of memory bandwidth to perform to their true potential.

Some aspects of moving away from its frontside bus designs will start to become possible as Intel introduces its 45-nanometer and 32-nanometer processing technologies, which will be capable of producing smaller transistors than Intel’s current 90-nanometer processing technology, Rattner said. At the moment, those introductions are scheduled for 2007 and 2009.

45nm & 32nm ?? :-O

Yeah !! Firefox has just surpassed the 50 million download mark recently !! <:-P Well, thanks to all your supports to Firefox !!

I always believe people will always appreciate the thing if it is good, or better than the rest. :)

So, now who dares to say IE is enjoying more than 90% of the Web Browser share (like what the web developer said in my class)?

OneStat.com said that since November, IE’s worldwide usage has fallen 1.62 percentage points to 87.3 percent market share. Firefox, meanwhile, increased by one percentage point to an 8.5 percent global market share.

Remeber, that is last November’s statistic. :)

If you still dare to say, please read this article, IE market share is going downward.

With its first full-fledged release last November, Firefox has shaken up a Web browser market that most analysts had deemed almost wholly mature. For the first time in years, the market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has begun inching downwards as Firefox adoption rises.

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Really really glad to hear this fascinating news !! Go Firefox, go !!

Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 7.0, due for beta this summer, will include improved support for two key Web standards – Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and PNG graphics.

I definitely think this is a great news for each and every Internet user because Internet Explorer (IE) is always the culprit for poor Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and PNG graphics support for the past few years. If you are using IE to view this blog, you’ll notice in the YaGoohoo!gle !! post, the picture background is gray in colour, whereas if you are using any other browser like Firefox and Opera, the background of that picture is actually transparent. This is due to the lack of support in PNG graphics by IE. Hope to see this problem sorted out when Microsoft launch the long-awaiting IE7.0 soon.

In a post to the MSDN IEBlog Web log on Friday, lead program manager Chris Wilson confirmed improvements to CSS and PNG support are on the way. “Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that Web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely,” he wrote.

PNG images will get alpha channel support, he said, allowing for transparent images and image overlays. “We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature,” Wilson wrote.

As for the CSS support, Some developers were sceptical that IE would pass a CSS compliance test known as Acid2. I have just tested recent versions of browsers such as Firefox 1.0.3 and Opera 7.54, and they both failed the test.

Anyway, I cannot be bias to any browser in CSS support, though Firefox is always my first choice for time being.
Let’s hope this CSS compliant problem can be sorted out in all web browsers. :)

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